#so that thousands of years later we would still know they where loved

[justmaghookit]

I am for real obsessed with the Plants from trigun. Not plant as in a flower but as in a powerplant but also yes as in a flower. A discovery so profound it saved the human race but decades, centuries down the line they still don't understand exactly what it is they made(discovered??)

Those scientists did what the alchemists of old where trying to do and put God in a bottle and it turned out it loves them so so much. But we can't stop killing God and sucking the marrow from its bone, even though it loves us, especially because it loves us. And maybe destruction is the only way we know how to love.

To quote a fitting piece of dialogue from the Doll in bloodborne

"Hunters have told me about the Church, about the Gods and their love. But, do the Gods love their creations. I am a doll created by you humans, would you ever think to love me? Of course, I do love you, isn't that how you've made me? "

And God so loved the world he gave his one and only son, ect ect.

Humanity made something it couldn't understand, and in an effort to be understood this thing put its children in humanities hands and went "love us please, love us like we love you. Can you see us, hear us, feel us? See we'll walk next to you, we'll stay by your side and forgive you even if you kill us."

#trigun maximum #trigun #its a story about the death seeking instinct vs the life seeking instinct #and its about humanities unchained potential to love so fully and so fiercely even in the darkest of days #isnt that how we where made? #someone has to twll knives about the ancient bodies we buried #of those individuals who where so so loved despite their disabilties that we buried them with the highest honours #so that thousands of years later we would still know they where loved

[boxingcleverrr]

Popular Hades & Persephone "retellings" are, rightly, getting dunked on all over the socials right now and, as a Pagan who has an altar to the Queen, I could not be happier. But also, I feel like a lot of people miss WHY they're bad - aside from just plain bad writing and lazy tropes. Which are, yeah, also REALLY bad.

Pretty much all retellings try to wave away, or excuse, or twist the whole kidnapping bit. And I actually do have sympathy and understanding for why, when speaking from a modern perspective.

But honestly...you gotta get over it. There are other stories to play fix-it with, not this one.

The Abduction is The Thing.

Were I a little more sober I could bring up chapter and verse of the Hymn to Demeter but frankly, if you know even the middle school mythology curriculum version of the story, you SHOULD know the themes. The story of Persephone was one mothers and daughters in the ancient world held dear, because it was a reality: you will, one day, be swept away from your home to go cleave to a man you most likely know nothing about. You will miss your mother, but chances are very good that he will be a good husband, once you get to know him, certainly better than Zeus or Ares, and he will make you a queen of his home.

Leaving home to marry was often scary, and violent (look up the history of the tradition of Bridesmaids, if you don't already know it - they were originally decoys on the marriage road). Centuries later we'd have tales like Beauty & The Beast serving the same function: comfort, hope, you are leaving your safe loving home to figure life out with a (often older, powerful) stranger. Your trauma over this sudden ending of your childhood made manifest in a Beast, or a God of The Underworld.

It's wonderful that we don't NEED stories like this anymore to comfort us (here, at least, in this culture). But if you try to force them into modern vernacular it just will not work, not really, because you're gutting out the whole point just to have a more tidy romantic male hero.

I have read MANY very good ...novelizations? fanfic(? however you would frame them, but they're certainly not "retellings"), etc. that simply take advantage of the blank spaces in the myth, and there are many!

It's not explicit that sexual assault happens - "The Rape of Persephone" as a title was coined in much earlier eras, when the word was just as often used to simply refer to abduction.

"She was starving!" the gods didn't need to eat. So it's easy to read her eating the Pom seeds as a deliberate choice on her part. Like, shit, people, scholars have written whole papers on the symbolism of this moment, between marriage rites and even yeah, Seph choosing both worlds with her husband's knowing consent.

And that, I think, is the real heart of the thing. People want an utterly mundane, spelled-out story here, as opposed to what it really is, has always been, just like any other myth or religious parable: IT'S A METAPHOOOOOOR.

They don't need to be destined, or meet at a goddamned BALL and then CONSPIRE to fake her kidnapping, or shit, I once saw one where Hades got MIND CONTROLLED by Zeus?! Jesus.

Persephone was yoinked into the Underworld against her will.

That's how it went.

I don't mean this in a "stay out of my belief system!" way, shit I'm a white American chick with delusions of witchery. I mean this in a "stop stressing yourself out trying to make things palatable" way:

This is a very real, very precious myth to many people, BECAUSE for at least that one event, Persephone had no autonomy, BECAUSE for thousands of years most women had no autonomy. Erasing that, sanitizing the fact that a girl is ripped out of the spring, from her mother's arms, is erasing the thing that gave comfort to women for centuries. And people can and should still find power and healing in it now!

Fill in the blanks the story leaves in whatever manner seems fit to you, there's plenty of room, but. Come the fuck on.

#blathering #truly had a ramble bubbling for weeks #just pagan things

[fatesundress]

⭑ for the love that used to be here. tom riddle x reader

summary. you and tom are the only muggle-borns in slytherin, until one day he isn’t.

tags. angst, afab reader who is referred to as a witch a few times and rooms with girls but i don't think i ever use she/her pronouns or say the word girl/woman, biggest warning is that this is SO long (idk what compelled me to write a year 1 – post-hogwarts fic but here we are twenty thousand damn words later), blood purity and bigotry, dumbledore is greatly offended by the bonding of two orphans until he can capitalise on it, frequent wwii mentions (specifically the blitz), book clerk tom, MURDERER TOM… ministry reader, kissing, smut once they’re 21/22 May all the minors in the room exit at once, more angst, sad ending kinda, me spreading a very personal and very nefarious tom riddle agenda that is canon to ME but probably only like two other people

note. i need a shower and an exorcism after writing this shit. i'm exhausted. i don't even remember half of it. but i'm also SO stoked, this is my little (very large, frankly) 100 followers celebration! i've only been on here for about a month and the love has been so crazy so thank you mwah mwah mwah ♡

word count. 21.8k (i know... i KNOW)

You learn quickly that your shade of green is not the same as theirs. The rest of them are emeralds, even at that age — they glitter with their parent’s polish. You are flotsam, sea-sick, envy green; the putrid boiling stuff that brews in your cauldron when you look away for a second too long, and, really, it’s more of a stain than a colour at all. There is a fraction of a second where you find something powerful in that. You are not an easy thing to remove. And then it’s gone, because they want to so badly.

You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.

He evidently does not.

“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.

You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”

“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”

“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”

He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.

It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.

There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.

That decides it. Flotsam still floats.

Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine. 

…It’s just that he’s insufferable.

The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.

Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones. 

“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.

You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”

“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”

In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.

I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.

You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.

It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.

Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.

You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.

When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.

You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.

Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary. 

Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.

You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.

For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tombs and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly. 

You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.

It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.

Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.

You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.

Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.

“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.

Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.

“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”

“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”

“I wonder why.”

He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.

“What, Tom?”

He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”

You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile? 

It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.

“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”

“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”

“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”

All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up. 

Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.

Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about? 

You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers. 

For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.

He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)

Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.

You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession. 

They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.

You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.

“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.

He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”

“Curiosity—”

“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”

He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.

You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.

But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.

“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.

“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”

“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”

This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary. 

“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”

He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure? 

It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.

The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning. 

The worst of the world has impeccable timing.

A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.

So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.

And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.

BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES

DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN

All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.

The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.

It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.

In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with. 

You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.

Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.

But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge. 

He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.

You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books. 

You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.

“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.

Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.

He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”

“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”

You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls. 

“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”

“An altercation.”

“Very good, that is what I said.”

You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin. 

“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.

You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.

You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated. 

But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again. 

She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.

For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.

Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)

Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.

“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.

“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.

“What? Malfoy?”

You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.

But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”

Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —

“A professor?”

“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.

He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.

It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.

He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.

Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.

You consider it a warning.

Tom does not.

“Just give it up,” you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”

His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.

“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”

“So?”

It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.

“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”

He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.

“Are you stupid, Tom?”

You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.

“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”

Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.

Tom acts stupid.

Dumbledore knows.

It all happens very fast.

You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.

You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.

You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.

“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”

Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”

You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.

“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”

“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”

“I —”

“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”

You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.

“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”

“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”

“So nothing novel then.”

“D’you want me to blast you again?”

His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.

You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”

That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.

“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.

“Tom.”

“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”

“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”

Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”

“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”

And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.

It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.

The day everything changes starts the same as any. 

You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now. 

Tom has cracked the book.

It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.

“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.

He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.

“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”

“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”

You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”

“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”

“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”

“I have no need.”

You frown. “You… you already know it.”

“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —

“You’re not muggle-born.”

“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”

“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”

“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”

You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.

“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”

He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.

“Are you trying to murder me?”

“I might.”

“You’d be the first suspect.”

“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”

Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.

He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice. 

It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.

“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all.  You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.

There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.

“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”

You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”

The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.

“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.

He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else. 

“Should I?”

And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”

It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.

Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”

The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.

You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.

Summer blisters when it comes.

Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them. 

And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.

A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.

Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.

But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.

It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?

You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.

“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.

“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”

And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.

He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.

Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.

You always are.

The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten. 

Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.

He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.

And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.

Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.

You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.

You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.

You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.

Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.) 

You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.

So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true. 

It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.

It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.

Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.

The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer. 

You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.

Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t. 

But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.

“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.

Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.

“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”

He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.

You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”

“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.

“You’ll get sick.”

His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”

Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.

Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.

When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid. 

What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.

You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.

Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.

