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#not the best time to post something with all the spoilers going around but yeah

jvnluvr · 1 year

Text

blue lock boys when you surprise them ! pt 1. ♡

ft. sae & kaiser x f!reader

(neo-egoist arc spoilers!! be warned)

author’s note: my last blue lock post got a lot of love and it made me more motivated, so thank you everyone! might do a part too where the roles are swapped, or with more characters. lmk by asking if you have any other requests. enjoy more bllk content, my lovely readers. <3

itoshi sae:

sae is gone a lot. you knew from the moment you got into a relationship with him that this would be the reality of your relationship. you loved him though, so even if you missed him tremendously, he would always come back home into your arms. there wasn’t much more you could ask for.

sae had gone to brazil for three games. it was a week stay, but it felt so insufferably long. maybe 3-4 days in, you were sick of being home after work not having anyone to go to or not having anything to do. so what did you do? obviously book a ticket to brazil yourself! to avoid suspicion, you told sae that you might not respond to his texts because you were going out with your friends and end up staying over at their place. (all your friends were busy that week.) but he didn’t catch anything!

you fell asleep on the flight, waking up to your landing. your heart was racing as you walked off into the airport. you’ve never really done something this grand before. surprising your boyfriend right before his game? god, you never expected to even set foot in another country for a while. all you could do was quickly rush to get a taxi, (you learned basic portuguese for this) and off you were to the stadium where his last game was being hosted.

quickly playing the driving, you ran inside. even if shidou was annoying, you thanked him for not revealing your plan to sae and helping you enter the stadium freely. “your boyfriend is a lucky one, yeah?” you could only nod in nervousness. why were you scared to see him? what if he just told you to go back home, what if he didn’t want any distractions, what if-? “c’mon he’s about to get on field, go!” shidou pushed you near the place his team was getting ready.

“hey [name]! sae didn’t tell us you were gonna’ be here.” one of his teammates grinned at you. you saw sae slowly turn around when he heard your name, an annoyed look plastered on his faces, thinking his teammates were tricking him for a stupid laugh. that was until he actually saw you, that his eyes widened.

“uh,, surprise sae?” he kind of just stood there for a second, not even being able to process the fact that you were physically standing in front of him. you only were able to feel dejected for a mere second, assuming he wasn’t happy to see you, that was until you were suddenly enveloped into a warm hug. and for a second, it felt as if you were the only two in the blazing stadium. “stupid, why are you here?” he whispered in your ear, not letting you go. despite his chosen words, his voice was filled with nothing but softness.

“cause i missed you, sae. you’re always gone, and even if i was prepared, it hurts not being with you.” you replied back. god no, you weren’t going to cry right before he went on the field. “don’t cry princess, i’m right here.” you were trying so hard to hold it in, but you couldn’t help it, he was with you, after what felt like an eternity. “thank you for surprising me, you’re the best thing i could ask for.” he kissed your forehead, still whispering so his teammates couldn’t hear the sweet nothings he reserved for you.

michael kaiser:

the ace of bastard münchen loved you very dearly. kaiser loved selectively, but the moment he laid eyes on you, he was smitten. truly, he tried to make as much time as humanly possible to spend with you but when blue lock joined the top teams, his brain had been haywire because of isagi. all he could think of was how to improve, how to crush him.

so naturally; with his brain occupied and all, he gradually started spending more and more time away from home to practice. sure, he still texted you sometimes and all, but you felt more lonely before than ever, since you were so used to kaiser being there to smother you in his love and adoration.

so when today finally came, the day where they would go up against barcha fc, it was him to finally prove he was a better player than isagi. he left super early that morning. he didn’t expect you to even try and leave the house because you studied from home, and he was going to be gone practically the whole day. to be honest, you really did want to go and surprise him at the game, but you couldn’t afford to skip class today. so you had to come up with something else grand to surprise kaiser.

so you went out after class, an hour before he was supposed to come home. you bought heart-shaped balloons, confetti, a cake, and any other decorations that you could drape onto the walls in your shared house. just before you were about to go back, you got a *ping!* from your phone.

ml michael: baby we won!!!! i’ll be home in a bit <3

you: congrats ! i’m waiting <3

you knew after that you had to rush home and get ready. gratefully your house wasn’t too far from the store. so you quickly unloaded everything from your car and put everything up in the living room, near the entrance of your house. “i hope he likes it, and isn’t too tired to just ignore everything..” you let out a slight sigh before continuing to finish up putting up the decorations.

you heard a loud engine outside and you would have been surprised if it was anyone besides kaiser. you quickly ran to shut off the lights before hiding behind the couch that faced the wall. the sound of the keys jingling as the door opened made your heart race as you held your hand over your mouth, not wanting him to even hear your breathing. “my dearest love, i’m home- huh? why are the lights off?” you couldn’t help but internally giggle at his insanely slow reaction time.

“[name], are we playing hide and seek or something? you know i’ll find you.” at that, you unintentionally rolled your eyes at his confidence. there’s no way he would expect you to be behind this couch, not to mention he hasn’t even turned the lights on- “found you.” you yelped as kaiser picked you up from behind, sitting you on his lap on the side of the couch.

“now, does my pretty girl wanna tell me why she was hiding behind the couch?” he kissed your cheek, and he swore he could see them turn red in the darkness. your entire plan? ruined. this really wasn’t the way you wanted to surprise him. “just wanted to surprise you, y‘know? you didn’t even turn on the lights silly.” kaiser gave you a confused look but nonetheless got up to turn them on. “surprise! and of course good job on winning your game today.” you smiled at him, but he just stared at you with the biggest heart in his eyes.

“you’re the cutest thing ever.” he lifted you up again and you wrapped your legs around him. “there’s a cake too, we should eat it.” you mentioned, totally forgetting that you set it out on the table. “i love you, liebe.” he couldn’t stop kissing you after that surprise.

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vin-taege · 1 year

Text

How It Starts, How It Ends

summary: a series of pivotal moments in your relationship with Chishiya, pre and post-Borderlands.

genre: some fluff, heavy angst, established relationship

pairing: chishiya x art student!reader

words: 3.5k

warnings: major character death, hurt no comfort, depression, possible spoilers for S2

First Meeting

"Look at this cute beetle I found."

The small insect gently crawled up your pudgy hand as you held it out. The boy in front of you didn't seem too impressed, responding with only a blank stare. You had always seen him by himself during recess and felt bad that he had to eat alone daily. The other kids were either scared of his dad or thought he was weird—but you minded no such things.

"Those carry germs. Some species of them even hiss or bite," he deadpanned.

"But not this one," you pouted, nudging your hands closer to him. "Look, I think he wants to meet you."

Truly enough, the beetle was inching its way off your fingers, seemingly heading towards the stoic boy. He glanced at it before looking back at you, then he sighed. He didn't think he could get rid of you, so he'll entertain you for now.

"I'll pet it, but I'm not gonna hold it."

"Deal!"

The way you beamed at him made him feel weird, like something was stirring in his chest. Interesting, he noted.

"I'm ___," you smiled, watching him swipe his finger back and forth the beetle's shell.

"I'm Chishiya."

.❀。• *₊°。 ❀°。

First Date(ish)

"I'm about to implode."

Chishiya looked over your notes and let out a snort. Almost everything was highlighted and it all looked like one big splotch of spilled ink on paper. You ignored him, opting to rearrange your home-made flashcards instead.

"Physics isn't that hard," he murmured.

"Yeah," you glared at him. "For you."

He chuckled again before getting shushed by someone sitting a shelf away from your table. This made you snicker, worry melting away for a split-second. "I don't get how you can grasp this so easily. The formulas all look the same and I don't know which one to use."

He hummed thoughtful before scooting his chair nearer you. "Just start by focusing on the question. Look at what variables they're giving you and at what's missing, then just match them up with the formula that fits."

"I know~ but—" you huffed. "It's a no-formula-card type of exam."

The way you pouted at him almost looked exactly like how you did all those years ago. You were his first—only—friend, and over time, him simply tolerating you had turned into him growing fond of you.

"How many formulas have you memorized?"

"Two, almost three."

"There's six right? Almost there," he gave you a genuinely encouraging smile.

You loved Chishiya for all his snark and cleverness, but you also loved how soft and supportive he can be when it comes to it. These were small moments you held near your heart, and you doubt you'll ever let them go.

He gently took the flashcards from your hands, tapping rhem on the table to align them. He moved a little so the blank sides were facing you and peered at you over the cards. "If you can get this all down by 5 pm, I'll buy you a snack."

"I want a box of macarons."

"I'll buy you a snack that I can afford."

"Deal!"

.❀。• *₊°。 ❀°。

First Milestone

"How was your finals, doctor?"

A light blush bloomed across Chishiya's cheeks. You were a constant pillar of support for him in life, one he hadn't experienced before from anyone else. Since college had begun for the both of you, you were consistently waiting for him after every finals exam he had—a small strawberry cake roll ready in your hands as a reward for him. It became a tradition for the both of you, and even though Chishiya wasn't the best with words, you knew he was appreciative of your actions.

"I've been offered to intern," his voice was neutral, though you know he was at most pleased with himself with the way his eyes crinkled up. In his mind, however, he was more excited about the cake in his hands rather than the position.

"Holy shit?!" you wrapped your arms around his neck, careful not to squish the frosting. His breath hitched for a second, before he wrapped his free arm around you. He buried his face in your hair, lips quirking up as he shut his eyes to savor the moment. "I'm so proud of you, Chi."

The sunset was slowly trickling into the wide windows of the school hallways. Chishiya didn't expect to be in that laboratory for so long, and it was only now that he realized how long you must have waited. Reluctantly, he pulled away from you to see your face better.

"Have you eaten yet? You might get an ulcer."

You chuckled lightly, "I've eaten lunch a few hours ago. I wanted us to have dinner together, but I've eaten some crackers while I was waiting."

"Crackers," he pressed his lips in disapproval. "Those aren't nutritious."

Lightly chuckling, you took his hand, leading him out of the building and soon, the campus. The weather was a bit chilly even though you had worn a jacket. Still, you were too stubborn to say anything. Fortunately, Chishiya read you like an open book. Without prompting, he took your hand in his.

"How was your finals? Did your prof like the color application?"

Your heart swelled up. You honestly didn't expect him to remember.

The final project your professor gave you for color theory was to pick an existing painting and evoke the opposite emotion of it by changing the colors and composition. It seemed easy enough, but it had stumped you since you wanted to pick just the perfect base.

The night you were finishing it, Chishiya stayed over at your apartment to "make sure you were eating"—an excuse for him to spend more time with you. He was adamant about getting you to sleep early for the sake of your circadian rhythm, and when he couldn't convince you, stayed up with you instead.

"He seemed to like it, thank god. The composition flowed well and he like that I used a tertiary color scheme."

"I told you the risk would pay off," he smirked.

"I know," you stuck your tongue out. "I should listen to my all-knowing boyfriend more."

Boyfriend.

He loved it so much when you called him that. Until now he couldn't believe you were real, that what you had was real. He would give anything in the world to stay with you forever.

You passed by a ramen shop, stopping in your tracks to scan the bowls of steaming noodles in longing. You had badly wanted something to heat you up, but one glance at the prices shot down your hopes.

"I'll treat you," he said softly. "You deserve it."

"But you're the one who got the internship," you pouted at him.

"I'll be treating myself too by buying myself good ramen," he raised an eyebrow, silently pleading that you'd just give in. "And you did treat me. You got me cake."

He raised the small box by the ribbons wrapped around it. When you stayed silent for a couple of seconds, he sighed. You were still stubborn about having to "owe" people things, especially if you felt like you "didn't earn it."

"Fine. I'll buy you ramen tonight and you can make it up to me by taking me to the cafe next week."

"Deal!" you gave in.

.❀。• *₊°。 ❀°。

First Game

Your first game in the Borderlands already had you running for your life. It was a five of clubs called Cat and Mouse. Set in a large office building, you needed to find the four mice scattered all over the place and take their tail—the twist being that the "mice" were actually people donning masks and guns. Red bandanas were attached to their belts, the tails you needed to get.

Chishiya was just behind you, heavily breathing as he slid between the winding hallways of the game arena. His hands were still in his hoodie pockets, much to your dismay. You had told him it'll slow him down, but he just shrugged you off.

"I know where the final mouse is."

The gunshots faded as you ran farther away from the main room. The two of you teamed up with a group of three other players, and Chishiya came up with the idea to lure the third mouse so you can ambush him.

You had seen another player holding a bandana, and by Chishiya's deductions, you only had another tail left to catch. "The gunshots stopped. We know that there's two mice either dead or incapacitated. Judging by how they seem to be on defense, I think there's only one left."

"Because it would be risky for the last one to come out," you murmured moreso to yourself, completing his thoughts.

He hummed in approval. "We need to find the other players to see if we can cover ground faster. Unless..."

He halted, staring straight down the dimly-lit hallway. You nervously looked around, readying the crowbar you held tightly in case anything were to pounce on you. Chishiya.

"Maybe we shouldn't stop in the middle of the hallway," you chided him, though he was still deep in his thoughts.

Suddenly, his eyes lit up with a realization. "Unless the mice aren't on the floors."

You're gaze trailed up to the ceiling, landing on the thin slits marked on some parts. Chishiya grinned proudly. Your intelligence has once again made him fall impossible even deeper.

"They're in the vents," you surmised. He nodded, looking at you in awe and love—as if you were God who came down from heaven to bless him, your devout worshipper.

"We need to tell the others so we can prepare another ambush then." You had considered going back to the main hall, but the other players might have left or been dead by then.

"Don't you want to rest first?" He asked teasingly.

You snorted. "Shuntaro, we have—" you glanced at the phone, "—five minutes left."

He hummed, feigning contemplation. That name was reserved only for serious occasions, and he knew you were getting riled up. "How about this: we tell them now, but we let them do the handiwork."

This was a side of him that you dreaded seeing. His entire "pawns go first" philosophy bothered you—in fact, you were strongly against it. You didn't like how this place brought out the worst in him, how it brought out the coldness and slyness of his heart.

Yet here you were, unable to leave him. You knew that he was only doing it to protect you. He wanted you to go back together safely as much as you did, but he did it in his own ways.

You bit your lip, voice laced with hesitation.

"Deal."

.❀。• *₊°。 ❀°。

First and Last Goodbye

The first game of the face cards round decimated what might as well be half of the players.

During the first onslaught King of Spades, you and Chishiya got separated from Kuina, Arisu, and Usagi. The crowbar you had kept from your first game served its last purpose when you used it as a makeshift golf club to hit the grenade away from you. Just as you did, Chishiya dove and pulled you downwards with him to take cover.

You eyes were closed tightly, and the only things you could hear were the ringing in your ears and the beating of his heart. For a second, you swore you had died. Then the arms wrapped around you loosened, followed by a hand running through your hair.

"Are you okay?" Chishiya whispered. His eyebrows knit in worry. "We need to move. Now."

You nodded wordlessly. slowly and quietly rolling off him. Screams and the roar of a rifle were still audible near you, but seemingly moving in the opposite direction. He helped you up, giving you a quick scan to make sure you weren't heavily injured.

"We need to find a sparsely populated area," he spoke once he deemed the King was far enough. "Looks like he's going after large crowds."

"We can go to the edge of the city and follow the river. We're bound to hit a forest sooner or later," you suggested.

"That might take time." He looked your tired state. The bags under your eyes darkened and small scars littered all over your body. An almost empty backpack slung over your shoulder, looking almost as sad as you were.

He weighed out his options: what you suggested was the ideal choice, but you were in no condition for a long trek. Finally, he came to a decision. "But that'll work. We need to do a supply run first."

Was it risky still being in the city? Yes. Did he want you to starve? No. As a compromise, he steered clear of the shops on the main streets. Unfortunately, the smaller stores you ventured into were already looted, only expired goods left in the wreckage.

You could tell Chishiya was getting frustrated. His jaw clenched each time you failed to find food or water. His composure was starting to crack for the first time since you got here. You sidled next to him, slipping your hand into his. He relaxed a bit, though his lips were still pulled into a small grimace.

"We'll be okay," you offered him a small smile. He kissed you on the forehead, returning only a small hum in response.

After thirty more minutes of searching, the two of you finally stumbled upon a shack that had edible food. There were candies at the front, the strawberry ones catching your eye.

Grabbing a handful of them, you strode up to Chishiya. His back was turned to you, the blond busy searching through shelves of cup noodles and biscuits. You tapped him on the shoulder.

"I got this for you," you brought up the candies like an offering. His eyes sparkled, and he couldn't help the grin that broke through his face.

"Charming." It was supposed to be teasing, but it came out genuinely grateful. He turned the backpack he was filling up towards you so that you can drop the candies in.

He held it in place for a few seconds longer, looking at you as if he wanted something. You raised your eyebrow in question. He hesitated for a bit, before leaning forwards and connecting his lips with yours.

You reciprocated the kiss, pressing closer to him. The bag landed with a thud on the ground, him favoring pulling your waist closer instead. He was rarely the one who initiated physical affection, but it only took him a bit of prodding to follow through.

He broke away, only to look you in the eyes. "I'll take you home. I promise."

"We'll take us home," you gave him one last peck on the lips.

For a moment, it felt normal again. It was just you and him against all odds. You were in your little bubble near the outskirts of town, safe from all the hurt.

Then the gunshots started again and they were scarily nearer this time.

Your eyes widened and Chishiya froze. You quickly picked up the bag while he slowly peered out the glass panes of the shop. The caped King was just down the road, a shotgun in his hands. He shot towards the inside of a shop, and Chishiya was certain he hit whoever his target was.

"That's not good," he muttered to himself. "___, run when I tell you to."

"I won't leave you," you snapped.

"I'll be right behind you. I promise." He gave you a reassuring look before peering out the shop window again.

"Fucker must have tracked us." With the crowbar gone, you had only the small bomb Chishiya made for protection.

He took it out of the inside of his jacket, waiting until the King got close enough. Chishiya knew it wasn't enough to kill anyone, but it would buy you time. That's all that mattered to him.

The crunching of boots on gravel drew closer. Chishiya twisted one of the wires around his finger, ready to pull the activator. The King shot into another store, closer to the one you were in this time. He emptied the round and lowered his gun to reload. In one swift movement, Chishiya pulled on the wire and chucked it as hard as he can.

"Go!"

The two of you sprinted out the shop. The can clunked on the ground as it landed before splintering into pieces with a loud boom. Chishiya yelled after you.

"Don't look back!"

Yet you did, just in time to see the King dodge behind the doorframe. Just in time to see he had the now loaded gun pointed at Chishiya.

In a split-second, you turned on your heel and pushed Chishiya into an alleyway, the bullet meant for him digging its way into your chest.

The impact slammed you against the brick wall. There was ringing in your ears and your eyes were blurred by tears. When did you start crying?

Chishiya grabbed your upper body, dragging you deeper into the alley. You could see his lips moving. He was trying to tell you something but everything was so fuzzy.

With adrenaline pumping in his veins, he scooped you up, carrying you as he ran. There were footsteps following not far from him. Pushing his legs to go faster, he inched around the twisted alley, slinking in and out of connected rooms, running and running until he found a door to a semi-basement hidden behind tarps.

He forced it in with his shoulder, careful not to hit you. The room used to be for storage—construction items and dust filling the space. He slid behind a pile of wooden beams, gently setting you down. The surroundings outside settled, and he knew the gunman had lost you.

But god, the bloodbath before him was the scariest.

He'd seen this happen before. He's seen how pale a person could get after so much blood loss. He's seen how it becomes more evident with the lips, cheeks, the tips of your fingers. He's seen that faraway look, the one where he knew the person was starting to drift away.

He put both hands on your chest, putting pressure on the wound. Your blood leaked through your shirt, soaking his hands. Frantically, he took his hoodie off and pressed it against you too.

"Don't die on me, ___. Please." He whispered, voice breaking.

His words brought you back, tearing your eyes away from the corner of cement bricks and bringing it back to his warm, brown ones. Tears pricked at the corner of his eyes. He's never cried before.

You tried to move your lips, only a croak escaping from your throat. "Chish..."

"Don't leave me, please. Please, ___."

A crimson puddle on the ground was growing at an alarming rate. He had no tools, no help. He was a doctor but he couldn't fucking save the only life that mattered to him.

Shakily, he held you closer. His voice never sounded this gentle before. "Stay with me."

"C-candies. Eat well... okay?" Your voice was hoarse. The humid room felt colder now. "L-love you."

"We'll eat well together. We'll go back together, I promised you. I'll get you macarons and ramen and those paints you've always wanted, okay? Deal?" His voice was wavering. He tightened his grip on you, pressing your chest harder with his other hand. "Deal?"

You looked up at him with a sad smile. With the last bit of your strength, you brought your hand up and pressed it against his. He laced your fingers together.

"___?" He whispered, finally letting the tears fall. "Deal?"

You didn't respond. You didn't get to hear him say he loved you too.

.❀。• *₊°。 ❀°。

First Grief

One minute.

Landing in the Borderlands. Cat and Mouse. The Beach. The face cards. Losing you.

It all happened within a minute in the real world.

Chishiya made a promise to himself while he was in the Borderlands. When the candies would run out, he'd stop fighting. When the last traces of you would leave him, he'd join you. Yet by divine intervention, they lasted enough until he beat the King of Diamonds. Long enough until Arisu and Usagi cleared the final face card.

And now here he was. Sitting on a hospital bed, knowing that he wouldn't find you anywhere in the hospital or the Earth for that matter.

He hadn't spoken since, only nodding or shaking his head in response to the doctor's questions. As a doctor, he'd known he would've been pissed at a patient that acted like himself. But nothing mattered anymore.

"We found you holding this. Your fist was wrapped around it pretty tightly that we thought the blood had cut off," a nurse told him. She placed a singular piece of strawberry candy on his bedside table.

He looked at it with mixed feelings of remorse and dread. He waited for the nurse to leave the room. Wordlessly, he reached over to close the curtains separating him from a patient with burn injuries. He allowed himself to break down again that day.

When his wounds had recovered enough for him to stand, he found himself sitting in the garden area. The candy was still unopened, sitting on the oak table in front of him. A part of him still hoped that you'd join him out of nowhere. That he'll hear your voice like tinkling bells calling out to him.

"I promised," he thought to himself. How was he supposed to continue everything you've built without you? How was he supposed to go home and face all the things you've left behind?

He wanted to cry again. He wanted to tear his heart out so he'd stop the hurt. He wanted you back. He'd give anything.

The small buzz of wings pricked his ears. He lifted his hand a little, discovering a tiny beetle that had landed near him. He stared at it for a few seconds before gently nudging it with his finger.

It grasped his skin, spiky limbs crawling up his hand.

"___ would've loved you," he whispered.

#alice in borderland imagines #chishiya shuntaro #chishiya alice in borderland #chishiya x reader #aib chishiya #aib imagines #imawa no kuni no alice #alice in borderland x reader #alice in borderland #chishiya imagine #aib x reader #chishiya shuntaro x reader #asks #requested

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dashielldeveron · 4 months

Text

soulmate trope | shigaraki tomura

Shigaraki’s route of soulmate trope.

"post-canon shigaraki? canon isn't even finished as of when this was posted on 4 january 2024!"

yeah. thank god. gives us time to write our own endings. and obviously i will be wrong about some things. i recommend you read at least one other route, preferably dabi’s, before reading this one. warnings: female reader. manga spoilers up to around chapter 390-411ish, based on language used by others to describe shigaraki and his trauma. bodily consequences to his trauma (some things are intended to read as AFO having forced an ED on shigaraki, but this is not made definitive). sexual content. stalking. gore (in a game). reader is experiencing a type of gifted kid burnout.

~28k

There’s a hentai book lying on your bed.

You’ve never seen it before.

Flipping through it, you winced at the positions the large-titted, ponytailed woman was manhandled into, and though you were frankly impressed that she managed to wear such intricate lingerie underneath her everyday business attire, the protagonist only just got home from work; let her decompress for, like, ten minutes before railing her against the window, please.

Whom did you know who would read volume four of something called GINSENG TEA X LUSTFUL BALLSACK?

Unfortunately, you were burdened with knowledge about your friends’ sexual habits, and some of them, therefore, were already ruled out: Shinsou only read erotica because he preferred his own imagination to any images hentai or live-action could provide, and Monoma only read hentai in which the woman’s eyes had hearts in them to let the reader know she’s enjoying it—not to mention Monoma wouldn’t buy a hard copy of it, let alone a story that didn’t have more plot and character development to it. There wasn’t enough drool for Sero to be interested, and the male protagonist wasn’t enough of a twink for Kaminari to project onto, so whose was this?

Moreover, who the fuck would come all the way back to your old school’s campus to break into your room to leave it on your bed? (Shinsou would be your best bet for that part, but whenever he finished a patrol nowadays, he went directly to sleep, and his and Monoma’s flat was across town.)

You cat, Dango, jumped onto the bed, slithering up next to you and bumping her head on your elbow affectionately.

“Is this yours?” you asked her, and she sniffed the book before climbing into your lap.

You tossed the book aside to pet your cat with both hands, and you resolved not to think about it any longer, even though the cringy way the mangaka depicted the female orgasm was burnt onto your brain.

***

Hopping to put your heel back into a ballet flat, you held the phone between your ear and shoulder while you struggled towards the lift. “I’ve got to cancel on you, Ochaco,” you said, flipping the back of your blazer collar down and adjusting the lapels, “I’m, fuck—I’m not gonna be able to make it this evening, so just go without me.”

Uraraka sighed on her end. “Okay. I know a lot of us were excited to see you after so long—there’s a card Tsu’s made us all to sign, and everything—but we’ll manage. ‘Spose we’ll just have a routine night at the bar and reschedule when you can make it. I miss you,” she said, “and I’m pretty sure I can say the same for everyone.”

The elevator door slid open, and you entered. “All of you are so clingy. I’ve only been away from the agency for around two months, and you know where to find me.” You mashed the button for the ground floor. “In fact, it’s embarrassingly easy to access me.”

“Well, we’re very busy,” said Uraraka, “People are very eager to conscript us for missions, even if they really could be done by the police. U.A. alumni have somehow upticked in their popularity even more since we graduated—”

“Ochaco, I know. I was there. Allow me to weep for your success. I am playing the world’s tiniest violin.” You shifted your bag’s full weight onto your shoulder and exited into the commons. “But listen. I’ve got to go; I’m running late this morning. I couldn’t find my pantyhose even though I laid them out last night, and they weren’t in any of my cat’s usual hiding places. I had to turn my flat upside down and still never found them.” The outside doors slid open when you approached, and the harsh, morning wind upset your hair on impact. “Give everyone my love, O. Tell Todoroki to smile in his next interview.” Eyes darting across your surroundings for any witnesses, you shrank in on yourself and bit the inside of your cheek. “And tell everyone I’m sorry, okay?”

By the time you arrived at U.A.’s administration building, the wind had been joined by a light drizzle that would probably morph into a storm within the hour, a prediction compounded by a plethora of faculty umbrellas in and beside the stand by the sliding doors. The front office was gloriously vacant, though, so you were able to slip behind the front desk without someone rebuking you for being—you shook the computer mouse to wake it up, the clock popping up in the corner—seventeen minutes late.

(You’d graduated with the rest of the class six months ago, and you’d founded the all-girls agency uptown, with most of the women in the graduating class joining to form an instant powerhouse of the industry.

Founding an agency appealed to a good deal of graduates, but you were the only one to go the distance: you were the one to actually make the calls, fill out the paperwork, get aggravating shit done, and by the time to move into the building, it had pleased you to no end that Midoriya had asked you for help on kickstarting his own.

And then two months ago, you’d pulled off, frankly, what was supposed to be an impossible rescue. For the first time, you were getting enormous amounts of attention, from civilians, from press, from other heroes—and you were being followed, never having more than a moment to yourself—always being watched, either from well-wishers or nay-sayers—and sometimes, the analytical critic, eager to point out your faults in the rescue mission to try to drag you out of the hero scene.

You hated yourself for this, but they won.

Too many expectations. All sinking down on you, as if no other hero existed while the light shone in your direction. [And you hated yourself for even daring to consider this—what reprehensible audacity, but—but was this how All Might had felt?]

You’d had something next door to a panic attack when a convenience store, a regular stop in your weekly routine, filmed your reaction to how they’d auctioned off your signed receipt for over nine hundred thousand yen. Breaking their cameras, Shinsou had to escort you out of there in a rush and call Aizawa for help.

Sobbing into Shinsou’s phone on the soggy concrete of a darkened alleyway, you did something you never fathomed you’d ever do, something you could never see any of your friends ever doing, something that seemed as alien and unthinkable as sticking your hand into a pit of needles: you begged Aizawa to get you out of the hero business.

You’ve been handled with care and relocated into a surprising covert secretarial job in the U.A. admin, Nezu’s logic was that you’d adjust to one person needing you at a time, say, over email or at the desk, and if you only answered the phone with only a shortened version of your name, then no intruding civilian would be the wiser.

The job was easy, anyway. Paid well for what it was, but perhaps that was simply standard for U.A. Nowhere nearly as well paying or exciting as working as a hero, but you were adjusting into mundanity. Some days had stretches of hours in which you didn’t interact with anyone, sitting at the front desk without a task, and you even had a few days in which you’d gone in, piddled around at the desk for your whole shift without seeing another soul, and gone home.

Your friends were always so busy. The two times you’ve been able to meet with them contained nothing but conversation about hero work, or else everything was somehow tangentially related to it, and you found yourself unable to contribute to the conversation. Both times, you’d left early, a little overstimulated, leaving Shinsou to make your excuses.

And Shinsou, bless him. Not avoiding you on purpose. In fact, you knew he’d drop almost anything for you to hang out, but you knew his schedule and how little rest he got. So, it was more of a self-imposed boundary on your side, taking into account that he needed sleep more than he needed to spend time with you.

So, yes, some of it was directly your fault, but you were achingly, astonishingly lonely, with an ever-lowering threshold for tolerance of outside stimulation, ultimately feeling like you didn’t belong here.)

Pens aligned. Coaster. Check the school email for—good, no emails. No voicemail. Get out your planner and write your hours in it to look busy. Hey, your water bottle’s nearing empty; maybe you could go fill it or even waste time brewing coffee. But where’s your work mug? You probably left it on the cleaning rack next to the office sink. You should go check.

“Hey,” said Aizawa out of nowhere, ignoring how you jumped out of your own skin, “Good morning. Are you doing a specific job at the moment?”

You gripped the arms of your swivel chair to ground yourself. Is this a test? “I was about to take a moment to make some coffee,” you said, because never let someone in a position of authority know that you were doing jackshit, “Is there something I can help you with, Aizawa-sensei?”

Frowning, he dipped his chin into his capture weapon, still tucked closely to his neck to shield him from the wind, and he shifted his weight to one leg, his fingers tapping in a ripple on the reception desk. “You don’t have to call me that anymore.”

“I’m gonna,” you said, “How can I help?”

Please don’t need anything. Please don’t need anythi—

“Permission has just cleared for me to assign you a long-term task.”

Shit, you thought, internally wincing at how he used the term task and not mission, as if you’d be plunged into the ice-cold water of a panic attack at the word. The kid gloves that everyone handled you with somehow both ingratiated and insulted you.

“You’ll be paid for it,” Aizawa continued, “and it’s low stakes interaction, not even face-to-face. It’s all online.” Aizawa clasped his hands on the desk and hunched over the top of it, the ends of his scarf trailing down onto your keyboard. “You’ll recall moving some boxes into room 310.”

“Of course.” Early in your first month back at U.A., you’d helped clean out and move some boxes into 310 in the same hall that housed Aizawa, Eri, and now you—you’d unofficially dubbed it as U.A.’s drawer to shove social rejects. “Is someone about to move in?”

“He’s been moved in for a while,” said Aizawa, pulling his capture weapon away from his neck, “Keep all of this quiet. You’re allowed to know because I’ve advocated for you, because I trust in you and in your ability to do this well.” Aizawa paused, the silence dragging on much longer than usual. His eyes glazed over, as if considering how to phrase his next proposal.

You waved your hand, prompting him to continue.

His eyes focused again. “The new person is a ward of the school, but All Might and I are his primary—caretakers isn’t quite the right term, and nor is supervisors, so perhaps it’s better to—”

“No, I get it,” you said, “This person is an adult, but they’re not quite independent. Go on.”

Aizawa paused, brow furrowed just slightly as he scrutinised you again, but he nodded slowly after a moment. “I’ll allow him to introduce himself to you. He doesn’t need me to set up expectations. What’s important for you to know, regarding your own participation, is that he’s very new to the hero scene and is receiving his hero training later in life than usual. He won’t be attending class but will be trained personally by select U.A. faculty, mostly All Might, Nezu, and me.”

“Is he officially a student?”

“On paper.” Something strange passed across Aizawa’s face, but you couldn’t name it. “Where you come in is his socialisation. He’s spent most of his life in disciplinary isolation. Because of the adults raising him, his instincts trend towards distrust and animosity.”

So, Aizawa wanted you spend time with him until he was no longer bad with people, like spending time with feral cats at animal shelters until they’re ready to be adopted. “So, he’s distrustful. Hostile. Angry,” you said, scratching the side of your head, “Is he—do you think he’ll bring up bad stuff I’ve done to use it against me?”

“He doesn’t know who you are, aside from someone trusted by U.A. with hero experience,” said Aizawa, shaking his head, “and you can choose what information you give him.”

“Does he,” you said, sucking in through your teeth, “Does this guy know about how you’re going about this? I think—wouldn’t he be insulted if he knew about how you’re socialising him like an animal?”

Aizawa looked over his shoulder at the empty office, but he bent farther over the desk and spoke softly, anyway. “Recently, when I was training him at night, he expressed that he never knows what to do when someone wants to talk to him after mission, whether it’s successful or not. He froze entirely when a senior citizen thanked him last week, and that’s when we decided something tactile needed to be done. Since he’s grown used to me, you’re the solution.”

Okay. A volatile man, someone who couldn’t go to U.A. at the average age but for whom Aizawa, Nezu, and All Might were making an exception, even going so far as to personally take him out at night to practise hero work.

Hm. Fishy.

But if the good, good men who took care of you wanted you take care of another misplaced person, then you’re going to do it to the best of your ability.

“I hope I can live up to your expectations,” you said, making a note in your planner, “What am I doing?”

“I need you to learn how to play a video game,” said Aizawa, “and I need you to be absolute shit at it.”

***

For you to help some loser with socialisation, he would be teaching you how to play some janky, twenty-five-year-old MMORPG called Cipherstone—and not even the current, polished version of it; you had to sign up for an account on the version preserving the game exactly as it was in 2007. Nostalgia reasons, apparently.

You nudged Dango out aside to check your bedside clock. The discord call would start in five minutes, and you were making your Cipherstone account, completely unable to come up with a suitable username.

“Don’t connect it to your other online accounts or your actual identity,” Aizawa had said that morning.

Dango’s tiny prance across your stomach was not helping, and you couldn’t use Dango in your username, because if someone knew about your cat (and hopefully no one did, because cats were not allowed in the dorms), then a Dango username could be linked back to the real you. You plopped your head back on your pillow, knocking against the headboard. What’s something that couldn’t be traced back to you? Slumping, you let your head fall to the side and sulked.

The hentai book peeked out from underneath a jacket on your dirty clothes chair.

GinsengTea

That username is unavailable.

Well. You couldn’t use your birthdate as added numbers. You kept typing.

GinsengTea69

That username is unavailable.

You’re not about to try Lustful Ballsack. Maybe if you put aside your secretarial propensity for being correct for a moment.

GinzengTea

Username available!