You are regardless. 

It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.

A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.

Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.

It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.

You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.

And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.

“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.

He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”

“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”

“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”

“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”

“Why?” he deadpans.

You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”

“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”

Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.

To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.

“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”

You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.

You are not his keeper. You know that. 

“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.

He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course’ but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.

And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.

What? Sorry. What’s going on?

He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”

You’re almost positive you did not.

Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.

You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.

Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.

Your contentment is remedied quickly.

Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.

You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.

Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.

“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.

You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”

He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.

You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”

“How’s that?”

“No one would be senseless enough to try.”

And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.

One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.

It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.

You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.

It happens again.

Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.

There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.

You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.

This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.

You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.

You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)

He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately. 

And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.

Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.

And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.

The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.

The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.

That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.

One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.

The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?

You take to the library.

Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.

The third sign is the end. 

You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.

He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight. 

And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.

So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.

Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.

He’s something else entirely.

What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.

You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.

His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes. 

You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand. 

“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.

You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.

“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.

Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”

“I’ve been good at it.”

His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.

His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.

“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.

You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.

You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.

He sees all of you.

Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.

“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.

“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."

He stares at you. There’s nothing there.

“Tell me, Tom.”

Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.

“I cannot.”

Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.

It’s late winter and it’s too cold.

“You killed her,” you say quietly.

“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”

“What are you… so it was an accident?”

“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”

“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.

He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.

“You told me to change things —”

“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”

“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”

“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”

“Do you want me to lie?”

“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”

“Her death is the first step to —”

“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”

“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.

All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.

“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."

You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.

“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."

“...What?"

“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”

You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”

“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.

“How lucky for you.”

“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”

“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”

His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.

“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."

“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain,  a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”

And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him. 

You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love. 

“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock. 

Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly. 

Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.

“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it. 

He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.

After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"

“I thought I would have time.”

“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”

He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”

Fuck him. “Fuck you.”

“Very cogent.”

“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."

He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”

You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.

“You have lost me, Tom."

He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.

You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.) 

You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish. 

There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.

You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.

Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.

That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same. 

You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.

And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.

You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.

It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.

Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.

Be well.

You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —

You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.

Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.

Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.

It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.

You find that to be true.

Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.

Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much. 

“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.

You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition. 

Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.

Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.

Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.

Due February.

It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”

Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”

Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.

You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”

Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”

And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.

Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.

You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.

You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.

In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.

Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.

You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.

But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.

You drink, and don’t look away.

By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.

There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.

You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal. 

An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.

You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it. 

You’re better than them. You can do it forever.

The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.

The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.

“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.

You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.

You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.

The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.

He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.

You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.

Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)

“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.

You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.

Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”

You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.

“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”

“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”

“I take that back.”

She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”

Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.

You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.

It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.

On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.

There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.

Indifferent it is. 

“Can I help you?”

“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.

You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.

“Am I?”

“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”

“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”

Indifference effaced. You’re angry.

He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”

Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.

It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.

“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”

Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.

He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.

He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”

You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.

“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.

Where is Mari?

“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”

You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?

“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.

You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.

“Well then —” 

Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.

His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.

“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —

“That would be wise.”

He’s still looking at your lips.

No one else is looking at you at all.

It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.

Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.

“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.

“I haven’t protested.”

But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.

“But you will.”

His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”

You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.

The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)

You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”

“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.

“You still lost me.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

He pauses for a moment. “I know.”

You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.

“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”

You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.

He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.

“My door is always open,” he says.

He lets you go.

You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.

Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.

If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.

It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?

You think of him often. You think of his offer.

My door is always open.

Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?

Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.

It’s a tempting door.

The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.

You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.

The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.

Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.

The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant. 

It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.

But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor. 

A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.

My door is always open.

Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.

Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.

She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.

When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.

It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.

A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.

“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.

“Renauld?”

He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.

“Well, yeah —”

You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”

“But McCormack sent him.”

“Where is it?”

“I… McCormack said that —”

“Where is it, Flack?”

“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”

That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.

The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.

But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.

“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”

You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”

“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”

You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.

It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.

“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.

Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”

“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”

“Who authorised you?” he hisses.

“I did.”

In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.

But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.

You were completely out of line and utterly right.

It isn’t something people like you are allotted.

Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.

And… he does.

With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.

It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.

There’s really no choice but to promote you.

Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.

By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.

The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.

Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.

After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.

“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “have you seen the shit the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a blimmin’ Unspeakable.”

“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”

Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.

“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.

“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”

“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”

“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.

“Yeah? Why don’t you ask your daddy for something better?”

“Alves, I’ll have you know —”

You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”

She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”

You roll your eyes, taking a drink.

That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.

But something about it itches.

You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.

You are green, through and through.

Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.

You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.

You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.

And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.

That makes it much worse when you sleep together. 

There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.

“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”

“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”

“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”

You’re incredibly daft about it.

There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident. 

The itch exacerbates.

You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.

You wake up and he isn’t there.

It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.

The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.

And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.

You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.

You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.

All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.

R.R

It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.

You return to Hogwarts posthaste.

It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.

The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be. 

You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.

“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.

Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.

“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”

“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”

And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.

Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.

There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.

But you do, because he told you.

You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.

It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop. 

It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.

You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.

The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece. 

It strikes you only when he’s standing before you that it’s his birthday.

You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.

He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.

“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.

“I thought your door was always open.”

You see his posture change from just his silhouette.

“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that." 

He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.

“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.

You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.

You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.

“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."

“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”

“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."

His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"

“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval. 

Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.

“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”

“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will." 

You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"

“Yes."

You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.

“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”

“I earned this,” you hiss.

“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”

“Fuck you.”

He smiles. “There you are.”

“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”

The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.

“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”

“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.

You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”

“I’d need a Vow for that.”

You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”

“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”

“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”

“A Vow.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tea, then? Biscuits?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”

“Hm. Terrible shame.”

Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”

He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”

“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”

“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”

“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”

Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis. 

“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain. 

He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.

“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.” 

You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”

Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.

“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.

“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”

He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.

He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.

“I should have killed you,” he repeats.

It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.

“Yes,” you agree.

It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.

Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.

There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.

He was your first in everything but this.

You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.

You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.

“How long?” he asks thickly.

You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back. 

“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."

You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"

You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"

His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake." 

You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster. 

“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"

“N-no.”

He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."

Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating. 

But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself. 

You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.

He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.

Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.

His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh. 

You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.

He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.

“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.

You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.

“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Rest now.”

And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.

You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.

He’s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.

You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…

A finger presses inside and you moan.

“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.

“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.

He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”

Oh, fuck.

He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”

Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.

You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes. 

Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams (though you want to) to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses.

You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s him doing this, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.

He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Rest now, you'd say if you could.

But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.

Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.

“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.

“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.

“Will you give me more?”

Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.

He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you again, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet like they despised to ever part from you.

You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.

He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —

“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.

That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.

You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”

A cruder version of you would go on. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?

And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything, and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.

Maybe you already do.

Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —

He slides in. You cry out at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.

“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”

You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.

“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”

You whimper.

“Would you like that?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.

If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.

“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”

Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.

“You can — uh — you can — ”

"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”

And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.

You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.

“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.

You remember then. What you meant to say. “You can take me too.”

You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.

He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you. 

He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.

You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.

But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.

Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.

“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.

You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.

He’s still inside you when he’s secure enough to bring you to his bed, only removing himself from you when you’re safely in his sheets, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.

You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.

“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.

You’ll dream of a morning where you wake up beside him, but you won’t be there.

#tom riddle #tom riddle x reader #tom riddle x you #tom riddle x y/n #tom riddle fluff #tom riddle smut #tom riddle angst #(the trifecta) #tom marvolo riddle #voldemort #voldemort x reader #tom riddle imagine #tom riddle oneshot #harry potter fanfiction #wizarding world #ftltutbh

[the-witch-of-one-piece]

Secrets Kept From Him Ran Haitani x Fem Reader Chapter 1: Secrets WC: 3.5K+ Resident: @enchantedforest-networkTW: Past relationship with Ran, Disappearing, Slight Suggestive Themes, Angst, Drinking, Suggestive Language, Secret Child He Doesn't Know About (unedited) MINOR DNI 18+

‘I promised to be by your side’ for years this phrase would haunt Ran in his sleep. His eyes opened up in the darkness of the room. He turned his head to the

side to see the woman he picked up for the night who was fast asleep. It just didn’t feel right no matter how many girls he brought home, nothing felt complete. To be exact no one could replace you. 5 years had passed by without a sign of where you left. He had tried to track you down when you first left. Trying to get a hold of family members, friends even trying to find connections to search for you. But each time there was a lead it was a dead end. ‘Why do I keep doing this to myself… they are not the same’ he sighed. He was doing this to himself, comparing each woman with you. Behind his smile only his brother could see that he wasn’t happy. The following morning Ran was still charming as he called a cab for his late night friend to be picked up. “Thanks for last night, I'll give you a call sometime.” flashing a smile seeing the woman get into the cab as it began to travel down the road. The smile on his face faded, his hands placed in his pockets as he went into his home. 

~~~~~~

“We just got in…no we are heading there right now…” you sat in the back of the private car as you were on the phone, you were looking through the windows, it's been years since you've been in Tokyo. It still looked the same. The bit of nostalgia hitting you as you passed by some familiar buildings. “Hey listen I will call you later tonight and keep you updated.. Okay… okay bye.”  you hung up the phone. “Everything is so big over here!” your daughter looked out from her booster seat. “You used to live here right mommy?”  her violet eyes looked over at you. “Yeah before you were born.” softly smiled as you ran your fingers through her long soft locks. 

You left Tokyo when you found out you were a few weeks pregnant. Ran didn’t know about the baby. It did worry you when finding out about your pregnancy, you were scared shitless. Ran coming home sometimes covered in blood, you had expressed your concerns for his safety many times. He would simply say ‘you don’t need to worry about a thing my love.’ but it worries you every single time. You worried you would get a call about a deal going south and he wouldn’t make it or if someone found out about you or your guy's baby you wouldn’t know what this person might do. You couldn’t take that risk, you needed to protect yourself and your baby. 

It hurt you to leave him  the way you did without any notice nor telling him where you were going. The days passed into months and your daughter was brought into the world. Along with trying to figure out how to be a mother you were dealing with your own anxiety. Looking at her growing each day she inherited Ran’s looks. You had a little piece of Ran with you. You wanted to give your daughter the opportunity to grow up in Tokyo and enjoy it like you did as a child. “We should be arriving at our new home tomorrow sweetheart.” you spoke. You bought a home on the other side of Tokyo avoiding some of the places you and Ran would visit. He was a creature of comfort he would usually stick to the places he was familiar with. The home would have all your belongings by the end of the day today. You were going to stay in one of the Hotels that had great reviews online. It was fairly new as well. Still in the back of your mind wondering what would happen if you would have run into him by accident or his brother… You wouldn’t know what you would do. Your mind would play thousands of possible scenarios from him being happy, to being betrayed and upset with you.

“Mommy we are here!” your daughter exclaimed as the car stopped in front of the Hotel. “Great lets put our stuff in the hotel and do a bit of sightseeing before it gets late.” opening the car door.

~~~~~~~~

“Ran, are you paying attention?” Rindou called out to his brother who was spaced out.

“Hmmm oh yeah, what time do we have to meet up with them again?”  They were in the car going to the destination meeting some possible clients for the club. One being a heiress of a prestigious alcohol company. Ran knew what he exactly had to do to get this contract with her. Even if it meant he had to sleep with her. “Seriously you cannot mess this up. If we can reduce the cost of this we are golden.” Rin looked over at his brother. “I know. Why don’t I just sleep with the bimbo first then you talk to her about contracts, she wouldn’t be able to process the quote we give her without thinking about events that happened before that.”  Ran suggested giving a smirk. His brother let out a deep sigh pinching the bridge of his nose “You have that full confidence in you by all means have at it. Might leave this to you right now then come back later on.” As the car pulled up to the hotel. Ran pulled up a photo of the heiress to make sure he wouldn’t mistake her for anyone else. He studied her features, making him woo her easily. He did look different from the last time you saw him. His hair was styled differently and wear a nice suit. You and your daughter were exiting out to the lobby. Your attention was on your daughter as she was happily talking to you as you held her hand.In this brief moment your paths crossed with his but both were too busy in your own worlds to notice each other at that moment. A faint smell of a familiar cologne hit your nostril for a moment. Looking up for a moment you were passing a group of gentlemen thinking it was one of them wearing the cologne Ran used to wear. You refocused your attention on your daughter.

Ran would be heading to the bar of the hotel where he is greeted by the striking beauty who was waiting for him. “Ms. Yamaguchi, I'm glad you were able to make it on such short notice.” Ran smiled as reaching for her hand kissing the back of it. “You do look lovely tonight. I’m Ran Haitani.” “Lovely to meet you Ran. They told me you were handsome but not so charming as well.” she looked at him with a sultry look. “You have a brother as well Rindou if I remember correctly… where is here tonight?” She looked towards the doorway. “He had to take care of some things at the club. I guess in the meantime while we wait, we can get to know each other? Can I buy you a drink?” the smile that no woman could resist. She gladly accepted his offer. It would only take him an hour to end up in her hotel room. 

Few hours would pass as you made your way back to the hotel with your daughter along with someone you trusted since the day you left. “We are glad you will join us for dinner tonight. I made reservations.” you smiled. Looking over at your aunt who you kept in contact with. 

“I'm glad to be finally seeing you both in a while. For a chance you both get to visit me for once.” she chuckled while walking into the hotel lobby. Your aunt never met Ran before, only had heard about him from the stories you would tell her. She did suggest telling him the minutes you gave birth to your daughter but she respected your choices on why you didn’t. 

When you pressed the elevator button you waited patiently. You saw something on your daughter's face. Kneeling down,facing away from the elevator cleaning her cheek. On the other side of the elevator coming down, Ran was focused on the lovely Ms. Yamaguchi. Her hands draped around his neck. As she playfully talked to him. “I never had a client take such good care of me.” her finger tips touching his lips. “Well there will be more if you like later on.” he was leaning in before the elevator stopped. They were on the lobby floor. When opening the door they saw a mom kneeling down with her back toward them, seeming to be cleaning her daughter's face accompanied by an elderly lady. Ran smiled as he exited the elevator. He noticed the little girl and thought she was adorable. Her eye color was similar to his own; he didn't really pay mind to all the details of the girl but her eyes. They made their way towards the bar where Rindou was. They heard the little girls say “mommy lets get in the elevator!” “Okay okay let's hurry in.” you chuckled. From that distance Ran heard the familiar voice that stopped him for a moment. When his head turned around he was able to get a look of the mom who was standing up. From a side view his heart dropped seeing you.  He watched you holding onto the little girl's hand entering the elevator. “Ran dear everything alright?” Ms. Yamaguchi asked when Ran seemed to pause for a moment.  He couldn’t just move seeing that you were here in the hotel he was at. He needed to talk to you. Ran composing himself quickly he turned his attention back to Ms. Yamaguchi. “Yes of course I thought I knew someone. But shall we meet up with my brother?” he asked, covering his issues with a smile. During the discussion between Ms. Yamaguchi and Rindou , Ran wasn’t paying attention. His mind was focusing on other things. His past love being here and trying to figure out what his next move would be. He could wait in the lobby till you came down again. Rindou would look at his brother's direction seeing he was preoccupied in thoughts. “Ran… Ran.” Rindou called out.

“Hmm I’m sorry what is happening?” he asked. 

“Must be still a little dazed and confused because of our private discussion earlier.” Ms. Yamaguchi smiled. “We were going over the quantity and price range.” Rindou spoke. “We agreed on this number.” Rindou pulls out a small notepad along with a pen jotting down the number and handing it to Ms. Yamaguchi.

She looked at the number. “I think we can make this work. Your brother can be very convincing ya know. I will have the contracts ready by tomorrow for both of you to sign.” She picked up her drink while taking a sip. The next thing she knew she had her phone ring. “Hello yes…Well I'm in the middle of something right now. I left you in charge for one minute and you decided to screw things up.” she sighed she brought the phone away from her ear “I do apologize gentlemen but something needs my attention. I will have my assistant send over the contracts in the morning. If you will excuse me I need to take care of this.” She got up from the seat walking away.  Rindou looked at his brother “What the hell is going on with you?” “What if I told you about someone from the past staying in this hotel right now.” Ran gave his brother a side glance bringing his drink to his lips. “Can you confirm they are here?” Rin leaned back in his chair. “She is here, I saw her. She still looked the same, just like I remember.” Ran spoke. “There is something else too.. She had some company with her” “Company you say? Who’s the guy?” he asked. Rin was already prepared to make something look like an accident waiting for his brother to describe the guy you might be with. “It wasn’t a guy…. It was a little girl and some older woman I’ve never seen before.” Ran began to remember the child feature more. The pretty violet eyes that resembled his, the child that looked no older than 4 or 5. “I need to talk to her more before assuming something… Listen, she will eventually come down. I wanna talk to her.” ~~~~~~ Fixing your daughter's hair you had her in a pretty purple dress. “You look great sweetie.” holding her hands. “You do too mommy.” her small hands cupping your cheeks as she gave your eskimo kisses. “You guys ready?” you asked your daughter and aunt. “Ready!” they both exclaimed. Walking out of the room. Getting into the main lobby you headed to the area where the restaurant was. 

Rindou wanted to see if Ran really saw the woman from his brother's past. He was casually sitting in the lobby looking at his phone each time the elevator opened and his eyes were on the elevator. His eyes focused on you when you stepped out with your daughter and aunt. He was in a bit of disbelief seeing you. Picking up his phone. “Hey you were right…. She is heading towards the restaurant.. Just one thing don’t act like an idiot just-” the phone was cut off “son of a .” he grit his teeth. He didn’t want his brother to do anything drastic infront of people. Ran was already at the restaurant. He had a seat in the corner where the bar stand was. Just a minute later after hanging up with Rin. He saw the group of three arriving at the check in. The server shows you to your table. The more he watched you the more he wanted to walk up to the table and talk to you. Hearing the small giggles coming from your daughter his heart was breaking. There was no doubt that was his little girl. It was like a little replica of him as a child. He wasn’t a part of yours and her life. He wanted to get a better view of you both. Still questioning who the lady was you were with. He was by the walkway in the corner where it lead to the kitchen he leaned on the rail. Your daughter was looking around the restaurant amazed by how beautiful everything was. “Mommy look at the big fishes in the tank!” she pointed to the large aquarium-like tank behind them. “ I know they are big fishes.” you watched the fish swimming peacefully. Your daughter's  eyes are still roaming around. She happened to glance at a table where she saw a family sitting. She didn’t know who her dad was, she had asked about him but you kept it very short with the answers. Excuses of daddy being very busy with work. She watched as the dad interacted with his children, making them laugh. Ran saw her looking over at the table and her smile disappeared for a moment. You caught onto seeing your daughter frown on her face. “You okay sweetheart?” you asked her. “Mommy, will I ever get to meet my daddy? At my old school I would see daddy’s pick up their kids from school and the kids would do all these things with their daddy’s… I just…” she stopped her sentence and looked down fidgeting with her hands. Your aunt looked over at you, after hearing what your daughter said. She had told you many times and now your daughter was asking about her father. “ I know, baby.” you cupping her face lifting her cheeks up to look at you. Just this statement was killing you so much. She was suffering not knowing who her father was. “You will meet him one day.. I promise.” you smiled, kissing her forehead. “Why do we get something sweet after dinner? I will let you choose something from the menu.” you wanted to see that smile appear on her face. “Really?” her eyes brighten up. “That sounds like a good idea now. Why don’t I help you choose Sweetie?” your aunt suggested to your daughter who happily scooted closer to her as they both looked at the menu.