Oh, thank God. You sorted out your password and started customising your character, though you couldn’t do much with the negative six billion pixels you were dealing with, and oh, is that the noise discord makes for a call? You plugged in your earbuds and clicked the answer button.

“Hello?” you asked into the microphone on your earbud cord, narrowing your eyes at his profile picture of a rotund, cartoon mouse. Username Tenkopeito. Looks like he ran into the same spelling trouble you did.

“Greetings and salutations,” he said, his tinny, rasping, just-got-out-of-bed, gruff-from-lack-of-use voice striking you with about fifty psychic damage, “I am Aizawa-sensei’s pupil, here to teach you about the intricacies of Cipherstone. It will be my pleasure—”

“Cut that shit out,” you said, narrowing your eyes at his profile picture: actually, that mouse was so round because it had just swallowed an enormous piece of konpeito whole, with the little star spikes jutting out underneath its fur. “No one talks like that. You sound fake as fuck.”

“I see,” he said after a beat, tone deflating to sound resigned (and though he’d relaxed, it somehow sounded as if talking this way took more effort, like it physically strained his vocal cords). “Am I not supposed to be nice?”

“You weren’t exactly being nice. You were using a customer service voice—which is being polite, not nice. Not even kind. Politeness is usually some sort of put-on affectation of niceness, forced for the situation. I understand if that’s what you think you need to do when you talk to people as a hero, but in hero work, since the stakes are high, you need to be genuine, or at least sound like you are.” Dango crawled across your stomach again, but you lifted her off before she could settle into a loaf on your keyboard. “In the field, it’s often hard to be kind because of how involved you get as a hero; being kind takes effort and drains you emotionally. Kindness implies there’s some sort of reciprocity, some sort of ongoing relationship. You can choose to be kind if you want, but it may wear on you in the long run. What will probably be healthiest for you, on your side, is if you aim to be nice, meaning being honest in a gentle way, framing situations positively but realistically for listeners. The public doesn’t want to be lied to and told everything’s fine, but telling them the harshness of reality doesn’t go over well. Kills morale.”

“Holy shit.” He was scratching something close to his microphone—it must be a fairly good mic, since you could deduce short fingernails against a dry surface. “That’s…a lot.”

“It is. But you can do it. All it takes is practise, and that’s what I’m here for,” you said, moving Dango from your keyboard again, “And I didn’t mean to overwhelm you with all of that; it just came out—I, uh, I happen to know a lot about the way heroes present themselves.” Swallowing thickly, you ran your tongue over your lower lip. “Why don’t we begin with what you were saying before? But in the actual way you talk, please. You need to be comfortable in your own voice.”

His mic picked up the distant noise of slurping through a straw, against what sounded like the bottom of a metal cup, which clinked when he set it back down. “Have you played Cipherstone before?”

“Total newcomer. Though I’ve seen some screenshots in memes.”

“Cool,” he said in a way that was clear it was not cool, “I can’t add you to my in-game friends list until you get off Tutorial Island. Share your screen with me until then.”

All right. You can be bad at this. You can be so bad at this. “What’s a screen?” Not that bad, idiot! “I mean,” you said, fumbling, “How do I share my screen with you?”

The scratching grew louder. “Bottom left. Screen button. Right click. Share option.”

“Ah.” You should probably lure him into thinking you’re competent while there was a literal tutorial onscreen so that he would be more frustrated with you later. “Gotcha.”

For a few seconds after your avatar popped onscreen for the first time, nothing came through but the 8-bit tutorial music. “Is that what you look like in real life?” he finally asked.

“No,” you said, not exactly lying. The character had her hair down in her face (which you wouldn’t normally do when you were on patrol, since it could get in the way of physical hero work), and, hoping to endear yourself to this weirdo, you’d chosen the sluttiest shirt: while none of the horrible pixelated options showed any boob whatsoever, the poor rendering still managed to convey that the top was off-shoulder. Again, not great for hero work. “In real life, I’ve much, much more panache.”

Another silence, during which you assumed he was looking up the word. “So, you click on the screen to go where you want to walk, on either the overall game interface or in the mini-map in the corner. Your destination will show up—”

“Wait, what should I call you, screwboy?”

“—as a red flag,” he said, frown audible, his rasping voice screeching to a stop the way brakes are slowly applied to the wheels of a train. “Not screwboy.”

“I’m not calling you by your handle. Not only is it cringe, but you won’t have to answer to it anywhere else in your life. If you don’t want to give me your name, that’s fine. I could call you by your hero name, if you like; it’d help you get used to answering to it. But no, I’m not calling you your username,” you said, shoulders slacking once Dango finally settled in a ball at your hip, “Especially since you couldn’t even get the correct spelling of Ten Konpeito.”

“It’s—it’s not supposed to say that,” he said, sputtering with a groan coming in at the end, “It’s a play on my name, and including the n makes it harder to say aloud. I think these things through; I have to be aware of my public image and branding now; that’s the whole point of this stupid—my name is Tenko, you asshole.”

“Oh, you’re gonna call civilians asshole?” You clicked your tongue. “Bad. Bad and evil. Speaking from experience, people don’t like that.”

“Just fu—just click on the map.”

“Fine. But you can’t fool me with your medieval, point-and-click game,” you said, clicking to pick up a fishing net, “Incidentally, the oldest known fishing net is the net of Antrea, crafted of willow and dating back to 8300 B.C.”

Tenko paused. “What would be the socially expected response to that?”

Your avatar fished for shrimps. “Oh, usually people yell at me. Get mad for bringing up total non sequiturs. My friend Bakugou is fond of telling me that I’m a collection of those bottle caps with facts printed on the inside.”

“Would…would you like me to get angry? Am I supposed to? I was under the impression I was supposed to curb my anger. To be nice.”

Your inventory filled with shrimps.

“You only need one shrimp,” said Tenko.

“You’ll thank me when we have food later,” you said, continuing to fish for shrimps.

“It’s the tutorial,” he said, frown creeping into his voice, “You won’t keep any resources from it. You should go chop the tree down to light a fire.”

“Well, hell. I want my shrimps.” You clicked away from the fishing spot and onto a tree. “Nothing’s happening.”

Tenko cleared his throat. “You need to talk to the woodcutting tutor first. She’ll give you an axe.”

“I thought this game had magic,” you said, guiding Dango’s head away from blocking the screen, “Can’t I just get logs with magic?”

“No, it’s—you must want me to get angry. As a test.” Scratching. “Magic comes later. Not for getting logs.”

You interpreted that as a sign to make the rest of the tutorial go smoothly. You followed the instructions for a few silent minutes, proving to him that you could read, and when you reached the end of the tutorial, a wizard teleported you to the crossroads of a town centre.

“Ah,” you said, genuinely surprised as other players’ avatars, decked out in what must be high-level gear, dashed past, “I don’t know where I am.”

“You can turn your screen-sharing off now.” Tenko typed on what sounded like a mechanical keyboard. “I’m over here. I’ve got—by the fountain—white hair, all black clothes. I’m not—there you are.”

Dozens of other players were running past the two of you, the only bare, new players in the area. Tenko’s pixelated avatar waved at you. Cheeky bitch. He’s so poorly animated and so very 2007 that it gave no indication what he could look like in real life. But he’s chosen to have a black t-shirt as his default, so he has to be a slut.

You resisted the urge to ask to feel his pixelated bicep. “You don’t have any equipment. I thought you’ve played Cipherstone before?”

“My main account is max-ed out. I started a new account to grow at the same rate as you. Before anything else, notice where we are,” said Tenko, “We’re in the centre of the city of Renfield. Get familiar with it. Think of it as home. It’s where you’ll always come back to when you get lost.”

It’s a barely animated town centre, with a short path up the stairs to a castle door and a few market stalls split between fountains.

“I have no idea what that means, Tenko.”

“It means that—that,” Tenko said, and stopped.

You couldn’t stop grinning, biting at your lower lip to keep from laughing—he’d let out a flustered huff, sounding a little strangled, because you’d said his name for the first time—and, judging by how long this delicious silence was dragging on, Tenko was probably his given name, not the family name. Beautiful, really, that a guy his age (however old he was, but he’s at least the same as you, since he couldn’t attend U.A. at the usual time) could get this nervous over a woman calling him by his name.

Tenko recovered in a way that showed he didn’t: “It means that you are always able to cast one spell, regardless of magic level,” he said in a rush, “It is a homing spell that teleports you back to this spot, so even if you get lost, you can always get back to Renfield. You can teleport other ways, too, but that’s for another time, and I need a cup of coffee.” He inhaled sharply.

It's only the first day, so you should go easy on him. Let his moment of awkwardness go.

However, Aizawa gave you a mission.

Excuse you, a task.

“Do you plan on getting flustered every time a civilian calls you by name?” you asked, petting between Dango’s ears, “Or are you planning on avoiding as much publicity as possible by being an underground hero like Aizawa?”

“I don’t—they’re not going to—it’s different with you. I can already tell,” said Tenko (you froze, fingers curled into Dango’s fur), “because I’m going to have some sort of working relationship with you. I assume you’re here to stay.”

Putting it that way made your heartbeat throb around your ears. You decided you could ask directly. “Tenko’s your first name, then?”

“Yeah.” He must have covered his hand with his mouth, muffling his voice at first. “But people usually—people have been calling me something else.”

“Then I can call you something else, if you like,” you said, getting back to petting Dango behind her ears and resolving to treat him with the same tenderness—he must need it, since no one in his life knows him well enough to call him by his given name.

“No, I think you should,” he said a bit too quickly, “Call me that. Tenko. I’m tired of that other stuff. Click on something to keep from logging out, by the way. There’s a timer.” Mechanical typing noises. “No, Aizawa-sensei wants me to be better. Of all things, I need to learn to respond to my real name.”

You squinted at your screen, as if the methodical rise and fall of his avatar’s chest could betray how he was feeling. Something had to have happened to this guy to make him feel this way about such a basic part of his identity, to make other people avoid his real name so universally. Aizawa couldn’t’ve have assigned you this task just to socialise him; something else was unfolding here. How did you enter the equation? If you’re supposed to guide someone who’s also lost their direction in life, you’re a hell of a bad candidate.

But what if you fuck up Aizawa’s plan, whatever it was?

Your recent history is riddled with things going downhill. What if you somehow screwed over Tenko? You’d be dragging someone else down with you, down to…the beginning again, a humiliating re-start, back at your fucking school, when the rest of your friends were out living the dream you’d all crafted together, the dream that apparently could go on without you in it.

Well. Enough of that. Distract yourself. Distract Tenko, too. “Got it. I want a hat.”

“What?”

“I want a hat,” you said, clicking the space around the fountain for your avatar to walk, “My head is cold. How do we get a hat? Hats. You should get one, too.”

“Hats. Very well,” said Tenko, clicking to face you across the shitty fountain, “Do you want one that’s purely decorative or one that has some sort of stats? Decorative ones we can get within a minute, with good RNG, by killing goblins across the bridge. There’s a low chance we could get a low-tier wizard’s hat doing that, too.”

“Then it will be a pleasure killing goblins with you, Tenko.”

“Mm,” he said at the back of his throat, “First, we’ll need to obtain some sort of weapons, since bare-handed punching them will take forever. We could either talk to the melee tutor to get a temporary sword or start wi—actually, we should talk to the melee tutor. Melee will probably be the easiest fighting style for you right now, and it’ll be the simplest, since you won’t have to worry about running out of ammunition or runes.”

“Sure,” you said, leaning back in bed, “Do we go starboard or port?”

“You can just call them east and west, y’know. And we go north.”

To be obstinate, you clicked the opposite direction that Tenkopeito was going, and the moment you ran offscreen, Tenko spoke in a low, grumbling voice into his microphone. “No, don’t run away from me. Come back here.”

The rumble in his voice shot warmth straight to your lower stomach, the nature of the encounter between the two of you changing in a second. Your avatar kept running to her destination, your hand frozen and hovering above the tracking pad. You blinked, your throat drying. Snapping back into it, you ran back to Tenko, who seemed unaware of what he just did to you—and he almost negated your arousal in the way he kept talking about sword upgrades and something called RNG.

Uh.

“—now, it’ll take about ten minutes, but it’ll seem like two hours of hard labour. Follow me across the bridge. Follow—there’s a follow mechanic, if you’ll right-click on me.”

Oh, you’ll right-click him, all right. You needed to know more about Tenko—why you’ve been paired off, what Aizawa’s planning for him, what—a tinge of shame soured at the back of your tongue, because what currently gripped you were minutiae: more about him, what he looks like, what he likes, what he does for fun, if you’re…the sort of person he’d get along with in real life, if you hadn’t been forced together.

God, get over yourself. You spend two months away from men your age, and now, you’re thirsting over someone you don’t even know because he said one hot thing. You needed to be socialised—no, stop. This isn’t about you. Stop thinking about what his hands would feel like on you, what he’d sound like grunting into your ear as he ground against you—

“You’ve been quiet for a minute,” said Tenko, slashing the first goblin, “Are you all right?”

A very heroic question when you haven’t been thinking too heroically. The thought of his voice muttering against your neck still grasped you tightly. “I’m having—technical difficulties.”

***

Poking your head outside of your dorm/apartment door, you scanned the hallway for witnesses. You gripped the handle of Dango’s carrier, still hidden behind the door inside your dorm, and you nodded back at her when she meowed at you.

“I know, baby,” you said, listening for footsteps, “We’ll be outside soon enough. Gotta check for people, though.”

Okay, nothing coming. You shifted Dango’s carrier out of your dorm and pulled out your key, sticking it in the lock at the same time as a door opened down the hall.

Too fast—you had to prod her carrier back inside, your foot stuck in the crack between wall and door, just as—as Midoriya strode down the hall. Keys jangling. Civilian clothes (a Froppy hoodie, in fact).

“Oh, hello!” Midoriya only seemed to notice you once you were struggling to close the door despite the carrier being the way, and hopefully you thrust it fully inside swiftly enough for him not to catch the flash of burgundy. He trotted up to you, hands in the pockets of his worn cargo pants. “I didn’t think you’d be around. Do you not have work today?”

Dango meowed mournfully through the door, and you stepped in front of it. “It’s my lunch break. I’m going for a walk.”

Midoriya nodded, and he glanced over his shoulder back to the room he’d left. “Gotcha, gotcha. Good weather for it, especially after that storm earlier this week.” easy smile stretched across his face as he faced you again, but his gaze weighed down on you, as if the number one hero’s attention magnified your failures in comparison to his rise to the top—and the fact that he didn’t mean to pressure you only exacerbated the feeling.

“Uh,” you said, stuffing your keys in your backpack and setting it on the ground, as if you’re not waiting to go back inside, “May I ask what you’re doing here? Don’t you have better—aren’t you busy?”

Chuckling, Midoriya scratched the back of his neck (and oh, in that laughter, he was hiding something). “I make time. I’m just visiting,” he said, jerking his head back towards the end of the hall, “A friend. I want to take care to see him regularly. I didn’t know you lived on the same hall.”

“If you can call it living,” you said, and for some reason, Midoriya frowned, took a step closer to you, and said your name under his breath, eyes fucking wide and too damn concerned for your comfort. Fuck, you only meant to make a self-depredating joke, not make the situation serious.

“You—you know that you can reach out to us. I mean that. If you’re scared you’re gonna burden any of us—”

You’d squatted down to go through your bag, just to have something to do, to have an excuse to not look him in the eyes. If you were going to cry—which you were not!—then the number one hero’s not going to get to witness it.

“—then reach out to me, at least. I’ve got time, or else I can make it.” Midoriya was kneeling next to you, and you kept your eyes on the inside of your backpack. “If it makes you feel less like you’re bothering any of us, I could check in with you when I come see my friend. I’d already be on campus. I wouldn’t be going out of my way.” He sighed to fill the space when you didn’t answer. “What are you looking for?”

“I can’t find my planner,” you invented, and, acting like you were upset, you zipped your backpack again. “I think I need to go back inside to locate it.”

He shifted his jaw, and he glanced down at your bag and back at you. “Come with me to the vending machines, at least?”

The new symbol of peace, asking to spend time with you. You didn’t deserve it, so you shook your head. “I don’t have much time left in my break. I think I’d better let you go.”

Shifting his jaw, Midoriya tilted his head at you, his eyes glinting. “All right,” he said slowly, “You know yourself better than anyone else. Do what you need to. Rest up.” He started walking backwards towards the stairs. “And I want to see you more—we all do. I’ll see you the next time I come around. Maybe the three of us could hang out?”

“Sure,” you said, shoving your key in the lock to let a thrashing Dango out of her misery.

***

“The church. It’s the one with the altar icon in the minimap.”

You clicked enough so that your avatar would backtrack. “How am I supposed to know that’s the church? Is that icon supposed to be an altar? It looks nothing like an altar. It looks more like a steaming cup of tea.”

“That’s fair,” said Tenko into his headset, “but this is the easiest quest in the game. How are you having this much trouble with it?”

“Oh, stop that,” you said, reaching his character in front of the priest, “It’s intuitive to you because you’ve been playing this for years. Do we kill this guy?”

“What? No. He’s going to give us each the key to a dungeon underneath the church.”

“How can he give us both a key if there’s only one?” You clicked through the dialogue with the priest, and a key appeared in your inventory. “Also, how accurate is this dungeon? Because if this is a broadly medieval game, then the dungeons will be closer to underground bathrooms rather than, like, creepy and wet with shackles and bones. That was popularised by Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.”

“How the hell do you know that,” Tenko asked flatly, “Ne—never mind. It doesn’t matter. Follow me to the trapdoor outside.”

You did, and it was locked. “Are we allowed to do this?” you asked, clicking on the key and then the lock, “Will we get arrested for trespassing?”

“Wha—no. No, we’re supposed to in order to progress the quest. In fact, our characters do a frankly criminal amount of breaking and entering throughout the game and never get checked for it. Hey, don’t go down there without me.”

Your character had only just gone down the trapdoor, prompting a blackout loading screen, but you popped back up to the surface before you could get a good look around. Your character stood next to Tenko’s, still next to the trapdoor. “What’s the holdup? I thought the only step was to use the key on the door. Did I skip something?”

“No, I—huh,” said Tenko, cutting himself off with a tinge of frustration creeping into his voice, “I lost the key.”

Raising a brow, you tilted your head. “What? How’d you lose it?”

“I don’t know. It was in my inventory one minute, and now it’s not. I didn’t touch it.” His mic picked up light scratching. “You’re not supposed to be able to lose the key, but I guess I can go back to the priest to get another. You wait—”

“Hold up,” you said, brow furrowed, “I have it. It’s in my inventory.”

“The hell? Are you sure it’s not just your own key?”

“Positive. I have two of them now. Same key, right next to each other. Want me to share my screen?”

“No, I—I believe you.” Tenko took a moment. “I’m not familiar with this sort of glitch, where an item from one player’s inventory randomly transfers to another’s. This doesn’t even happen, in my experience, but maybe it’s because this is one of the earliest quests coded into the game. It’s twenty-five-year-old code at this point, and it might have glitched because we’re both trying to perform the same quest actions on the same game tick.”

“Sure,” you said, “So, what do I do? Do I drop the key for you to pick up, or?”

“It disappears if you drop it. Trade me. Right-click, trade option.”

Once the key was traded, the two of you went down the trapdoor and wove your way back into the underground headquarters of a low-level cult, vacant for the moment but with evidence of rituals on the walls and floors, particularly in front of their bloodstained altar.

“Okay, we’re in their headquarters,” you said, making your character walk up the aisle, “What now? Priest guy didn’t give us any instructions.”

His avatar followed you and sat on the only programmed-to-be-sittable seat in the pew, his black cape (that he stole from a highwayman’s corpse) folding under his legs. “Actually, he did. You just clicked through his dialogue.”

“Because you’re here to tell me what to do, Quest Man.”

“Click on the—” Tenko heaved an enormous sigh, microphone sparking. “You figure it out. What’s clickable in this room? What has examine text?”

You hovered your mouse over most of the room, and nothing popped up with the examine option, except for something on the altar. “It’s this weird-looking, severed hand, isn’t it? This thing standing up on a slice of wrist by itself?” Your character walked nearer to it, fingers splayed widely enough to hold an in-game apple. “Weirdest ring-holder I’ve ever seen.”

When Tenko didn’t say anything, you glanced towards his character, but he was still sitting on the pew.

“Is this whole quest a pun? Because it’s one of the easiest quests, so they’re giving us a lot of guidance, so it’s like they’re holding our hands to get it through?”

That broke his silence: he scoffed into the mic. “I doubt it,” he said, “You need to grab the hand for the quest to keep going.”

“Fine,” you said, clicking the hand, and the instant your avatar touched it, a zombie spawned from the altar and began to attack you. “Dude! Did you know that thing was gonna jump me?” you asked, clicking away a few spaces but turning around to stab at it with your stupid bronze dagger, “And you just sat there? You could’ve warned me.”

“I did, and the priest did, and the duke who gave us this quest did. That’s why we went and baked all those pies in your inventory, yeah? For you to eat during this fight?”

Your character kept missing hits. “Yeah, but—like! I didn’t know the fight would be now.”

“Hey, relax.” Tenko’s voice sounded muffled, like his mouth was smushed as his fist dug into his cheek. “It’s only a level 12, and you’re level 9. Not too big of a difference. With your armour and weapon, you out-level it.”

The miss sound effect spoke for itself.

“You’ll kill it eventually. You won’t always hit zeroes, so it’ll pass.”

Though your character dealt her first damage, you frowned. “That’s…that’s actually really good advice, Tenko. The stuff you just said would work well if you were trying to calm someone down—reminding people of reality and emphasising perseverance over luck or natural talent are some of the better ways to encourage people.”

“Is that so,” he asked flatly, trying to put off a yawn and failing, “I haven’t—I wasn’t thinking about hero work. Just thinking about the game.”

“Well, it was nice,” you said, “and it seemed like it came naturally. Mind if I ask if something caused it?”

He yawned again, but he must have leant away from the mic so that you wouldn’t hear anything besides the initial inhale. “Nothing special happened today, but I’m too tired to get irritated. Therapy took a lot out of me today.”

Therapy. Therapy. Okay, so he’s got an official diagnosis somewhere. The word today implies that it’s a regular thing, and for some reason, this session was more intense. Intense emotionally? Physically? What kind of therapy? Well, they offered cognitive behavioural therapy on campus, but considering his non-traditional student status, his might be outsourced. Plus, if you, a former hero but technically a civilian, are being implemented into his care plan without being informed directly—

“You usually don’t go this long without saying some inane non sequitur,” said Tenko, that same, strange scratching picking up on the mic, “Snap out of it. You’re gonna get killed by the easiest quest boss in the game.”

Making an undignified noise, you shook yourself and spam-clicked on a cherry pie for your character to eat until she was healed completely, and then you clicked on the zombie to attack again.

“Why’d you pause when I said therapy? Surprised I’d go? Think that sort of thing is below me?”

“Of course not,” you said, trying to seem like you were focused on the fight so that he wouldn’t get nervous about sharing personal information, “Therapy good. Therapy great. Everyone needs to go to therapy.” Since he appeared to be taking this casually, you could probably ask after the type without it seeming too intrusive. “What kind? CBT? That’s what—”

“You think U.A. would arrange for me to get my cock and balls tortured? That wouldn’t qualify as therapy for me, certainly, and there’s no way that U.A. would pay for—”

“Not fucking cock-and-ball torture, you muppet; cognitive behavioural therapy. The sitting-down-with-therapist-to-talk-about-your-trauma-and-restructuring-the-way-you-think-through-practise type. You fuckin’ pervert,” you said, grinning at his avatar onscreen.

“Good to know. I didn’t know the name for it.”

“It’s good that you made this mistake with me instead of with Aizawa-sensei.”

“He’s probably more inclined towards bondage. Congratulations on killing your first boss,” said Tenko, and you blinked in surprise at your character: you’d defeated the zombie while staring at him. It fell to the ground, dropping bones and some sort of arrows.

“Take those. Check to see if they’re iron or steel. All right, equip them in your ammo slot for now so that they don’t take up an inventory space.”

You did so. “Why didn’t it attack me with the arrows if it were holding them?”

“There’s no logic to it besides that arrows are on its drop table. It’s coded to attack by punching you in the face, which doesn’t involve arrows.”

“Sure. Now, let’s get out of the cult basement; I wanna bake more pies until we can make apple ones. Did you know that the first record of fruit pies was around 1600? That means these fruit pies are anachronistic, since this game pitches itself as medieval.”

“Is that…” The hesitance had you beaming, daring him to actually ask it. “Is that not medieval?”

“Tenko, get your head out of your ass. For reference, 1600 is arguably the year the Azuchi-Momoyama period ended and the Edo period began. The game frames itself as medieval European, and 1600 is hard Renaissance-slash-Early-Modern. That’s Shakespeare times, screwboy.”

Only silence on your headphones. Character still on the pew. You made your character walk over to his to perform the curtsy emote, and in real life, you frowned. “Did I go too far there? Bit too annoying? I’m really sorry if I’m bothering you with this sort of thing; my friends say that I—”

“Nothing’s wrong. I needed a moment,” came Tenko’s voice, quiet and steady, “I could hear you smiling, and it was—it was good.”

Inhaling sharply, you pressed a fist to your mouth. Great. Fucking fabulous. Goddammit, you hadn’t aimed for it to go this way, but were you now the one getting flustered at something as simple as—

“Do most people consider a long pause in conversation rude? Did I fuck up with that?”

“No! No, of course not,” you were saying, trying to recover but still startled at how he was able to flip the vibe of your conversations in so few words, words that seemed so casual to him but grabbed you by the throat/cunt, “Especially since you followed-up with a check-in of how it might be strange; a lot of times, people will be comforted by checking to see if something’s okay with them personally…”

Frowning, you trailed off when another avatar entered the cult’s sanctuary and strode up the aisle. You hovered over the new guy’s stupid frog mask to see his username was Venomothman.

“Fucking great,” grumbled Tenko, “Here comes someone else to break our immersion. Ignore him. I’ll go ahead and fight the zombie so that we can get out of here.”

“The zombie’s dead. You don’t have to fight him,” you said, as Venomothman sat directly on top of Tenkopeito, with both avatars glitching as they took up the same space on the pew.

Tenko made some sort of noise in the back of his throat. “No, I have to kill it, too. It’s like each of us is the only one doing the quest, so in your version, the evil has been defeated, but in my version—it’s this thing called an instance—”

Venomothman: wow a couple questing together

Venomothman: bet ur one guy on two accounts

Venomothman: roleplaying that he can get a gf

The new guy’s in-text chat appeared in yellow font above his avatar’s frog-faced head, and somehow, the boggly, green eyes made his words more irritating.

Venomothman: leave the basement sometimes ya incel

“Some people are assholes recreationally,” said Tenko, making his avatar stand to go to the altar as the clatter of mechanical typing came through the mic, “Let me get rid of this fucking scumba—wait.”

Venomothman: ur doing too much work to stare at pixelated ass

“Would it be correct for a hero to insult someone online?”

You shrugged, even though he couldn’t see it. “Eh. You’re not on duty, and you’re not under any persona connected with your public branding. I would say go for it, but since you’re trying to be better with people, you may want to practise.”

Venomothman: somehow this is even more pathetic than never knowing the touch of a woman at all

“Then I’ll shut him down. The shit-talking isn’t bothering me so much as his breaking our immersion in the game,” said Tenko, grabbing the hand on the altar to start his instance of the fight, “I’m trying to cultivate a particular experience for you, and he’s a fucker who won��t stop yapping. Give me a second.”

Venomothman: is this what does it for you??

Venomothman: why no response

Venomothman: hard to type with one hand, isn’t it, ******* shithead

You laughed through your nose. “Cipherstone censors the word fuck?”

“It censors fuck; it censors cunt,” said Tenko, avatar casting a weak air spell at the zombie, slowly, slowly draining its health, “Everything else is fair game.”

“Will it censor variations of cunt? Like, if I typed in cuntbag? Or—actually, let’s find that out later,” you said, tapping the buttons on your earbud cord to turn up the volume, “Let’s practise navigating difficult social interactions. What’s our goal here in this conversation? Is it to continue to engage?”

“No.” His spell missed, and the zombie landed a hit on his character, prompting him to eat half of a pie. “It’s to close the interaction. Therefore, I need to say something concise that invites no response, right? I’m assuming that a simple fuck off is unacceptable.”

“You’re getting better at this, y’know?”

“Is that condescension I detect?”

“Only a little.” You slumped back against your headboard and reached for the bottle of water on your bedside table. “Actually—no. No condescension. Genuinely, Tenko, you’re picking up on this stuff easily, and it’s impressive. You’ll be able to walk little old ladies across the street with style and flair in no time.”

“Hilarious,” he said, voice restrained and tight at the mention of his name (too easy—he gives himself away aurally so freely; who knows what you could read off of him when you had a visual?), “I’m sure no one wants me touching them. Can I—hm.” He sounded like he was pressing his fist against his face somehow. “Why you keep bothering to compliment me? Most people bitch down to me like I’ve spat my own cum in their coffee.”

“Wha—how about because you deserve to be complimented? Listen,” you said, electing to brush over his vivid simile, “Silent admiration rots. By keeping in appreciation or gratitude, you’re not doing anyone any good. Kind regards are meant to be shared. Like, now, if I held back any positive thoughts concerning your growth, then you might not feel encouraged to keep going.”

“Like I’m gonna go around fucking complimenting ev—”

“I’m not saying you have to,” you said, “but consider trying it more often. See if anything turns out better. And be sure to be sincere about it—obviously.”

“This is bullshit.”

“Just consider it. So. What has he told us about himself based on how he’s insulted you?”

“He’s so low-level that it looks like he just created his account. His stats are even lower than ours,” said Tenko, speaking more quickly now that it was a subject he was more comfortable with, unequipping his wand to punch the zombie instead, “But he’s gone out of his way to get the frog mask.”

“His words, Tenko,” you said, unscrewing the cap and doing your fucking darndest to pinch your mouth from smiling at his slight hitch when you said his name, “I’m trying to get you to notice on whom he looks down and what that means for his personal social status.”

“Right,” he said a bit too quickly, a bit of a break in his voice on the word, “He’s debasing me for—oh, you’re brilliant. How the hell do you notice these things? He’s using basement dweller as insult, meaning he considers himself above that. Leave it to me.”

You muted yourself briefly to glug down water; you didn’t know how sensitive the mic was on your earbuds, but considering that you could catch onto Tenko’s occasional rustling of what sounded like plastic bags on his side or typing on his mechanical keyboard, as he was right now, you would prefer not to be emitting the same.

Tenkopeito: Your mom wishes you would come out of your room to talk with the rest of the family more often

You spluttered into your water bottle as the yellow text appeared above his head, and you unmuted yourself. “That is not what I meant for you to—”

“Was I being mean?” The mic caught the creak of Tenko’s chair as he leant back in it, and you could picture him defensive and pouting as he crossed his arms (and it struck you that you couldn’t imagine his face. Grimacing, you bit the inside of your cheek). “I wasn’t being rude. I could be so much crueller, but I thought this would be more of a devastating blow. Living on the same floor as your family isn’t the same as living in the basement, so I’m acknowledging his level of social power while still demeaning—”

Venomothman: i mean you right

Venomothman: lmao how tf did you know it was me

“I think we should log out,” you said, wiping the water off of your chin with the back of your hand and setting the bottle back on the bedside table.

Over Tenko’s microphone, you heard the shrill pitch of a custom ringtone and a startled but violent shuffle at the noise. “Hold on. I’m getting a call,” he said, voice coming through at a distance, as if he’d knocked his mic aside.

“Oh? Who is it?”

It took him a minute, but Tenko eventually replied, “A friend.”

That must be a damn good microphone, because you could still pick up on Tenko’s side of the conversation a few feet away. “Yes, hello?” he asked, a bit more brusquely than you’d heard him before.

“Oh. I didn’t,” he was saying, “How was I supposed to know that you’d—yes, that’s her. The one working with Aizawa-sensei.”

Very nice, you were thinking, as you unlocked your own phone to check your messages. Very good for him to have friends. Not that you would’ve pegged him as the absolute loner type, because he proved to be adaptable and quick on his feet, but since Aizawa’d recruited you for interpersonal help, you’d considered that he may not have friends. So, good on him for having at least one friend, it seemed, who cared enough to create an account on some stupid video game solely to annoy him.

“—cool of you to make an account to hang out with me. Stop fucking laughing; I am trying to be kind to you, shitstain. Okay. I don’t know. I haven’t been in contact with him in the past two days. I’ve been busy. Let me check.” Tenko leant back towards the mic to address you. “Do we have a schedule for the rest of the week? For instance, are we doing this again on Thursday?”

“I thought we were,” you said, scanning your room for your planner so that you could check your calendar, “Did something come up?”

“It’s not imperative that I go,” Tenko was saying into your ear, while you picked up your laptop to walk over to your U.A.-issued desk, “but another friend who’s been out of town will finally be back then. We might hang out.”

“Psh, go with your friends,” you said, delighted that he had more than one (fighting envy that it was so easy for them to meet up), “We can do this another time.”

“Understood,” Tenko said and backed away from the mic.

Venomothman: so have you sucked his dick yet

Tenko’s incensed shout of “Touya!” had you turning down the volume.

Venomothman: not to be the world’s worst wingman, but my dude is packing. and goes commando all the time.

Venomothman: and i would know. “i” sometimes “did” our “laundry”

You: what’s with all those quotation marks

Venomothman: and do you know the last time it was sucked? never

(Fucking hell. This Touya was walking you back into forbidden territory: the sexualisation of Tenko. After that first session, when you’d been turned on by his confident, rumbling voice as he’d given you an order, you’d felt guilty for sexualising him for the rest of the night. It was as if instead of friend-zoning him, you’d sex-zoned him, only able to see him as a sexual person/object. For the sake of your mission task, that felt unfair.

Or maybe you weren’t even sexualising him. Maybe your brain was appropriately interpreting what he’d done as sexual.

Whatever. Something in your gut was begging you not to see Tenko only through romantic or sexual lenses right now, and you couldn’t explain why.

And talking about Tenko’s apparently massive dick was not helping.)

Tenkopeito: Touya if you don’t ******* shut up I am going to tear off your other arm

Venomothman: no need, boss man

You heard Tenko sigh and say into his phone, sounding exhausted, “I’m not your boss anymore, Touya.”

Venomothman: no need, douchebag

***

Draped over the side of your bed, you dangled a shoelace in front of the gap in an attempt to coax Dango out from underneath. “Dango, sweetie,” you said, whipping the shoelace to the side, “Come out here so that I can look you in the eyes. Where is my planner, you whore?”

At a firm knock on your door, you shot up, dropping the lace. “Never mind,” you said, sliding off the bed, “Stay hidden.”

You opened your door on Aizawa, bare arm raised in mid-knock, wisps of hair plastered to his forehead by dried sweat, and a sweatshirt tied around his waist. He took two seconds to look over you before saying, “Get dressed. Civilian clothes. You have three minutes.”

Throwing on yesterday’s outfit, you rushed to follow Aizawa out of the dorm and off campus, nearly stepping on his heels while he wove through night pedestrians, pulling on his own sweatshirt to minimise skin contact once the crowd thickened.

You flipped up your coat collar to sneak a glance over your shoulder. “Is this a test?”

Aizawa combed his fingers back through his hair, gaze straight ahead. “Not for you.”

“Right.” You stepped more lightly, naturally falling back into patrol patterns: noting exits (narrow alleyways favouring the left side, underground into the subway station), checking vantage points (upper-storey windows in the resident buildings, non-industrial rooftops), honing in on light sources (yellow- and LED-tinted streetlamps, ambience from open businesses) and physical presence (close enough to brush shoulders with passerby [putting you on edge, because the slightest touch could be pivotal]). You had to consciously unclench your jaw, body flooded with stress it hadn’t felt in months. Swiping at the inner corner of your eye, you asked, “Does it have anything to do with the guy in the black hoodie and face mask following us?”

Aizawa laughed through his nose, once. “All right, then. What’s that ice cream place you and Shinsou went to all the time? Take us there.”

Bewildered, you changed directions to head towards Nekozawa’s, with Aizawa placing a hand on your shoulder to slow your pace, and by the time you pushed open Nekozawa’s glass door to the glowing, pink parlour, you were prepared to hold it open for your follower in the face mask. You watched his broad back as he ordered some ungodly, radioactive-blue ice cream with gummy bears before retreating to a table outside despite the dropping temperature, and Aizawa gestured you forward so that he could pay for the three of you.

Holding your ice cream, you hesitated at the door, swaying underneath the seasonal cat decorations dangling from the ceiling.

“Go on,” said Aizawa, retrieving the U.A. card from his wallet, “I’ve got to make a phone call, so don’t wait up. Don’t be too harsh on him; we’re here because he did a good job in the field today. Tailing you was extra practise.”

Nodding, you nudged open the door, bracing yourself at the cold, night air, and let it drift shut behind you as you approached the table, the farthest one from the pink lights.

Hood pulled up, Tenko bent over his blue monstrosity, face mask hanging by a loop over his left ear. Scuffing your boots on the concrete to announce your presence, you sat across from him, setting your cup on the cast iron before swinging your leg over the bench. You managed a cursory glance over what appeared to be a sketchbook before he closed it, and once he’d stowed it away, he swopped his spoon to his dominant hand to keep eating.

“You draw, Tenko?” To make him feel more comfortable, you kept your gaze towards Aizawa inside on the phone. “Do you think you’re any good?”

“Not yet. But I’m gonna be,” he said, clicking his pen and clenching it in his left hand, “I’ve got all these fucking artist’s gloves, so I might as well put ‘em to use.”

“Very nice,” you said, nodding, closing your eyes as you dipped your spoon into your ice cream, “But as a reminder, you don’t have to be good at something to enjoy it. I love doing stuff I’m absolute shit at. It reminds me of medieval bestiaries. They didn’t know shit about animals, but, boy howdy, did they have fun illustrating them. Did you know a weasel used to be called a polecat?”

Tenko huffed, his face mask fluttering. “It really is you.”

“Of course it is,” you said, beaming, and for the first time, you looked at him.

Tension flooded your teacup of a body and overflowed into the saucer and onto the floor. Heightened by the cold, a vein on the back of your hand strained and pulsed visibly, and, jaw locking, you lunged over the tabletop to grab him by the shoulders, shaking him.

“What the hell is wrong with you‽” You climbed over the table, pushed his ice cream out of the way (he shot out a hand to save it from toppling off the table, and he ripped off his face mask to set it aside before it fell to the ground), and planted your foot on his thigh and your elbows on his chest, caging him in as you forced him flat on the bench. “Why the fuck are you using your real name in your fucking Cipherstone username, you fucking moron‽ People could fucking track you!”

The man who had been Shigaraki Tomura eyed your fists in his hoodie and then his cup of ice cream. “You didn’t have a problem with it before.”

“I—” This idiot! “I didn’t know it was you. There are a lot of Tenkos.”

“Then there’s my logic,” he said, hands dangling by his sides, making no attempt to touch you—you didn’t know if you appreciated it or not. “I thought you knew who I was.”

“No, I fucking—I would have given you advice that was more specific to you, over the spiel I was giving interns.” Releasing your grip on his hoodie, you sat back up and scooted over on the tabletop. Though you wanted to keep holding him, to hug him after all he’s been through, he probably wouldn’t want that. “I’m—sorry about tackling you. I, uh—fuck,” you said, and, grimacing, you slid his ice cream back to him and reached across for your own, pretending with everything you’ve got that it was perfectly normal that you were sitting on a table next to Shigaraki Tomura, who’s been teaching you to play a video game, who’s apparently living at the end of the hall, who’s decorated his door with Eri’s silver tinsel for Christmas, who’s banned from drinking caffeine, who could rest his fucking head on your thigh if he wanted. Normal. Yeah.

“Again, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to keep doing that,” he said, fishing out a gummy bear like you hadn’t lunged at him, “Your reaction was reasonable.”

“It—it wasn’t, really,” you said, laughing nervously, “I wasn’t expecting you. I mean, no one knows what—what happened to you. Afterwards. It was really unclear.”

“It was that way on purpose,” said Tenko, “It was thought to be better to emphasise the total destruction of All for One instead of whatever happened to his leftovers.” He shifted a bear to his back molars to bite into the frozen gummy better. “Nezu-sensei decided it was better to keep it muddled for now.”

Muddled was a good way to put it. There’d been so much chaos at the end of the war that so much never was accounted for. You’d think that the location of Shigaraki’s body would be high on the list, but satisfaction was found simply in the splintered, spectacular remains of AFO. Shigaraki’s name wasn’t cleared, per se, but in the aftermath, Midoriya especially stressed that yes, Shigaraki committed atrocities, but he’d been abused, groomed, and literally bodily possessed by AFO to think that way. Didn’t excuse him, but wasn’t entirely his fault.

The locations of the other PLF members—well, the core of the League, really—were public, if not vague. Spinner was in the States at a rehab that specialised in heteromorph trauma; Toga was at a local women’s facility called Sakura Grove, and Dabi was living with his family—he must have been that Touya on the phone, holy shit.

So, here he was, sitting on the bench at the same ice cream parlour you visited with the same friends who fought him, hunched over in oversized, black clothes you suspected were Aizawa’s, broad shoulders and faded scars out of place in the pink lights, white hair pulled back in a blunt ponytail with his bangs flopping over his forehead, seemingly unbothered by the toe of your boot pressing against his denim-covered thigh.

God. He’s scratched at his neck so much that it looks like he’s been beheaded with a blunt axe.

Tenko’s eyes flickered up to you, their colour deepening to crimson in the tinted lights. “So. You’ve got questions.”

“Are you okay?”

Tenko swallowed with effort, scowling. “Don’t start with a hard one.”

“Right,” you said, throat drying, “Who knows you’re staying at U.A.?”

“Faculty and staff. My therapist. The police force. The ramen shop Aizawa-sensei and I go to. The intensive rehab I was at before. The top of the hero commission. Touya, Touya’s father, Spinner, Toga. Eri and Midoriya,” he said, tongue swiping over his lower lip, “You.”

Somehow both fewer and more than you’d figured. “What exactly…is the situation? Aizawa-sensei was vague.”

“Officially, I’m like Eri: a ward of U.A. My old rehab thought I was good enough to live off their campus, so I’m back here, where I can be watched by people capable enough to bring me down if I go crazy again,” he said, brow furrowed as he traced the side of his cup with his spoon, “I should resent that, but it’s not like I have anywhere else to go, especially somewhere as comfortable as this. This is fucking stupid to say aloud, but fucking—fuckin’ All Might is the closest thing I have to family now, along with Midoriya.”

“I’m not following.”

“My grandma was the holder of One for All before All Might had it.” He pointed at you with his spoon. “So you can make the connection from there. But it’s stupid; I’m stupid—” He was shaking his head and staring into his lap. “—because it’s like I have a brother in Midoriya and a goddamn father in All Might—and then Aizawa-sensei’s acting like a dad, too, to me and Eri, and Nezu-sensei? Nezu-sensei is so fucking cool,” said Tenko, dragging his hand down his face, “He’s got a driver’s license! I don’t even have one of those. And he can type fucking 210 words per minute with those little rat paws, and I’m still getting used to using all five fingers, fuck.”

Cute. You scraped the bottom of your cup. “Hey, I think you type well.”

“Yeah, well, that’s why it takes me so long to reply in the in-game chat function. Why I prefer communicating over voice call. Learning new habits, and shit.” Tenko stabbed his ice cream with his spoon. “Nezu-sensei has arranged for me to train as an aftermath-clean-up hero. I had been—” His fingers on one hand circled the thumb of the other. “—in discussion with him in rehab about what I could do, and we decided I could consistently help when there’s collapsed buildings after attacks; I could dust the wreckage so that we could find hostages or make it easier to clean up and rebuild, and Aizawa-sensei and All Might-sensei have been working with me to control what parts of what I touch gets dusted so that I could create pitfall traps for holding criminals. It’s…going. It’s going,” he said, curling his lips in his mouth to moisten them, and with narrowed, determined eyes, he took another bite of ice cream, the blue staining the inside of his lips.

“Tenko, that’s a really cool application of your quirk. I hope you can find more,” you said, tilting your head and smiling down at him, “but—I have to ask—aren’t you tired?”

Tenko rolled his eyes. “Of course. You’re part of the group ensuring I don’t have caffeine.”

“No, I mean,” you said, shaking your head, “I mean, you don’t have to be perceived as useful. You’re—you’re just fine if you wanted to rest. You’re worthwhile just as you, not as—as a job, as a, I don’t know, a redeemed hero or anything. You can just be Tenko.”

“I know. My therapist keeps reminding me. But one of the most vivid memories I have from when I was living in that house,” said Tenko, sneering, “is that I desperately wanted to be a hero and that I would pretend to be one a lot. While I’m aware that I can never atone for what I’ve done, if I did nothing but rest, I’d be alone with my thoughts. And with what I’m learning to do, as a hero, someday, someone might…need me. Need my help. I imagine that’s a good feeling.”

You sat back, leaning on your hands, the cast-iron pattern cutting into your palms, to survey him. “You’re very much re-writing my first impressions of you as my gaming buddy and as the post-war Shigaraki. You’re surprisingly well-adjusted.”

He snorted. “I shouldn’t think it’s surprising. I’ve had almost a year and a half in intensive rehab, and I’m still in therapy every day.” He started listing on his fingers, starting with his thumb. “I’m on antidepressants; I know where my next meal’s coming from and when I’ll get it; I consistently have a safe roof over my head, and I know my friends are getting that, too. I have mentors who care for me as a human person instead of as a tool. I get to stay in contact with my friends and get to make new ones,” he said, nodding curtly at you before quickly looking away, “I’m fucking away from that sadistic fuckface. He’s goddamn dead and burned away to nothing. That’s the main thing. Everything else is a bonus.”

Tenko sighed, bangs fluttering with the movement, his shoulders straining as he leaned onto both his elbows on the table. He sighed again and scooped the last gummy bear out of his cup, and you let the silence carry on while you finished eating.

“Long phone call,” Tenko said eventually.

An increasingly grumpy Aizawa was leaning against the glittery wall inside, phone between his ear and shoulder, and furiously scraping the inside of his ice cream cup.

“Yeah,” you said, “but it’s been good talking to you, Tenko. I really appreciate you telling me all of this.”

“I would’ve talked about it sooner, but I figured you knew who I was and didn’t want to address it,” said Tenko, tapping his fingers one by one on the table.

Pulling the collar of your coat closer to your neck, you frowned, hesitating on how to phrase it. You watched your breath cloud in the night air before settling on, “There’s an off-switch?”

Brow pinching very slightly, Tenko followed your gaze to his hand, with all five fingers coming to rest on the cast iron, and he tapped all five of them on it for emphasis. “Yeah. There always has been. All for One kept it from me. Power of belief kept me jittery and alert my whole life.”

“So long as you thought you’d destroy anything you touched, you would?”

He nodded. “That bitch.”

“Agreed. We should kill him.”

And Tenko laughed. Just for a moment, barely making any noise, but he smiled with his teeth, grin stretching across his face as he looked away and eventually closing his lips, the smile lingering for a few more precious seconds.

***

You closed your laptop to answer the phone at work, clearing your throat to ready your receptionist voice before you picked up. “U.A. University Administration; how may I help you?”

“I need you to fucking murder me,” Tenko spat through the phone, angry and panicked, “I need you to rip out my bones and suck out my guts through a straw. He fucking let me hold onto them, and I’ve fucking gone and lost such a fucking iconic piece of—”

“Tenko, please, take a breath,” you said, relaxing your customer service mode but clutching the phone to your ear, and after catching the eye of the woman with jars of strawberry preserves waiting to see Nezu, you slumped over in your seat so that she couldn’t see you over the desk’s overhang. “Tell me what’s wrong. We can fix it. Are you alone? Is everyone else busy? Do you need to come sit with me?”

“I—fuck,” he said, and you heard some deliberately slow breathing, but his voice still had an irate, twitchy edge afterwards. “During our practise patrol last night, Aizawa-sensei was talking about support equipment for me. I’d never given it much thought, because it’s always been just me and my hands. He leant me his Eraser Goggles for me to think about for my—and I don’t know where they fucking are,” he said, inhaling sharply on the last word, “I’d left them on my desk, but I’d taken them up to the roof to sketch them, and then I’d brought them back to my dorm—”

“And Aizawa-sensei must have swung by to pick them up since then,” you said, pushing yourself back to slide in your swivel chair to the back of the reception desk, “because he was here at the beginning of my shift to print something off, and the goggles are on top of the printer. Relax, Tenko.”

“Hooooooly fuck, you’re kidding,” said Tenko, audibly deflating, and you smiled to yourself as you slid their band around your wrist.

You kicked yourself back up to the front. “You’re okay. You’re not gonna get in trouble. I’ll bring them by at the end of my shift.” You sat up straight, and the strawberry preserves woman was shooting a concerned look in your direction. “I’m at work, though, so I think we’d better end the call soon. Anything else you need?”

Tenko hummed into the phone. “Not really. You can’t be that busy.”

You smiled again, feeling—feeling domestic, as if he were your boyfriend calling you during work hours. How strange, Shigaraki Tomura. How interesting. “Would you believe I was grinding in Cipherstone when you called?”

“And you don’t call yourself a gamer,” he said, clearing his throat multiple times, “What skills?”

“Woodcutting and firemaking,” you said, opening your laptop again, “Are you feeling under the weather? Your voice had a bit of a rasp there.” Sounded like his old voice for a moment.

“Further cementing that Aizawa-sensei’s right to be worried about you. He says your brain’s going haywire analysing any detail work you can get, because you’re not out in the field anymore,” said Tenko, clearing his throat again (?), “Am I your new project?”

“Tell me what’s wrong, lest I pick up some damn throat lozenges for you before I come home,” you said, and a voice in the back of your head screamed that that threat was extremely cosy and intimate, especially since you’re claiming both of you have a home in the same place—which, sure, you both lived on the same hallway, but so did Aizawa and Eri, and please shut up; Shimura Tenko needs a friend, not a lover right now. Besides, that stupid hallway wasn’t really home for either of you but was more like a temporary holding cell.

“Fine. I’ve been throwing up all morning.”

“Thank you,” you said, electing not to make a pregnancy joke, “Do you need to see Recovery Girl?”

“No, I’m used to it, and I’ve already talked to her about it. I threw up a lot out of anxiety and stress when I was growing up with All for One, and now I’m throwing up because my body can’t handle the amount of food it’s getting regularly, which is fucking ridiculous, since it’s still less than a normal person’s version of three meals a day.”

What. The fuck. How can he casually drop details of deep trauma like it’s nothing? How could AFO let a child keep vomiting out of stress for years and years and never interfere? Well. Yeah, he could. You supposed that Shigaraki’s voice, as you first heard it as the USJ incident, was the ultimate result of that heavy strain on his throat for years. Explains some things about his teeth back then, too.

God. If AFO weren’t dead, you’d strangle him. Keeping a child physically weak because he’d be easier to mould. It was known that AFO had been psychologically manipulating Shigaraki, but now that you thought about it, manipulating his physical growth would have served AFO, too, since he was planning to move into Shigaraki’s body.

And what did this guy do now that he’s got bodily autonomy? Oh. Just. Play some video games. Talk with his friends. Try out some new hobbies. Make crafts with Eri.

It’s a shame AFO didn’t have a grave, because you’d be skiving off work to drown it in acid.

“My stomach is killing me,” said Tenko, “I’ve got to hang up to drink something and go to sleep. Knock on my door when you get home. I want to start a new quest as soon as you finish work.”

Home. He’d said it, too. He probably didn’t mean it in the same, domestic way that you’d been entertaining, but it made your heart swell. “Okay, Tenko. See you then.”

***

His therapist had assigned him homework: go on a planned, public outing with a peer, and stay out for at least an hour.

It wasn’t exactly a picnic you were packing, you kept telling yourself, scooting behind Tenko to get to the spice cabinet in the dorm kitchen, because that’d be too close to a date rather than homework. But the two of you packed a meal to take, with Eri sitting on the kitchen counter while she nibbled at rabbit-cut apple slices, and she held the thermos of decaf tea in her lap until it was time to stow it away.

After a short train ride and a quiet walk through midtown, Tenko stopped you in front of the back gate to what appeared to be a restored, historical estate, judging by the golden shachihoko shibi on each corner of polished hip-and-gable rooftops of the extensively aristocratic—mansion? palace?—that you could make out in across the distance of its sprawling grounds, the immediacy of which was the excessively well-kept, traditional garden that you and Tenko were breaking into.

“Is this legal?” you asked as Tenko reached through the grate to unlatch the doorway.

“I have an in with the gardener,” he said, sweeping the gate open for you and gesturing brusquely for you to enter.

“No, that wasn’t a joke,” you said, taking the few steps inside, finding yourself planted onto a polished, level stepping stone, and staring down a squeaky clean tsukubai despite the thin layer of frost over the water’s surface as the whole bowl began to freeze, “You can’t be doing anything even vaguely illegal, Tenko.”

When you said his name, he closed his eyes, pausing for just a hair in his relatching the gate, before facing you and shifting the strap of his bag farther up his shoulder. “Prude. Yes, we have permission from the owner.”

He kept looking back over his shoulder at you as he led you through the gardens, hopping across stepping stones to pass over a carefully shaped brook that led to a tiny waterfall near stone lanterns, weaving through trellises with the wintry shells of wisteria vines and shaped evergreens. He tutted and rolled his eyes when you stopped at the waterlily-coated koi pond, its fish swimming and flicking their tails in the artificially heated water (for some, odd reason, what appeared to be a compact duck coop had been constructed near the pond’s edge, its wood new and un-bleached by the sun like the rest of garden décor). You’d been about to ask about it when Tenko had jumped out of his skin at the sound of a deer scare, bamboo tapping stone.

“Stop laughing,” Tenko said, cheeks burning (and you tried not to take too much pleasure in that, but you couldn’t help it).

“Oh, a sensitive boy, a delicate boy,” you said, grinning as you hopped onto the same stone as him, cool, clouding breaths mixing together in the proximity, and you yourself could feel heat rise to your face. “Nothing to be ashamed of. Good traits to have, actually. Means you’re feeling secure and comfortable in your surroundings, if you’re off-set that easily.” Feeling bold—it was the cold; it was how the proximity already flustered him; it was how his hands were full because of the bag; it was—whatever—you reached for his silly All Might scarf and re-tied the front, fluffing it up to cover more of his neck.

You made the mistake of making eye contact: full of caution, his eyes kept darting from your hands to your face, searching for something, his lips parted, otherwise completely fucking frozen.

Were you making him uncomfortable? You stilled, your fingers still in the fringe of his scarf, tension tightening in your chest and jaw (clenching).

Tenko noticed. And—and to this day, you can’t believe he fucking did this—he ran his tongue over his lower lip and lifted his chin, exposing more of his neck to you. He then was suddenly very interested in the koi pond, the ruddiness spreading from his cheeks to his ears.

Throat dry, you gave his scarf a final tug and patted it (?) to show (??) a job well done (???). “Yeah,” you said, smoothly, like a smooth person, like someone who adjusts scarves of hot, in-process-of-reformation villains on the regular, “Where are we going?”

Tenko spun on his heel and strode away, muttering what sounded like, “Right into my grave.”

You pretended not to hear it and let him lead you to the only building unattached to the main house: a small, traditional teahouse that had a recent addition to it in the back. The creak of the bamboo engawa when you climbed onto it was muffled underneath the bright pealing of windchimes strung across the covered porch. Tenko was already kneeling at the tearoom’s sunken fireplace inside, its handle carved into a fish, fiery as its kindling, and was unpacking the travel teacups from the bag as you closed the door behind you, shutting out the cold, enveloped by the comfortable heat trapped inside by the cushioned walls.

Tenko must have arranged for this space to have been prepared for you. A kotatsu with floor cushions was tucked near the fireplace, pre-heated, with two further space heaters in the unoccupied corners, cords trailing into what must be a hallway linking the traditional and modern rooms, the latter of which was shut off from view. Beside a red-tinted wooden dresser stood an oddly empty tokonoma, and instead of a scroll or painting, amidst bits of pieces of scotch tape hastily half-torn off the back was a shittily cut-out, paper heart.

Shaking your head, you took a step towards Tenko, and the floor chirped at you, freezing you in place.

“Yeah, I don’t know why they do that,” said Tenko, pushing on his knees to stand, “They just do.”

“These must be nightingale floors,” you said, crossing to the kotatsu, a bird under each step, “The chirping’s caused by the way the nails rub against the v-shaped clamps holding the floor together. Have you been to Nijō Castle in Kyoto? These are in the hallway—supposedly used as a security measure, but who knows.”

“You need a hobby.” Tenko ripped the paper heart from the back of the tokonoma, crumpling it in his fist. A shred of it remained under the scrap of tape on the wall, which he bent towards to scrape off with a blunt fingernail.

“I have several,” you said, easing down onto a cushion and unfolding your legs underneath the kotatsu blanket, the luxurious heat swaddling your legs and hips. You fought the urge to curl up underneath it entirely.

“How many of them involve getting your ass thrashed by me in Cipherstone?” Tenko retrieved the bag from the sunken fireplace before returning to the kotatsu, and he sat on your left, resting the bag between the two of you.

You took the thermos of decaf tea when he handed it to you. “Tenko, you’ve been playing that game for years, and I just began. Of course my ass is gonna be thrashed by—you know how the game works. You have all of this previous information about the game that I don’t have.”

Tenko scoffed and slid your teacup across the kotatsu’s surface. “As if I could conceal any information from you. You’re too…eh.” He waved it off, shaking his head.

“I’m too what?” You unscrewed the thermos lid, and steam surged upwards, rising to caress the planes of your face.

“It’s been unfair of Aizawa-sensei to make me tail you,” said Tenko, leaning your way, all five fingers curled around his own teacup as he stretched across the tabletop. “I’d have a chance of success if it were anyone else.”

“I’ll give you that,” you said, pouring steaming, amber tea with slices of yuzu into Tenko’s cup, “You’re getting quite good at it, not that you were bad in the first place. But yeah, it’s a bit mean of him to test your tracking skills on me.” He’d never said to stop, so you poured until liquid almost overflowed at the rim.

He gasped at the heat but nudged his teacup back to his place at the table, unable to hold it in his palm anymore. “I think I would’ve preferred working with Hound Dog-sensei for that. He’s less detail-oriented. I could win, if it weren’t you.” Jutting out his lower lip, Tenko glared down at his tea for a moment before slumping in his seat to slurp at the tea without picking it up.

“Don’t feel bad about it. It was literally and actually my focus for hero work, profiling and detail shit and being aware of my surroundings. Information stuff. Infiltration stuff.” Setting the thermos on the far corner, you cupped your hands loosely around your teacup, appreciating the warmth and getting cosier by the minute.

Tenko was rooting through the bag for the other thermoses, full of sukiyaki for each of you. “It’s clear you’ve worked hard to hone your skills. Were you this talented as a student?”

You accepted the new thermos, fingers clenching tightly around it. “Uh. I think I may have been better back then. More focused. More passionate, anyway. I had to think about it really hard back then, make conscious decisions to notice things, and now I think I do it instinctively. I think I’m slipping because of that.”

“Hm,” said Tenko, tongue rubbing over his teeth behind closed lips, and he opened his mouth to say something but shut it, instead twisting off the cap to his soup thermos. He took the first sip of sukiyaki broth and—and was absolutely beautiful (you couldn’t make sense of it beyond that; he was a mess of details that you couldn’t fit together into a larger picture that made any sense: white eyelashes light against his cheeks as they fluttered shut, face muscles relaxed, scars overlapping with laugh lines, cracked lips becoming moistened by the soup, both hands cupped around his thermos like a child, no strain to his posture, baggy hoodie swallowing him up, kotatsu blanket yanked up to his hips to cover his crossed legs, scar on the corner of his mouth delicately shifting with his baffled smirk when he caught you staring, a strange pink rising to the tips of his ears). “What?”

Uh. Hm. You pinched the bridge of your nose and then moved to rub your eyelids. “What were you going to say about me?” you asked, and you withdrew your hand from your face to raise the soup thermos to your lips, taking a mouthful of noodles and the sweet, salty broth.

Tenko shook his head. “I’m trying to avoid thoughts that fall back into my old habits.”

“Try me,” you said, holding his gaze when he met it, “I won’t tell.”

Weary, he broke eye contact, and he fixated on fishing out a certain slice of green onion. “We needed someone like you back then.”

Back then? When he—oh.

Back in the League.

Though you attempted to hide your grin by taking a sip of sukiyaki, you caught his eyes flicker to it. “You would’ve taken me? You would’ve let me in?”

“Would you have joined?” he shot back, a bit too quickly.

“No,” you said, rolling your shoulders and settling down farther underneath the kotatsu, “Never. But since you shared something you shouldn’t’ve, I’ll do the same.” You set your thermos down to rub your eyes again—God, you couldn’t look at him for too long, lest your intrusive thoughts hand you your ass. “I thought about it. About joining you.”

You dragged your hand down your face, peeking between your fingers at a muted clink. Tenko was staring at you, something fucking unreadable in his scrounched eyes, and both hands lay five-fingered and flat on the kotatsu, steam from his open thermos fluffing up hair on one side of his head. “You’re not serious. You wouldn’t have.”

“Not in the way you think,” you said, tilting your head back, “but I often thought, in the aftermath of the Paranormal Liberation Raid, what I could’ve done, if I’d known what I know now. And as the rest of the war was unfolding, I only wanted it more.”

Tenko blinked, slowly. “Tell me what you would’ve done.”

“Oh, you would’ve hated me, down to the dregs of my very soul,” you said, shifting to sit on your knees, “I would’ve started after your fight with Re-Destro, after the PLF was established. When you were letting allllllllll those heroes in, the sidekicks, the nobodies, anyone who seemed like they were with the cause. I would’ve infiltrated. Slipped in without notice. Hawks did, with the Commission, but I would’ve been going in as a free agent.”

“No one notices a U.A. student slide in between the masses. Re-Destro’s lackeys wouldn’t notice you at the door like I would. You get in,” Tenko said, taking his thermos in hand again but still engrossed in you, “What then?”

“There was a short period of time between the PLF establishment and your procedure, right? Around a month? That’s when I go. I worm my way into the good graces of some of the nine lieutenants—I’ve decided my pipeline would’ve been Geten to Toga to you. You’d just come out of an enormous battle, with Re-Destro and that city and Gigantomachia for a whole month. I heard you were bandaged up, on crutches, that you’d lost fingers that you regrew in that regeneration tank,” you said, eyes on his hands, one in a fist in his lap and the other around his thermos, five fingers pressing onto the grip but the pinkie finger hitched farther up than the rest, “That you’d given a speech and made your appearances regardless. That you’d pushed yourself to your limit and then broke yourself a little more. And you would’ve loathed me, because I would’ve come in, earned my way to your side, and I would’ve put my hand on your shoulder, slid it up your neck to cup your cheek to ask Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to rest?” You smiled and huffed, shoving it down, and though his hard stare should’ve pinned you to your seat, you pushed on the corner of the kotatsu to edge yourself over to his side, a knee on his cushion. “I like to think that you’ve sighed, sulked a bit, reluctant to admit anything was wrong at all, because back then, you had no use for moonlight. But I would’ve made you look at me, taken you to a bed, made you lie down until your eyes fluttered shut and the tension swept through your body and left. And you would rest,” you said, finding yourself leaning over him very slightly, knees touching his, just enough so that he leant backwards just a fraction, “I would’ve made that month so soft for you. I would’ve taken care of you, when nobody was fucking paying attention to you in the way that they should’ve. I fucking—I wanted it.” You gripped the front of his hoodie, fist grasping more fabric than necessary to shake him. “I wanted it. I wanted to care for you. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know. And you were fucking alone, in an unfamiliar place, and it kills me to think about that.”

You ducked your head to wipe your watery eyes on your sleeve, taking a breath—and realising what you were doing. You loosened your grip, but before you could pull away, Tenko was cat-like quick to grab your sleeve—why won’t he touch you?

“I wouldn’t have accepted your help,” he said, quiet, controlled, holding you down with his eyes, hand shifting to curve under your sleeved wrist, signalling that you could escape at any time, “That was after the worst month of my life, fighting Machia, and I wouldn’t have accepted it. I had too much to do. I would’ve shaken you off.”

“No, you wouldn’t’ve.”

“I would’ve,” he said, a bare finger, featherlight, skimming over the tender, bare skin of the underside of your wrist (oh, wow), “I wouldn’t trust that easily in that short of a time. You’d have met me, and that’d be it. If you’d persisted, I would’ve ripped you to shreds and tossed you aside.”

“Tenko,” you said, both relief and tightness blooming from your wrist, “You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”

The hallway shoji slammed open, somehow rattling as it slid in its tracks and shook the walls, and you and Tenko scrambled apart, with you jolting backwards on your hands, grappling for your seat cushion, and Tenko banging his thermos on the kotatsu, hastily wrestling with keeping it upright as he flung his body to the side.

“Hey, fuck you, Touya,” Tenko spluttered out, elbowing himself upright as—as fucking Dabi strode inside, hands in the deep pockets of his black sweatpants. “You said you’d stay in the main house.”

“Don’t mind me,” said Touya, cool as you please, raising both of his hands in defence, “I had to ensure you’re not fucking in my bed.”

“What is—” Tenko clambered to his feet to cross to him, chirping with each stomp, and whisper-shouting once he’d corralled Touya into a far corner. “I said we’d hang out later today, Touya. You swore you’d stay inside and watch Naruto this afternoon.”

The polite thing to do would be to appear fascinated by the tea. You returned to your cushion and poured yourself another cup.

“Yeah, but I’ve been told I’ve got shit to do later. I’ve got to go to this fuckin’—fuckin’ family stuff. I don’t wanna get into it,” said Touya, at full volume, “and I wanted to check that your girl was real. Y’know, she looks nothing like someone who’d have GinzengTea as her username. Have you given it to her already?”

“Shut the fuck up. I was just about to do that, if you hadn’t interrupted, cockhead.”

“Cool,” he said, a bird-note as he shifted his weight, “I wanna see what she thinks.”

“Hell, no—”

“I helped pick ‘em out. Let me watch and have an ohagi, and I’ll leave,” said Touya, chirping towards you before he finished the sentence, and Tenko followed him, muttering under his breath.

Touya sat on the bare tatami next to you, joints cracking as he yanked the kotatsu blanket up his legs, shooting you a small salute and a concerningly charming smile. “Hey,” he said, tilting his head, eyes half-lidded, smile stretching to show more of his even, white teeth, “I’ve seen you before, yeah? When was the last time you laid eyes on me?”

Tenko pelted him in the chest with a plastic-wrapped ohagi, cutting off the ooze of charisma. “Show-off,” he said, nudging another sweetened rice ball your way.

You nodded but didn’t move to unwrap it, since you were still working on your sukiyaki. “I’m surprised you remember, Touya,” you said, the name feeling strange on your tongue, “It must’ve been years since I elbowed you in the tit.”

Eyes lighting the fuck up, you snapped towards Tenko when he laughed into his plastic wrap: still not loud, still not making any vocalisation with it, but releasing a heavy, sharp burst of air with a wide, open grin. He hunched over to hide more of it, using both hands to unwrap his ohagi—and in the moment he realised he’d been unwrapping it with only his pointer fingers and thumbs, he dropped the rest of his fingers onto the rice ball, still smirking to himself.

Biting your lip in your own smile, you turned back to Touya (you caught his moment of mild alarm at how thrilled you were when Tenko laughed—or maybe it was alarm at Tenko laughing at all—but Touya relaxed his eyebrows and shut his mouth the second you faced him again). “God, yeah, it must have been before that last battle that we’d met in a fight, and I’d gotten close enough to hit you, and…” You shook your head. “Actually, I don’t wanna talk about that stuff. It’s not who we are now.”

“That’s fine.” Touya nodded towards Tenko and took a bite of his ohagi. “Shimura, don’t you have something to give her?”

Shimura. That was his last name, you supposed, but wasn’t it odd that Tenko called Touya by his given name and that Touya called Tenko by his family name? Tenko didn’t make you call him Shimura. Well, you supposed that there’s only one Shimura now, and because of the number of Todorokis, it paid to be specific—

“Here.” Tenko set a flat box in front of you, flipping the buckle of his bag back over. “I was going to give it to you with more formality, but since this bastard showed up, I’m doing it like this.”

Biting the inside of your cheek, brow furrowed, you unpacked a pair of pale blue headphones, soft to the touch with a mesh headband so that your head wouldn’t ache.

“Noise-cancelling,” Tenko said, gabbling, frowning very slightly, “Rechargeable. There’s a detachable microphone so it can function as a headset. I wanted to do something good for you.” His eyes darted towards Touya, and they dropped to his ohagi’s bulging filling, seeping out onto the plastic wrap. “You need them, anyway. I’ve been sick of hearing you through those shitty earbuds; their sound is terrible, and when you said you’d lost your only pair—which I don’t fucking understand how you can lose those things, because they just fucking show up in my shit all the time, like a goddamn plague—I thought you needed something quality—just to make it easier on my end, obviously, so that I don’t have to tell you to yell into that shitty, built-in micropho—”

“Tenko,” you said, reaching over to place your tea-hot hand over the back of his, fingers curving with his along ohagi’s edge, “Thank you so much. I adore them. I’m really grateful that you would think of me.”

Tenko froze, the same as he had when you’d adjusted his scarf. Unable to look you in the eye, like a prey animal, stiff, shoulders tense, colour rushing up his neck to his face and ears again—but this time, he lifted his hand just a hair from his ohagi to press back into your palm, and the corner of his mouth twitched.

“Hoo, boy,” said Touya, startling the both of you when he slammed his hands on the kotatsu to push himself up, “I’ve had enough. I’ve had my little snack. I’m leaving.” Once on his feet, he stretched, pressing his hands to his lower back and arching it, grunting.

“Good fucking riddance, cocksucker,” said Tenko, rising and grabbing Touya by the elbow to haul him to the door.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Touya, dragging his feet, chirping slurred and confused by his movement, and when Tenko had him at the wall, trying to shove him out, Touya, smirking under your watch, whispered something to Tenko while forcing something into his palm. Touya ducked out as Tenko looked at what he’d accepted and, letting out a yelp, dusted whatever it was before he hurried back to the kotatsu.

(When you left the teahouse half an hour later, you discovered that he’d decayed only the wrapper and not the condom itself.)

***

“One moment, please. Nezu-sensei is in a meeting right now, but he’ll be out momentarily. Please take a number—yes, the ticket puncher when you first came in,” you said to yet another impatient and pissed client in the admin waiting room, packed to the gills with parents, press, vendors, potential sponsors, and, for some reason, Mt. Lady’s entire representative team. “By the door. If you’ll take a seat, we’ll be with you shortly.”

God, you could punt Nezu for this. Not that there was anything wrong with establishing a new, annual event for U.A.—a cherry blossom garden-set, competitive scavenger hunt coming up in the spring—but because of his casual comment that it would rise to the same importance as the Sports Festival, you were swamped with those eager to invest early. Unable to take a break, you had to work with your head bowed, desperately hoping none of these people recognised you and your failure, when all you wanted was to reply to Tenko’s messages on Cipherstone that morning.