 Picking up your wine glass you sipped on your wine. You started to realize how many families were in the restaurant.  Your eyes began to wander around the restaurant to see some happy couple and families enjoying their meal. When your eyes reached the corner of the room they didn’t move when they landed on him. His distinct violet eyes appear back at you, even though he had a new hairstyle. He was there looking back at you, the eye contact didn’t break for a second. The moment your eyes looked away was when your daughter caught your attention. “Mommy I want this one!” She brought the menu close to you to show you the item she wanted.

“That does look like a yummy treat, sweetie.” you smile. You took a quick glance back at the corner where Ran was standing and he was gone. “Mommy is gonna go to the bathroom really fast okay? Behave for your aunt for me?” turning your attention back to your daughter. Your daughter nodded promising she would behave for you.

You got up from the booth and made your way to the corner of the restaurant. You couldn’t believe your feet were walking toward his direction. Your heart was pounding against your chest, as you approached closer. When you reached the area you saw an empty hallway. Walking down the empty hallway you saw the different paths to the hotel. You were looking down at the hallway but no sight of him. The quicker you were looking down the aisle when you felt someone grabbing your hand pulling you into an aisle of where rows of doors continue down the long hallway. The smell of his YSL cologne hit your nostrils, the hypnotizing violet eyes were close. It didn’t take long or Ran’s slender arm to wrap around your pulling you closer to his body. His other hand caressing your cheek as he brought you to his chest in a tight embrace. His head is buried in the top of your head taking a deep inhale of your scent. “____.” he whispered your name. It didn’t take much longer until you found yourself holding him. His embrace was just like you remembered, and how much you missed every moment of it. “I missed you…” 

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#secrets kept from him #chapter 1 : secrets #Telenovela Tokyo Revengers Edition #ran haitani #ran x reader #ran haitani x reader #ran haitani x you #ran haitani x y/n #ran haitani angst #tokyo rev #haitani brothers #haitani rindou #tokyo revengers #tokyo revengers x reader #tokyo revengers x you #tokyo rev x reader #tokyo rev x you #val's writing #the witch of one piece

[goldustwomun]

bite the hand (e.m.)

pairing: rockstar!eddie munson x girlfriend!reader

summary: things come crashing down around you when you watch eddie from the sidelines of the stage. you know you shouldn't leave but you beg eddie for forgiveness anyway.

warnings: (unedited) more angst folks i think i'm going through something, established relationship, swearing, tears crying sobbing (for eddie but you too babes x), i use face and features too many times but we move

wc: 2.0k+

note: short and (not so?) sweet :) :( i'm really struggling to sustain my writing for very long but oh well xoxo

Here’s the best part distilled for you But you want what I can’t give to you Your hands are gravity while my hands are tied

He should’ve known it’d get to you eventually. The screams and cries of thousands for him and only him, because as much as he stood, awestruck, by the talent of the others, it was always his name the crowd went hysterical for: Eddie. Eddie. Eddie. They’d chant and sway and go all but rabid when his black mop of hair would peak from around the stage, teasing in that very ‘Eddie’ way that you were all too familiar with when he’d feel a little more playful in bed. His mischievous eyes and quirked lips, tattooed skin and leather-clad thighs. He was the embodiment of a devilish smile, dripping, oozing, even, with sex appeal and charisma.

But it wasn’t just you, now, who noticed those things about him. The two of you weren’t perched on a bench outside of Wayne’s trailer anymore, smirking into the other’s mouth after a particularly strong joint he had rolled from his stash, legs resting on top of him as you were all but sat in his lap. Neither were you the sole body in the crowd of the Hideout, the only one out of the tens of patrons to be hanging onto every rasp of Eddie’s voice, every strum of his long fingers against the guitar.

It wasn’t just you, now, who noticed those things about him, and you knew because of the hundreds of letters he got, every other week on mail day, from adoring fans and sycophants and a few stalkers. You knew because of the way the crowd stretched so far into the distance that you couldn’t see where it ended, the countless bodies moving like a singular mass of pure, unaltered adoration for the man who assured you it’s you, it’s only ever going to be you.

“Penny for your thoughts?” And his voice broke you from the road you were beginning to travel down. You tried your best to force the smile on your lips, and really, you think he knew you were faking it but the giddy energy from the show he was soon going to be playing had already begun to fizzle through his bones and so he ignored it. He took it, instead, for something genuine despite the way it didn’t quite reach your eyes.

“Only a penny, Munson?” you scoffed at an attempt of playfulness. “I know for a fact you could offer me a lot more than a penny.” He laughed and your belly dipped, even all these years later, when he pressed his lips to your cheek. Eddie Munson might have been a kind of lust personified but he was also the sweetest human being you’d ever known.

“Ah, you’re right. My girl deserves much, much more,” and his lips began their slow descent from your face to the crook of your neck, fixated on that one spot that would have you shivering in mere seconds. He stopped for a moment; face still buried into your flushed skin— “Two pennies then?”

You groaned – “Eddie” -- at his pitiful attempts of humour (but really you loved it), shoving him away even if you didn’t really mean it.

“I’m only kidding, sweets, I’m only kidding!” he cooed at you, soothing your pout until it melted into that smile of yours that he loved to be the cause of as his fingers traced meaningless patterns into the exposed skin at your hip. “Forgive me?” he begged, his turn to pout now.

And it was comical, really, the way you gave into him, whatever doubts you had crumbling at the very feel of him against you, his words forcing whatever walls you were beginning to build-up only moments before to crumble into nothing at your interlaced feet.

“Always, Eddie,” you promised, voice leaving you at barely a whisper. And when you continued, heart thrumming as you waited for his answer, your words wavered: “Do you forgive me, too?”

He watched, confused, as the question left your lips, head tilted like a puppy unsure of his surroundings. “What would I ever need to forgive you for?” he asked, soft.

“Just—do you? Would you? Forgive me?”

He stared into your eyes, a penetrating gaze, begging you for an answer and explanation for your behaviour, but when you remained quiet he acquiesced. “Like you said, sweetheart: always.”

You nodded, that same, tight smile appearing on your features. The sound of a knock on his dressing room door pulled the both of you out of whatever daze hung, limp, in the air, and Eddie moved past you to answer.

“Five minutes to go, Eddie. Need to get you mic-ed up.” You couldn’t hear his answer (probably something along the lines of ‘Be right there’) over the roaring in your ears. The door clicked close again as a warm hand traveled to your waist, turning you in-place. Eddie’s hand moved to cradle your face in his palms, touch cautious like he always was when it was just the two of you. Like you were splintered glass, on the verge of breaking.

“Going to come watch outside, yeah?” And how could you say no to him and his big, brown eyes. So you nodded, followed him through the corridor leading towards stage left. People rushed around, gathering wires, plugging amps and checking cables with the kind of frenzy you’d never get used to despite having been there for almost all his shows.

Gareth, Jeff and Doug were already huddled in a corner, cheeks split into nervous grins. They waved Eddie over who gave your hand a reassuring squeeze before joining them, face dipping as someone came in to swipe some powder over his face.

You don’t remember what happened after that because the next thing you knew, the band was rushing onto the stage, the arena blacked-out, and the moments the light switched on, a deafening roar erupted from the crowd, bright lights carving out their bodies from the darkness. You edged closer to the stage, only just visible from behind a curtain, when the crowd came into view.

And you hated it, the way your gut twisted, mind reeled. You know if you had just said something, anything, to Eddie when it had begun, weeks ago on the first night of the tour. Someone had slipped a note into your back pocket as you and Eddie pushed through a crowd, security walling you in. But you had felt it, and you just knew what it was going to say.

It wasn’t the first and it wasn’t the last, but you had to applaud its author for the precision with which their words sliced at your very core, holding a mirror up to every insecurity you had ever had (and more you hadn’t even considered) until your hands were shaking, fierce.

When you stared out into the crowd, when your gaze connected with someone right in the front, and a look of disgust overtook them, you felt that lest tether inside of you snap free. The air knocked from your lungs, that same cold feeling of fear dripping down your back.

Eddie must have seen it, he was watching you the entire time, having tuned into your every move since the two of you had left his dressing room. He knew you were acting odd, skittish, like a petrified cat getting ready to flee. So when you retreated, he motioned to Jeff to keep the crowd busy before running off on in search of you.