Tenkopeito: You’ll like the next quest. You can pet a dog in it

Tenkopeito: Come over to my room this evening so that we can talk in person

Was he intending to speak with innuendo or with such sincerity that it cut right through you? Moreover, was he aware he was even doing it? Based on what you’ve observed, Tenko had no idea what he was doing to you, nor did he know how hard you were trying not to act on your attraction, though you weren’t even doing a great job of suppressing it.

It’s strange: Tenko evoked some strange, unnameable emotion in you like nothing else. You wanted to coddle him; you wanted to play stupid video games with him; you wanted to sweep his hair out of his eyes, and though you kept telling yourself that you didn’t, you wanted him to tell you how to touch yourself, how to touch him. You brushed it off. Another time. Perhaps never.

“Oh, hi!” Former pro-hero Ragdoll squealed your family name, making you jump in your seat. “It is you. I couldn’t tell from farther back in the line.” Fuck, Ragdoll would recognise you, since she and the rest of the Wild, Wild Pussycats trained Class A, and she specifically spent time with you on your tracking skills because of her Search quirk.

Don’t cause a scene. “Hello, Shiretoko,” you said, doing your best not to let your face be seen from over the reception desk’s overhang, “It’s good to see you. How can I help?”

When she beamed, she was as bright as ever. “Oh! The Pussycats want to offer our services for the scavenger hunt! We wanna get back into charity and civilian events now that we’re back from our mission for—but wait, you know all about that!” You didn’t. But her cheerful voice carried, and people were already turning towards Ragdoll, part of a hero team ranked in the top thirty. “I wanna hear more about what you’ve been up to! Since you left the hero business, no one’s known where you’ve been! Gosh, have you been behind this dreary old desk the whole time?” Ragdoll leant over the overhang, flicking at a loose strand of your hair. “I thought you were sent out on missions out of the country! Like, really important, top-secret stuff. It’s weird seeing you in an office, especially since I consider you a mini me. Why are you back at your alma mater? Did your agency not want you anymore?”

She wasn’t meaning to be cruel. Her loud, blunt sincerity, though, drew the attention of onlookers, and their flashes of recognition, subsequent judgment, and turning away made your chest tight. “I needed a break. That’s all.”

A thin, blonde woman in a burgundy overcoat leaning against the wall immediately next to the reception had been evaluating you, scanning you from top to bottom during the exchange. She didn’t bother hiding her curiosity, and when you shakily handled the rest of the conversation with Ragdoll, she turned to the short, softly featured man beside her. “You know her?” She hadn’t even tried to quiet her voice; it jolted you from Ragdoll, but you steeled yourself and continued printing off a schedule for her—and from the depths of your brain came the woman’s identity: Uwabami, the snake hero, one who usually flaunted her celebrity status but currently dressed down, without her hair snakes (a rattlesnake, a yellow king cobra, and a Japanese rat snake, which—shut up! You don’t need this information right now! Can you be fucking sane, please?).

Her sidekick—no, an intern, a student at U.A., some fuckin’ twink in the year below you, name escaping you at the moment—had some iota of tact when he looked you over, slanting his body away, as if he weren’t staring. “Yes,” he said, trying not to let you hear, “She’s my former senpai and nothing more to me. We didn’t run in the same circles. She’s the one who made that rescue a few months back, the one that got a lot of online backlash.”

“No, seriously,” Ragdoll was saying, “Why are you back at U.A.? Don’t you have somewhere else to go?”

“My—” People behind Ragdoll in line were listening. Trying not to show it. Your throat ran dry, and you couldn’t think of a lie or a pleasant half-truth. “My flat was compromised. My address was leaked, and eventually, people were—look, Shiretoko,” you said, forcing the words out of your mouth, “I really don’t want to talk about this. Here’s the printed schedule. I’ll talk to you later.”

You slid the paper across the counter, and she took it, waving goodbye and still beaming.

“Is this what happens when a hero career doesn’t work out? They just shove you back where someone will take you? At any old office desk?” that fucking twink was asking Uwabami, “I can’t—it honestly scares me to think I could lose myself and be misplaced like that. It’s wasting talent, don’t you think?”

“How can I help you?” you asked the next person in line through gritted teeth.

When Uwabami lowered her sunglasses to glance over them, you inhaled sharply and swung your swivel chair so that you wouldn’t see her. “I don’t know about that. Maybe this dreadful administration office is where she’s meant to be.”

Biting his lip, he shifted his jaw and crossed his arms, slumping against the wall. “You’ll always have a place for me, right, Uwabami? I don’t want this to happen to me.”

“Yes, I can print you out a copy of the same schedule. If you’ll allow me a moment to print.”

“Of course, Kakeru,” Uwabami said, ignorant of how you were gripping a pencil so tightly that it could snap any second, “You’ll never be left behind.” But then she fucking stared you down, deliberately holding eye contact while you were at the printer, and she said, “You’ll never need a place to hide. I’ll make sure you don’t fail.”

“Hey, how about you shut up?” you hissed, ripping the printer-warm schedule from the tray and storming back to your current client to shove it into their hands. “Aren’t Japanese rat snakes supposed to be in hibernation this time of year, anyway?”

***

Someone in Mt. Lady’s group recorded it. Someone posted it.

wizardjenkins11: jesus christ who knew u.a. had its own island of misfit toys

emotionalsupportdynamightsweat: nice to see that she kept her snark, but what is she doing back at school?? don’t heroes have some sort of paperwork component to their work. why isn’t she still at an agency

blood-is-thiccer: lol ua’s the only one who’d take the bitch. she’s being rude as hell to an actual pro hero. lameass quirk anyway and ass flat as hell lmao she fucken deserved that guy lighting her mailbox on fire

LynchianTiddies: You’re encouraging domestic terrorism???

blood-is-thiccer: that’s not domestic terrorism

LynchianTiddies: Then what, pray fucking tell, is it??

blood-is-thiccer: wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandalism

XylemPhloemBuckaroo: no but I get what that guy was saying about wasting talent tho. Out of everyone in that class a, she’s the only one not topping the fucking hero charts rn. She’s the only one who’s left hero work. What makes her weaker than the rest of her classmates? What happened to her to make her like this?

koiboi69: wouldn’t you quit if people were camping outside your house/work/grocerystore? And also FUCK, man, there’s no fucking need to say she’s fucking weak. that’s kicking her while she’s down

XylemPhloemBuckaroo: I’m not kicking her while she’s down. I’m stating facts and asking reasonable questions.

koiboi69: bro wouldn’t YOU feel down if you’d didn’t have a home to go back to??? going back to u.a. is like admitting defeat, like you couldn’t handle it on your own and need protection

mawatadaddysgorl: i love seeing updates on her bc it makes me feel so good about what i’m doing with my life

***

Uraraka and Shinsou texted you but couldn’t call, let alone come from across town. Aizawa was AWOL, and Dango was hiding under your bed, so you, blotchy-faced and damp, were crumpled on the floor outside of room 310, eating vending machine bullshit and waiting for Tenko to return home.

Exactly all the insecurities you’d been stuffing down for months and months, brought out to air in front of everyone. Instead of doomscrolling, you locked your phone and slid it across the hallway carpet, burying your face in your hands and stomach lurching to the thought that you might soon be plastered everywhere in sight, again. Another round of intensive laying low loomed on the horizon, especially now that your location was made public. Your little secretary job was good enough, and relocating elsewhere on campus would lead to more job training, which would be a bitch.

Where was Tenko? You needed him here to say something irreverent and vindictive. Something unhinged. Or you needed him to hold you, pull you into his lap, and bitch about the whole thing while watching a movie. Tenko had messaged you to come by after work, so why wasn’t he…?

The staircase door hissed open, Tenko pushing it with his back, reusable grocery bags on his arms, and—and wearing a cape? Who the fuck wears a cape casu—oh shit he’s in his hero costume.

You’d heard that he had one, designed by the same company that’d made Midoriya’s and Shouto’s, and the similarities were clear: a boxy sort of design due to thick fabric that still somehow hugged his chest, a minimalist utility belt, and sturdy, knee-capping boots, positively flaming scarlet in contrast to the dark greys of the rest of his jumpsuit. The most obvious connection with another hero, though, made your chest throb: his cloak fastened with the same clasp his grandmother’s had. His dust-blocking respirator lay around his neck for the moment, but what was most embarrassing for you was how your brain fucking wheezed like a boiling kettle at his bare arms, biceps bulging, every fucking inch of skin down to his fingertips completely on display like a goddamn slut.

Whore behaviour. Whore behaviour! You had to duck your head when he squatted next to you, because oh, now you could see the stretch marks on his upper arms, because he’d gotten large way too quickly to be healthy, and smell his fading Old Spice and sweat from being out on what must have been an emergency call, and he was setting his grocery bags aside, reaching out to graze your shoulder, and wow, he’d been complaining about how he didn’t have abs yet despite working out five days a week now that his stamina had increased, but that fabric clung to his lower abdomen, looking very, very flat.

Initially pinching the fabric of your sweater, he shifted his jaw and laid his hand on your shoulder. “Who am I dusting?”

“God, Tenko,” you said, trying to look anywhere but his arms, or his abdomen, or his fucking lips, but he was leaning so much over you that he occupied most of your line of vision, and the only way to avoid seeing anything besides wisps of white hair was to gaze at the popcorned ceiling. “You’re not supposed to do that anymore.”

“Oh, yeah? Who am I dusting?” He squeezed your shoulder, stretching his thumb out to rub at your collarbone.

“Unless you can dust everyone in the country, I don’t think decay will help.”

Tenko clicked his tongue. “I have been explicitly told not to do that,” he said, shifting to sit on his knees, “I have—” He dug into a grocery bag for a moment. “—this for you. You like this shit, right?” Tenko pressed a bottle of pink lemonade into your hands.

“Fucking. Fuck. I do,” you said, passing the condensation-coated bottle from one hand to another, chest tightening, blinking to keep the water levels low, “Thank you. You didn’t have to get me this.”

“I know that,” he said with a dismissive wave, and he paused, fists in his lap. “Would it help if I gave you a hug?”

(What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what the—)

“Yeah,” you said calmly, like a calm person, and when Tenko opened his (muscular) arms, you crawled into them, wrapping your own around his back to rest between his shoulder blades. You rested your chin in a fold of his cape, cheek pressing against the side of his respirator, and you frowned as his embrace tightened, pulling you closer in a sloppy, unpractised sort of way, grounded by the steady rise and fall of his very solid chest.

(This felt…affectionate. Romantic, even.

But Shigaraki Tomura didn’t do romance, and you don’t—you’re not—you wouldn’t dream of being conceited enough to read someone’s perhaps thoughtless actions as flirtation, because why would someone be flirting with you? No one did that in general, and being U.A.’s humiliating problem child exacerbated the fact.

Moreover, why would the man who was Shigaraki Tomura, in the middle of his rehabilitation and re-discovery of self, even in the microscopic chance that he had the mental energy to experience romantic feelings, aim that romantic impulse towards you? It would make more sense if he liked someone he’d known for a while, like Touya or Spinner or Toga, and if his romantic feelings leant towards recuperative trauma-bonding, wouldn’t it be more apt to feel for someone at his rehab? His therapist, maybe? He’d idolised Aizawa before he’d met him, and even that would make more sense than latching onto someone as late in the process as you.

He’d gotten flustered when you’d tied his scarf, and Touya’s played terrible wingman. But still. You couldn’t know. You can’t read into this, even though reading into things had been your job, because—because no one would want you. You’ll have to…You’ll have to gather more evidence. You couldn’t be certain.)

Tenko hummed, chin digging into your shoulder, blowing strands of your hair out of his face. “I calmed a kid down earlier by hugging her. Is this working for you?”

(…oh.)

You sniffled and hid your mouth in his cape so that he couldn’t catch your pout. “That’s—that’s good that a kid allowed you to comfort her. What happened?”

“Pipes broke in an old apartment building in the Takoba district. The third floor collapsed under the pressure, and it trapped families in part of the building. I was called out to dust the rubble trapping them,” Tenko said, tapping his fingers high on your back in a ripple, “and they had me dust some other walls to help start the repairs. It was cool. And this one little girl who’d gotten out before the rest of her family was really nervous, and she was sticking to me, holding onto my cape. I was telling her that everything was gonna be okay, like you’ve taught me, and when I asked how she was doing, this fuckin’ kid extended her arms to me. So, I fucking hugged her. Picked her up so she could see what was happening better. It was weird, but it felt good.” Tenko sighed. “I hate how it wants me to be kind more.”

And fuck, fuck, that’s the last straw to this horrible day, and you’re crying, silently, controlling your breathing to keep Tenko from finding out, because goddammit, this idiot bastard man was surprisingly easy to love.

You buried your face fully in his shoulder, hoping he couldn’t feel any wetness through his costume, and you and Tenko sat in the quiet of the hallway for a minute, interrupted only by the A/C kicking in.

Tenko tried to part the two of you enough to look you in the face, but you doubled down, curling your fingers into the fabric of his jumpsuit and keeping your head bowed. Scoffing, he sat upright, making you follow his movements to stay hidden. “You gonna tell me what’s wrong yet?”

“Forget all that shit I’ve taught you,” you said, grumbling to his tits now that he’d changed positions, hating how stopped up you sounded already, “It doesn’t matter what you fucking do in the public’s eye, because there’s always gonna be someone who hates you. You can’t please everyone, so just fucking be yourself. That’s funnier, anyway.”

“Did you psychoanalyse some press member’s pathetic sex life, or something? Deduce an affair based on the way he knots his tie? Announce the state of his dick to the whole room because of the length of his pants?”

“Fuck off, Tenko. I’m not some pretentious-ass Sherlock Holmes bitch,” you said, pursing your lips and instinctively pulling back to glare at him—

And the moment you did, Tenko cupped your face in his hands, soft at the palm and strongly calloused along his fingers, keeping you facing towards him no matter how hard you tried to jerk away, struggling to stay upright. “You are crying.”

“No, I’m not,” you said, just as a falling tear touched his thumb. As you adjusted to his grip, your hands fell to his thighs, pressing against them in fists.

“Hm. Well, you don’t have to tell me,” he said, eyes on another tear trailing down the other cheek, “but you’re joining me to watch a movie with Eri. I got snacks on the way home.”

You sighed, taking in how big his hands were and how much of your face they encompassed, trying to memorise their feeling until they were snatched away forever. “I thought we were gonna start a new quest tonight. I was excited.”

Tenko balked and shifted into a sceptical grin. “You wanted to play Ciperstone tonight?” he asked, both thumbs rubbing your cheekbones and moving to swipe underneath your eyes.

You sighed again, shoulders heaving as Tenko released your face to flick tears off of his hand. “I didn’t want to be myself for a few hours.”

Tenko pushed on his knees to stand. “That’s actually related to what I originally wanted to talk to you about. Furthering the working-with-others mission,” he said, and he extended his hand to help you up. “What do you know about Dungeons and Dragons?”

***

“God fucking dammit!” Tenko slammed his palm to his forehead and leant back to balance on the kitchen chair’s back legs and then combed his fingers back through his hair, upsetting some strands from his ponytail. Groaning, he crooked his face your way, smushed his face against the chair back, and pointed towards his forehead, where a red splot was forming. “Hit me as hard as you can.”

“Being bludgeoned won’t change the fact that you rolled a three,” you said, nodding towards his d20, “I ignore his whining and continue to drain the fig tree to charge my spell.”

Behind the DM screen, Shinsou rolled his own dice, and once his eyebrows had shot up to his hairline, he turned to Midoriya. “I need you to roll two d12s and a d4.”

Tenko bolted upright, hastily sweeping his bangs out of his face. “Wait, what does Midoriya have to do with it? He’s across the fucking grove! He’s engaged in close-ranged combat.”

You turned away from Shinsou’s sly grin and towards Tenko, mouth nearly a straight line, yanking another cluster of grapes from the communal bowl, and shoving two grapes in his mouth. He pinched at his lower lip as he chewed, twisting and peeling at dead skin, frowning as he focused on his character sheet, scanning it for some sort of information he was forgetting and absentmindedly raising his knee to his chest, the heel of his foot propped on the seat of his chair (thank God his jeans were from Best Jeanist’s Moulded to Your Ass line: the denim strained with his muscles. Your eye twitched). In this particular morning, with the five of you squared off at Aizawa’s kitchen table, papers and dice strewn among grocery store bakery cinnamon rolls and coffee cups (Tenko’s was full of gatorade instead of coffee, much to his chagrin), as Tenko was throwing grapes into Touya’s mouth while Shinsou did math, the narwhal house slippers dangling off Tenko’s feet, it struck you that Shigaraki Tomura had become just some guy. One who went for walks to clear his head, who spent hours failing to do a kickflip on Present Mic’s skateboard, who used emoticons over emojis, who got nervous in fast food drive-throughs, who collected hero merch (of Aizawa fervently and Present Mic against his will), who was losing his sensitivity to foods like leeks and onions, a man who was growing more and more exquisitely mundane.

And goddamn, he’s clever and perceptive and patient and cheeky in a devastatingly attractive way, and he’s flustered easily, eager to do a thing correctly, and utterly, totally captivating in his endless discoveries of what it means to be alive.

You timed it so that the shudder and shock crossing his face could pass as response to Shinsou’s description of how Tenko’s enchanted crossbow bolt missed the Spirit Realm Necromancer entirely, instead sinking into the sacred Grand Oak and instantly shattering the tree as if it were glass, its elaborate root system holding up the floating grove splintering into thousands of tiny shards, the ground beneath your party’s feet crumbling at the slightest suggestion of the shifting of weight. But really he curled in his lips with a furrowed brow and stuttering breath when you reached underneath the table to graze the back of his hand, and when he forced himself to relax, shoulders slackening, frown fading, Tenko spread his fingers to cover more of his denim-clad thigh, which you took as a timid sort of consent. Biting the inside of your cheek, you eased your palm over the back of Tenko’s hand, lacing your fingers through his and going through the motions of reacting to Shinsou’s shattered earth. Neither of you looked at each other while Midoriya’s character suffered the Necromancer’s spell to increase gravity, each movement of Midoriya’s bulky, steel armour accelerating the fall of the floating grove. By the time each of you had had enough turns to land on solid ground, preserving little of the sacred grove but all surviving, Tenko finally squeezed your fingers back, curling his own to grip them more firmly, keeping your hand pinned to his thigh, steeling himself, sitting up straight, and proposing getting close enough to the Necromancer to drive a crossbow bolt directly into his skull.

Midoriya was already muttering to himself over the effectiveness of the action while Shinsou worked, and Touya irreverently flicked his dice at Tenko, chugging coffee with his other hand. “You plunge the bolt by hand into the Necromancer’s head,” said Shinsou, “but with your strength debuff still in effect, you only nick him.”

“I try stabbing it through his ear.”

“It goes through,” said Shinsou, nodding and running his hand back through his hair, which sprung back into place, “It doesn’t pierce the neocortex, so he can still summon another—“

“I stomp him to death with my hooves,” said Touya, picking at his teeth and running his tongue over the spot.

The rest of you turned to him slowly in various states of incredulity.

“You don’t have hooves, Touya,” you said, tilting your head at the same time Tenko rubbed his thumb over yours, prompting your breath to hitch and a strange warmth to travel through your body, making you feel dizzy.

Touya grimaced and reached for a cinnamon roll. “I take off my leather breeches and boots to reveal my hooves. I have been a satyr masquerading as a human this whole time.” He leant forward on his elbow, glaring at Shinsou and gesturing with his cinnamon roll. “I stomp him. To death. With my hooves.”

Tenko sneered, his teeth cutting into his lower lip, but he merely opened his mouth and closed it, poking his tongue into his cheek. “I suppose maiming a party member wouldn’t coincide with my character’s chaotic good alignment,” he said, heaving a huge sigh to—oh, that cunning rat bastard—to conceal how he flipped his hand over in yours to touch palms, weaving your fingers back together and squeezing again, planting them back on his upper leg, massaging between your knuckles with his thumb.

“What’d you just roll?”

“Nineteen,” said Touya, casting Shinsou a slice of his most charming smile.

Midoriya let out a little laugh as Shinsou bitterly plopped his head on his fist. “Fuck you, Touya. Congratulations. You clomp over to the Necromancer and stomp all over him. Stompy stomp stomp stompy stomp. It’s difficult to watch at the insane speed you’re going, so no one stops you from doing such a good job pounding him that he’s ground into dust. Bits of him drift away in the wind.”

Here Midoriya winced. “Weren’t we supposed to retrieve the soul crystal embedded in his gauntlet? We can’t get our reward from that Silver Age dragon rider if we don’t have it.”

“Correct,” said Shinsou, glancing down at his notes, “It has been stomped to smithereens. You can’t even make out what parts of the pile of dust were once flesh.”

Ready to bolt, Touya was getting up from the table and holding up his hands in defence, but before Midoriya could start a speech that would have been more apt for the number one hero to use on patrol rather than during a DND game, the door to Aizawa’s flat opened, and in he walked, covering his yawn with the back of his hand. He halted at the sight of the five of you around his kitchen table, taking in the scattered papers and remnants of breakfast before settling on your DM. “Shinsou,” Aizawa began, disappointment outweighing the exhaustion in his voice.

“You’re the only one with a table that could fit all of us,” Shinsou said, spinning in his chair to face him, “This dormitory doesn’t have a good common area like the student ones do. Would you really prefer us to—”

“We can find you a table; there’s plenty on campus.” Aizawa lifted his goggles over his head to set them on the counter. “Is this why Monoma kept slowing me down during patrol?”

“No,” you and Shinsou said, while Tenko said, “Yes.”

Aizawa actually smiled as he unwound his capture weapon from around his neck. “Look who’s the only one telling the truth.”

“Why would I lie to you, sensei?”

Touya smacked Tenko on the arm. “Suck-up.”

“You promise?” Tenko shot back, nose wrinkling with his grin.

“This coffee had better be amazing, because it’s the only thing keeping me from kicking you all out right now,” said Aizawa, rubbing a dry eye with the heel of his palm, other hand outstretched for someone to pass him a mug.

Tenko’s thumb bent inward to swipe the inside of your palm, a silent protest while he drank from his stupid little mug of gatorade, and when he noticed what was at the bottom, he flinched. It must have been Touya who’d put your dice in Tenko’s cup.

***

Following the video of you insulting Uwabami, you’re garnering an unnerving amount of attention again, but it’s clearly someone different than last time. Whoever your stalker(s) was this time around, they were careless and unsubtle—and this confidence to be careless left you jumping at the slightest sound when you were alone.

Furthermore, you legitimately couldn’t deduce your stalker’s motivations, because no clear message linked his actions. At first, you chalked it up to the dorm’s shitty dryer eating your bright blue thong, but when you couldn’t find your lip balm or trolley pass or eventually your favourite sweater, you concluded that something else was at play here, further cemented by more and more tiny things going missing—things that, if you were stalking someone, you would’ve selected as small enough not to miss.

But bizarrely, your stalker left shit of his own lying about. A phone charger appeared underneath your pillow; loose change and a travel pack of alcoholic wipes showed up in your bathroom sink. Hello Kitty band-aids, a hair clip that looked like one of Rumi’s ears, deep-moisturising hand cream, a tiny lizard keychain with a white hamburglar mask drawn on. You couldn’t wrap your head around it. What could your stalker be trying to say besides he could access your personal space with ease? Hoarding it all in the drawer with the GINSENG TEA X LUSTFUL BALLSACK hentai, you were struck with the notion that this may have been going on even before the video.

God, you missed when this school felt more like home instead of a holding cell, back when Shinsou and Uraraka and the rest were all still living together with you, when you could simply turn the corner to the common area to demand who took your laundry detergent and get an answer immediately (you also missed taking Aoyama’s bougie food, though you suspected that towards the end he was buying extra specifically for you). You sent an email to Aizawa about the potential break in security, and he promised to monitor the situation, though there was no evidence of physical entry.

Evidence. It’s been on your mind.

Sure, Tenko’s done stuff that could be read as romantic: how he plops your hand onto his head to demand you play with his hair, how he hovers whenever Touya stands too closely to you, how he gets upset on your behalf when people glare at you in public.

(Tenko grabbed your elbow, breaking your focus on the clothing rank. “We’re going.”

“But we haven’t found you a red coat yet.”

He lifted the hangers from your arm and slid them back onto the rack, despite belonging elsewhere. “Don’t care. I don’t like the way the cashier’s looking at you,” he said, jerking his head their direction, and when you tilted your head to glance at them over his shoulder, Tenko tapped your chin twice, guiding you to look back at him. “You shouldn’t have to be on guard when I’m with you.”)

If you were reading into it—and you were—Tenko was being so careful with talking about the pro-hero scene around you that it was almost as if he’d gotten a mission task from Aizawa to distract you from anything that might make you feel bad about yourself.

(“I hear you’re causing a lot of paperwork for my old man,” said Touya, pulling out another floor cushion from the storage space in the teahouse wall, “He hates that you’ve had to dust so many structures near his agency. He’s a decrepit creature of habit, and now that his commute is different, he’s—”

“Hey, Touya, tell us what flower bulbs you planted this winter,” Tenko said abruptly, clamping the lid on the pot hanging over the sunken fireplace, “Tell us what your garden’ll look like in spring.”

You shut your book, even though you’d just opened it. “Wait, are you saying that Touya is the one who keeps this garden? That’s—”

“You like it, sweetheart?” Touya dropped his cushion next to yours, ignoring the way Tenko was glaring daggers into his back. “Think it’s impressive?”

“Holy shit; I thought we were in the back of some professionally restored historical site the first time we came here,” you said, smiling at how Tenko’s petulant stomps to his seat chirruped, even when he scooted his own cushion towards yours (adorable; you’d think he didn’t like you giving attention to anyone else).

“Well,” said Touya, propping his hands on the kotatsu so that he could get a better view of Tenko, “With enormous pride and a huge erection, I’m pleased to announce that this garden is all my hard work.”

“Stop that,” barked Tenko, jabbing a finger towards Touya, “Stop bringing up your cock.”

“I could talk about yours, if you want. His monster cock is excruciatingly leaky and so shaped.”

Groaning, Tenko clonked his forehead on the kotatsu’s tabletop before Touya could say anything else, arm still outstretched. He peeked out from underneath his bangs towards you, tension leaving his body at your burst of laughter.)

He’s also taken your comment about silent admiration to heart. Over the discord call (through very comfortable headphones), you’d made a dumb joke about not being able to play for long, and he’d shut up immediately. When you’d confessed to lying and hoping you’d scared him, he’d replied seriously: “I want to protect my time with you. I don’t like it being taken away. I feel better when you’re with me.”

You’d frozen in the middle of weaving bowstrings while his character continued stringing them onto bows. You’d never have gotten that sort of remark at the beginning of your relationship. Tenko must genuinely be listening to you.

Anyway. You decided in the event that Tenko was collecting evidence, too, that you would leave him some.

The first time you’d been in his room had been for a specific purpose, which was to help him rub in his new facial scar moisturiser (not to take them away, or anything, because Tenko wanted to keep them, claiming he wouldn’t recognise himself in the mirror if he didn’t have his scars—and you thought they were devastatingly attractive, anyway—but just to keep them hydrated enough not to itch), but now you were here just to spend time in the same space. You were reading on his bed (oh, hohoho, his bed), and Tenko was drawing in his sketchbook on his couch by the window. With his mouth pinched in concentration, he squinted down at his paper, swiping away eraser shavings with his artist-gloved hand.

Drawing by natural light. Tenko was in room 310 because of its wide windows. It had been his one request when U.A. was placing him.

AFO had deliberately raised him in a bedroom without windows. You’d kill him if he weren’t already dead.

Thankfully, AFO’s influence was absent from Tenko’s dorm: Naruto sheets from Touya, an old Nintendo DS on his bedside table with Nintendogs in the cartridge slot, Present Mic’s skateboard propped against the coatrack that held only a black hoodie, unfolded but clean laundry in a basket next to a dresser with prescription bottles atop it, a mirror that served more as a bulletin board of Eraserhead merch than as a way to check his reflection, red shoes by the doorway, books borrowed from everyone from All Might to Shinsou to the ramen delivery guy strewn across the room, on shelves, his computer desk, his rug. The thing Tenko’d had to explain to you was a therapist-assigned painting hanging over his desk: he’d painted a murky, purple-blue, abstract sort of thing, and you were strangely touched when he’d explained it was Kurogiri (and now that you were looking, among his bulletin board of Eraserhead, a few drawings of Loud Cloud were mixed in).

There’s a lot of people in Tenko’s life who care about him now, and you’re happy to be one of them. Setting your book aside, you got up to sit next to him on the couch.

He paused when you sank into the cushion next to—well, no, you were basically sharing the same cushion, especially since he unfolded his legs from underneath him so that you could get closer. You scooted over so that your shoulders touched (scandalous) and looked over his drawings.

He’s drawing your DND characters. While his sketches aren’t exactly good, you can clearly tell who’s supposed to be whom, and they’re fun to look at, so that’s all that matters. At the centre is your character, Ginseng—you named it after your Cipherstone account because why not—in the process of spell-charging. Your character relies on the traditional ritual of tea ceremonies, from the growing of the tealeaves to serving it, summoning whatever tools you needed, like the table and dishware, and if an enemy got caught by the conventions of politeness of the tea ceremony, they were trapped in it until they’d drunk their teacup dry. Tenko had drawn her early in the spell-charging process, with branches of tealeaves sprouting from underneath her skin, with her harvesting them from her forearm. It’s rather flattering, the way her determined expression lit up her face.

Next to Ginseng was Tenko’s character, Peito, also lifted from his Cipherstone character. He was sitting on the same log as Ginseng in the middle of camp, backs touching while he cut feathers as the first step in the fletching process. His carved-willow quiver leant against his knee-high boot, red even in a fictional universe. Peito’s hands were bare, five fingers pressed against his knife and arrows.

Further back in the camp (really just towards the top of the paper, since Tenko wasn’t good at foreshortening yet), Midoriya’s character, Jackrabbit, was holding up two hangers, one with his steel and the other with sleek, black leather armour. A nice touch, really, since Midoriya had swopped Jackrabbit’s primary armour to the more lightweight leather since the shattered grove incident, and wow, you could even tell it was leather based on the pencil strokes.

Seated nearby, Touya’s character, Granddaddy Slapkins, roared with laughter at him. His shoes lay next to him, his hooves out. For some reason, he’s not holding his pet duck; he’s instead cradling what looks like your character’s wild shape, a cat with the same chocolate-point markings as your real cat (your character’s shapeshifted form was just Dango, but Tenko didn’t know that. He still didn’t know Dango existed, because cats were still illegal in the dorms, and Tenko, that little brown-nosing shit, would probably tell Aizawa about her. Cute how he’s only a suck-up to Aizawa, though).

Your favourite detail, though, was how his character was smiling. Unabashedly. As if it were a no-brainer, as if doing anything else made no sense at all.

With a stab of affection, you nuzzled into Tenko’s shoulder, resting your chin there while he sketched loops of chainmail onto Granddaddy Slapkins’s shirt, and a shiver racked through him.

“Oh, are you cold?” you asked, sitting back up and heading over towards the bed, “Let me get your blanket.”

“Wha—no, I—sure,” said Tenko, setting his pencil on his sketchbook and the whole thing on the arm of the couch, eyes half-lidded as you returned with his throw blanket.

And without thinking, you moved on impulse, as if all higher orders of cognition had checked out for the night, because you behaved like you did in your head whenever you thought about Tenko: casually, intimately, and domestically. You wrapped the blanket around yourself and knelt on the sofa before swinging a knee over his lap, and you snuggled into his chest, clutching his shirt and nosing at his neck.

Your eyes snapped open.

(What the fuck?

If this had been a planned attack, then it would’ve been a thing of brilliance: casual, seeming to meet a physical need [heating a chill] in the name of physical closeness. But you fucked it. This wasn’t planned, and thus you don’t have a way out of it without otherwise betraying your romantically-motivated interior.

Thank fuck he’s frozen up, too. But how do you get out of this? God, you really shouldn’t be teaching him how to navigate interpersonal relationships when you get yourself into shit like this.)

You swallowed thickly, pulse pounding in your ears.

“I need your advice.” Tenko’s chest barely rose when he took his first breath since you climbed onto his lap. “What would be the socially expected response to this?”

“Uh. That depends on if you’re into it or not,” you said, forcing yourself to sit back in his lap to give him some space, “If you dislike it, then it’s to get me to get off of you, and if you welcome it, then, uh. Anything else.”

Tenko unclenched his fists at his sides and—a pause, shifting his jaw—he let his hands rest at a barely-there touch on your hips, dragging them upwards to your waist, applying enough pressure there for you to feel all ten fingertips through your shirt. “Is this,” he said, wetting his lower lip, and he couldn’t continue, instead swallowing saliva.

Gathering your nerve, you wove your hand through his hair to scratch at his scalp in the way he’d liked when you’d played with his hair, and at the familiarity, Tenko huffed, shutting his eyes tightly and pressing his forehead to yours in a rush, almost knocking them together. He took another breath, heat washing over your face, and you slid your other up hand to cup his cheek.

Tenko shivered again, and he clamped his hand over yours to keep it there. “Are you sure this is what you mean to do?”

He seemed receptive enough to it, but you couldn’t be certain. “Yeah,” you said, “If I’m reading it right.”

“But it makes no sense. I’ve got to be reading it wrong,” Tenko was saying, frowning, “No one would willingly like me—”

“For fuck’s sake, Tenko—”

Practically slapping your other hand to his cheek, you kissed him, pulling him closer, one of his hands still over yours with the other now gripping your waist as if he’d never let you go. Tenko grunted into it, surging forward to keep his rough lips (sticky from his freshly applied pineapple-beeswax chapstick) seared to yours. You felt, more than heard, his miniscule whimper at the back of his throat when he opened his mouth, sliding his tongue into yours, and you could hardly keep kissing him for smiling. But he needed a breath before you did, so you broke it, sensing he wouldn’t do it out of wanting to keep you nearby.

Panting, Tenko tried and failed to push your hair behind your ear in an attempt to be suave. “Now, I perceived that as romantic.”

“It was romantic, you muppet,” you said, thumping his chest with the back of your hand.

“Good.” He cleared this throat. “Cool. Excellent,” he said, shifting underneath you (with difficulty, under the constricting denim of his Moulded to Your Ass jeans), “I want it to be, when it comes to you.”

“Thank God, I really want that, too,” you said, sighing, “but, like, I really don’t know if it’s ethical to pursue a romance this early into your recovery—”

“The fuck is wrong with you? I want it. I want you.” Frustrated, Tenko grabbed your hips in an iron grip and ground up into you, slowly, and that tight-ass denim let you feel precisely where in the drag of his hips his cock touched you, letting you feel the shift in pressure at his tip, down his shaft, to the first curve of his balls. “I thought I was alone. I thought no one else would ever be able to understand me, having fallen from what I was raised to be. Fallen,” he said, spitting, “Such a nasty word for what we’re actually doing: we’ve been reborn together. We get to build our lives back up together. We get another chance at it. I wanna spend mine with you.”

He strained his neck upwards to kiss you again, insistent, moving with confidence when he took your lower lip into his mouth but only nibbling on it once, despite being posed to bite down with vigour.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about what anyone else thinks of you and what anyone else thinks of me. I—”

“That’s not true,” you said, your turn to catch your breath, “You care so much about what Aizawa-sensei—”

“You know what I mean,” he said, shaking his head, hair falling out of his loose ponytail, “You think of me as me, and that’s all that matters. If you’re really that fucking worried about me getting into a relationship too early, go talk to my therapist. She says you’re good for me. A good influence, anyway.”

“Holy shit,” you said, mostly in reaction to how Tenko started trailing frantic, dry kisses down your neck, and, realising you should probably be doing something back, you rolled your hips, feeling awfully warm under the blanket.

He bucked back up into you, more out of desperation to keep you close over a need for friction but still giving you a taste of what it would be like to have him thrusting into you. “Fuck,” he said, almost grumbling, “I’d say fuck being ethical about it, because I’ve wanted you for a long time. I got hard when you shook me by the shoulders outside of that ice cream shop; I thought my soul was gonna leave my body when you adjusted my scarf. Hell, I—” He cut himself off, grinning in a way that, back before you knew him, you might have described as maniacal. “I wanted you back during the war. I saw you fucking elbow Touya during that battle, and the way you made him crumple to the ground was so fucking sexy. And you recovered from when he swiped at you so easily; you slipped around his attacks like it was fucking second nature. I thought it’d be cool to have you by my side, having you—” He realised what he was saying, and he relaxed, smile fading into a curious, pensive sort of look while he brought his thumb to your kiss-swollen lips. “And now I get to.”

You kissed the pad of his thumb, blinking slowly.

“So. Yeah,” he said, dropping his hand to your shoulder as he broke eye contact, a little red, “I think it’d be cool to be with you, even if we have to be careful.”

“That’s the thing, Tenko,” you said, biting the inside of your cheek as you gathered your thoughts, “I’m scared, because while I know that we should, because that’d be safe, I don’t want to be careful. Since I’ve quit being a hero, every single thing about how I’ve been living has left me feeling empty and alone, because it’s like I’m wandering through limbo. Everything screams that whatever I’m doing now is temporary, that it’ll pass, that I don’t truly belong in this situation, because I’ll find what I’m supposed to be doing later and my real home is somewhere down the line, but—fuck.” You rubbed your eye with your fist. “You, Tenko. You don’t feel temporary. You feel forever.”

Underneath you, Tenko stretched to pop a crick in his back, and he tilted his head to lie on the back of the couch. His ponytail had come loose, and his hair splayed against the fabric as he stared at you, one hand idly rubbing at your waist.

“Well. You’ve got to belong somewhere,” he said eventually, and he tapped all five fingers onto your thigh. “It could be with me.”

***

Dango was missing.

Incredible how the best evening of your life preceded the worst day you’ve had in years. You called out of work and spent hours scouring the dorm and then campus. A gruelling, miserable sort of day, anyway, grey and rainy and cold, and the campus was swarmed with people setting up for the scavenger hunt event later this month, populating the area with non-U.A. personnel and construction. Your cat was out in that mess, and you didn’t even know where to search first. It’s loud, scary, and wet, so Dango would most likely be hiding and not come when she’s called.

Had Dango escaped your flat? Had your stalker stolen her? Had she been confiscated by U.A.?

You couldn’t call any faculty for help; they’d get onto you for having an illegal cat on campus—and Hound Dog, the one who’d be the most help, might just scare her to death. Too early in the morning to call any of your friends, and you doubted they’d alter their busy schedules to help you out of a situation you should be able to fix yourself. But damn it, how come your own tracking skills only worked on people?

You shook yourself, coming out of your spiral the best you could, and you were close to hyperventilating. You sat down on a curb.

You found yourself calling Tenko, despite it being too early in the day for him to be out of training, filling with dread about never seeing your cat again and having to clear out her stuff from your room. Pulling your soaked jacket closer, you wiped at your nose and waited at the dial tone.

“Hey, I thought you couldn’t call during work. Miss me that much?”

The second you heard his strangely chipper voice, you started crying into the speaker.

He inhaled sharply, tone shifting. “Tell me who the fuck I’m stomping to death with my hooves.”

Ducking your head, you managed a smile but continued to fucking sob. “You don’t—don’t have to kill anyone, Ten—Tenko. I’ve f—fucked up.”

“What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“I’m on cam—campus,” you said, unable to speak for a full sentence without having to cut yourself off to keep bawling, ugly and loud and getting snottier by the minute, “It’s my fucking fault that I haven’t been ta—taking my stupid sta—stalker seriously, and I should’ve reported it, but—but I—goddammit!” The rain picked up again, coming down in rapid, fat drops, and, shielding your eyes, you rubbed your phone screen on your sleeve, not that it did much. “Sor—sorry. Rain got heavier.”

“Where on campus?”

“No, Te—Tenko, I’ll get up. I’m coming to you,” you said, sniffling and pushing on your knees to stand, wet and hungry and ready to crawl into your sock drawer to sleep for days. “I—I’m just so fucking pissed at myself, because my cat is fucking lost, and I could’ve sto—stopped it if I hadn’t been so secreti—tive.” Hands shaking, you yanked your soaked hood over your head and trudged towards your dormitory, and you kicked gravel, rocks scattering over the path, before losing your footing on it and nearly falling. Fuck this.

“You have a cat,” said Tenko, losing his fervent. “What’s it look like?”

“Beautiful.”

“I need more than that.”

“She fucking—I based Ginseng’s cat form on her, okay? She’s this enormously fluffy thing, mostly whitish with a brown face and legs, and it makes her look like she’s wearing a mask and thigh-high socks like God’s sluttiest little jester,” you said, knocking on your dorm’s mailboxes for luck out of habit as you passed them, “And you can’t tell Aizawa-sensei about her, because if she’s taken away the moment I find her, then I—”

“I have her,” said Tenko, “She’s in my dorm with me.”

You ran the rest of the way to his room, panting and absolutely disgusting by the time you got there, and when Tenko opened his door, there was Dango, loafing on the back of the couch and watching raindrops race down the window.

“What the fuck,” you said, dropping your wet coat and toeing off your shoes, “How the hell did she get in here?”

Tenko shrugged and hung your coat next to his hoodie. “Can she open locked doors?”

“I hope to fuck she can’t,” you said, and you rounded the couch to wrap your arms around that dear little loaf, and Dango jumped off the couch to crawl underneath it before you could fully hug her. “Oh, good. She’s fine. Acting like normal.” You sat on the couch’s arm, adrenaline evaporating to render you boneless.

“She was in my room when I came back from training. We ended early today, since Aizawa-sensei has something.” Tenko stooped to yank two bottles of gatorade from their plastic rings and headed towards the sofa to offer one to you. “She didn’t seem upset or hurt. She’s been sitting there, napping on and off.”

You accepted it and twisted off the cap. “So, who put my cat in your room?”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“I don’t know,” you said, taking a shallow sip, careful not to overwhelm your agitated stomach, “They’d have to know about Dango in the first place, and I suppose my stalker would, since they’ve theoretically been breaking into my room.”

Tenko paused mid-sip, and he hastened to swallow. “Someone’s been breaking into your room?”

“Yeah,” you said, easing down the arm of the couch and onto its cushions, “I think. There’s no physical sign of entry, but my shit keeps going missing, and stuff that’s not mine keeps showing up. Let me tell you, I need some of that shit they’ve stolen; it’s hard to replace—”

Tenko touched your lips with three of his fingertips to quiet you, and he gestured for you to stay put while he scrambled over to his closet, where he stood on his toes to retrieve a wicker basket from the top shelf. He dropped the thing into your lap. “Are any of these yours?”

All of it was, missing things you blamed on everything from Dango to your stalker to your own forgetfulness: your favourite sweater, your trolley pass, lip balm, your shitty earbuds, your good pantyhose, your planner, your d10, and, among many smaller things, even that bright blue thong you’d lost in the wash (Well. It’s better to find your thong with your new boyfriend over finding them returned to your dorm coated in your stalker’s cum, you supposed).

“I was losing my goddamn mind,” Tenko was saying, “Stuff kept showing up. I thought it was a test at first—”

“I don’t have a stalker,” you said, absentmindedly rubbing the fabric of your thong between your fingers, “Your shit has been—you read that GINSENG TEA X LUSTFUL BALLSACK shit? Tenko.”

“Oh, you have that?” Tenko scratched the back of his neck, but not in his self-harm way; it reminded you of Shinsou’s nervous habit more than anything. “Haven’t you read it? Isn’t that what you were naming your characters after?”

“Ah, ha, ha. Moving on. What is important, though, is why and how this is happening to us.”

“Yeah, I don’t…”

The two of you spitballed for a while, long enough for the both of you to finish your bottles of gatorade and for Tenko to start another, and neither of you came up with anything substantial.

“Hell with it,” said Tenko, standing to stretch, his movement disturbing Dango from her nap in his basket of clean laundry, “Let’s go ask Aizawa-sensei.”

Aizawa was not pleased when he discovered the both of you waiting in his kitchen, but he listened to the story, and when you were done, he stepped out of the room to make a phone call. When he came back, he looked even more exhausted than when he’d first come in.

“I’ve just gotten off the phone with Sakura Grove,” said Aizawa, wincing when his bones creaked as he sat in his chair, “Tenko, do you remember villain in-fighting within the PLF? In particular, I’m asking if you remember breathing in a pink dust cloud. It would’ve been in Deika City, in the month between your fight with Re-Destro and your body modification surgery. If our sources are accurate, you would’ve been with Touya.”

Tenko scrunched up his face. “Why would I have been—hm.” Frowning, he reached into the bag of popcorn you’d commandeered from Aizawa’s cupboards. “I know what you’re talking about. They were only letting me eat healthy stuff in the week before I went under. Touya was taking me to scrounge for something salty and shitty for me, because I couldn’t take it anymore. He started hitting on someone he thought was a waitress, and she—this is why I remember it—she compared the width of her hand to his thigh and said no thanks.”

“That’s Ito,” said Aizawa, sighing and crossing his arms, settling his chin into his capture weapon, “When did she use her quirk?”

“She shoved her hand on Touya’s face when he opened his stupid mouth again, and he passed out with swarming, pink particles floating around his head. She turned to me—and she must not have recognised Touya, but she knew me, because her face lit the fuck up. She never touched me, but I remember having to sneeze.”

“She never told you what her quirk did?”

“I woke back up in the PLF headquarters. I assumed whoever picked me up had killed her and that her death negated any effects.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why? What does it do?”

Aizawa let out a soft laugh, muffled through his capture weapon, and he jerked his head in your direction. “You tell him,” he said, snatching the bag of popcorn and heading towards his bedroom.

***

He’d been nervous about wearing a suit. They reminded him of AFO.

But you’d strayed away from dark colours and too much structure, so his light greyish-blue suit jacket stayed unbuttoned even as you leant across to the passenger seat to adjust his All Might tie for him (a Put Your Hands Up Radio tie had been offered, but Tenko had already closed his fist around the striped tie Midoriya would loan him). Part of his bangs had been pinned back to show off his annoyingly handsome face, especially in how his sharp, red eyes observed caught every movement of your terrible attempt to tie the tie based on the pictures Aizawa had sent you.

“We’re not gonna be late, are we?” Tenko drawled out, the corner of his mouth quirking upward, hand resting on the car ceiling as he angled his chest towards you.

“Shush; we are in the parking lot,” you said, looping the larger end. Or were you supposed to be looping the smaller one? “Besides, the world won’t end if we’re a few minutes late to my class’s annual reunion.”

A flimsy excuse for a party, one made because hero agencies needed some sort of named event as an excuse to dismiss your friends en masse. But it was spring again, and they were coming out of the winter blues, and they wanted to see you again, so, hey, why don’t we work something in around your schedule? If you can’t come to this date, then we’ll reschedule it until you can.

And, like. They knew. They knew Tenko was your soulmate. You suspected they all wanted to see what he was like now, too, because no one but Shinsou, Midoriya, and, apparently, Bakugou had known.

You undid the loose knot and tried again. “Are you nervous?”

“No,” he said, scrutinising the tacky balloons and streamers swaying in the night breeze outside of the otherwise intimidatingly elegant venue, “but those kids might be.”

“Those kids happen to be friends my age,” you said, “and I’m barely younger than you are. They know you’re coming. You’re fine.”

Tenko sucked in through his teeth, tapping the roof of the car one finger at a time. “The last time they saw me was as a thing. An object of destruction.”

“Well, they’ll definitely see you as a human person when I spill how you designed a unicorn DND character for Eri.” You pulled the fabric taut but kept it from lying closely to his neck (a boy didn’t like feeling constrained). “You know what? This tie is as good as it’s gonna get.”

He ducked his chin to examine its knot. “It’s shit.”

“It adds to your devil-may-care, reformed-bad-boy sort of charm,” you said, giving the tie a final smooth-down and poorly suppressing your smile when you felt his muscles through his shirt. “Mathematically, there are only 85 ways to tie a standard tie knot. I don’t believe we’ve reached any of them.”

“How do you know these things? You’re unbeliev—” Tenko jerked his face out of view of the window as Aoyama and Kouda, gesturing wildly, strode past the car and into the venue. “Listen,” he said, clearing his throat, “I know I don’t care and that you don’t care, but other people will. Your reputation is gonna plummet right into its grave if we’re out in the open together.”

You shook your head, letting your smile show. “So, I fucked part of a rescue job almost a year ago. So what. So I’m dating my soulmate. Am I supposed to do otherwise? Honestly, Tenko,” you said, curling loose strands of hair behind his ear, letting your fingers linger around his cheek and neck (he leant into the touch), “I don’t care. I would’ve chosen you even without the soulmate bond. You’re too endearing to pass by. You’re too…babygirl.”

Tenko had been guiding your hand to his mouth, and he snorted before it got there, warm air scattering in a short burst. “Don’t call me that,” he said, pressing his lips to the centre of your palm and waiting until you met his gaze to retract them.

A different warmth shot to your lower stomach, but you had to keep pressing, for the sake of the bit. “Oh, then what should I—darling? Honey? Pookie bear?”

He scoffed and nipped at your pinkie. “None of those are good.”

“Tenko.”

He breathed in, shoulders rising, eyes fluttering shut. Taking a moment to kiss the tiny bite mark on your finger. “Yeah,” he said, opening his eyes in a slow blink, catlike, “Feels good. Feels—like coming home.”

Beaming, you reached down to lace his fingers through yours. All five of them squeezed back. “Then let’s go.”

soulmate trope taglist: @bakugouspsycho, @pansexualproblemchild, @doonaandpjs, @sunsetevergreen, @the-coffee-is-on-fire, @liberace2, @ladymidnight77, @nonomesupposedto, @gooooomz, @kissmebakugou, @pachiibatt, @celestair, @tiredkittykat, @cheshireshiya, @90s-belladonna, @infjsnightmare

#bnha #shigaraki tomura #shigaraki x reader #shigaraki/reader #shigaraki imagine #shigaraki fic #mha #shigaraki headcanons #shigaraki fanfiction #shigaraki fanfic #soulmates #soulmate au #soulmate #dash it all

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pretend-i-do-not-exist · 2 months

Text

Under Spell, Right From The Start

Synopsis: He insists you're nothing special... but if that's the case, why do you cross his mind so often?

Pairing: Lucifer, Mammon, Satan, Belphegor × MC (separate)

CW: Gender Neutral MC, You/Yours, Fluff, Crushes, Spoilers for lesson 16 (OG) in Belphie's part, A smidge of angst in Belphie and a drop of it in Satan's too bc I couldn't resist

A/N: HEY HI!! So this is my first post, for this fandom specifically, and I'm still trying to grasp my writing style, so I apologise if it's a bit everywhere and not the best. However, if you do enjoy this trainwreck that I call writing, feel free to leave me a request. I'd really love to see some :]]] Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and HAPPY VALENTINES DAY ♡

Lucifer:

How could this be? The Avatar of Pride falling for a mere human? Impossible. He would never.

...Is what he said initially.

Over time, he found himself craving your presence

There was something about you that had him absolutely enthralled

Maybe it was the way you convinced him to take breaks

Or maybe it was the comfortable silence you settled in

You were doing your own things, but... doing them together? Even better.

Perhaps it was the way you learned to manage his brothers

#singlemomgetsabreak

That's a lie. He never gets a break.

#justiceforsinglemom

Now, you could manage his brothers

That doesn't mean you were always going to do it

He insists you're giving him grey hairs

But he enjoys having you around

And he cared for you, more than he wanted to admit to himself.

You're part of the family, after all :)

Mammon:

Pf- please. He's modelled for the biggest brands and has been on the covers of magazines.

He's got a line of demons waiting for him, and you think he'd get hung up on you? Yeah, right.

And he's definitely not trying to grab your attention when you join him for his photoshoots

And he'd never get pouty when you can't hang out with him because you've already made plans

Why should he care?

Oh, but he'd give anything for your attention

MC, he quite literally will run across the Devildom for you if you call

He's your first!

If he isn't by your side, and you aren't by his, then what's he gonna do??

He's greedy. That's what he is.

He's the Avatar of Greed, and you're his most valuable treasure.

Satan:

He has his books, he has his knowledge, and he's very content with it all

The last thing he needs is anyone disturbing that peace for him.

But... you.

He strangely likes his peace even more when you're there?

You could both be doing your own things in mutual silence or you could be talking about a new book the two of you are reading (that is if you like reading)

You make him feel even more at peace than if he was on his own

Then it hits him, he doesn't enjoy your presence, he enjoys you.

He's thinking about you when he's reading a new novel

Imagining you both as the protagonists because he's shaking the thought out of his head

Because you wouldn't want that, would you?

He's taking his time doing more and more little things for you

Annotating books

Letting you borrow books from him

Recommending books to you

It's all worth it to see that smile on your face

He just didn't realise it then

Belphegor:

He hates humans and you're no exception.

He just needs to get out of this stupid attic

Then he'll show them all

He's said it before and will continue to say it: this exchange program is a bad idea

... Because he's met you.

You're ruining this for him, I mean why do you have to be so beautiful?

Why do you have to be so nice?

Why are you so eager to help him?

You don't know how he's...

It. Doesn't. Matter.

You're human.

That's not gonna change.

Even after the murder, he finds his thoughts recircling

You- you're forgiving him? After everything? How??

More importantly, why does his heart swell with hope?

Hope that things can work out between you two

It's a crazy dream of his, that's for sure

Speaking of dreams, you're frequenting them more and more

He thought that it would be the opposite but boy was he wrong

His dreams are simultaneously becoming his worst nightmares because as sweet as they are while he's asleep...

Nothing quite dispels that feeling of disappointment when he wakes up again and you're not there.

#obey me #obey me lucifer #obey me satan #obey me belphegor #obey me mammon #obey me lucifer x reader #obey me satan x reader #obey me belphie x reader #obey me mammon x reader #omswd #obey me shall we date #Spotify

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genericpuff · 3 months

Text

the last few episodes of persephone moping around have felt like less of a self-reflective moment for her to grow and change and more rachel griping about criticism and surrounding herself with yes men

this isn't gonna be in any way a formal essay like my usual sort, more of a slam post honestly, so fair warning that i'm gonna be a little salty here

EPISODE 263 SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!

but seriously, it's been a pity party of greek proportions because this constant "woe is me" shit with persephone that's constantly met with "no queeen you're amazing and perfect" has been going on for DAYS (real time and comic time)

literally every episode since the comic returned has had some segment of either persephone or hades (or both) being upsetti spaghetti over their current situation because oh nooo persephone made the deal with erebus and had to sacrifice something. even though they both knew that was gonna happen and yet she did it anyways. so she just continues to lock herself away in her mansion and spout adorkable quips while her husband, mother, and colleagues deal with the mess she caused.

and of course there's the constant inclusion of apollo spitting straight facts about persephone being a terrible queen and person, but of course because it's apollo saying it, it's not meant to be taken as gospel, essentially clapping back at the words of the critics who call out persephone for being a shitty and toxic protagonist by putting those words into the mouth of a literal rapist.

and yeah episode 263 had a lot of the same shit, to the point that you could literally swap out the names of the characters and the words they were speaking and it applies exactly to rachel and the corner she put herself in u.u it's been a thing for a while now that apollo has just felt like a mouthpiece for LO criticism but as mentioned by users within the subreddit during the discussion of this newest episode, it's never felt more apparent than now.

so yeah enjoy this satirical text edit of a sequence from the newest FP episode, which I honestly can't tell is meant to satirize the critical community or Rachel's reactions to the critical community because the weird reality this comic and its community exist in has just become that wack that it's hard to believe it's not directly from The Onion sometimes LMAO

-and as much as i find myself empathizing with the pressure that rachel is surely under right now - no one should have to be subject to the screeching howls of the peanut gallery - i can't help but be reminded of the memes and tweets she's put out that basically outright say "persephone is supposed to be celebrated for being a shitty person, if you can't handle her at her worst you don't deserve her at her best 💅"-

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A post shared by Rachel Smythe (@usedbandaid)

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-and how often she's ruined her own day looking for critical groups or people with the "wrong opinions" that were minding their own business, or how much she's stifled her own community's attempts to discuss the story openly by having her mods ban anyone with even so much as a question regarding persephone's integrity.

so yeah, as much as i can empathize with her from one creator to another that being under this amount of pressure and scrutiny must be immensely frustrating and exhausting, beyond that one similarity i just can't empathize or relate to this mindset of almost learned helplessness that's taken a firm grip over her writing. this is the story she wants to tell and by all means no one is entitled to make her stop, but if she's gonna keep using her greek myth "retelling" comic that's trying to be "feminist" as a mouthpiece for her own griping over criticisms that are largely on-point and justified - to the point of putting the words of her critics into the mouth of her token villain like she's playing some single player barbie doll "act out that fight that sounded cooler in your head" game - then she's gonna keep getting called out, full stop. i figured she didn't have any nose left to rip off in spite of her face but apparently not.

look, i get it, there are some opinions and behaviors within the critical community that even i'm not on board with. there are people who absolutely take shit too far on both sides of the fandom, and i think both sides need to do more to hold themselves accountable for how they interact with each other, the comic, and rachel herself. i make it a point to keep my shit in my own house, i'm not entitled to rachel's attention and frankly it's the last thing i want because i have a lot of fun here and i don't want that to be potentially ruined or dampened! but if you come into my house and complain about the decorating, then i legitimately don't know what to tell you. i used to love LO and i'm so sad for my past self knowing fully well they're not gonna be able to wholeheartedly enjoy this comic forever due to how manipulative and shitty the storytelling has become. a story that i once connected to as an AFAB who was a victim of assault and abuse and generational trauma.

if persephone being the true main villain in her own story was ever meant to be the point of Lore Olympus, then it's taken way, way too long to get to that point, and rachel herself definitely doesn't seem to be of the mindset that that's what she's become with all of her blasé meme'ing on a plot arc that she's still expecting us to take seriously. persephone was never a very complex character to begin with - being an easy self-insert for the audience and rachel to project themselves onto and relate to - but at least in the beginning she felt like she had so much legitimate potential, she was naive but put her best foot forward and clearly wanted to make a life for herself, made by herself.

now she's just mean. jaded and mean. dependent on the constant validation of others to the point of being manipulative. an absolute shell of a person who can only grow a spine when she's punching down on people weaker than her, completely incapable of standing up to the people who are a legitimate threat to her. it's not empowering, it's not subversive, it's just another pick me story about women pitting themselves against other women and never taking accountability for their own behavior, mistakes, and deliberate actions meant to hurt others, often teetering on the line of straight up narcissism all for the sake of a "boss babe" moment.

anyways, if you want an actual well-written and GOOD scene of an empathetic female protagonist struggling to find their footing in adulthood being called the fuck out for their learned helplessness behavior, go read Tamberlane, it tackles this topic much better through its main character who keeps using her brokenness as an excuse to never do better, it slaps and it's so real.

#the only thing i could possibly enjoy from these episodes is minthe coming forward #and leuce #and tori #other than that they're just a bunch of nothing #no plot #no yeehaw #just boohoo #and not even in the good way where you know the 'boohoo' is gonna lead to some good yeehaw #the shitty and toxic way where the 'boohoo' is a personality trait that everyone else has to bend themselves around #lore olympus critical #anti lore olympus #lo critical #Instagram

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viviennevermillion · 1 year

Text

wide awake

notes: sorry i haven't posted any writing in a while, chapter 7 part 2 hit me like a burning truck full of chemicals racing at 200km/h towards an elementary school.

word count: 9,2k words

about this work: this was inspired by katy perry's "wide awake" as a contrast to malleus' humming of "once upon a dream." set during and after chapter 7. i don't know how this chapter is going to proceed so i'm going out on a limb here but yeah

synopsis: you woke up to the world crashing down on you, realizing what malleus had done. he had wanted you to be happy forever in a dream...when all along your dream had been him...will you ever forgive him?

contains: malleus draconia x (gn)fae!reader, angst to fluff, fighting and making up

warnings: angst. lots of angst. also chapter 7 spoilers. themes of loss

dark content creators & consumers dni

...thunder rumbling, castles crumbling; i am trying to hold on. god knows that i tried seeing the bright side; i'm not blind anymore....falling from cloud nine...

Falling in love with a crown prince had never been on your list of predictions for your school years at Night Raven College. If you were to be honest, you had been surprised that there were even other fairies attending the school. For most of your life, it had always just been you. The people came and passed you by and as the years went on; you’d gotten used to it. People came into your life and they never stayed for long. That didn’t make their bonds with you any less meaningful. In a way, they lived on through you. Through your memories and the stories you told of them to younger generations. And it always made you smile to see how people listened with awe about the ones you held dear in the past and learnt to love the same things about them as you did.

With each bond you had, you grew and learnt and as long as you did, nothing was truly ever lost. The world around you changed as you helped it grow as best as you could while you stayed roughly the same. But Malleus Draconia had changed you. When he came into your life, you knew not soon after that your world wouldn’t be the same again.

You remembered the day you had met him for the first time. Not long after the entrance ceremony, you had used the lively dinner party held to welcome the new students, to slip away and explore the area on your own; running into the dorm leader of Diasomnia in the process. You almost chuckled at the memory. You had worried about getting in trouble on your first night at Night Raven College; being caught outside past curfew by a dorm leader. But you soon came to realize that Malleus wasn’t supposed to be there either and that your new acquaintance had a habit of sneaking out without his retainers as well.

You remembered how odd Malleus had appeared to you that night. Unlike everyone else, he wasn’t wearing his ceremonial robes and he didn’t even seem to know that the ceremony was today even though he was a dorm leader. Fireflies were dancing around him and he seemed pleased that you were ready to strike up conversation with him but equally as troubled, for he feared you might not keep his late night strolls around the campus and to the village at the foot of the hill to yourself. You had chuckled.

“Alright, here’s the deal”, you smirked at him, “I’ll keep your little secret to myself…if you take me with you. Maybe you could show me around…I think that could be fun.”

He had looked shocked back then but knowing him as well as you did now, you could imagine just how bewildered he was that you had just met him and were ready to hang out with him just like that.

“Very well then”, he laughed with a cheerful expression on his face, mumbling something about how you knew no fear. You did now.

“So, is this a habit of yours too?”, he had asked, eager to get to know you.

“They haven’t built a place that can contain me yet”, you had joked, which made Malleus laugh once more. Slowly but steady you had brought fresh wind into his life. For a fae, you didn’t seem like time had left you behind. Rather than that, you were always in motion, changing and growing along with the world. In a way, that made him envy you as much as he did admire you. Through it all, watching you, Malleus felt like a mountain carved into the landscape of the world; strong and unwavering but looking down from his pedestal at the lively ways of the humans and feeling unnoticed and uninvited. Where he seemed to hardly notice the passage of time on some days and dreaded the inevitable that was waiting for him in the future, you seemed grateful for every day; finding wonder in all that was fleeting, carrying it with you as a treasure that was yours to keep even when it had long left this world.

He almost couldn’t believe his luck when you joined his club and kept inviting him to spend time with you. Malleus hardly ever declined. He grew enamored with you; accepted you into his life and always hoped that maybe you’d choose to stay. And you learnt to love him. You loved how eager he seemed to learn about anything new you could show him about the world and how surprised he looked when he was met with something unexpected. You loved his smile and you wanted to be there to share his happiest moments with him. You loved the way he pouted whenever Lilia dared to unpack the embarrassing childhood stories about him.

As time went on, it became undeniable that your bond was something special; as if fate had brought you together for each of you to have a companion at long last. Someone who would stay when all else faded. Days were just a little bit brighter with the prospect of seeing Malleus. You heard Lilia joke once about the way his eyes lit up when he saw you for the first time after a long school day, hoping you’d ask him to take a walk with you or show him a new board game or one of those movies he was so unfamiliar with. You went to festivals and cinemas; listened to each other’s favorite songs and read each other’s favorite books. Which in Malleus’ case happened to be a lullaby from Briar Valley he played for you on the violin and an antique book titled “Gargoyles and their mystical origins”.

You remembered the melancholic sound of the violin, remembered how you marveled at his mastery of the instrument. You knew now the sad songs he played were a testimony to his ever-present loneliness; to all the unchanging years inside his castle and the dreams he longed to make into a reality but never could. Even as thorns had clouded your view and the last thing you heard was the quiet humming of the man you loved but didn’t recognize…you remembered the songs he played for you once and how he had smiled when you complimented how beautiful it was and encouraged him to show you another melody from his homeland. You remembered the way he had shared his world with you in an attempt to give you something back for all the new experience you introduced him to and you wondered how things had spiraled this far out of control. Where did we go wrong?

In your eyes, Malleus Draconia became someone who wore his heart on his sleeve. You could see how he felt in the thunder outside or the snow falling to the ground; but just as well in his eyes, as much as he tried to hide it. You learnt about his passions; what he treasured in this life and the dreams he didn’t dare voice out loud. With time, they became all too familiar to you.

So it came as no surprise to step outside after the internship orientation meeting and find soft but cold snowflakes resting on your skin. You sighed as you remembered the way Lilia had announced his departure from this school to everyone and how, contrary to your expectation when you heard the news, Malleus had just as much not seen it coming as everyone else did.

He heard the soft knock on the door of his room and knew it was you. “Come in”, he called out, quieter than he usually did. You did as he told you, closing the door behind you and sitting beside him on the bed. There was an emptiness and hopelessness in his eyes that you had never seen before. He took a deep breath once in a while, as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. Like he was lost and all the years he spent alone and isolated left him unable to find his path forward. Malleus was staring at nothing in particular as the snowflakes continued to fall outside. He was caught up in his own world, and if he hadn’t called you in; you would have been unsure if he was even aware of your presence at this moment.

“So…”, you sighed and tried to find the right words but just as well being at a loss at how anything you could do or say could make him feel better right now, “you don’t seem to be doing too well…want to talk about it?” As a fae yourself, you knew the signs. An exponential loss of magic, weakening speed…Lilia’s time on this earth was nearing its end. You were sure that deep down Malleus knew too; even though you could just as well imagine he was denying it in this current moment; arguing with himself that since Lilia had said nothing specific, maybe he really just meant something else than what the prince had understood. He lifted his head slightly and his eyes met yours. In that moment he looked like a frightened child but when he spoke he retained his usual calm demeanor. “I’m just a little surprised, is all”, he sighed and attempted to smile at you, “have you picked an internship yet? During all this commotion, I almost forgot to ask you.”

You shook your head. “I have a few ideas but nothing specific yet”, you mused and leaned your back against one of the bed posts, crossing your legs as you reached for one of the pillows to make yourself more comfortable, “it’s more like I have some skills I want to work on but no specific profession I want to apply to. So I’ll carefully consider my options.” Ever since you met him, Malleus Draconia shook your world and brought it to a different path. You had gone from place to place, working different jobs and meeting all sorts of different people and you had been certain that after your time at Night Raven College was over, that was what you’d continue to do. But now? Now you weren’t so sure. A quiet voice inside you had always raised the idea that maybe you could stay with him. Leave behind the human world you’ve lived in for all your life and become acquainted with your own kind again. A part of his country. Maybe a part of his family.

You were unsure whether Malleus felt even remotely the same as you. Loving Malleus was an all or nothing affair. There was no trial period; no going on dates and being together for a while and splitting up if it didn’t work out. A lot depended on Malleus’ public appearance and to say that him getting into a relationship with anyone would be a big deal was more than an understatement. If you were ready to take a step into that direction, you had to be ready for all the strings attached to the man you loved. A legacy, a crown and a country to take care of. A responsibility to keep peace and ensure that your people could lead comfortable lives.

Confessing to Malleus would be a big step and you didn’t know if you ever would. You weren’t sure if you were adequate to rule a country; yet it wasn’t necessarily something you were opposed to.

Leadership, public relations, bureaucracy…those were what you intended to focus on. All things that were important for a ruler. So that, if after centuries of walking among the mortal folk, you decided to put all cards on the table and spend your life by Malleus’ side, you could at least be sure that you were up to the challenge. That was a precondition for you to feel confident about approaching him with your feelings. You didn’t want to risk backing out and breaking his heart. Or being rejected by his people. And even if things didn’t work out, you could still use these skills on your path forward.

The time at school you had spent with him so far seemed way too short to determine whether you wanted to spend the rest of your days with Malleus, as much as you did love him. And now the year was slowly but surely nearing its end. So you had another idea.

“Do you have anything picked out yet?”, you asked the man you loved and the one you had grown to consider your best friend. Malleus shook his head as well. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to learn in just 3 months…even 9 seems really short to me”, he sighed and clutched the list with the possible internship locations. You pulled out the map where all of them had been marked.

“Well, given that we both don’t know yet what we want to do…why don’t we do something together?”, you suggested quietly and spread the map out on the bed, pointing at a couple of locations, “of course we don’t have to do exactly the same thing, but there’s a couple of cities here where the internship possibilities are basically just piling up…maybe we could just decide on a location and then…I don’t know…live there for a while?”

Malleus already had the surprised expression you were so used to on his face, but you continued. “We could get an apartment and explore the place together…there’s a bunch of spots on the map I haven’t been to either…and I could show you one of those human amusement parks you thought were fake when you saw a picture for the first time”, you chuckled and raised your pointer finger, “oh, I know! Or a mall! We’ll get the biggest ice cream cup they have and then regret all of our life choices. And take an escalator. You’ve never been on an escalator right-”

Your words got cut off by the surprise of Malleus’ embrace. It wasn’t the first time you two had held each other, but from the way he was clinging onto you, you could tell he was more distressed by today’s events than he let on. He let out a sigh of relief as you wrapped your arms around him gently and ran your fingers through his hair in a comforting motion. “That sounds wonderful”, he whispered and you rested your head on his shoulder as you closed your eyes and smiled.

Malleus held onto you like you were his lifeline right now. That just as he was confronted with the inevitable loss of people he held dear, you had offered to stay around a little longer and had shared your ideas with him as if they were something you had been looking forward to presenting to him for a while. A new beginning. He thought about how you’d laugh at his surprise upon discovering all these modern human things you mentioned and how you’d be there waiting for him at the end of a work day, asking him what the two of you should get for dinner. He couldn’t help but smile at the thought. He was looking forward to taking an escalator for the first time. And trying some unusual ice cream flavors with you. Or being on a train. He knew you’d find so much joy in his curiosity and surprise and Lilia would want to hear all about your mundane adventures together-

Oh…right…

Malleus’ smile faded from his face instantly when he remembered. Although hope for the future and dreams of happiness had filled his mind not a second ago, the image of bliss had now been distorted into a world without Lilia. Without him nudging the young dragon fae playfully when he announced that he was off to spend some time with you; teasing him about when he was going to confess his love to you already. Without the horrible food on the dinner table that Malleus wished wasn’t there but that simultaneously Diasomnia just wouldn’t be the same without. Without anyone to guide him when he didn’t understand something. A world where he was on his own, unsteady where you were so self-assured and down-to-earth. A world where he was expected to lead when there were days where he felt like he could hardly stand without his guardian.