He called after you, having bulked up enough since high school to catch up with you with ease. When you moved faster at the sound of his voice, he did too, finding you pacing in the haven of his dressing room. He shut the door, locking it, before approaching you, slow, cautious, like the floor was uneven and you on a precipice.

“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” he asked, unsure.

You weren’t facing him so when your shoulders began to shake, he wasn’t sure if you were crying or laughing. But when you turned, face splotchy and chest heaving, he rushed forward, gathering you in his arms.

“What is it, my sweet girl. What’s wrong?” he murmured into the top of your head, holding you tight so that the pressure of his embrace might calm you down enough to talk, to explain or clarify or at least quell the rapid thrum of his worried heartbeat.

“I can’t Eddie, I just—” you hiccupped, voice muffled by the sound of his t-shirt— “I can’t do it.”

“It’s alright, love, just try, yeah? Just—whatever comes to mind—”

“No—You don’t get it—” and you pulled away, the distance between the two of you growing with every moment in more ways than one. “I can’t do this. This thing—” you motioned between you, and he froze.

“You can’t do what?” his voice hardening, on the offensive, and his face contorted to prepare him for the worst.

“Eddie. It’s too much. It’s been too much for so long and I know I should’ve—” a sob ripped from your chest and all he wanted to do was reach for you, his body yearned for it, but he knew better. “—I should’ve said something ages ago. Not let it go so far but it’s too late and you can blame me for—”

“—for what! Us? This? Is that all we are? Some vague abstract of now? Just come out and say it.” he was exploding, erupting, Vesuvius and Pompeii. “Go on. Say it.”

And it was your turn to yell and shout and hurl until your lungs seized. “It’s killing me, Eddie! I feel like I’m fucking dying here. I can’t compete with them, not anymore. I’m exhausted and I feel—I feel fucking heavy.” You were panting from the force of your words, the weight they carried, and you had been carrying.

“There’s no competition, sweetheart. There will never be a competition,” he pleaded, stumbling a step closer but you pushed back.

“I know you feel that way, Eds. I know you do—” his heart squeezed at the nickname. “—I know this is irrational in so many ways. It shouldn’t matter that your fans fucking despise me,” and he flinched at the crudeness of your words. “But there’s one of me and millions—holy shit, there’s millions of them, Eddie. They’re suffocating me and I just—I want to breathe, again. I need to breathe.”

The walls were crashing and crumbling and nothing he said would help to rebuild them, not this time. And he must have sensed it because it was like the air was knocked out of his lungs, too, and he fell to his knees in front of you, clinging to you like maybe if he held on tight enough, he could stop you from leaving.

“Please. My love. My sweet girl. You’re it. You’re always it,” and it must have hit him, what you had meant earlier, because he couldn’t stop rambling, stop repeating: “I forgive you. I forgive you, always, my love. It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re mine and I forgive you.”

Your heart cracked open then, your hand cradling his tear-soaked face to where he was burrowing himself into the pillow of your stomach. You couldn’t bear it anymore, to hear him, see him, touch him, whilst you cut away the pieces of your love. You brushed the hair from his forehead, your own tears falling on him and he cursed himself for making you cry.

You still don’t know if what you did was from a place of strength or weakness, if the way you went about it, with thousands still waiting for him mere feet away, was cruel or kind. But you needed to do it, or at least, that’s what you kept repeating to yourself in your head.

That and Eddie, Eddie, Eddie -- your mind chanted.

You were the only audience he ever needed. If only you knew.

As always, reblog + comment if you enjoyed this or want more! Requests are opennnnn :D

#eddie munson #eddie munson x reader #rockstar!eddie munson #rockstar!eddie x reader #eddie munson angst #eddie munson fluff #stranger things #stranger things fanfiction #bite the hand #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x y/n

[somanyratsinthewalls]

Kinktober Special Part 5

Mo’s Kinktober Special 

The Crew’s Whore (Part 5) (+18)

Summary: You are the former owner of the Grand Line’s most popular brothel. Your powerful fighting abilities got the attention of the captain of the Straw Hat Pirates. He had asked you to join their crew but what would you bring to the team? Your battle skills were hardly comparable to many of the other Straw Hats… but you actually had a great skill. Your years working as a high end escort had prepared you to become the private plaything for this pirate crew. You joined the Straw Hats as their personal sex toy.

Pairing: Sanji x afab!reader x Zoro

WC: 3100 :)

TWs: Threesome, three way, anal sex, vaginal sex, blowjob, face fucking, sex toy usage, eating out, oral sex, crying, arguing during the deed, they simply can't agree. I love this one tbh. porn.

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4

Chapter 5: The Rivals

It was an average night aboard the Thousand Sunny, the crew was in good spirits and was getting ready to enjoy another lavish dinner. Zoro was napping on the upper deck, Usopp and Luffy were playing around and cackling at each other, Sanji was preparing the evening meal in the kitchen, and everyone else was off occupying their time elsewhere. 

You knew you had a special date scheduled with Sanji tonight, so you thought you might visit him in the galley to tease him a bit. He was always so fun to work up. 

You slinked into the galley from the deck and sidled up next to your sweet love cook who was at the sink washing his hands. The countertops were littered with small bowls of meticulously pre portioned ingredients and jars of spices. He senses your presence and turns to face you. 

“Oh mon amour! Do you need anything? I can fix something for you quickly if you want, perhaps a cocktail? Your wish is my command-“ You shut him up by cupping his face in both your hands a pressing a sweet kiss to his lips. You smile at him.

“I’m just excited for tonight, Sanji. Can’t wait to feel you.” You wink at him.

“… oh love, you have no idea how much I’ve been looking forward to it… you’ve prepared yourself- right? It’ll be alright if we-?” Sanji slides his hand over your ass, pressing in the center. He felt something subtle but hard resting between your plump cheeks. He could feel the plug you were keeping in your ass, to open yourself up for him later. You nod up at him. A single drop of blood escaped his nose. 

“You are so perfect, y/n, you know that? I have to finish preparing dinner, but trust that I will be thinking of your tight little ass the entire time.” He grins down at you. 

“See you later then.” You flash your cook a smile as you waltz excitedly out of the kitchen. 

——

As per usual, dinner was excellent. You enjoyed plenty of delicious wine and treats as you shot the shit with the crew. After the meal was over, the crew began to filter out of the kitchen and head off to bed. Eventually it was just you, Zoro, and Sanji sitting in the galley. Sanji was finishing dishes and you and Zoro were finishing your drinks. You decide you want to finish the bottle so you lean off of your stool to grab it from the other end of the table. 

Zoro swiftly grabs you by the belt loops of your jeans and slams you down on his his lap aggressively. 

“Ooof- Zoro! Down, boy!” You giggle at him while still pulled into his lap. Zoro leans close to you and begins growling in your ear. The sake was clearly talking.

“Mmm…. Wanna take you on the deck tonight, where anyone could see us…” Zoro starts mouthing at your neck. “You’d love that shit, huh? My dirty little girl… so cute…” He reaches a hand up to grope at your breast. 

“NOT TONIGHT MOSS HEAD!” A damp dishtowel was balled up and chucked full speed at the swordsman’s head on your neck. 

“THE HELL DID YOU SAY?” Zoro picks you up off his lap and sets you down on your feet, getting ready to fight Sanji.

“We have a date, you barbarian. Something you’d know nothing about. She’s spending tonight with me, get in line.” Sanji explains. 

“It’s true, Zoro… I am occupied tonight, I’m sorry, handsome. Tomorrow?” You tried cupping Zoro’s cheek to calm him down. 

“No way, FUCK YOU shitcook! I’ll have what I want when I want it, especially before YOU do! She’d have a much better time with me anyway!” Zoro was heated, he was horny and wanted your body to relieve his stress. That’s what you were for, right? He wasn’t a fan of all the fine print this arrangement came with. 

“YOU THINK YOU FUCK HER BETTER THAN ME? Don’t make me laugh, moron. You don’t know anything about a woman’s pleasure. You can barely tell your left from right.” Sanji spat back at him. 

“I BET YOU’VE NEVER EVEN MADE HER SQUIRT!” Zoro was screaming cross the kitchen island. 

“OF COURSE I FUCKING HAVE YOU ASS-“

“SHUT THE FUCK UP! Both of you!” You raised your voice and walked to stand in the middle of them at the end of the counter. They both shut their mouths and look at you, not used to hearing you yell. 

“You guys are ridiculous. I care about both of you equally of course, there’s no need to act like toddlers fighting over a toy. You’re grown men. If you can’t figure out how to share, you’re BOTH getting NOTHING.”

“Mon amour but-“ Sanji began to speak.

“NO BUT’S. From EITHER of you. Figure it out.” Frustrated and annoyed, you storm out of the kitchen and return to your room. 

——

About an hour later you were laying on your bed, your silk black robe opened and splayed around your body. You used your left hand to pull and twist your nipple, while your right hand was between your legs slowly teasing your clit with one finger. Regardless of how the night went, the plug in your ass had made you so horny all night that you couldn’t wait any longer to relieve the wet ache in your cunt. Knowing how much better your orgasms were when you had a plug in and also if you took your time to tease yourself, you decided to slowly pleasure your body. Deep sighs and airy whines left your mouth as your chest rise and fell, enjoying the feeling you were giving yourself. You felt your muscles tense around the plug in your ass and you moaned out. 

*knock knock*

“I’m busy…!” You breathe out heavily. The door opens anyway. Sanji gingerly steps in. His eyes widen at your exposed body before him. You didn’t bother to stop your movements, most everyone had seen you like this by now anyway. Sanji strides towards you after a few moments of a blank stare. 