Malleus was staring at the hands he had folded in his lap. “How do you do it?”, he asked, not daring to look into your eyes as he tried to keep it together. “Do what?”, you asked, noticing the shift in his mood immediately. You took his hand in yours and squeezed it gently. "Letting go…”, Malleus mumbled, “moving on after…after they’re gone.” His voice got so quiet as he spoke those words that he wondered whether you had even heard them. You hesitated for a moment, still holding his hand tightly within your own.

“It’s certainly not easy”, you sighed, “it never was and it never will be. But the pain lessens with time.” Your gaze fell to the window as you watched the stars outside; glowing and burning in the distance millions of miles away. Malleus still seemed lost in thought. You remembered the first time you had lost someone who was there for a significant portion of your life. You looked at Malleus’ hopeless expression and knew his world must be shattering into a thousand pieces right now.

“I like to think that we’re all on an endless journey”, you began again, still looking at the stars but you could see from the corner of your eyes that the fae prince lifted his head to look at you, “in the end, we’re all following a path that’s our own and meant only for us. And sometimes our paths cross with those of others. We meet them, sometimes because we chose to and other times under the most unexpected circumstances…and they walk with us for a little while. They share their journey with us; where they’ve been so far, where they’re hoping to go…”

Malleus seemed to think deeply about your words, now also gazing at the stars outside.

“We rest together, we overcome obstacles together…we love and learn because of each other”, you smiled as a shooting star crossed the night sky, “and one day our ways part. The ones we treasure move on to walk their own path once more and we watch them disappear on the horizon and they never look back. And we have to continue on our path as well. I believe it’s because there’s somewhere else we need to be and that wherever those we’ve parted from are now…they’re all cheering for us to get there. And who knows…maybe we will meet again one day.”

Malleus smiled at you from the side, admiring your outlook on this world. How you could be so full of hope even in the most dire of circumstances…even when faced with loss and death. He knew you hadn’t always been this way. That you too had faced the hardships of learning how to live with your long lifespan and carrying on relentlessly, knowing that at the end of the day you’d remain while all else faded and gave way to something new. You simply had more time to grow and adapt, despite being roughly the same age as him. “That’s a beautiful way of looking at it”, Malleus mused and his thumb brushed over your hand he held as the fearful words he didn’t dare say crossed his mind. That’s a strength I don’t think I have…

You didn’t feel too well, leaving him that night. He insisted he was going to be fine, hugged you one last time before you left his room. Maybe he needs to be alone right now, you thought, process everything that’s happened…and everything yet to come.

Maybe if you just hadn’t left him…maybe if you just tried a little harder…

No, you clenched your fist as the wind blew past your face and you gazed upon the thorn-covered island, this had nothing to do with you. This is his own fault.

That fateful day you had woken up in more ways than one. You had woken up from the sleeping curse Malleus had placed on the whole island; the blissful dream that seemed to suffocate you and shatter your heart into a million pieces. But you had also woken up from the dream you thought you were living. The love you thought you had and the happiness that once seemed all too familiar to you. Gone were the days of laughter and joy and you weren’t sure if they would ever return again for as long as Malleus was a part of your life. Maybe it was time to cut the thread spun by fate to lead you to each other.

You shook your head and tears ran down your cheek as your eyes were blinded by the sunrise. It was as if the sky was trying to comfort you, telling you not to cry as there would always be a path forward, with or without him.

Even though the dream world created by the spell was gone, two worlds were still existing within your heart. The one before; the one where you were planning to spend your future with Malleus; the way you saw him and loved every little detail….and the way you saw him now. The world where he had overblotted and attempted to decide the course of your fate with his own hand. Where he believed a false dream; an endless loop of joyful moments, could ever make you as happy as the real world had done with him by your side.

Even though the nightmare had ended, you still seemed to be living in it. You weren’t sure which one was the worse illusion, the dream he decided you and the other students should spend the next thousand years in or the one you lived in before he had disappointed you so much that all you had been able to do for the past two days was weep. The sense of betrayal you felt because of his actions was indescribable, even after all the yelling and explaining you did of your feelings you hadn’t grasped the full extent of it. How could he do this?

You knew how he had felt. You had seen his fear and his desperation; you understood how the only perspective he knew was his own and that at the time, living in a happy dream that would never end probably seemed the better option for himself as well, rather than facing the loss of Lilia, who had been there since he was born, and the knowledge that from now on, he’d only continue to lose more and more. But he dealt with it the wrong way and now he had to take responsibility for the consequences.

“Y/n, please…”, you remembered how he had knelt there in the aftermath of his destruction, gazing upon the shaking silhouettes of his classmates and the worried and confused eyes of his guards. It had started to rain and as he saw his reflection in the puddle left on the ground and looked up to meet the eyes of those who looked at him in a fear that had never been there before; the blissful dream he thought could bring him happiness had finally shattered and nothing remained but guilt. He was used to people avoiding him. To people being intimidated by him and not daring to get too close. But for the first time in his life he saw someone fear for their life around him; look at him like he was one wrong move away from ending it all. I’ve become a monster…

The rain poured down on Sage’s Isle but Malleus could hardly feel it as it hit his face and he wept. He was no stranger to crying. He vividly remembered how Lilia had told you about his many tantrums as a child with a smile on his face. But now, in the face of true despair, he wondered if there was any going forward from here on out. In a fruitless, impulsive attempt to preserve what he used to have, he had broken it so much that it seemed irreparable. He had never seen this expression on your face before. Like something inside you had broken. And never would he have wanted to be the cause of it.

Malleus, at the time, had thought his “gift” would genuinely be something to make the people he’d grown to care about happy. It was simple; an almost too simple solution to a world that seemed so complicated that it threatened to drown him if he didn’t desperately cling onto all that was familiar; despite all of his power. I should have thought this through…, he clenched his fists as heavy sobs left his lips, I should have asked them what they wanted. This isn’t what they wanted.

In the end, the way he tried to avoid losing the ones he loved had only made him more lonely. It brought nothing but suffering. He was alone; destined to die eventually with no one to stop his overblot. And his loved ones were doomed to sleep a thousand years; robbed of the opportunity to grow as the world kept changing around them. Living in an illusion that was happy but ultimately meaningless.

And now he’d lose them regardless. He broke the bonds he had and now he was left with nothing.

“Please…don’t go”, he whispered through sobs as your expression turned from one of sadness to anger.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done, Malleus?!”, you seemed furious but tried to speak as calmly as possible right now, “you can’t keep people around by putting them into an endless stasis! You could have killed everyone here and yourself! What the fuck has gotten into you?”

Your words were the only sound except for the rain. No one else dared to utter a word.

Malleus kept his head hanging and didn’t dare to look into your eyes as he replied. “I am so sorry…”

You let out a bitter laugh. “‘I’m sorry’ doesn’t cut it Malleus”, you spat out, “you’re supposed to rule a country one day and yet you have the impulse control of a rabid squirrel. You could have compromised the safety and well-being of your entire nation with this! I understand how you felt but the only way you know how to deal with your problems is through insane magical gimmicks and making that everyone else’s problem in the process. If that curse hadn’t been lifted, those people would have slept for a thousand years and the students would have never seen their families again! The loss you tried to prevent for yourself you pushed onto others. They would have woken up in a world completely unfamiliar to them. I would have never seen you again. You didn’t ask any of us what we wanted before you threw your damn tantrum and decided for us! You don’t want people to be scared of you? Well congratulations Malleus, but you messed that one up royally.”

Malleus' sobs got even louder. “I know…what I did was stupid”, he could hardly speak through the crying, “really, really stupid. I lost control…I couldn’t think. I was too upset and I did something unforgivable…and now i lost your friendship, haven’t I?”

You had no pity left for him at that moment. “Wow, what was your first clue?”, you responded sarcastically.

Malleus looked at you with a pleading expression, basically begging you to stay at this point. “Is there anything I can do? Anything at all?”, he asked, “I want to make it up to everyone…I can’t undo my actions but I want to make it right for all the people I’ve hurt…so please…just give me a chance.” His voice cracked and you sighed.

“You can’t undo what you’ve done and you can’t just make it right or earn yourself points and hoping if you’re just kind enough to people and do enough for them, they’ll forgive you eventually”, your voice was calmer now but it didn’t soften your harsh words, “some of them never will. Maybe not even I will. What’s done is done and I swear to god, please do not throw another grand magical tantrum to try and fix it. Face the mess you’ve made like the adult you are and deal with the consequences. The only thing you can do is move forward.”

You hesitated for a moment before you spoke again.

“No matter how powerful you are, you can’t run from the rules of cause and effect. That’s just what life is like”, you crossed your arms in front of your chest, “sometimes we mess up majorly and there’s nothing we can do to fix it. It’s up to every single individual whether they forgive you or not. There’s no guaranteed way to atone. You can only be kinder to the world around you and hope it chooses to be kind to you in return.”

The two of you remained quiet for a while. Most of the students had used the opportunity to sneak away; to a place they presumed to be safe. Only Lilia, Silver and Sebek were still there. Malleus thought about your words. He knew in his heart that you were right.

As silence filled the area around you, your anger about what he had done came back. You knew you probably should have just walked away and cooled off…left him to his own devices and never looked back. But you were too angry.

“You tried to play god for us and treated us like game characters or little shrimp in a terrarium rather than people you care about who make their own choices and live their lives in ways you will sometimes disagree with”, you gestured wildly, “it felt like you didn’t even see us as autonomous people but rather toys you can play with however you please. And that’s terrifying, Malleus. That’s something that, even despite your tendency to impulsively respond with magic to upsetting situations, I would have never expected from you and it broke the most important bond I had to another person in a long time…”

Tears were streaming down your face once more as you were reminded of the loneliness both of you were all too familiar with. That despite your unwavering determination and an optimistic outlook, nothing changed about the fact that you’d always end up alone sooner or later, living longer than most people you’d meet throughout your life. That had changed with Malleus. You finally had someone who could be around for the rest of your life and it felt like you had finally arrived somewhere you belonged. Finally found someone to walk the rest of your journey with you. And now he had kicked that dream in the guts and replaced it with his own delusional idea of a happily ever after.

He had been your dream. Sharing your happiest and worst moments with him. Going through life together; staying by each other’s side for as long as you could.

“I wanted to stay. And you wouldn’t even have needed some dumb dream world for that. I’ve thought about moving to Briar Valley after graduation even though there’s no electricity and the books are 200 years old; all so I could stay with you. I would have trusted you with my life before this, Malleus”, your voice cracked, “right now I wouldn’t even trust you with an hour of my time.”

Your words stung and left him in shock. He knew you treasured him as a friend…but that you cared for him this much? He had no idea. He always thought his love for you was one-sided and now he had broken it, possibly beyond repair. He could have had someone who stayed by his side for the majority of his long life…he could have had that and he pushed you away.

“Will this ever change?”, he asked quietly as you turned around and began walking away from him.

“Goodbye, Malleus.”

Your heart had hardened over the past few days. At first you had locked yourself in your room; living off dry bread and water; unmotivated to go outside. Professor Trein had even knocked on your door a couple of times to make sure you weren’t dead. When students passed by your room, they could only hear you crying from inside.

Eventually the overwhelming sadness just died and left behind an empty void. The sun had risen and was breaking through the curtains. You could lay here for days to come and grieve the bond you seemed to have lost but nothing would stop another day. There was no point in wallowing in self-pity, you knew that. You needed to distract yourself; needed a sense of purpose.

So you went down to the village at the foot of the hill to help clean up the mess Malleus’ spell had left behind. The overwhelming amount of magic had made the technological devices on the island utterly useless and in some cases the thorns had destroyed entire houses. Fortunately no one had been seriously hurt physically but the locals were facing all sorts of problems right now. Communication with the mainland was completely shut down and people struggled to make themselves food with the shops closed up and their household appliances not working. Night Raven College and Royal Sword Academy had offered to provide the people with food and shelter, if they needed it, and it almost made you smile at how they had once again managed to turn this into a competition. Some things never change, huh?

Malleus strolled aimlessly around the island, unsure what the future held in store for him. He observed the village from the distance, watching from the shadows as the market place became busy again and the students complained about having to clear it of dozens of vines. He looked at you; at the forefront of it all, putting all your effort into restoring the town to its former idyllic image. He watched you hand out soup to the elderly and help the old mayor set up a fundraiser for the restoration of what Malleus’ spell and overblot had destroyed. He heard that you had suggested to Vil and Neige to hold a benefit concert in order to raise money for the locals. Malleus noticed the smile on his face as he became witness to the kindness you gave to others, one of the many reasons he had fallen in love with you in the first place.

He remembered the words you spoke that day. “The only thing you can do is move forward.” He was proud to see you do just that and even if you may never forgive him, you had inspired him to do the same; regardless of whatever loss he may face in the future. Malleus saw how you gave a weak smile to a little girl who was crying about her favorite teddy bear that had been impaled by thorns and tried to comfort her, even if you hardly had any reason to smile yourself right now. He could tell that you were tired and still unsure, your emotions all over the place. Since when had he become so perceptive of that?

He heard you let out a genuine laugh as Professor Trein offered to fix the little girl’s teddy bear and she ran over to her parents in excitement to tell them about it. “No way, I had no idea you could sew”, Ace exclaimed with a shocked expression while looking at his teacher. Trein crossed his arms in front of his chest and sighed. “I wanted to make a scarf for my wife’s 32nd birthday years ago”, he replied awkwardly, “not my proudest work but it did make her laugh. So I kept doing it, and with time I improved.”

Once you had heard enough of Professor Trein’s stories about his wife, you moved on to another house to try and clear it of the thorns. You saw how everyone came together and supported each other, and although many Night Raven College students were definitely complaining about it, it still brought a small smile to your face. Malleus had broken your heart but there was so much out there still waiting for you even if your ways parted. So many people worth meeting and supporting with your presence, even if it may long outlast them.

From the corner of your eye you could notice a boulder being lifted next to you. There was only one person around strong enough to just do that with bare hands. You looked up to see Prince Malleus Draconia in the flesh, removing the thorns he had caused and trying to fix the house they had destroyed with his own two hands. The two of you silently worked next to each other for a while, not daring to say a word. You observed Malleus quietly, hoping he wouldn’t notice your lingering gazes on him. You didn’t know whether you should hate the fact that his presence calmed you or that his helpless attempts at trying to fix this situation without magic almost made you laugh. But you eventually decided to raise your voice.

“You’re not going to use magic to just fix the whole town in a flash?”, you asked, raising an eyebrow at Malleus who in that moment poked his hand on a thorn and watched it bleeding helplessly before you reached for the first-aid kit and handed him some bandages and a pair of gloves. “My magic is still drained”, Malleus explained, “and the blot hasn’t fully disappeared yet. It’s better if I don’t use magic for now.”

He hesitated for a moment, looking down. “Besides…”, he sighed as he put the gloves on, “I don’t…really feel like using magic right now. Not after everything that happened.” You nodded and resumed your work.

Malleus picked up another boulder and shoved it where it had fallen off the house. “You know that’s not how you build a house, right?”, you sighed and looked at him through half-lidded eyes. “Then how do I?”, he laid a finger to his chin and pondered on an alternative for a while. You pointed to the docks. “There’s a couple of construction workers over there whose job is to do exactly that. Why don’t you ask them and find out?”, you suggested and Malleus nodded.

He followed your advice and found that this was the longest conversation he ever had with someone who wasn’t a student. He learnt that one of the workers was really proud that his son had been accepted into Royal Sword Academy recently and that another one was married to a baker who made the most delicious sweets in town. Malleus mused that he’d have to check these out sometimes. All this time, these people had been living so close to his school and he had never thought about the lives they led and what things they were passionate about and what they wished for. They had been caught up in his spell and he didn’t even waste a second thought on them when he had cast it. On how much they could have lost because of it. He had cast them aside when he should have kept them safe and supported them.

Malleus looked at you and all that you had contributed to in such a short time. And then he looked at himself in shame and realized that you had been much more of a leader than he could hope to be. He had taken the opportunity to get away from the castle and explore the world outside of Briar Valley but he had always wondered what there was left for him to learn at this school. He chuckled at his past naivety. This was what Lilia had been trying to teach him all along, wasn’t it? That the world was so much bigger and more complicated than he ever would have expected and that Malleus had so, so much left to learn. He was hardly ready to be a king.

All the work had left you exhausted and you were glad once the day was over, looking over the island from a balcony at the school. The sun was setting and tinted the horizon in hues of red and orange. You leaned over the balustrade and noticed how the mess of thorns and debris was already looking a lot better than the day before.

“You sure worked a lot, didn’t you?”, you heard a familiar voice behind you, “makes me wish I would have been able to contribute.” You turned around and your gaze met Lilias. You nodded. The two of you remained silent for a while, watching the sunset as it marked the end of your time together. “When are you leaving?”, you asked, knowing Malleus’ spell had already prolonged Lilias departure. “Tomorrow morning”, the older fae replied with a peaceful smile on his face, “you should come and see me off.” “I will”, you smiled back as a gust of wind blew past your face.

You thought about the coming farewell and how Malleus would likely be there. Tomorrow would be hard for him, you knew that much…

“You love him, don’t you?”, Lilia asked as if being able to read your thoughts.

You crossed your arms, visibly flustered. “I-”, you pouted, “don’t ask me that right now.”

Lilia chuckled. “He loves you too, you know?”, he didn’t miss the surprise on your face as well as the fleeting smile he got out of you by telling you this. You sighed and raised your eyebrows at the former warrior. “You weren’t supposed to tell me this, were you?”, you knew Lilia had a habit of spilling the beans on the people he raised, even when they were very much not up for that. “Nope, khee hee”, Lilia confirmed your suspicions and you buried your head in your hands.

“I know you’re still mad”, he sighed and his gaze met yours, “but I can assure you Malleus has learnt from this. I can’t stop you from leaving if that’s what you decide to do, but I’m asking you to consider if your anger is really stronger than the bond the two of you have.”

“I don’t know”, you replied. “That’s okay. Take your time and think about it. No need to rush”, he smiled and put his hands to his hips, “so where are you headed now?”

You thought about his question for a while. You had tried to grow and learn in order to make sure you could face the trials ahead if you were to confess to Malleus. You didn’t know at the time whether his grandmother or his people would even accept you or whether Malleus felt the same for you. But in your pursuit of security and growth you had found something even more valuable: a new sense of purpose. Regardless of whether you’d end up with or without Malleus by your side, the resolve and strength you had gained through the experiences you had with him were your own and they’d remain even if you were to part ways. You didn’t need to marry a prince and rule a country to put them to good use.

You gazed once more upon the island below the castle and the thorns that had been removed from the village squares. You pulled out your phone and noticed that the fundraiser had gone way beyond its original goal thanks to a donation by the Asim family. You smiled as you looked out towards the sunset.

“I’m going to continue to support others. To improve what is around me and step up to take responsibility. Share my knowledge with others as the centuries pass by. Innovate. Hear people’s stories and follow them on their journey for a while”, you closed your eyes as a sense of determination but also a feeling of peace rushed over you.

“I know where I’m headed. Whichever path I’m on."

You looked back at Lilia who gave you an appreciative nod and a pat on the back. He smiled and seemed satisfied with your answer. “Malleus has a lot to learn from you, if you let him.” The older fae had disappeared when you looked up again.

When you entered the mirror chamber on the next day, Sebek, Silver and Malleus were already assembled there to say goodbye to Lilia. He had brought along all of his luggage and Sebek and Silver were already crying.

“Now, now, don’t get all teary-eyed about me”, Lilia said with a smile as a tear of his own ran down his cheek. He walked over to Sebek and took the first-year’s hands into his own. “Sebek”, he began, “do me a favor and don’t stay holed up in that narrow worldview you’ve grown to have. Make some friends. Let people in. There is so much more for you to see and experience. You’ve grown into a wonderful guard for Malleus but I also want you to find your own path and something you want to dedicate your time to without being focused on another person. I’m proud of how far you’ve come and I’m certain you’ll only grow more from here on out. I wish that you find patience and open your mind to the world around you. It was a pleasure to work alongside you and watch you become stronger.”

Sebek nodded and started sobbing, frantically trying to wipe his tears with the sleeve of his jacket.

“Silver”, Lilia pulled his son into his arms and held him tightly one last time, remembering how he had picked him up when he was just a baby, “you’re the best son a father could ask for. I am so proud of you and you’ve grown into a wonderful young man. I’m glad to call you my son. Don’t look back too much and continue moving forward. There is a great future ahead of you. Don’t worry about your old man too much. I’ll always be there rooting for you, even when you can’t see me. Take care, Silver.”

Lilia waited patiently until Silver was ready to let go. He held onto his father, wishing he could prolong the inevitable but knowing, after all that had happened, that it was time to let go.

And so did Malleus.

When Lilia stepped over to him, he took both of your hands into his and looked into Malleus’ eyes. “Malleus”, Lilia sighed and shook his head, “you caused me a lot of grey hairs with your actions those past few days…but I trust that you’ve learned your lesson and know what you have to do from here on out. All the advice I could give you, I think you’ve learnt the hard way with recent developments. I only hope that you find a way to live your life that makes you happy and feel content.”

Lilia hugged Malleus and chuckled. “I still remember the time you had an eggshell on your face and couldn’t dress yourself like it was yesterday.” “Do we have to bring that up again?”, Malleus pouted but his expression softened when he heard you laugh beside him. Lilia looked at you. “Y/n, I know that you’re still angry and have a lot to sort out…but do you really think this grudge is something you’re going to hold for centuries?”, Lilia asked, “both of you will be faced with loss over and over again throughout your life. But the two of you will remain alive throughout the majority of it. You have each other. Don’t throw that away. Take care of each other and help each other grow. I know you care a lot…keep an eye on Malleus for me, alright?”

Lilia chuckled as you linked your hand with Malleus’ and squeezed it gently. “He’s a handful”, you sighed and Malleus let out a laugh, pulling you into a hug with a relieved expression. “Don’t test me, Malleus Draconia”, you hissed but wrapped your arms around him as well, resting your head on his shoulder. Once you parted, Lilia smiled at Malleus. “The last few days have been…a lot”, he chuckled and Malleus sighed, “but I’m proud of you too. And I’m sure that you’ll be a great king one day. You have a long way to go, but you’ll get there. I’m certain of it.”

Tears ran down Malleus’ cheek as he bid Lilia farewell…one of the few people he had known since he was born.

As soon as Lilia had left through the dark mirror, Malleus broke down. It was raining outside again and he was sobbing along with Silver and Sebek. You had pulled him into your arms and let your embrace comfort him; your anger forgotten in light of the loss Malleus just faced and the overwhelming sadness that resulted from it.

The days that followed were quiet, as if time had stopped. Malleus had needed some time to himself to grieve and you had given him the space he needed but offered your comfort when he wanted it as well. It took a while; the sun rose and set again over the horizon as the days went on, but you eventually heard a knock at your door. “Come in”, you called out and Malleus opened the door, walking into your room and closing the door behind him. He was quiet for a while, just sitting next to you and pondering what to say next.

“Do you forgive me?”, he finally asked.

You sighed and chuckled. “I can’t just reject an old man’s dying wish now, can I?”, you shook your head and took Malleus’ hand in yours, “besides…he was right. I’m not going to hold that grudge for centuries. So I might as well let you off the hook while you’re still within reach.”

Malleus’ expression turned to one of relief and he wrapped his arms around you, holding you tightly against his chest. Against all odds; against what he felt he deserved, you had given him another chance and chosen to stay. And he would make sure to not let it go to waste. He remembered how devastated and sad you had looked after his overblot. He never wanted to make you cry again.

You looked up into his eyes. “But no more using magic on people without asking them first…or trying to solve personal problems with magic. You have to promise me that”, you told him, “you get one chance. And if you mess up, promise me you’ll let me go and move forward, okay?” Malleus nodded and he rested his head on top of yours. “I won’t disappoint you”, he promised and squeezed your hand.

As all the boys who overblotted did, Malleus had started seeing a counselor to work through what had happened as well as through the loss of Lilia. You were still more distant than you used to be but with every passing day you warmed up to Malleus again. You could laugh again and join him for his club activities. You went to his favorite cafe with him after it had reopened; sharing a big cup of ice cream before heading to the beach to watch another sunset. One of many to come.

“How have you been holding up?”, he asked you with genuine concern in his voice as he sat down beside you in the sand. “I’ll pull through”, you sighed, “but sometimes I wonder if I’m still living in a dream and I’m going to wake up to the harsh reality any moment now…”

Malleus’ heart was aching, knowing he was the cause of those feelings. He had broken your trust and it would take a long time to fully restore it but he was ready, whatever it might take. Just no magic, he had promised you that.

“There’s a legend in Briar Valley”, he said with a smile while looking out into the sunset, “of a princess who was woken up from a sleeping curse by true love’s kiss. Lilia used to tell me about it all the time when I was a child. It was my favorite bedtime story. We even hold a festival based on it every year….I was never able to go thus far…but maybe we can go there together sometime…”

“If that’s your attempt at flirting, you have terrible timing, read the room Malleus”, you shook your head but he could tell from your smile that you weren’t serious, “so…are you going to kiss me or not?” Malleus chuckled and pulled you close, his lips finally meeting yours to promise you your happily ever after…as well as that was possible in such an imperfect world. But it was real and it meant so much, regardless of the trials and tribulations along the way. He understood now why a dream would have never made you as happy as he wanted to see you. He had to work for that and he swore to put in all the effort it would take for you to put the past behind you and be certain in the future you could have with him.

You kissed him back eagerly, pouring all your love but also the exhaustion the past days had left you with into the kiss. Tears ran down your cheek and you couldn’t even tell if they were yours or his. Malleus’ lips were soft and still tasted like the strawberry ice cream he had while at the cafe. He held you gently and kissed you over and over again, relieved that you were still here with him, even through all that had happened. He loved you so much and so unconditionally that he had no idea how he hadn’t realized it sooner.

You had to push him away gently with a chuckle, as Malleus had just been leaning in for another taste of your lips and he probably would have been content just doing that for another three hours. “I still need to breathe, you know?”, you laughed and watched the waves meet the shore. Malleus leaned his head against yours and held your hand in his. The overblot and its aftermath seemed like a terrible nightmare to you now and Malleus’ kiss had woken you up to the dawn of a new day.

“I remember how you told me that those who leave us are off to another path different from our own”, he reminisced, “if that’s true, what do you think Lilia is doing right now?”

You chuckled. “Probably cooking something horrible.”

Malleus laughed through his tears but you could still see the pain that was written on his face. “I miss him”, he said quietly and let you hold him, clinging onto you for comfort. “I know”, you whispered, “I do too.” Malleus nuzzled your cheek before pressing a kiss to it. He looked into your eyes with a loving expression, grateful for every minute he could spent within your presence.

“Thank you for choosing to stay with me”, he squeezed your hand and a smile made its way to his face. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, he was looking forward to the future. “I love you”, he told you and cupped your cheek with his hand, watching you lean into his touch and softly kiss the palm of his hand.

You brushed his bangs out of his face and pressed a kiss to the markings on his forehead, noticing how the action made him visibly flustered.

“I love you too, Malleus.”

#twisted wonderland #malleus draconia x you #malleus x reader #malleus draconia x reader #malleus draconia #twst #twst x reader #twisted wonderland x reader #twst malleus #twst chapter 7 spoilers #chapter 7 spoilers #twisted wonderland chapter 7

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unreliablesnake · 6 months

Text

Warning: mw3 spoilers

You knew Simon was suffering. It was easy to tell by the way he had his muscular arm tightly wrapped around your body, pulling your back impossibly close to his chest, and the way his face was buried in your hair. His breathing was controlled, as if he had been counting to five in his head over and over again, forcing himself to keep his breathing even.

It was very tempting to ask him to talk about it, to finally open up about Johnny’s death, but you didn’t want to scare him with your intrusion. If he sensed you were prying into details, he would probably just build higher walls around himself. So you waited, eventually falling asleep to his neatly calculated breathing pattern.

In the middle of the night you woke up to him tightening his grip around your stomach so much it almost hurt, but you decided to wait for a short while to see if he would wake up from what seemed to be a nightmare. Maybe he was dreaming about that day, reliving the moment he lost his best friend. It was painful to watch him go through all this without the possibility of helping with the grieving process.

“I wish you knew how much I love you,” you suddenly heard him whisper against your hair, his iron grip easing up a little.

“I know,” you told him.

He placed a soft kiss on your head before speaking up. “I thought you were sleeping. Why are you awake this late?”

You could have told him the truth, that it was him who accidentally woke you up, but you didn’t want him to feel bad. So you reached down for his hand and laced your fingers with his. He let out a sigh, his hot breath sending a shiver down your spine. “You dreamed about him, didn’t you?” you asked as casually as you could.

Simon thought about the answer, but eventually he let out a grunt and said, “Yeah. The first time we met. I was so fucking annoyed by him.” He kept a pause and you waited patiently for him to continue. “There was a point when I thought I lost him. Lucky for us he had great survival skills,” he added.

“I can imagine how hard it must be, but…”

“I know, I should try to accept he’s gone,” Simon said, knowing perfectly well what you meant.

But it wasn’t easy and you knew it. “I found a good therapist who specializes in this. You should go see them,” you suggested.

“I don’t wanna think about that now. Let’s talk about it tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay.”

You let it go for now. His tired voice gave away that he was in desperate need of some sleep, so you gave him the peace and quiet he needed for that. But you couldn’t fall asleep, not when you kept remembering all the good things he had told you about Johnny. You lied to him. You couldn’t even begin to understand what he was going through. This was something you couldn’t handle alone anymore.

••••••

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#call of duty #modern warfare #mw2 #simon ghost riley #simon riley #ghost #simon riley x reader #simon ghost riley x reader #ghost x reader #soap #john soap mactavish #john mactavish #mw3 #mw3 spoilers

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darling-i-read-it · 1 year

Text

Reunion

Trevor Philips x fem!reader

Word Count: 5k

Warnings: smut, unprotected smut, gta5 story spoilers,

Author’s Note: I am very aware this is the randomest thing to post. I have been replaying gta5. I am in love with Trevor. He’s my best friend, he’s the funnest to play, and I need him (nefarious motives). I unironically have a part 2 to this I’ve half written where the reader and Trevor meet up with Michael so let me know if anyone is invested <3 This is partly inspired by me going into the strip club to go to the atm and then going batshit insane. i am no better than a man but it is never the women im objectifying.

Summary: The reader did the original heist with Brad, Michael and Trevor. Afterwards, when everyone got split up, Lester told the reader that both Trevor and Michael were dead. After the jewelry store the reader wonders if he was lying about both of them. The reunion is filled with anger and also long lasting tension.

I don’t own these characters. They belong to author/director/creator

(not my gif)

“You see him at all? After the incident?” Michael’s voice trailed off into a feign disinterest. Lester and him both knew; this is what the conversation had been leading up to. The conversation had dissipated away from the task at hand, casing the jewelry store. Neither of them seemed to care.

“I kept tabs on him for a while. Needed to know that he didn’t blame me,” Lester complained, reminding them both of the idicotic ways of their former friend.

“Yeah, where’d he go?” Michael questioned, trying to be nonchalant.

“North, south, east, west. Wherever there were liquor stores to turn over and hitchhikers to disappear.” There was a beat of silence as Michael climbed further up the roof to get a better vantage point. The words could have remained in the air, if Michael hadn’t pushed further.

“Where did they bury him?”

“They buried him? Not as far as I know.”

He wanted to ask. He knew he had to.

“You see her?”

Lester was glad Michael couldn’t see his face. It was a knowing look. Oh God, Michael wanted to talk about her again! Something so familiar that it didn’t even seem out of place, not even after everything.

“No. She left all together.”

“She still…she still around?”

“She’s alive if that’s what you’re asking. Moved, made a better life for herself. Better than he could’ve gaven her. Or you for that matter. Still got the bullet wound to prove she was there though. Physical therapy for months on that shoulder.”

Michael was hit with a sudden pang of nostalgia. He thought about the pandering, the vein attempts to make himself look better for you. The fight’s he and Trevor used to have all the time, arguments on who deserved you and who would get you. He had hoped you were oblivious. Now he wasn’t so sure he believed that.

“I told her he was dead.”

Michael paused on the roof, his movements only momentarily stunned.

“You feel bad about that?”

“It was the only thing to do. She would’ve found him. They would’ve found you. Bad for everyone.”

“And especially your cover.”

“Especially that.”

You were living a life where both he and Trevor were dead. You had moved on because it was the only thing you were able to do. He yearned to know what it could’ve been like if things hadn’t gone to hell. The danger was intoxicating but never as intoxicating as you.

He thought about Amanda. How she had never been you, how that’s the reason he was never able to love her the way he wanted. Clearly she had never loved him quite as much either, as was the case from her tennis performance. You were out there somewhere.

“I don’t wanna know,” he decided. If Lester told him even the smallest thing, a job, a marriage, a kid…he would go looking. He knew himself better than that.

“I wasn’t gonna tell you if you asked.”

Another short beat. He was almost to the highest vantage point.

“She deserved better than both of you. But you have to know she would’ve always chosen him.”

“There’s no need to hash up old shit okay? I was just asking to see who was still around. There’ll never be a better get away driver than her.” Even his deflection felt fake and vein. Lester saw right through it but decided to let it be. Michael thought of Franklin, diverging his thoughts. He could have him work, train him, mold him. He huffed as he got to the highest point.

“Now just to take a picture of the vent up there,” Lester said, evenly. The conversation was over. They wouldn’t talk about you or Trevor again today.

You were sitting at the small dining room table of your apartment. It was more of an island honestly but you called it the dining table because it was the best you could get. Los Santos was an expensive city and you were lucky to have found a place you could afford at all. Not that you weren’t doing well here.

The television was on to the news, though you weren’t necessarily paying attention. You poked at your mashed potatoes, proud of yourself for making anything tonight. You grabbed the remote with the intention of changing it to a shitty reality TV show when the screen shifted. ‘Breaking News’ painted the bottom of the television in red. A man was speaking but the volume was too low to hear it. You turned it up, out of sheer curiosity. You were reminded of a life before this one, a bang of guilt in your chest that you had desperately tried to get rid of.

Was it the guilt that brought the nostalgia forward? Or was it the way they reported it to be set up? Was it the cars, the hacking, the timing? Was it the sheer familiarity that made you sit forward? Or was it the fact that looked exactly like a Michael Townley job?

“You forget a thousand things everyday,” the witness said, shaken, “make this one of them.”

Your food was forgotten. Your face had gone blank with confusion.

“That motherfucker,” you muttered. The urge to throw something came back with his face in your head, the funeral you went to, the life you left. You saw his face on a big portrait and cried in front of it, wishing you had been faster. You left before ever seeing if anyone held a funeral for Trevor but now you wished you had stayed. What if you had spent all this time alone when they were out there, somewhere. What if Trevor was still alive?

The TV was now a ghost. It was now a time long forgotten. It was the bullet wound in your shoulder that now ached, something you hadn’t felt in a long while. That jewelry store was in Los Santos. It was here. Michael was here.

Lester told you him and Trevor were dead.

You searched for your phone. You didn’t have his number anymore, you couldn’t. He had changed it. He was too smart to keep the one he had years before. You recklessly searched anyway, knocking over the chair you were sitting in, tossing your pillows aside. Finally you grasped the phone in your hand, frantically searching in your contacts. His name remained, under L, and you called the number. It rang and rang and rang. You were already starting to think about how you would find him when the line picked up. Your breath caught.

“Y/N.”

“You fucker. You motherfucker. You fucking fucker.” You almost didn’t recognize the voice coming out of your mouth, you were so dedicated to the rage you felt. It was almost Trevor’s, almost the same cadence that you had picked up from him. It was amazing how fast all of that came back to you. How, just like that, you were her again. You weren’t her anymore, even when you took a turn too fast or knew the fastest routes out of an issue.

“What are you talking-”

“You know what I’m talking about,” you seethed. You failed to think about how he had kept the phone just for you, just in case you needed him one day. It didn’t even cross your mind that Lester had loved you too, that they all had. You were friends in the purest sense of the word. You were all each other's people. Now, you hadn’t heard or talked to Brad since he was arrested. Now you were a different person.

Lester was laying low but he still answered your call.

“I don’t know-”

“Is he dead?” You couldn’t say his name.

“Michael? “

“No.”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t believe you.” There was a bitterness in your voice you almost didn’t recognize. Her, her, her. When did you stop being her? “Lester tell me the fucking truth.”

“I don’t know. I used to follow him but there was no use.”

“What do you mean you used to follow him?” There was a long pause. Too long. “What do you mean?” You sat down slowly on the chair by your island. You grabbed the edge of the counter. Your knuckles were strained. “Did he live?”

Silence.

You were gonna kill Lester. You were gonna kill him and you were gonna enjoy it.

“Where did you see him last?”

“Sandy Shores. But that was ye-” You hung up the phone. You should’ve asked about Michael, you knew you should’ve. You wanted to but the anger was too much. If you saw Michael now, you’d kill him with your bare hands. Sandy Shores was not a large place. And you were a determined person.

Trevor looked in the mirror at the tattoo he had for Michael Townley, his dead best friend. His formally dead best friend. On his other arm was a tattoo for the only girl he had ever really loved. She was supposedly dead too.

He broke the mirror with a fist. His knuckles started to bleed from the glass cuts. He ignored it. Ron was standing in the doorway, shaking, leaning over. Trevor almost made a shitty joke about his posture but for some reason, he didn’t. He had already sent Wade to find Michael Townley but he had kept you to himself. He wanted to find you but he’d do that with his own two hands. No one else needed to know you were out there. If you were out there. A Townley job did not mean you were still alive. Just because Michael lived didn’t mean you had.

“What the fuck do you want Ron?”

“Sorry boss.” He moved out of the doorway, down the steps outside. He looked around eagerly, glancing back at Trevor but not holding eye contact too long. Trevor followed him outside and walked past him. “Bikers had been scoping out here while you were gone.”

“Did you tell them to fuck off?”

“No?”

“Well next time, tell em to fuck off!” Trevor approached his truck with the intention of going to the city himself to find Michael. Michael would know if you were alive.

Trevor thought about that time little. He thought about leaving his friend, about the bullets that flew past him, the moment he knew he would never see you again. He thought about the bullet wound in your shoulder, the one in him, the wounds that will never fully heal. A constant reminder of the near death experience he lived through and shouldn’t have. In drunken nights he always wished it had been you who was in his place. You would’ve made a life. Had you made a life? Had you done it without him?

He hopped in the truck. He needed more booze.

“Where ya going boss?” Ron questioned.

“Bar.” He started the engine. It rumbled to life underneath him and it was already hot from the heat. He turned his head to Ron. “Get lost Ron.”

Ron nodded eagerly, already starting to stumble away. Trevor needed to clear his head. He needed to cloud his head some. He pulled away, mentally going through the map closest to him. If he went to a strip club, he was extra sure not to think about anything else. But the better booze was always cheaper at just a bar. If he went all the way to the city he could search for Michael at the bottom of a bottle.

All of those options seemed like good options. He wanted to beat the shit out of somebody. He should probably stay in Sandy Shores to do that. But where’s the fun in doing what you’re probably supposed to do? He made a sharp turn, almost running over a girl crossing the street.

“Hey don’t you see I’m driving here!” he yelled, feeling better already knowing he had probably ruined someone's day with their near death experience.

“Watch where you’re fucking going! Jesus Christ, some people don’t know how to fucking drive,” you called, anger lacing your voice.

The cogs turned at the same time.

You were standing on the side of the road, in the dust of the truck. You stopped walking completely, replaying that voice in your head again like it was your favorite song. The familiarity ached at you. You knew it the second you heard it.

Trevor had gotten about half way down the road when he hit the brakes. Hard. He was in the middle of an intersection. People were honking at him but he just sat there, both hands on the wheels, eyes squinted in confusion.

With ease he put the car in reverse. Much to the dismay of the few drivers around him, he backed up. You were staring at the truck as it did so, not sure if you should laugh or cry or yell or have any reaction at all.

He stopped beside you, head turned. You stared at each other for a moment. Eyes so familiar it was like coming home after a long time away. Like the feeling of your own sheets but someone else had made the bed.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost sweetheart,” he hummed, his voice as cocky as it had always been. “Which can’t be true because if I remember, you’re my ghost.” Your lips parted. You approached the truck and he let you, wordlessly. You were in shock. You were stunned. There had to be a word for seeing a ghost from your past you thought was dead. You wrapped your fingers around the edge of the door.

“You motherfucker,” you whispered, in awe.

“I’m the motherfucker?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not the motherfucker.” You wanted to hit him. You wanted to kiss him. You wanted to slash his car tires. You wanted to take him home.

“I thought you were dead. I mourned you, Trev.” The car behind him honked. Neither of you had even noticed they were there. You both turned and it was like you were possessed by your respective ghosts.

“Can’t you tell we’re having a fucking moment?!” Trevor yelled. They honked again. Trevor pulled out a handgun. You watched him wordlessly. He shot the window. He missed. The car quickly diverged around and was gone in the dust again. You opened up the car door, his gun still smoking. He watched you, eyes curious. He thought he had memorized your entire body but now that you were there in front of him he realized his memory had never done it justice. You shut the door behind you and turned to him. The hand with the gun was slung against the passenger seat.

“I need a drink,” you muttered. He chuckled lowly.

“My girl.” He started to move forward again. Closest bar would do, he decided.

Lester wasn’t sure if he should even tell Michael. It was probably for the best that none of them had any contact for a while after the robbery. He had set that rule himself. They would lay low, stay straight, stay away from each other. Still, after the phone call with you it seemed stupid to not let Michael know, in some capacity, that you were going to be looking for him. Maybe he was more worried about you finding Trevor and then dealing with the aftermath of the havoc the two of you could bring.

Lester stared at his phone. He could text Michael. He could call. He could drop a place to meet. He knew that his friend would come if he asked, ever the rulebreaker. If you and Trevor remerged together that would be bad for everyone. That was bad for this whole thing.

Lester finally picked up the phone. He decided a text would do.

She knows.

Michael picked up his phone. He had been desperately attempting to hide from his kids and Amanda. He was glad for it, honestly, that the life he had chosen had chosen him back. But when he saw the text from the number with no photo with it, his jaw tightened. He had told Lester he figured Trevor was dead but now a risk was going to have to be made. You were out there and you were either looking for him (which was bad) or Trevor (which was worse).

Trevor and you were better off thinking the other was dead. The world was better for it. The money, the people, the general crime rate were all better for it.

“I want the TV,” Tracey said, approaching him. Her voice was muffled. It was like he was hearing her from underwater. “Dad. Give me the remote.” He looked up at her then, eyes still wide from worry. She made no note of his mood. He handed her the remote. He stood up, grabbing his car keys from the side table.

“Where do you think you're going?” Amanda questioned when he ran into her in the hall. He didn’t come up with an excuse fast enough and the judgemental look in her eyes creeped in.

“Gonna try and find an old friend,” he admitted.

“Yeah? How old?” Amanda dripped in annoyance. Did he mean a stripper? Did he mean a criminal? Somehow she knew it would negatively affect her.

“Old.” He pushed past her. Amanda looked at him and knew there were only two options to that answer. Neither were good.

Michael opened his phone to Lester’s number.

Where?

You sat beside each other in a bar that wasn’t memorable, drinks in hand you didn’t know the name of. You sat as close to him as you could get, legs touching. You didn’t want to ever not be touching him again.

“I had no idea,” you told him. “Lester told me you died.”

“Fucker.”

“I know, I know. Trust me, I’ve got a bullet with his name on it.” You took a sip of your drink. He looked at you, watching eagerly. You looked different. Well, you looked the same, but the clothes you were wearing were different. You must’ve had some sort of office job that required clothes on you he had never seen before. You used to steal his shit all the time, when it was clean. “I’ve got seven bullets for Townley. I’m makin sure that motherfuckers dead this time.”

Trevor smiled.

“Fuck girl, I thought you bled out from that shoulder wound. I thought I left you there.”

“You did leave me.” He glared at you. You had told him to leave and he did, only after you begged. “Lester told me you were gunned down in the escape.”

“You saw the fucking jewelry-”

“Yup.” You shook your head. “Bold of him. Really bold.” You finished your glass. You pulled down your blouse at the shoulder, revealing the bullet wound scar. He put his hand on your shoulder. He hadn’t touched your skin since seeing you again. It made you shiver. He poked it, making you roll your eyes. “Don’t be a dick.”

“All I know how to be.”

He rubbed it with his thumb, shaking his head.

“Looks like it hurt.”

“Yeah well.” You put your sleeve back up.

“So you haven’t seen him?”

“Nope. Went to find you first.”

“I’ve always been your favorite,” he bragged. You rolled your eyes, a sly smile playing on your face. It was true. It had always been that way. “You got any leads?” You were more reliable than Wade.

“Lester know’s where he is. I was gonna pay him a visit anyway.” “Well there’s no time like the present,” he offered. You gave him a look. He couldn’t read it. People skills had never been something he was particularly good at. You tilted your head.

“You haven’t seen me in nine years and you wanna go find Michael right now?”

His eyes went wide.

“Nine years and she finally admits it.”

“You knew it then. Don’t pretend you didn’t.” He did remember it. He remembered all of it, every second of it. He leaned in.

“I’ve got a shitty trailer with a shitty bed.”

“That sounds like heaven right now Trev,” you said under your breath. He had been wanting to kiss your lips as long as he had known you. It took so much of him not to do it all the time when you saw each other regularly. After he thought you were dead, he regretted not doing it every chance he had.

You threw money at the bartender, too much he noted, and piled into his truck. Your lips were on each others before the car even stopped. You crawled over the middle of the truck, wondering if you would even make it to the bed, wondering if you even needed to.

Ron came rushing out of the front door, talking before he registered, “Boss the bik-” He stopped, literally putting a hand over his mouth. It wasn’t odd to find Trevor fucking a girl in his truck but Ron knew he didn’t like to be interrupted. Trevor left your lips for only long enough to speak.

“Get the fuck out of here Ron!” He nodded, scrambling away. You popped open the truck door and slid out. You weren’t touching Trevor for a mere moment and he grabbed you again, pulling you towards him. “You’re not getting outta here again,” he promised, voice low and threatening. You smiled brightly.

Ron opened the door to his place nearby and peaked through the window. You were dragging Trevor behind you, hands interlocked, a puppy dog look in his eyes. Ron was used to seeing Trevor with girls. He wasn’t used to seeing Trevor with girls he liked. He lost the two of you as you entered the trailer.

Trevor’s lips didn’t leave yours, even when the door hit him from behind. He hugged you close to him. How close could he get to you? How close could he make you so that you never left him again?

You hadn’t expected Trevor’s lips to taste so good. You expected beer or weed or unbrushed teeth or something shitty but something about them was intoxicating. He had a firm grip on your ass, pulling you closer to him. You tripped over something on the ground. You pulled away to see where you were going.

The trailer was a mess. There were beer cans littering the ground, half naked girls on the walls, unwashed dishes in the sink. He let go of you just to move shit off of his unmade bed. He grabbed the pictures he had of girls and tore them off his wall.

“Disrespectful,” he grumbled, kissing you again. And just like that you could have been anywhere in the world and it didn’t matter. You had waited long enough.

He was clawing at your clothes with one hand while the other dragged up your back under your shirt. You shoved him down onto the bed. He chuckled, falling onto his back.

“I think I’m in love with you.”

“Think?” You crawled on top of him, cupping his face in your hands. Why hadn’t you done this before? Why hadn’t you done this so many times? His hands reached for your shirt and it wasn’t until then that it hit him. You were alive. You were here. You were in his arms. He had beat the stupid longstanding fight him and Michael would always spat about over drinks. You were here, with him. He took off your shirt.

“God woman.” He cupped your breasts, eyes wide like they were gonna pop out of his head. You put your finger under his chin.

“Eyes are up here Trev.” He kissed you like he would never be able to do it again. He needed to be on top. The rising tension in his sweats were hard to ignore as you sat on top of him. He could feel your every movement. You slid your hands slowly up his shirt and then down again, fingertips electric. You hummed as you trailed kisses down his chin. While you were distracted he flipped you onto the bed. You made a surprised noise that caused him to chuckle.

“My girl.” He took off his shirt. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept with a girl and wanted to make it last. When was the last time it was less fucking and more something else, something he could barely remember the name to? You gripped his shoulder. There was a tattoo there, your name in faded ink. Your eyebrows softened. He didn’t seem to notice. “My girl,” he repeated, whispering against your skin.

“Trev,” you whined. He was already shimming down his pants. He kicked them off the bed onto the floor. You could feel his hardness against your clothed core. He fixed his fingers around the loops of your jeans, pulling it down with ease. You raised an eyebrow at his expertise but he was so caught up in the taste of you he didn’t notice.

“God!” You arched your back, looking up at him with wide eyes. He couldn’t wait any longer. Without warning he was inside you, all of him. You gasped at the sudden change and then eased. He gave you no time to calm down or adjust but he was leaning over you and his lips were permanently on your skin and it was like the room had gotten ten degrees hotter in the span of five minutes. You could probably fuck around all night. Trevor could go again and again but he needed to do this right now.

He placed a finger on your clit. You gasped, eyes locking with his. He grinned smugly. You kissed him to shut up whatever he was about to say.

Your breath hitched as he sped up, moving his fingers wildly and without care. Somehow he managed to hit just the right spot.

You came together, plagued by moans and spasms.

Still inside you he smiled, self satisfied.

“Never thought a dead guy would make you cum huh?” You snorted, eyes shut tightly.

“Fuck you Trevor.” You were laughing through your words.

“Haven’t gotten enough yet?”

He collapsed beside you. You found the bed more comfortable now in your bliss. You grabbed a pillow, placing it under your head.

“Get me a beer T. I can go all night.”

When Trevor woke up you were still in bed. He had a hand on your thigh, now clothed, much to his dismay. He had no idea what time it was. You had thrown on one of his clean shirts, one of the rare ones. You were hunched over your phone, sitting beside him. He rubbed his eyes. You turned your head, realizing he was awake.

“Mornin’ sleepy head,” you said, a pleasant smile on your face. Your hair was a mess of the night. He could still feel it on the tips of his fingers. He could still taste you on his lips.

It hadn’t been a dream. You were here. You were with him. It wasn’t a wet dream, it was reality. Just the thought made him dizzy.

“Let’s get drunk and get hitched.” You laughed gently.

“Now that’s an idea.” He sat up and kissed you aggressively, throwing you off but not by much. Your phone fell from your fingers. You turned to him. His girl. His girl. His girl. You pulled away, much to his dismay. “I think I know where Michael is.”

He groaned.

“You had to remind me.” He fell back onto the bed with a flop.

“Los Santos. There’s a Michael De Santa with two kids and a wife. Amanda.” He perked his head up.

“You check the plastic surgery records?”

“I did not but I have a rough estimate.” You stood up. The bed was cold without you. Couldn’t you just live forever like this? Why go find Michael at all?

And then he remembered his anger.

“They’re living in a mansion, Trev,” you said. You hadn’t taken any money from that robbery. You couldn’t, it wouldn’t make any sense. But Michael was out there and he was using that money somehow. He had taken it all for himself.

Trevor’s anger intensified. He was here in the slums of San Andreas in a shitty trailer. He had put his life on the line. He had lost everything he cared about. Michael got the house and the family and the life they had all risked it for. He had lost you for nine years.

He tossed you the truck keys.

“Start it but don’t drive it,” he said. You rolled your eyes.

“You think you’re a better driver than me T?” You both sat in the memories of you driving away with money, evading the cops, knowing nothing but the danger in your speed.

“I’m the only one that drives that truck.” You put your hands up in surrender, backing out.

“Yes sir.”

God he wanted you back in bed.

Part 2

#trevor philips x reader #trevor philips imagines #trevor philips x fem!reader #trevor philips fanfiction #grand theft auto imagines #spicy tag

422 notes · View notes

defectivefanboy · 1 year

Note

hey i’m just asking maybe could you do dating head canons for crimson from helluva boss? nsfw or sfw i don’t mind <33

Absolutely. I love how the fandom is already down bad for mafia man.

hey i’m just asking maybe could you do dating head canons for crimson from helluva boss? nsfw or sfw i don’t mind <;33

Overall notes: Stories written on this blog are GN until specified. While this story uses they/them pronouns, and I don't mind female readers on my blog, I do not write for y'all, and if you are a fetishizer fuck off????????????????? ew.

C/W: Possible OOC, Mentions of kidnap, abuse, torture, murder, death threats, mentions of sexual assault, cursing, spoilers (duh)

Notes: I tried making it as close to mafia man without him just beating you low-key /j, the first part of this I made into a small story without realizing, I hope that alright. Just some build up to it. <3

SFW

Prior to the relationship

"Earth Hell Angel"

Let's ignore the fact he would probably, most definitely never come into contact with any of us. Point blank.

You would have to be making some kind of deal with the Knolastname family, born into riches, or work for him. (I have stories for each in my head)

But let's tinker with the process shall we

The way you two met was by young Moxxie

You were a musician playing at one of the very few operating clubs in greed, operating meaning wasn't just a front for something else.

Moxxie was a teen at the time and being a teen felt a little rebellious. Like of course who wouldn't rebel against their mafia father.

Only issue was, Moxxie was in the middle of a mission when he decided to rebel leaving his father's men to find him in a club listening to a singer.

Crimson was just gonna burn the place down, maybe this time Moxxie would learn to not fuck with him anymore, but he wanted it to run deeper.

He wanted to kidnap who ever the singer was and torture them in front of the young imp to properly ingrain the lesson into him.

What he didn't expect was to be seated at a table each passing night, lit cigar in hand as he waited for the performer of the night.

It slowly became routine for him, and he slowly become your top patron. Enough to were you didn't need to preform so much.

That was until you met a bright eye imp with a tune for music...

And his devilish father

The young imp for express his passion for music, which you could only respond with the same enthusiasm, if It wasn't for the menacing eyes scanning over your body as he whispered to the shark behind him, eyes never leaving you.

This went on for months, moxxie would come and talk to you after shows and show you some songs he made. Though it wasn't just Moxxie paying you visits.

If it wasn't moxxie in your dressing room after a show, the older Knolastname would take his stay.

He often made snide remakes on working in, as he would say, "The only place where even the roaches don't wanna go" while he made himself comfy on the couch in the room.

Originally he had body guards posted around the room, outside the door, and around the outside of the building.

But that ended when one of his men tried to make a move on you while he was on the phone.

Oh boy the look on his face when he came back into the room and saw you being held down by one of the guards.

He doesn't know why, but when he saw the scared look on your face, a silent plea for help was all it took for a whole new line of guards to be instated.

"One bad apple can rot the rest. So its only best he gets rid of them all right?"

He was gonna need a LOT more walls in his home for plaques.

From there on out the only people that were allow in your room were him, Moxxie, oh and him, did he forget to mention that handsome imp right there? yeah him, oh wait thats him, whoops.

It became routine, well, as much as mafia work can be routine.

Each week he'll ask you when you're preforming, then not respond to any other text or conversation after that, because why would he? That's not what he's asking for.

Don't worry though, he still actively listens and pays attention, even making mental notes here and there on some things, but nothing else matters.

He's just going through his mental calendar of the week to make time for each show. <3

And if he's unable to make it, he'll either send Moxxie or a goon with a stack of money to make up

Though half of it just goes to the person who delivers it, you tried sending it back once and the poor goon had to walk back to the club with a bullet in each knee

Soon after moxxie was the only one allowed half the money

He found out the goons were given half the money and were made to give it back, half alive of course.

Dating Crimson

This old man only realized he liked you when he was in an argument with Moxxie.

Moxxie had a date with chez, but Crimson wanted to send him to the club with yet another stack of money.

"Sir, this is the third time you sent them money today. I think they are well off for the night."

"I didn't call you here to think, boy, I called you here to go to that club. I don't want to repeat myself."

"Well, sir, I don't think sending your son with a stack of money is gonna win their love."

The air grew still in the room as silence over took them

"Get out."

Moxxie needn't think twice with that one, as he raced off to his fishy lover (pun intended)

Jesus and thats just before the relationship, I couldn't even imagine what it would be like to date him. (yes I can thats why im here, albeit VERY OOC cough you're not abused cough)

When this man finally has you in his grasp, I hope you don't like traveling far.

He is a possessive lover, like Possessive lover with a capital p.

As much as he hates it, he'll allow you to play at the club, it's not like he owns it or anything.

He does, he bought it awhile ago when he overheard how your boss talked to you. good to not he's not missing... side eye

Oddly enough (I say as I write) he's very touch starved.

He is very handsy the moment you allow him to be, a hand is always on you, if you're not already held close to his side.

"What are you talking about? I keep you close to me so you don't get lost. Can't have you winding up in an unsavory deal down here."

His favorite thing to do is come into your dressing room and hug you from behind as you get ready in the mirror.

Face buried in your neck as his body slumps and his tail wraps tightly around your leg.

Only looking up when your hand runs through his hair and you let out a light giggle, a soft glare pointed at you through the mirror.

Another has to be when you're sitting on his lap in your dressing room, music playing in the background as you softly sing the words to him while you chart your hands through his hair

Crimson never cared for music, to much of a sinner thing for him, mostly because he did business with other hell-born and never interacted with them, but he could appreciate it a bit if you came along with it

Especially when you give him that look, one that would carry the seven rings of hell alone, and it was all for him.

God, he would lock you up away from all of hell in an instant if you let him.

He actually tried once, though it went over quite quickly when you threaten to no longer give him kisses or attention in general, he surprising backed down quickly.

Though his next statement was for you to move in with Moxxie and him. No, not a question, Yes, a statement.

Your belongs had already been moved while you had this conversation. Hope you don't mind.

Oh Oh OH did this make Crimson happy. The first morning he felt a warm body wrapped in his arms, he dug his face deeper into the source.

He could call off his meetings for the day, not like they could do much about it.

Not when he has what he wants right in front of him.

He may never encounter an angel from heaven, but why would he need to, he had his own right here.

Crimson only truly realized this when you barged into his office one night, grumbling incoherent insults carrying a plate of food in your hand.

"You know for someone who gets on me for not eating right you always take it above and beyond."

placing the food on his desk you pull a chair around and sat next to him reaching into your pocket.

"I hope you're not planning on killing me, darling."

"You have a headache, don't you?" "huh?"

"You've been at work for over a day, you gotta have one by now."

Placing a bottle of pain killers on the desk you picked up the fork and softly blew on it to cool it down, before bringing it to his mouth.

Yeah, he could get use to this, he could get really use to this.

And yeah he may not be his son's biggest supporter, but when he sees Moxxie and you gushing over whatever nonsense that came to mind, his home no longer felt as cold like it once did.

NSFW

C/W: Marks, Degrading, Collars, Choking, Smoking,

Did I mention he was a possessive lover? Because he's also a jealous lover, and it tends to end with a few REALLY obvious marks on your body

From the dark and almost concerning hicks that adorn your neck, to the red and angry claw marks that riddle your thighs, the guest started to wonder if you were mauled by a bear.

or a cannibal... Say, did he sound like a radio host?

He doesn't even want you looking at anyone else and if he found out anyone was trying to be with you it would mean their head was mounted on the wall

and yours was planted in the bed... <3

"To think we would go through this again, it's almost as if you want to be treated like a dog"

Mind you he's still an old timer, he isn't one for anything fancy. Aka: you brought up toys in bed and he got a little too jealous at the thought of you cumming from something that wasn't him

"Saying I don't fuck you well enough? That's funny, because if I do recall, your pretty little head was cock drunk before I even did anything, or are you just that much a whore that you need more then one?"

The thought of getting an Ozzie's Mold your own Cock kit did pass his mind once or twice.

Remember how I said he was handsy, I don't know it's because he's a murderer or not, but I do see him being very fond of choking.

It reminds him of a collar in a sense, getting you one has passed his mind too

You would wear it for him right? At least when you two are alone? Just for a bit.

Long enough that he can take some photos of your blissed out face saving it for later, as the metal tag shines slowly with each rise of your chest.

But in all honesty his hand looks much better wrapped around your neck as he ruts into you from behind, growling in your ear as his grip tightens.

Crimson is literally the definition of Grr, bark and growl, and they all happen at once.

It started out with a low growl from him as you talked to a male coworker, soon it turned to him barking orders at you to get on your knees in your dressing room.

What? It's your fault you decided to talk with that low life. He should be rewarded for letting him walk away with half his vision.

I must say though, the old school charm does such wonders.

Especially on date nights <3

He may have already been in your pants, he still goes out of his way to treat it like it's the first time.

Compliments thrown your way as he pours you a glass of wine, all of it over looked by a sneaky tail trailing its way between your legs in the middle of dinner.

You ARE at Ozzie's after all

Those nights end up with you slowly riding him, his hand on your jaw to keep you looking at him.

"Something the matter dear? Do you need help finishing? Just ride me a bit more, yeah? You've been doing so good for me."

Crimson's strong suit... is definitely not his praise, but he does pick up on the small noises and movements you make each time he does.

Yet, he saves it for those soft and affectionate nights. He's still a mafia man at heart, but hey, he's coming around.

One last thing that will set this imp off is you smoking, as random as it may seem. Be it weed, a cigarette, shit, even one of his cigars, his lips(?) are on yours inhaling the smoke you exhale.

You did mention a band named cigarettes after sex at point. Why not put it into action.

Talking about after sex.........

He's fucking terrible at after care. You would be lying through your teeth if you said he was.

He's gotten better after a few months, few meaning over half a year. He's gotten better at least?

It's not everyday a Mob lord is on his knees cleaning up after himself, or running to fetch a glass of water.

Though he makes it up with more trips to the lust ring~

He can't help it, they have the best clubs in all of hell <3

“I never learned to like something, darling. I only let it consume me.”

#foolish writing #request #helluva boss #helluva boss crimson #crimson x reader #crimson x male reader #crimson x female reader #vivziepop #I story on which he is just beating on you is LK funny to me #thats as canon as you could ever get #request open

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hotpinkrathian · 2 months

Text

Ahhhh so I have to admit I have been working on something, it's a very big project for me.

It's 30 000 words long as of now, and I estimate to be about 1/2 - 2/3 of the way through the story. I'm super excited about it, however I don't want to get to a point where I'm almost done and don't finish, which is why I am writing it so much.

I want everyone in the kyalin Fandom to be right there with me when it's ready. So I'm going to do my best to finish it before I start posting.

How would I describe it???

A Kyalin mystery slowburn

Here's a snippet from Chapter 3 (spoilers ahead)

“Here,” Tenzin said, passing Lin a notice.

“So secretive,” Kya joked, pretending to lean over.

“It's not that secret,” Tenzin said, “two more came forward getting letters, bringing the total to-”

“Forty-nine.” Lin finished. The names added to the list weren't familiar to her. An Earth Republic mayor, and a fire nation general. “Something tells me there's one more out there,” Lin said.

“You think? An even 50?”

“Stopping at forty-nine would be good thinking on their end,” Kya said, “I mean, it would have everyone worried over the 50th letter, which doesn't exist.” She elaborated.

Lin raised an eyebrow, shrugging it off.

“What are the odds they get out anyway?” Kya asked.

“You mean the dirt?” Lin clarified.

“Yeah. Are the threats… real? Do you think they actually know something, or is it… broad enough to make yo- people think they did something.”

“Well we've bounced around that idea for a while,” Lin said, “but I think the general consensus was that… they were a little too close for comfort.” She looked to Tenzin, whose harrowing eyes reflected the anxieties of her own.

Her own letter bounced around in the back of brain, waiting to be unpacked. She had divulged so much into dealing with the case, and worrying about Suyin, she hadn't put much thought into how she would deal with the information revealed by her letter.

What she would do.

What she would say.

She didn't inherently think she had anything to be ashamed of, but there were plenty others who wouldn't see it that way.

It would be career ending, perhaps enough to chase her out of town in search of a fresh start.

If Suyin was still alive, Zaofu could make for a nice retirement place.

“Excuse me for a moment,” she said, getting up. She made for the bathroom down the hall, but instead opened the window at the end of the hall.

Delicately, and with precision, even in her wine-induced stupor, she climbed outside, hanging onto the ledge.

She'd done it a thousand times in her teen years. Scaling the air temple had been a right of passage, and a necessity, when she was with Tenzin.

It was second nature to her as she hauled herself to the upper floor.

Luckily, the window wasn't locked and she got back inside with ease.

She walked quietly down the hall, praying she didn't wake the kids. It was as she remembered. Almost nothing had changed, and a strange wave of deja vu overcame her.

It ended when she entered the left door, and not the right.

Kya's room was one she hadn't been in much, especially as she got older. It looked as she had envisioned. It was tasteful and colorful. Lin envied her ability to pick out pictures and tapestries of varied colors, still managing to make them go together.

First she checked the nightstand, which had a lot of interesting things, but nothing she was looking for.

She checked the duffle bag on the chair, nothing but clothes and towels.

She sighed, looking around.

She noticed the bed was lifted slightly off the floor. Tenzin used to keep… stuff under his bed.

Perhaps these airhead all thought alike.

She got on her knees before laying herself gently onto her stomach.

She outstretched an arm under the bed, feeling around until her palm landed on a box.

She pulled it out, and allowed herself to stand up before setting it on the bed and opening it.

The unmistakable waxy green seal.

The inky handwriting on the back with a clear name designation.

The clear indication that it had been open and removed multiple times.

She held it in her hand, her fingers frozen.

Fifty

#legend of korra #kyalin #korrasami #atla #lok #lin x kya #tenzin #pema #korra #asami #mako and lin #bolin x opal #post cannon #kuvira #should i hide a secret in the tags #mystery

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noproofread · 3 months

Text

Pretty Pink

"I'm swimming into you, into the ocean with a parachute"

inspired by Touch Tank and dedicated to @vangowithit <3

it's my first time writing for Koby and i tried my best to capture his essence

Koby x gn!reader

mild spoilers for post timeskip one piece, i had opla Koby in mind though :)

captain Koby, fluffy, reader has a crush on their pink haired captain, confident yet timid Koby.

word count: 1,023

it's almost 6am and i couldnt sleep so i ended up writing this in an hour and a half lol

masterlist here

Koby was the nicest captain you had worked under. And you had been transferred from captain to captain due to your behavior. They said you were hard to manage but in reality your previous captains had different goals, different perspectives on what was considered justice. You weren’t hard to manage, you just didn’t succumb to their opinions and they hated that. But Koby was different. It wasn't just his sense of justice, his aura was different. He was softer and yet he was a strong leader, almost intimidating at times. Perhaps it was the title, or the amount of work he put forth. Regardless, you always found yourself staring at him, studying him almost.

His pink hair looked so soft as it was moved by the wind. His skin pale, his eyes matched the ocean, his lips were the most beautiful shade of pink. You swore he always caught you staring but he never said anything about it. You had deluded yourself that maybe he was too shy to talk to you. Maybe he watched you as intently as you had been. Every passive gesture towards you fueled this fantasy. Every look, every graze of the fingers, every time he called your name.

You were so caught up in reminiscing every moment you had with your captain that you didn't realize you had been staring at him once again. It was the snapping of his fingers that brought you out of your head. You felt your face heat up as your eyes met his. “Are you okay? You zoned out pretty hard there” Koby said. You blinked, you were sure he could hear your heartbeat just as you could. “Heh, yeah all good! Just… Just thinking.” You smiled, your eyes drifting to his lips. You bit your own lips as you imagined the feeling of them on yours. You imagined how his breath would feel in your ear. How his hands would feel all over you.

“Okay well. Do you have any questions?” Koby’s voice snapped you out of your thoughts once again. You stared blankly at him. “Questions about what?” He chuckled lightly. “Your task… You are to find the whereabouts of the Foxy Pirates on this island” Koby explained, motioning to the island behind the boat. “Right. Uh.. No. No questions” You stood up straight, selling the illusion of complete focus. “Okay... Well if you do end up having questions. Or if you run into trouble, let me know!” He smiled at you, making a pale pink hue wash over your face. You hoped he didn’t notice. You looked down briefly, attempting to hide your blushing face. You began to notice that you were the last cadet on the ship. You felt two fingers placed below your chin, beckoning you to look up. You met Koby’s gaze, blushing deeper as he smiled. “You better get going then. Hurry, before it gets dark out.”

Maybe it was the small amount of concern in his voice but you felt that he was implying of doing something once it got dark. You weren't so sure that it was delusion anymore. His hand had been on your chin, he wanted you to look at him. Maybe he wanted something else. Maybe he did notice your gaze on his lips, his hands, his lips. You were frozen in place, looking into Koby’s eyes. You heard nothing but the crashing of the waves against the ship and the thumping of your heart in your ears. You knew your face was red at this point, melting into Koby’s blue eyes. The air around the two of you felt thick as butterflies bloomed in your stomach. His hand traveled to your cheek, caressing it lightly with his thumb. This wasn't delusion, this wasn't a fantasy, this wasn’t in your head. This was happening.

You had never been so infatuated with anyone before. Koby had such a power over you. Your past superiors would call you unruly, disrespectful, hot headed. Perhaps it was Koby’s demeanor. He was somehow strong and confident yet fragile. He had a strong effect on you but you still felt like you could break him. This moment, looking into each other's eyes, his hand on your cheek, tracing circles on your skin with his thumb. It felt like it had been hours. Time felt slower. Koby’s face was pink, it matched his hair. You knew he wouldn't make a move. He was your superior, he was most likely thinking about what the consequences would be. How making any move further than what had already been done could affect your working relationship, how it would reflect on his leadership role. You didn't worry as much. You had admired him for far too long to let this go so easily.

You took a step closer to him, closing the gap between you. You could feel his breath on your lips, watching his eyes leave yours and trail down to your lips. He licked his lips quickly. His hand was now still on your face, it was shaking slightly. Who knew the esteemed Marine Captain Koby was so shy. You smiled at the thought briefly before leaning in to kiss him. His lips were just as soft as you imagined. The feeling alone made you dizzy, intoxicated. You grabbed onto his coat, pulling him closer to you. A small whimper left his lips at your actions. You kissed him deeply, savoring this moment. You held back the urge of sliding your tongue into his mouth, it wasn't the right time for that. But the right time will come eventually. You ran your fingers through his hair, his soft pink hair. You pulled away, panting. His face was flushed and his mouth remained open. He was so fucking pretty.

“I-” He began. “I don’t-” “If we get in trouble for this, I’ll take the fall for you” You interrupted him, smiling. He laughed breathlessly in response, taking one step back. “You should know that I was holding back.” You continued. His eyes widened at your confession before smiling at you. “No need to hold back cadet. I can handle anything”

#opla #one piece #one piece fic #one piece fluff #captain koby #op koby #opla koby #koby x reader #x reader #koby one piece

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turtlecleric · 3 months

Text

I'm in Hell

SPOILERS FOR SYMPHONY CHAPTER 22 - THIS POST IS LONG YOU'VE BEEN WARNED

I'm so Unwell. I have never had any misunderstandings like the thing with Donnie, but I have been betrayed by someone who was my best friend for years, so this chapter... it's hitting me really, really hard.