“My love… moss head and I… we worked it out, I promise… may we… still have our date?” He pleads for you as he crawls onto the bed with you. 

“Aww, I knew you could do it, sweet boy. Thank you so much.” You bring your wet fingers up to his lips. He sucks on them greedily. You slide your body to lay back on the bed with your head hanging out off the edge barely. You spread your legs and beckon Sanji to lay between your thighs. He knows exactly what to do. Once situated, Sanji uses both of his large palms to lift up and spread your cheeks so he could see that cute little silver butt plug. He groans at the sight combined with the gorgeous scent of your dripping cunt. 

He dives in immediately. You gasp at the immediate feeling of his lips on your clit. Sanji was one of your lovers that was simply the best at eating pussy. He always did it with such fervor, such passion, that you were convinced he was doing it for him own pleasure. 

Sanji hmm’d and groaned against your slick sex as he became drunk on your flavor. Your breathy moans sped up as he worked your clit and your hole towards a climax. 

*WHAM* 

Your door swung open, you opened your eyes as your head hung off the bed facing towards the doorway. 

Zoro stood there looking you dead in the eye, upside down.

“Hmmm what a pretty sight. Can’t believe you’ve gotten her this close, curly.” Zoro coos at you before stepping inside your room and closing the door behind him. 

“Zoro.. I… Thought you guys worked this… out… What-“ You choke out as Sanji doesn’t even look up and notice the swordsman’s presence. He briefly pulls away from your cunt. 

“We did. I invited him.” He dives back in, sucking on your swollen clit. Sanji slips two fingers inside of you as you process this information. You cry out in pleasure but also confusion. 

“Since you’ve given that shit head the honor of fucking your ass tonight… I figure this would give us the perfect opportunity to learn to share.” Zoro smirked as he strode towards your bed, slowly shedding the sash around his waist and untying his trousers. 

Your pussy throbbed at the thought of having both men inside you at once. 

Zoro stepped out of his pants and came to stand by your sweaty face. He stroked his half hard cock in his hand and used it to firmly tap your lips. 

“Open up, Princess.” 

You oblige and open your mouth and loll your tongue out for him. He shoves his dick into your mouth and thrusts softly and slowly. All of this is happening while Sanji continues his assault on your pussy with his mouth. He needed you soft and open for what was going to happen tonight. 

“Make her cum, cook, I wanna feel her throat when she screams.” Zoro breaths out as he fucks your face. 

“MhmmMMM-HHHMNNN” You shriek out as best you can as Zoro’s now fully erect cock barrels into your throat. 

“Don’t tell me what to fucking do, asshole!” Sanji tried to protest but making you cum was exactly what he wanted, too. Sanji stood up and moved away from you briefly to remove his clothes. You whined around the dick in your mouth desperately, having your orgasm ripped away from you. 

“Awww my beautiful love, don’t worry I’ll give you what you want so badly.” Sanji cooed at you as he lined his cock up with your dripping hole. 

“Shut up and get inside her already!” Zoro barked at him. 

Already sliding inside of you, the feeling of your warm walls sucking him in, Sanji couldn’t come up with a response other than a loud moan. You groan around Zoro, pulling back for a second to catch some air. Sanji began thrusting inside of you.

“Oh fuck-! So good Sanji I-!” You moan out as drool dribbles down your chin. Before you can finish your praise, Zoro is stuffing himself back into your mouth. 

“Moss head, slow down! You’re gonna hurt her!” Sanji pants out as he pounds into your pussy. 

“She’s fine just look at her, she’s about to cum!” They both look down at your shaking form, eyes slammed tightly shut, tears streaming down your face. Your legs clamped so tightly around Sanji’s torso as they trembled. It was clear you were so close. 

“Gonna finish on those pretty tits, princess.” Zoro pulls out of your mouth to hover over your body and stroke his fat cock to completion. Just as the first hot rope hits your chest, your body tipped over the edge and you shrieked as you came, violently, on Sanji’s cock. Your torso jerked forward with the force of your orgasm. 

“So beautiful, my love, I’ll fill you up so good, ah-“ with a final declaration, Sanji spilled his load inside your pussy, grinding his hips into yours and whining. 

After a few moments of silence and heavy breathing, Sanji pulls out of you. 

“Ready for round 2, little slut?” You heard Zoro whisper in your ear. The low timbre of his voice sent fireworks straight to your sensitive cunt. 

“We worked out our issue. It took a lot of effort, so I think you owe us a bit more for dealing with our differences, my love.” Sanji moves out from between your legs to make room for Zoro. 

“Get me hard again.” Zoro barks down at you. You sit up and start to stroke his thick cock, soggy with your spit. 

“And me too, don’t forget about our date mon amour…” 

You were no longer thinking for yourself, your brain had stopped working long ago. You wanted to please both of them so badly, so happy that they had learned to share you so nicely. You lean forward and put Sanji’s sensitive dick into your mouth while you stroke Zoro with your hands. Zoro’s hand was on your throat as Sanji’s hand was tangled in your hair as your bobbed up and down on his oversensitive cock. After a few moments of “good fucking girl”s and “such a cute little slut”s, both of your men were hard again and ready to ruin you. Zoro pulled away first as he laid down on his back on your bed. 

“Sit on it.” Zoro commanded and you obliged. You pulled your wet mouth and tear stained face off of Sanji’s cock as you moved to sit on your swordsman’s thick length. You eagerly lined him up with your open, soaking hole.

“Stop.” Zoro stopped you. “Slow.” He grabbed your hips and guided your body onto him at a torturously slow pace. You let out a long moan as he slips you onto him inch by inch. 

“That’s my good girl, taking me so well. Look at your messy little pussy…” Zoro grabs your hair and makes you look down at the milky combination of your cum and Sanji’s cum leaking out all over his balls and pubes. “See what a filthy mess you’re making on me? Huh? And you still want more cock? What a little slut…” Zoro thrusts up into you and you gasp. 

“Be nice to her, moss head. She’s been such a nice play thing for us tonight. You can’t say one nice thing??” Sanji appears behind you, his chest pressed to your back as he begins to play with the plug in your ass. He slips it in and out of you, moving easily from the amount of lube you have shoved it in with earlier. You whine. 

“Nnnnnn Sanjiiii- Can I have it?” You wanted to feel both of them inside you at once. 

“Fine, curly, y/n has the most perfect holes I’ve ever had. So tight and warm, such a good toy.” Zoro smirked around you at his rival. Sanji ignored him. You feel the plug slip completely from your ass, you sigh at the emptiness. Briefly, Sanji spreads your cheeks as you lean forward onto Zoro’s chest. He could see where Zoro was buried deep inside your soaked cunt as well as your slightly gaping ass, lubed and open for him. 

Slowly Sanji presses his leaking tip into your puckered hole. 

“Sanji!” You yell out.

“Relax… I’m almost in… such a good job my love…”  Sanji whispers as he leans down to kiss your shoulder. “Hey idiot, rub her clit or her suck her nipples or something, She’s gonna loosen up more or else she’s gonna choke my dick in here.” 

“I don’t work for you…” Zoro grumbled as he took your left nipple between his teeth as he snaked his hand underneath you to rub at your engorged clit. 

“Ohhh, FUCK Zoro that’s so good-!” You moan out loudly, feeling your muscles spasm then relax. Then you felt Sanji plunge the rest of his length into your ass. 

“AAHh! FUCK!” You were so full, your head was spinning. Sanji’s thinner length buried deep in your asshole, Zoro’s thick cock bullying your g-spot inside your pussy, it was stimulation overload. Once both men were fully seated, there was some sort of unspoken communication between them and they started thrusting. 

You were screaming. The feeling was so intense, your body was going limp. Zoro held your body up with his strong arms while Sanji gripped your hips tightly with his smooth hands. 

“Holy.. Shit… Moss head, you.. you have to try this next time… It’s so fucking tight and hot…” Sanji desperately thrust his cock into your back hole as he chased his release, completely lost in pleasure. 

Zoro was too busy drilling up into your spent pussy, eyes locked on your face. Your eyes were rolled back and your mouth was completely open and slack. He couldn’t let curly brow cum inside you and not him too… He wanted you to cum again so you could milk him dry. He holds your body above him as you as were tossed back and forth on both of their cocks. 

You were being used as a fuck doll, essentially… and holy shit did it turn you on. Your body was so overstimulated but you felt the knot in your tummy begin to tighten again… 

“Sanji! Zoro! Shit, I’m-“ You squirted your release all over Zoro’s abdomen. Your body fell further forward as you began whimpering when your orgasm wore off. 

“Shit, it’s too tight… I’m going to-“ And with that, You felt the unique sensation of Sanji filling your ass with his hot seed. 

“Me too, fuck!” Zoro jams his hips up into yours and you cry out as he hits your cervix, feeling his throbbing tip deep inside as he fills you. 

You fully fell forwards towards Zoro, falling onto his face, nose pressed between your breasts. Sanji is still seated in your ass as he strokes your back and catches his breath. Eventually, your blonde pulls out, and your moss head picks you off his cock to lay you on your back in bed. 

Zoro spreads your legs. 

From how your hips were angled, the boys could see two loads of cum dripping our of your stretched pussy hole and one load dripping from your puckered asshole. Both men were mesmerized by the sight. 

“so… is someone going to clean me up… or?” You questioned while sitting up on your elbows. 