---

When Leo first met Vi, he was studying her a lot. Remember the near-physical weight his scrutiny had felt like? You feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. ... like a pinned rabbit ... you see an obsidian edge beneath his smile that feels a little sharp as you lean into it.

And then later in her apartment:

[Leo talking] “…You know what really got me interested in talking to you?”

“What?” you ask, tilting your head.

“Donnie came back from talking with April and he was talking about you."

This is literally Vi and Leo's first time meeting - I don't think Leo started to really hate her until after she started coming to the Lair and he saw how Donnie reacted to her presence, but he mentions that Donnie talked about her already. It's framed within Vi's mind as him being careful with his family. He's the leader, he's careful around new people, he wants to make sure she isn't a threat, etc. But even though this is before the touch thing started, there could've been the seed of hatred already there depending on how Donnie spoke about Vi to Leo.

---

He [Leo] peers at you like he can read your life story where it’s written on your soul. ... “…You don’t have a lot of friends, do you?” he asks, his voice soft and yet cutting you all the same.

and this:

[Vi talking] “I had a lot of fun tonight. I’d… like to have more nights like this one. To. To have a family. If I can.” “You can,” he [Leo] says

He knew from the first fucking time he met her that she was lonely. That she wanted friends, wanted a family, wanted to belong. He knew that better than anyone else in the family, not only because of her saying this to him but also because of how well he reads people and how much time he spent with her. He's the only one who has seen her in her apartment, too, caught her in those few vulnerable moments in her home. I'm so fucking angry.

There are so many times in the fic that... I can't even articulate... here's some quotes early on -> "you hate how much you like this guy [Leo]" and "you smile when you see [the text notification is from] Leo" and when Vi is sick in the store she says "I miss Leo" and on and on. And that whole fucking time! He was!! UGH!!!

---

When Vi agrees to make Leo some bread so that maybe he can get some of Donnie's apology cookies he texts her "ttyl i gotta go rub this in donnie’s face" and yeah that's him being a little shit as always, but it's ALSO proof of him using EVEN THEIR PRIVATE TEXT CONVERSATIONS as ammunition rile up Donnie.

---

Hey look! Bits that hit different/hint at more going on/might be Leo's mask slipping!

“How long do we hafta wait before she ain’t a guest anymore?” Raph asks, causing you to snort a laugh.

“That’s up to Donnie,” Leo says, voice heavy with an undercurrent of meaning you’re not picking up on, causing you to look at him with a raised eyebrow. He smirks, reaching over to poke your cheek with his finger. “Y’know. He’s the one who met you first, and all that.”

…Something tells you it’s more than that, but he’s good enough at hiding it that you don’t feel comfortable calling him on it in front of the others.

...

you have no idea how you fit in [to the family], and Leo had all but told you that the space is here, ready and emblazoned with your name on it. You don’t quite see it yet, even if he apparently does.

...

“Yeah, don’t worry about it. It’s complicated,” Leo says easily, and it’s only just, but you pick out the thread of iron bars in his tone, ready to come crashing down if you push even a little too hard. So, you don’t.

“Okay,” you say easily, causing him to get that piercing look he gets sometimes, the one when he feels more like a ninja than a funny turtle man who tries to see how many cookies he can shove into his mouth at once and sends you pizza rat memes at four in the morning. “…Dude, we’ve been friends for like, a week. It’s cool that you aren’t ready to spill your guts yet, you know that, right?”

His eyes go sharp, but then he hums and smiles. You feel like you did the night you first met him, like there’s a test here and it’s in a language you don’t understand. It’s a bit uncomfortable, prompting you to grab your own drink and swallow a healthy bit of it just to have something to do.

...

[Vi talking] “…He [Donnie] seems lonely.”

Leo hums under his breath, cutting a portal that feels a little like home. “Well, lucky he has you, then.”

...

“Uh, I met her first,” Donnie says, scowling, while Leo just gives him a smug look.

...

You do, however, lean in while the others are occupied, whispering to Donnie, “So, ten dollars, which one of them tops?” and laughing when he chokes. You catch Leo’s eyes and give him a devious grin, spying him look to Donnie with a curiously blank look before shifting to a catty smile of his own when he looks back to you

...

“One portal home for a lovely lady,” Leo says as he steps through, his face going a little flat when he looks over your shoulder to Donnie behind you.

...

Leo is… astonishingly quiet for a moment, his face blank of anything for you to read as he stares at the piece hard. Then he looks up at you, and you see an unusually capable person that doesn’t feel like your best friend, even as much as it feels like the real Leonardo, here for the first time for you to see.

...

[Vi talking] “I don’t… I don’t like keeping secrets. Or lying. Not from people I care about.”

The weight of Leo’s eyes is almost physical. It makes you remember that he’s asked you to keep secrets, and your eyes snap to his, wondering if that’s the reason why he’s gone still like this. “I—I haven’t told anyone. About the ninja thing, or the Krang thing. I’d never—”

“I know,” Leo interrupts, threading his hand through your hair so he can cup your nape and press your forehead to his own. “I trust you.” You release a sigh of relief, nodding. “I’m just… thinking it might be time for us to repay that back.”

You blink, gaze darting between his eyes. “I don’t… what do you mean?”

“We’re a pretty close-knit family. There’s a lot of… baggage. A lot of history. A lot of stuff we haven’t told you. And it’s… it’s starting to feel a little disrespectful,” he says, looking a bit displeased. “You’re one of us. It’s only fair.”

---

We all know about the constant comments Leo makes about being Vi's "favorite turtle" and "best friend" in front of the others/in the group chat. He talks in Chapter 22 about purposefully draping himself across her and pulling her close, hugging her, scenting her, touching her in front of Donnie to piss Donnie off. But there's all these other little things that seemed so innocent at the time and now I'm losing my mind wondering about each of them, wondering - is that something he did with malicious intent? How many nice things were ONLY done to piss off Donnie? There are so many times that he compliments her - for example:

“What? I can’t compliment my bestie and her fine legs?” Leo coos, reaching over and flicking your nose gently.

“Leonardo,” Donnie warns, folding his arms.

And I remember, during my second read through after I finished Chapter 20, being so happy and grateful that Leo was pretty consistently giving her compliments, because she deserves to be complimented and taken care of and loved, because she deserves good friends who hype her up, and this WHOLE TIME-

(Side note - that time that Leo complains she smells like Donnie's lab, he shoves her away and she falls to the floor. First read, it's just Leo being playful. Second read, I wonder... is that a little bit of his frustration getting out of him in a physical way? He shoved her to the fucking floor, and then, once Donnie shows up, Leo pats the cushion next to him for Vi to sit by him. Then he wraps his arm around her and pulls her in close to smell her. But that's only after Donnie shows up.)

When Mikey takes Vi's So-Shell profile picture -> “Wha—?” you start, only to feel Leo leaning in to smoosh his cheek against yours, the distinct feeling of bunny ears brushing the back of your skull. Once again, this is in front of Donnie. Plus it's for her profile picture, so that means every time Donnie sees her So-Shell profile he'll see Leo in the picture, too. Leo was also famously the first like on her first So-Shell post and gets her to always leave nice comments/emojis on his thirst traps.

When she comes to the Lair to practice with her viola, Leo offers up HIS room first, and only once she declines does he -> “Ugh, fine, you are so boring,” he says, and removing his arm, he shoves at your shoulders hard and pushes you through the portal. (Pushing her onto the floor, pushing her through the portal... he's kind of rough with her in the beginning, and I figured it was just because he's haha silly funny turtle man, physical comedy, joking around whatever but... again I wonder. Is he letting himself be a little rough as a way to express his true feelings?)

God, all these little things that... might have an ulterior motive and might not.

It's around the time Vi gets bruised up by that guy at the coffee shop that Leo seems to start actually acting like a real friend, in my opinion. “…You don’t even get how incredible you are, do you?” he asks, causing you to roll your eyes. “You seriously don’t see it.”

The very next chapter he gets a glimpse of her being anxious over not being able to play, while she notices that he looks tired, invites him to listen to music and lets him sleep on her back, and in that chapter it says: you sit, quiet, letting him use you. My second read through, this line hit me hard because I KEPT noticing that she really does nothing but GIVE and I feel like she's constantly doing things to be useful to others. And now, as I'm skimming through a third time, it turns out that... yeah. Yeah. He was fucking using her. In Chapter 22, Leo says "then you reach out and touch me in a way no one has. You’ve helped me, even though I was just using you" and I'm thinking this is the moment that that really started. When she first let him sleep on her. And that's also the first time he churrs with her. After that, he gets her really nice sushi, and she thinks he's guilty for drooling all over for her, but I think maybe he was guilty because he's starting to realize how nice she is and how shitty it is that he's using her like that, even though he does continue those manipulative behaviors.

---

He sighs, his face going openly affectionate. “…You’re so…”

What he thinks you are, you don’t know, as he chooses instead to pull you into a hug. You go easily, seeking the comfort of his embrace, hoping he can feel in your arms that you truly do mean what you said.

“You know, instead of sorry, you should say—” Leo says, though as his face gets close to your throat, his mouth snaps shut and he goes still in a manner that reminds you a little of Donnie.

“…Leo?” you ask, going to pull back from the hug to look into his face only to feel his hands go tight on your back, holding you close while he dips his beak to your skin and inhales. When he does pull back, he’s got a look of shock on his face that he quickly schools into something more neutral, but barely.

This is where he smells Donnie on you for the first time, and the guilt he was starting to feel, the actual genuine affection he was developing for her, may have then been interrupted/overshadowed by his anger.

Vi was right to say she isn't gonna go back and examine every detail, because it's so fucking MUDDY! There are glimpses of true softness from him sprinkled throughout with him ALSO still hanging over her and doing shit that pisses Donnie off on purpose. And then of course the scene with Leo in the kitchen when he scares her, where we get the first big glimpse into his true anger about the whole situation, where we see him being sharp and cutting and dismissive and- I'm not going to paste in that whole scene, but he's so, so, SO angry. When she has that visceral, terrified reaction, he feels so bad (I do think he was genuinely, truly horrified that he scared her), but then he finds out that Vi and Donnie are (as far as Vi is aware) dating, followed by her telling him that Donnie misses touching his brothers, misses hugs, followed by Leo deciding to tell Vi about all the family secrets... so he's wrestling with this rage and jealousy, but he's also starting to really accept her as family (I think, since he shared the info about the Krang, about Lou Jitsu, about Casey, since he asked for her help)...

It kills me that, after that, he saw her trying so hard to help, like when she went to the library and got books on PTSD and fell asleep taking notes and she wakes up with a blanket covering her and a little blue heart on a note - he saw her doing that, on top of everything else she CONSTANTLY does for other people, for his family, and HE STILL, EVEN AFTER THAT, DOES SHIT THAT'S MANIPULATIVE. THE 4TH OF JULY PARTY, FOR EXAMPLE. “What she said,” Leo purrs, his fingers fluttering on your stomach as his eyes cut off to the side. He has a sharp look to his features that you’re a bit too drunk to dissect, so you just ignore it. He HAS to be looking at Donnie, here.

(Side note - we still don't know what Leo was doing when Vi was in the shower getting ready for the party... if anything. Maybe he really was eating cookies.)

It's at the end of the party that he smells sex on Vi, I think, for the first time. And the following chapter is when he starts avoiding Vi, and she goes to confront him and he says he's "Thinking about things. About what I want.” And THAT'S when he finally stops his bullshit. Ch 22 - "I stopped. Completely. After we talked in my room.”

---

I'm still working on fully re-reading Chapters 17+ until I make it back up to 22 and putting more thoughts into that post, but. Dear God. Sam is a genius and I'm so angry at myself. I had been so confused and angry with Donnie, when in reality he truly DID NOT KNOW about the misunderstanding between him and Vi. Meanwhile, as I'm fawning over Leo and so happy Vi has him and so grateful he's been such a good friend to her... he was the one using her, this whole time. I cannot believe it. I'm SICK with rage. I can't imagine how Vi could possibly... I can't... FUCK dude

#symphony #turtlecleric ramblings

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revvethasmythh · 9 months

Text

I think it's very interesting--and I mean that genuinely--that overwhelmingly in the past week or two, the responses I've seen about Relvin have centered around the idea that "he should have fought" for Imogen or that "he should FIGHT" for Imogen. I've seen this particular line pop up quite a few times in slightly different ways, and I think maybe we should unpack this a little.

Because in the physical sense, Relvin can't really fight. By that, I mean his stats probably look like Gilear Faeths and like, yeah, you can argue that Gilear tagged along during Sophomore Year and therefore, so could Relvin. But Gilear also *spoilers* died three separate times in a 20 episode span, and is only alive at the end because Emily loves him so fucking much and Brennan's resurrection rules in FHSY are more lax than Matt's. Particularly post-Solstice, where there is no resurrection to be had at all if Relvin were to die. If you want Relvin to join the Hells and Fight The Moon And Ludinus Too, it's really not feasible even on just a physical level. That's not even engaging with the question of "why would the Hells even want him there?" They wouldn't. He'd be a nuisance at best and a liability at worst.

If you want to him to Fight The Moon sans the Hells on his own, he's really not capable of that either! He's not a scholar, he's not a magic user, he's--he's a groom. A stablehand. He can't "pick up his pitchfork" (that he shovels manure with) and stand defiantly against the forces that face Imogen & Co. He's really, truly Just A Dude. Which is kind of the point I've been trying to make about him. He's lived his life around extraordinary people, and he is not extraordinary. He doesn't have the tools to fight something like this, which is part of his tragedy. Is there a world where he quits his job, leaves his horses and his home and his life and tries to become a warrior for the sake of his absentee wife and the daughter he loves but doesn't know how to love the right way? I suppose. But wouldn't that be a different story than this one? And isn't it worth finding the meaning in the one we're experiencing now?

If this argument is that he should have fought for Imogen on an emotional level i.e. having been there for her more or more outwardly shown her affection, we kind of run aground of the same problems. The ask here is that we fundamentally change Relvin's character to make him something that he is not. He is a man who struggles with emotions, and was probably desperately scared about what Imogen was experiencing when it happened and didn't want her to feel his fear. Or his thoughts about her mother. And so, yes, he pulls away (for a variety of reasons). And there is a conversation to be had about his choice to withhold information about Liliana--it's questionable. But, then, every option he was presented with was questionable. What do you tell Imogen, who was abandoned by her mother when she was two? That her mother is dead, or that her mother abandoned her? You pray Imogen never develops the same debilitating powers as her mother, but when she does? Do you give her the comfort of knowing someone else had the same powers, the same struggles, at the expense of prompting more questions about her mother? Do you take the chance to be peppered with questions about how these powers work only to helplessly look on and say "I don't know," and maybe send Imogen down the same road as her mother even sooner than she actually did?

There is no good option. There is no heroic version of Relvin that makes all the right choices and becomes Imogen's white knight father, endlessly supportive and wholly committed to her. The situation is too complicated, and Relvin, frankly, is far too much Just Some Guy to be able to really grasp what Imogen is going through or to fight it in an active way. But I do think it's interesting that this seems to be the version of Relvin that the fandom would have found acceptable.

#at this point I'm just collecting data from the things people are adding to my relvin post #and I am Learning Things #critical role #relvin temult #bells hells #also--don't be a dick on this post. there is no reason to be a dick. this is a chill measured discussion we're having about fandom #let's keep it that way

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alannybunnue · 1 year

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Ok, Imagine: The Targaryens as yanderes Part 3

I am not gonna lie that i am overjoyed over the attention these imagines received. So i will just keep going.

T.W: The entire plot of House of the Dragon, some spoilers actually, The Targaryens, cheating, death, family drama, threat against a child's eye, and maybe more.

Tags: @rosaryos

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Viserys!Reader:

As the time went by, after all the commotion on Alicent marrying Viserys. Your life became even more divided, now having to spend time with your stepmother while also helping her take care of your new younger brother, Aegon.

Aegon is a clingy baby who won't let you go until he's in deep sleep, who cried the many times that you had to leave to do anything else and couldn't hold him anymore (Believe when i say this is gonna last for a long time...).

As for the others, you still spent time with them, however, due to the war with Triarchy, you haven't seen Daemon nor Corlys and Laenor in almost 3 years, you mostly saw Rhaenys and Laena in Driftmark whenever you visited. You rarely see Rhaenyra since she is too busy with her duties and most of your time together are of her rambling about it or you just sat next to each other while reading. As for Viserys, whenever you spend time with him, you are mostly concerned about his condition, which has become something obvious to you, so to calm you down on this, you also had the company of Otto.

During the Aegon's second name day, you were walking around with Rhaenyra most of the time, since you refused Alicent's offer of staying with her and the other ladies once you saw Larys Strong close by, that man always made you feel uneasy, so staying away from him was the best choice.

And not too long after, your father and sister have an argument, she grabs your hand and goes to the first horse she sees, puts you on it and run, just to be followed by Sir Criston, and the 3 of you spend the night on the forest just so you (a child) could have a eternal memory of a enraged boar attacking you and Rhaenyra killing that same boar out of...you can't really tell whether it's out of frustation or just defense. (But you are traumatized :D)

And then, a some time later, you are in King's Landing with Alicent once again(Yeah, you spend a lot of time with the Hightowers) helping her with Helaena, your new younger sister who won't stop crying unless you are in the room to calm her down, which has become a good reason for Otto to point out that you would make a wonderful mother (This resumes your reaction to this). And all of this while waiting for Rhaenyra to return from meeting potential suitors for her to marry.

And then both her and Daemon return...AND BOY HE IS NOT HAPPY. It didn't took him long to notice how close you are with the Hightowers, and that itself is a crime on his opinion (Daemon: How dare these cunts try and steal the only niece that i am not trying to f*ck?) and yes, Rhaenyra feels the exact same.

So remember that scene where Viserys made fun and laughed with Daemon on Alicent's suggestion? Yeah, your disappointed look made the laughing cease immediately and they remained quiet while you dragged Alicent to Rhaenyra. And the moment while they were reconstructing their friendship made you tear up, cuz you were done with your sister's nonsense (Like girl, it has been 3 years-)

And then you wake up the next day with nothing but CHAOS.

Rhaenyra and Daemon had been accused of f*cking each other and since you were too young to understand this topic, but all you knew is that your sister was LYING, it's written on her face.

Daemon, being exiled again, didn't had time to say goodbye...(Actually Viserys demanded that you were taken somewhere away from where he could be). As for Otto, once he was dismissed from his post as Hand, he immediately went to you, warning you about his departure and saying that in the future, you had to pick a side, and for you to be wise when the time came.

Then you were dragged to a ship to sail straigth to Driftmark, where you were attacked by the affection of the Velaryons, especially Corlys haven't seen you in years, all of this while Viserys proposes to marry Laenor to Rhaenyra.

You also were introduced to Joffrey, who was very kind to you knowing pretty well how Laenor adored you and you were too cute for this world, so it's understandable why everyone loves you so much.

On your way back home, you spotted Sir Criston walking way from Rhaenyra with a bitter look, since you liked him for taking care of you and your sister this whole time, you tried to give him comfort by staying at his side. Criston always view you highly since you are the new realm's delight and you always made people feel better, this just made him even more protective of you.

During the wedding, you sat between Rhaenyra and Viserys, even if Corlys and Rhaenys sometimes pulled you close to them, and when Daemon showed up, he dragged you to sit with him.

And then the dance started, and after the betrothed danced, you were taken away from Daemon to dance with them, and soon it started to switch between you dancing with Rhaenyra, Laenor, Laena and Daemon. My, even Sir Harwin was in the mix, but Daemon always stoled you away, so you didn't get to spend time with the Strong man (Remember, you are still a child here-)

Alicent was not happy with this, she kept telling Viserys to bring you back to the table, saying that you were to young to be dancing around these many people. But actually she just didn't wanted you around Rhaenyra, since she sets a bad example to you.

When the fight broke the party, you immediately went under the table to hide, just to be grabbed by Daemon and taken away while Rhaenyra was saved by Harwin. Everyone came to check on you in Alicent's arms while she scolded Viserys for not listening to her and claiming you could have been hurt.

What should have been a week of celebration was turned into a small ceremony filled with distress. You watched as your sister and Laenor said their vows as Alicent held you close.

The years went by, and more your best friends were distancing from each other. Once you were of age, Viserys had to same headache from years ago as numerous letters of proposals arrived from potentials suitors for you. As much as he didn't wanted to marry you off, he knew that it was necessary. So to keep you in King's Landing, he married you (At the age of 18) with Harwin Strong.

And let me tell you, your marriage was a good one, considering how affectionate and caring Harwin was with you, especially when you gave birth to your daughter, that man didn't leave your side. The problem was...Harwin did a poor job on honouring you, and you knew that very well, since all of Rhaenyra's sons had clearly his features. But you never said a thing, because you loved both of them, and you got attached to the boys quickly.

Jacaerys and Lucerys are like your own children, at least they act like it, since they tend to obey you more then their parents, and both treat your daughter like she was their sister. Both seeks your affection and your approval, feeling ashamed whenever you scold them for something.

However, Alicent kept reminding you of that detail, trying to show you how horrible both Rhaenyra and Harwin were for doing this to you. You remained calm for a long time enduring her comments on the boys, since you were still her friend, and her sons were just as special to you as Jace and Luke were.

Aegon remained the clingy child who pouts when you are not paying attention to him, and you give him as much comfort and love possible (Considering the amount of pressure he endures from his mother) but you can't ignore his...tendencies(You caught him on the window one day and you can't get that image out of your head now-) and his obvious envy of your daughter. Helaena, in other hand, is the apple of your eyes, she adores spending time with you and your daughter while showing her bugs and none of you seem to find her weird because of it. Aemond, the second born son of Alicent, had different reasons to seek out for you, due to many times where he was picked on by his brother and nephews for not having a Dragon, he used you to scold them for it while comforting him, it gave him a sense of pride, not gonna lie. As for Daeron, he was the calmest and more collected of his siblings, but also the one that you barely had around, since he was sended to Old Town, in which, made you sob a little, since you adored spending time with him.

You and your daughter were in the room with the boys and Harwin when Rhaenyra and Laenor showed up with baby Joffrey, the little one was unquiet until you got closer to him...to your disappointment, he also had the same features as your husband. Your sullen look was not dismissed by him nor your sister.

You scolded Rhaenyra for being reckless on walking right after giving birth, in which she replied by saying that she wouldn't have done it if Alicent hadn't demanded for Joffrey to be brought to her. Hoping that you would take her side and see who Alicent truly was.

Not too long after, you went to see Helaena, just to find Alicent and Aemond, the boy exclamed that he was given a pig, and those words were enough for you to realize what happened. They noticed you presence and you questioned if it was the boys, Aemond simply nodded before going in your direction as you comforted him, your daughter, still in your arms, patted his head as trying to help.

Alicent told you that she would handle the situation, glad that you helping her son and that you could see how terrible Rhaenyra's boys were (Or at least, that's how she saw it). The rest of the day was less intriguing, but you made sure to show your discontent at the boys for what they did. Aemond was very delighted at this, as for Jace and Luke, they tried everything for you to forgive them.

You went to watch the boys spar the next day, not only for them, but also to spend time with Viserys, who was watching them proudly, and your father in law, Lord Lyonel.

You spotted your husband around watching as well, but also criticizing Sir Criston's way of teaching, since he obviously favoured Aegon and Aemond over Jace and Luke. But one thing led to another, one comment about the boys and Harwin, and Sir Criston was beaten by Harwin and dragged away by the King's guard. He looked at you before being taken away.

You watched from afar as Lord Strong argued with Harwin over what happened, reminding him of the reality and how reckless he was, while your husband was looking at you, you were looking at Rhaenyra who thought was well hidden while listening to everything. You didn't hate her for what she did, but that still hurted you deep...you didn't knew if you could forgive her.

You knew clearly the consequences, you didn't bother looking at your husband for the rest of the day, you focused on your child, as you always did.

Lyonel's request on taking Harwin back to Harrenhal was...a problem, Viserys knew that you would have to go with them, as you were Lady Strong and it was your duty, but he couldn't let you go...That was something that Alicent ardently agreed, no one there wanted you to leave.

Rhaenyra felt regretful over this, she knew that it was her fault, her relationship with Harwin would take you away. She tried to apologize when you said your goodbye to her and the boys, but no words left her mouth, she didn't had the courage to do it.

Alicent tried to convince you to stay a little more, that you didn't need to go now as her children watched, all of them sad over the news, but no one could do anything to stop you.

The only one who didn't seemed hurt over your departure was Viserys, he gave you a warm goodbye, wishing you a safe travel and asking you to visit whenever you could, because even if he would miss you dearly, he understood your duty.

Before you both left the castle, Harwin stopped for a moment. He said that it would take him a long time to remend his mistakes, he wasn't apologizing, since he knew you wouldn't forgive him that easily. But he swore that he would do anything to be better, for you, your daughter, and your future children.

Once you were in Harrenhal, everything was unfamiliar to you, but you had to get used to it, your daughter asked for a long time if the boys were coming too, but you didn't had the heart to tell her that she wouldn't see them as often as before.

But at night, you smelled quickly, something burning, the room was on fire, you heard Harwin calling for you to stay close to him as he tried to break the door and called his father. Your mind was in despair, for you, for Harwin, for Lyonel and especially, for your daughter.

But everything went black as the roof fell onto you and your husband.

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Rhaenyra!Reader:

You watched as your parents were buried, being held by your mother's handmaiden who was the reason why you survived.

When the fire started, she immediately went for you, as it would be of your mother's wish for you to be rescued before her. Unfortunately she did get hurt in the process.

As soon as the funeral ended, you were taken directly to your uncle, Larys, who was in Driftmark for Laena Velaryon's funeral instead of his own family. You were never fond of your uncle, not just because your mother did everything in her power to make sure you wouldn't be around him, but also because he was creepy.

You ran up to them, despite the protest of your handmaiden, which made everyone pay attention to you as you hugged your aunt's legs.

You already very late, at night, and as soon as you entered the room, you saw the amount of people inside. That made you nervous, you looked for a familiar face among the crowd, spotting your aunt Rhaenyra, holding your cousin's close, both Jace and Luke were hurt.

Everyone grieved your mother's death heavily, and seeing you, the resemblance of her (only with darker and curler hair) made them more emotional.

You looked around to see Aunt Alicent and Aemond, the boy who used to cry on your mother's shoulders (Not literally, but you get it) and he had a huge scar on his face, you remember your mother saying how Alicent's children needed the most comfort as possible, considering how needy they are, so you went up to him and patted his hand(since the chair is too high for you to reach his face or head).

The discussion then changed from Aemond lost of an eye to "Who is getting this child's custody?"

Alicent defended that it would be better for you to return to King's Landing since it was your home for years and most of your family from both sides lived there, and she tried to imply that Rhaenyra wouldn't raise you well by reminding what Luke did.

Rhaenyra claimed that you were closer to her side of the family, also mentioned that your mother would prefer for you to be raised by her. Alicent scoffed at that.

Viserys shutted everyone out and said that you would be raised by all of them, you would be taken to both sides in a specific time and that was it, end of discussion.

"But what of our son's eye? Where's the justice for what happened to him?" - Alicent mentioned, recalling of what the initial discussion was about.

And then the whole conflict started, as Alicent ran after Lucerys, you hid in between her children while covering your ears and closing your eyes.

Everything else was a blur to you, you woke up the next morning to your handmaiden telling you to prepare to say goodbye to your grandfather and his family. Since it was determined that you would stay with Rhaenyra first.

Speaking of her, during her conversations with Laenor and Daemon, she declared that she would do anything in her power to protect you from the Greens, as a way to repay for everything she did to your mother, even if she had to lock you up to make sure that Alicent would not take you away.

Everyone said their condolences to you, even your uncle, although it was brief one. Alicent told you that you could always come to her for comfort if you felt in need of it, for she understood how it was to lose a mother. In that moment Rhaenyra wanted to scream.

Aegon, Helaena and Aemond were pretty close to you in that moment, which suprised you a bit, especially Aegon. But you hugged them all out of respect :D

Once they left, you spent the rest of the day with the boys as all of you were hurt, in same and different ways. And you also got to meet Baela and Rhaena, both could understand you the most, since they also lost their mother that day.

As a new day started, and you discovered of your uncle Laenor's death, you and the others witnessed Daemon and Rhaenyra's wedding. You couldn't understand much of it, actually, you didn't care. You were only scared of what would happen.

After all, your life went upside down too quickly to go unnoticed.

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A/N: That was a lot... hope i wrote everything i should and my grammar wasn't too messed up. Anyway, thanks for reading all of this

#fireandblood #hotd yandere #a song of ice and fire #house targaryen #house of the dragon #rhaenyra targaryen #alicent hightower #daemon targaryen #harwin strong #harwin strong x reader #yandere x reader #platonic yandere #yandere imagine

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ihavenoideamanokay · 8 months

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okay I've given up I'm gonna rant about the blue beetle movie because OH MY GOD

I wanna watch it again but I don't wanna go back to the theater I just wanna buy it already so I can watch it over and over and over

IT WAS SO GOOD

spoilers ofc so be prepared (also this is gonna be really long)

my one complaint. is khaji having a feminine robot voice. because I'm used to young justice where they were just a slightly more murderous sounding jaime which I think is perfect. idk it just feels too much like a marvel movie with the female robot suit. IT WAS BETTER THAN A MARVEL MOVIE THOUGH HAHAHAHA-

(for the record I usually say they/them for khaji bc they are a bug robot thing I don't think they understand or care about human gender but I'm stuck between that and that one venom post where they say venom uses he/him sometimes to match eddie's gender BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE KHAJI WOULD DO THAT 💀💀)

anyway I loved the movie soooooooo much and I love boostle being gay (and wasn't prepared for ted having a wife) so I was worried that ted had a daughter but she was AWESOME I LOVE HER SO MUCH

I especially love how nice she was???? her only surviving family member is a complete jerk and it never rubbed off on her, no matter how done with it she was and all that

I have a family member who, like vIcKy, is just mean to everyone for no reason (okay victoria kinda had a reason I'll get to all that later) and if I'm around her for too long I start wanting to match her energy. like yell back. I'M A HORRIBLE PERSON? LOOK WHO'S TALKING! that kinda stuff. but JENNY DOESN'T DO THAT I mean she still stands her ground and all that BUT she never sinks to victoria's level and that's amazing.

anyway on victoria's reasoning yeah I get it, it totally sucks that you helped create the company and it never got passed down to you, and I'm not trying to invalidate that in any way, I'm just saying, think about it from a different perspective. she could've been a psycho from the beginning. creating weapons will probably make you feel horrible and depressed because you're killing people! I just think we don't know if she cracked because of that and that's when she started seeing people as expendable, or if she was born like that, or if she became like that because of the sexism! I was just thinking about it and I feel like there's a possibility that their grandpa thought she was being a little too aggressive or something and that's why he gave the company to ted. of course, I'm not saying that's what happened, just that that's an interesting thought I had.

NEXT this is dumb but I'm too bi for that movie I saw the main couple and went IVHVAJBKSBEJV THEY'RE BOTH SO PRETTY WHAT 😭😭😭 (well it was more like I went yeah the guy who plays jaime (I'm sorry idk any actors) is pretty and then jenny came on and I just. oh no. then they flirted and I was like NO WHAT-

okay I love the family relationships in this movie because they're all so different. I mean you have jenny and her mom who she didn't really know (because she died), then her dad being distant, then her and her aunt constantly hating each other but being too scared to do anything about it. of course they didn't wanna kill each other because ✨lawsuits✨ but they wanted to get rid of each other because victoria was doing horrible things and jenny was getting in her way. then you have jaime's family which is a disaster in the best way possible. I love how we didn't see them that much but could still tell exactly what was going on there. you get that they're all super close (you even get that there's no privacy💀) and they're all like best friends. I feel like his mom should've gotten a bit more characterization, but whatever. I mean her husband died?? and we barely see her???? idk. I just like how drastically different it is from the kords like I think it's cool.

I realized after the movie that. his grandma never saw him transform the first time. and she probably saw the hole in the roof and, knowing her, did not care. then when he comes back they saw khaji attached to him and she was probably filled in, but. we never saw her reaction. I think it was a good decision not to show it, because she'd probably react in some way that mentioned her fighting people in the past and all that.

okay this is another cursed thought but what happened to jenny's motorcycle at the end? she drove it over but then jaime flew her away. did she leave it there and just make him pick her up later to get it? did he go back and fly it to her?? motorcycles are heavy man I don't think that would be fun. did he drive it to her???? did he just leave it there??????? did he fly her everywhere after that??????????? people will guess your secret identity man. also did milagro steal it because that is totally a milagro thing to do-

OH YEAH let's talk about how they all hated jenny when jaime transformed because as funny as that was. guys. she literally told him not to open it. (honestly I feel like it's an insult to khaji's intelligence that they thought they couldn't get out of a fast food box but that's just me.) and I totally get that they hated her because she was a kord and victoria was being horrible but like THEY JUSTIFIED IT AS "YOU DID THIS TO HIM" AND I FEEL LIKE OUT OF EVERY COMPLAINT THEY HAVE WITH HER THAT'S THE WORST ONE TO USE. SHE KINDA GOT JAIME AND MILAGRO FIRED AS WELL although that's also because milagro was breaking rules and jaime's just too good of a person to not yell at victoria. WAIT WHAT ABOUT THE FACT THAT SHE SAID "PROTECT IT WITH YOUR LIFE" KNOWING FULL WELL HE COULD ACTUALLY DIE THAT'S A GOOD COMPLAINT but like we can excuse that bc we love her here

okay so yes the scene where he talked to his dead dad was fine and all like I like it but. PLEASE. THE CGI WAS SO BAD IN THAT ONE PART. like the rest of the movie was fine BUT SERIOUSLY COME ON GUYS but in other news I love that scene because anything that has khaji just. vibing. is the best. and then having jaime accept them and stuff.

I just realized this movie could totally be a queer metaphor because of the whole acceptance theme?? I mean it's not like THE QUEER METAPHOR MOVIE EVER it's more like hey self acceptance. I mean you have to come out to yourself before you come out to others so idk that's just random

anything that has khaji da and jaime being best friends is automatically amazing. so my favorite arc in young justice is the reach arc (because I'm a sucker for possession and it was just totally well done) and my absolute favorite part of the arc + favorite blue beetle moment + possibly favorite part of the whole show??? is when khaji says the "then you haven't learned anything from our time together" line (that jaime says like an episode or so before I think) and every time I rewatch that I'm just like 😭😭😭😭😭 because they're besties your honor (or in love idk that ship isn't my first choice but I don't have a problem with it) and it's so so so good

I was so worried the movie was gonna be bad because I've only seen one recent dc movie (okay it was half of one) and I'm going to be honest I was not engaged at all I was kinda bored (I don't wanna say what movie it was because it's a very very hot take) and I was like oh no what if this movie does it too. nope. I also was really really hoping that they'd actually be like yeah the scarab's name is khaji da AND THEY DID I WAS SO HAPPY

oh my god I was looking at the cast and they listed victoria's assistant scientist guy as dr. sanchez. NOW I'M NOT THE SMARTEST BUT I'M PRETTY SURE THAT'S NOT HIS NAME- WASN'T THAT A WHOLE PLOT POINT 😭😭😭

that's all I have to say for now, there will probably be more later

#spoilers for the blue beetle movie #blue beetle #the movie this time not just the character(s)#blue beetle movie #blue beetle 2023 #jaime reyes #khaji da #jenny kord #ted kord #michael jon carter #booster gold #milagro reyes #rudy reyes #victoria kord #this post is so long watch out

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