“I’LL DO IT” the two men shouted at once. They spent the next 5 minutes arguing over who was going to bath you and wash your body while you sat on the bed dripping. You flop back on the bed, realizing they’ll never get over their friendly competition. Oh well, you thought to yourself. If they fucked you like this every time they got jealous, you could get used to it. 

xx

#one piece fanfiction #one piece smut #one piece #one piece anime #one piece fanart #one piece live action #one piece netflix #one piece fandom #zoro x reader #sanji #zoro x sanji #vinsmoke sanji #black leg sanji #one piece sanji #sanji x reader #roronoa zoro #zoro roronoa #one piece zoro #zoro #roronoa zoro x reader

[opreaadriann]

High School Revenge

High School Revenge is an interactive fiction game set in the scariest imaginable location: high school. In this game, you will get to play as a teenager that was betrayed by his best friends and classmates 7 years ago, and get to come back to their high school, with a completely different look, preparing your revenge on them, Count of Monte-Cristo style. You will get to live a full academic year alongside your 8 targets, as you befriend, betray, and even romance them to get what you want. Will you forgive them after learning of their reasons or will you go through with your sweet, sweet revenge? The current version of the demo is 51k words.

Demo

The game is still a work-in-progress, so any suggestions are appreciated! If you find any bugs or issues, make sure to mention them.

Other places where you can follow the project or support me:

X/Twitter COG Forum Patreon

Features:

Play as male, female, or nonbinary.

Romance your 6 childhood bullies, your 2 childhood friends, or hidden allies.

Live the tragic childhood events that lead to the worst day of your life and decide how everything went down.

Almost all targets will have deep secrets that you’ll have to discover throughout the story and use against them.

Pretend to be a charismatic popular kid, a likeable klutz, a rebel that goes against the norm, or the edgy, silent type.

Lie, charm, spy, blackmail, everything is on the table to get your revenge. There is no “good” way to learn the targets’ secrets and there’s no perfect way to get the job done.

Your stats will almost never affect your capability to get revenge. All that will make a real difference will be your relationship with all the characters.

Spend a full academic year getting to know your targets, interacting with them through random events, relationship events, or hobby events, similar to a Persona game.

Romance Options:

Targets

Dylan Evans

The first friend the MC ever made, Dylan was once just a nerdy Asian kid with big square glasses, playing video games with you every single day. However, as time passed, he turned into a social media influencer, garnering over tens of thousands of likes on every post.

With an incredibly fake smile, Dylan manages to turn most people into his followers, as his strategy to suck up to the rest of the students seems to work quite well.

Though he seems to be quite irredeemable, you do remember him being a selfless kid with a big heart. There are so many memories with him helping you out whenever he could, being the only person you could confide in. What could have made him turn against you when you needed him most?

Olivia Hartley

If your MC had to choose the most unlikely person to ever do them wrong, then Olivia would be their first choice. Strong willed and incredibly sarcastic, this raven-haired tall girl has remained exactly the same 7 years later.

And yet, she did betray you on the day of the Tragedy, giving secret information to your bullies and allowing you to fall victim to their prank… What could have been her reason?

Olivia is an incredibly intuitive person, with a quick mind and a powerful personality to boot. Someone like her will likely be a huge challenge in the upcoming revenge, but not even her can stop this mastermind.

Michael Knox

This tall, dark, and handsome captain of the Baseball team can be, depending on your choices, the person that tricked you into falling in love with him, only to publicly humiliate you in front of the whole school.

He is an incredibly talented athlete with a very arrogant attitude, assuming that the world belongs to him. With a very rich dad to support him, nothing has ever gone wrong in his life, if we were to ignore his mother’s death during his birth.

Can he be considered one of the main antagonists of this story or is he just a secret follower that only followed orders during the Tragedy?

Cecily Knight

Ah yes, Cecily Knight. Everyone, everywhere knows who Cecily Knight is. This petite blue-eyed blonde is the captain of the swimming team, and regularly publicly humiliates anyone that attempts to get to know her romantically.

With such a strong reputation, Cecily manages to order around anyone in the school with ease, as they all lower their heads when she passes them on the hallways.

However, observing her more closely can reveal that she is much more docile with her friends and loved ones. Is she actually an ice queen or is it all a facade to protect herself?

Connor Cobb

With his long blond hair and piercing smile, Connor tends to attract every girl that passes his way. However, he manages to make them all leave once he opens his mouth, as his desperation can be seen from miles away.

As the star guitarist of The Fighting Rooster, Connor is an incredibly talented individual that planned the whole part of the Tragedy where they befriended you first before destroying your life.

Though he seems like a total idiot, looking into his life seems to reveal that there is more to him than just this fake persona he shows everyone. With 3 younger siblings, Connor seems to have a lot on his shoulders as many in his family look up to him.

Isaac Freeman

With his curly red locks and emerald eyes, Isaac manages to trick many people into thinking he is someone they would like to get to know. As the mastermind behind the Tragedy, he is the worst out of all the people on this list.

It is quite common for him, even 7 years later, to bully students so badly that they decide to move schools. By observing his behavior, it seems that all he cares about is being thoroughly entertained.

Either make him laugh, do something outrageous, or get out of his way, as he will do his best to make every day more interesting than the last.

Vivian Porter

Vivian turned from Isaac’s best friend in her childhood to Dylan’s current confidant. With a seemingly perfect appearance and an endless wardrobe, Vivian manages to impress anyone that sees her pass by.

She is incredibly empathic, being able to tell what anyone is feeling at a glance, allowing her to use this skill to make anyone fall for her ambitious tricks.

Is she just someone that just made a mistake during childhood or are her intentions impure at this age as well?

Haley Freeman

As Isaac’s twin sister, nobody would expect her to be the biggest goody two shoes the world has ever seen. Seemingly stuttering her way through most conversations, people usually tend to forget she even exists.

This curvy redhead has a deep passion for painting, as she spends most of her time in the school gardens, capturing the view.

Is there more to Isaac’s sister than meets the eye or is she just another victim of Isaac’s abuse?

Allies

Angela Slone

A swimmer with long, brown hair, Angela is part of the team alongside Cecily. After being bullied into submission by the harpy, she reluctantly decides to help the MC carry out their revenge against their many targets.

With a bubbly personality and a merciful soul, Angela is possibly the worst ally for this revenge you could find. However, this doesn’t mean she can’t be tricked into giving you what you want.

Marcus Parmer

Marcus has led a horrible life during high school. Being diagnosed with a medical condition forcing him to go bald, he has been constantly bullied by Isaac ever since he joined the Baseball team.

He is much more serious than any of the allies you can find in the school, but he isn’t the most capable person for the job. He is, however, excited to help you get rid of the scum pretending to be students in his school.

#interactive fiction #choicescript #interactive game #romance #high school revenge #dashingdon #if wip

[sunny44]

Surprise

Pairing: Lewis Hamilton x mom!wife! Reader

Warnings: just fluff

Summary: Surprising Lewis with little Hamilton’s first time in the paddock.

Lewis and I met in Spain when we were on vacation.

I was on vacation from my job and he was on summer break and by some kind of miracle we met in a bar.

I was alone drinking while my friends were dancing, I was excited that we were going to go out until minutes before my ex-boyfriend had the courage to send me an invitation to his wedding with the woman he cheated on me with.

My mother had sent me a message warning me because the address he knew was the address of my parents' house.

So this let me down completely.

Not that I was still in love with that idiot, far from it, but the fact that he had the courage to invite me made me realize that I have spent three years of my life with that person who didn't even deserve one month of my time.

And that's when Lewis showed up, I guess the fact that he found a sad woman in a bar, drinking alone on a Friday night caught his attention.

That's when we started talking and I as a person completely uninterested in any kind of sport didn’t knew who he was, in fact I only found out months later that we were already talking.

He didn't hide who he was, in fact he told me both his name and what he did, but he didn't specify that he was a formula 1 driver and that he was one of the best ones that existed.

We exchanged numbers and talked for months until he was in England for a race and invited me to go, this was when I fell in love with the sport but also where I realized how much damage it would do to my life just to be seen with him.

People found my social medias which at the time were bombarded with horrible comments about me and my appearance and that it was impossible for him to be with a person like me.

It was then where I became terrified and distanced myself a bit from him because of this. After much insistence he managed to convince me to go out to dinner with him.

That same night he was honest with me, that if we decided to try to have a relationship unfortunately it would be like that, people hating me without even knowing me and telling lies about me.

In other circumstances I would have walked away because this life of being known was not for me, I liked being unknown to the public eye and that the amount of people who would judge me would be less than being the girlfriend of the most famous Formula One driver.

But I knew that if I didn't take the risk I would miss out on one of the best things that would happen in my life, and now I'm sure I would have regretted it.

Lewis and I have been together for 5 years now, and every day I realize how much in love with him I am.

The first years of our relationship were very hectic, the weeks away for races and events, the thousands of messages exchanged during the day and FaceTime calls at night, and those were also the most complicated years of the relationship.

It was like a test, a test to know if the relationship would survive the thousands of lies about betrayal from both parts, the manipulated photos to look like things that weren’t true, the nights of crying and tears for not knowing what to believe even though we were absolutely sure that everything was just a big lie.

I'm sure these years were essential for both of us to learn to trust each other.

——————

It was the weekend of the Silverstone GP and I had lied to Lewis that I couldn't go because I had a lot of work to do, but in fact here was Luke and I in the car heading to the track.

Lucas Hamilton was our 3 year old son. This would be his father's first race that he would be watching straight from the garage.

When we found out that I was pregnant, we agreed that above all, Luke would be preserved from the toxicity of the internet. His fans knew that he existed and also knew his name because when he was born we thought it was only fair that the fans knew about him from us and not from the paparazzi, but they had never seen more than a small body in the pictures we posted.

Lewis had already shown interest in taking the little one to watch him race but I still didn't feel comfortable about showing him to the world, but I knew how much he wanted me to go this weekend and I also knew how upset he was that I couldn't go.

So nothing better than to surprise him with our presence plus Luke's first time.

Toto had helped me with the plan, sent me the paddock passes and let the security guards know that I would be here.

I got out of the car, I put the paddock passes on mine and Luke’s neck and carefully pulled him out of the car.

"Where's daddy?" He asks as soon as I lock the car and we start walking towards the paddock.

"We're going to go see him now okay?" He agrees and takes my hand again as soon as we enter the paddock

As soon as they recognized me the cameras all turned to me and with Lewis Hamilton's faceless son along it was as if the photographers multiplied.

As we were getting close to the garage, Lewis was coming out of it with Roscoe along with him and as soon as Luke saw him he let go of my hand and came out screaming.

"Daddy." Lewis recognized that little voice on and he opened the most beautiful smile as soon as he saw his son running up to him, even Roscoe started barking.

"Hey buddy." He bent down and picked him up on his hip. "What are you doing here?"

"Me and mommy came to see you." He says excitedly and soon he sees me. "I missed you daddy."

"I missed you too buddy." Just then the three of them come toward me. "You said you were going to work."

"I lied, I wanted to surprise you."

"You sure surprised me." He gives me a kiss.

"It's bad to lie mommy."

"It really is, isn’t." Lewis says in a teasing tone. "We're going to have to ground Mommy."

"That's right."

"Are you taking your father's side?" He agrees.

Luke was definitely a daddy's boy, besides being an exact copy of Lewis, even more now that he’s bigger, the only thing that’s the same as me is the eyes, Lewis has dark eyes and mine’s are green.

"Daddy can I sit in your car?"

"Of course you can, let’s ask uncle Toto to give you some gloves too, come on."

We pulled into the garage where Lewis put Luke into the car, after we were together for a while Lewis had to go because the race was going to start and when he won we ran to the front of the podium where as soon as he jump out of the car he came running over to where we were.

And I could have sworn that this race was the most special one for him.

Bonus scene!

Y/nhamilton instagram post

Liked by @lewishamilton, @anthonyhamilton, @mercedesf1, @sebastianvettel and others 91939

Y/nhamilton The best Weekend we had in a long time. Me and Luke had the best time here in Silverstone and there’s nothing better than an F1 race, specially when daddy win the race.

Thanks to everyone that came to support my husband, Lewis and our family really appreciate the love.

Tagged: @lewishamilton

LewisHamilton thanks for everything, you are the best mama and I’m so lucky to have you. Thanks for bringing our baby boy to the race.

Y/nhamilton we love you so much

Sebastianvettel so nice to see the two of you this weekend, beautiful family

Y/nhamilton thank you Seb, we have to plan a meeting with the kids

Yourmom miss you guys so much, the three of you have to come visit. He also looks a lot like Lewis.

Liked by LewisHamilton and y/nhamilton

#f1 fanfic #f1 imagine #f1 x you #f1 #lewis hamilton #england nt #f1 instagram au #lewis hamilton art #lewis hamilton fanfic #lewis hamilton headers #lewis hamilton edit #lewis hamilton fanart #lewis hamilton icons #lewis hamilton imagine #lewis hamilton wallpaper #lewis hamilton one shot #lewis hamilton x you #lewis hamilton x reader #lewis hamilton masterlist #lewis hamilton instagram au #lewis hamilton aesthetic #lewis hamilton angst #lewis hamilton social media au #lewis hamilton smut #lewis hamilton drabble #lewis hamilton fluff #lewis hamilton blurb #mercedes #mercedes amg petronas #mercedes amg f1

[panther-os]

@amikoroyaiart did this awesome commission of my OC Lennie and my version of Ghost! I've wanted to commission her since I first came across her art over a year ago but it took me a while to save and just ahhhhhhh so worth it

Fun fact! The pants are uniform accurate. 141 is an international task force, and while Ghost and many of the rest of the team are SAS and wear black or navy fatigues, Lennie is an tArm (Irish Army) and wears that specific camo pattern! Their neon pink hair is definitely out of regulation, but no one dares call them on it.

Lennie is nonbinary and their full name and rank is Lieutenant Lennie Lynch. They're from Carrick-on-Shannon in Leitrim County of Ireland, and they're the 141's Chief Logistics & Supply Officer. Anything from toilet paper to ammo to fresh fruit to video games, it all goes through them. They have a ton of smuggler contacts in order to get supplies out to remote areas, and they use this network for information as well.

Basically Laswell's job, but more focused on keeping people alive via food and bandages and etc than keeping people alive via intel on the enemy.

Price met Lennie at the same time he met Nikolai. It was a joint an tArm and SAS operation where the two squads wound up trapped in a snowstorm with dwindling supplies, including much-needed medical supplies. Lennie asked for an hour with the sat phone, spent that time making threats and promises and calling in favors, and then Nikolai (the only pilot good enough and crazy enough) dropped off the supplies not too much later, which is how he and Price met. Then, a few years later, Price pulled Lennie for the Taskforce knowing their skills would be needed.

Lennie drinks far too many cups of coffee a day, barely sleeps, and spends the majority of their time in their dark office staring at computer screens. Their first date with Ghost was a joint nap on their office couch. Their best frenemy is @atohii 's OC Niko, the Chief Medical Officer, friend because they've made him weep tears of gratitude over the supplies he needs to keep everyone healthy, enemy because they've cut him off from energy drinks (the hypocrite) and gotten the entire rest of the base involved in it.

It's best assumed that Lennie knows everything and could be anywhere. They walk very quietly and often surprise people by slurping their coffee from right behind them. If they were an animal, they'd be a wild hare - the kind that surely speaks a thousand tongues and knows exactly how you die.

Ghost is still with Soap, and Soap is also with Niko, and sometimes Ghost and Niko are together as well, but romantically, Lennie's just with Ghost. We love a poly141.

This Ghost is based on TikTok cosplayer Kuromi (his account is tagged MDNI, please respect that) and Irish actor Fra Fee (because Les Mis is an old SpIn and my Ghost is Irish, his ggparents immigrated to Manchester during the Great Hunger). I don't have any specific scar or tattoo headcanons for Ghost, but I like Amiko's usual spread so I asked her to just use those, and I'm thrilled with how it came out!

And just ahhhhhhh I'm still screaming over Lennie 😍

#/incoherent noises/ #call of duty #amikoroyaiart #cod oc #my oc #oc #simon ghost riley #lt lennie lynch

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

So, recently found someone tried pressing charges on me for this. However, cops laughed at him for it.

Am I the AH because I reported my manager?

I(F24-27) met this manager(M 27-30) when I worked at my last job. This manager was being lovely and started dating a newly high-school graduate. His girlfriend got fired for stealing not just merchandise, but money from the register. She was promptly fired and he claimed they broke up for it, but got back together. The summer after she was fired, an employee's dumb ass fell for a phone scam and the store lost thousands of dollars. She was fired too, but it was under his authority that she did the phone scam since he was "too busy" to do it. It was apparently some register program maintenance? Yeah, a manager is suppose to do that, but he didn't. My manager went on vacation for the entire month of his birthday, during that time I sent him a happy birthday and told him he was missed and we awaited his return. Months later at the end of the year, his girlfriend saw the messages, and when I arrived at work he basically threatened my job and called me some colorful things. I cried then and there and he refused to apologize to me cause he was so happily taken and blah blah.

So here's what happened. Because he refused to apologize to me, I cried the entire day. We had recently gotten a new store manager, and he was concerned and asked me what was wrong. I told him what happened and even showed him the messages I sent my manager from months back. He said he didn't see anything wrong with them, that even he himself would have sent similar messages if someone was gone for that long. So, he wrote him up for it. So, apparently I was the bad person for that? I mean, he said some messed up things to me. Keep in mind, this was the week before the new year. Ok, after the new year started, there was a lot of investigations going on, thanks to our previous store manager since someone blew the whistle on her and found out she did a lot of sketchy things. My manager was being investigated for this too, for dating someone who got fired for stealing and the phone scam thing (I think it's because the store lost more than 10,000, I seriously wish I was joking). So, apparently me reporting him for what he did to me was wrong by his logic. So, months went by of the several investigations, even some auditing company got involved (I know scary!), and by May, this manager went on a couple of week vacation. He had posted online him playing a drinking game and another employee who he worked under and was a minor too, was present in what he recorded and posted online. Now, my beef is he had admitted to me he provided alcohol for his gf when she was a minor and her friends, then I see that crap. I ended up reporting it and I guess I cost him his job? He literally went to another company after it happened. I know I'm not the moral police and other people aren't my responsibility, but I just didn't feel right seeing that. He was 29, what is he doing hanging out when 17-20 year olds? The only legal adult was his gf, these were her buddies she made when she was in high school. I'm not sure where the 17 year old came from tbh? I just know she was working at our store and was 17 at the time, but that's besides the point.

So, I found out recently a little before covid started when he contacted me he was trying to get evidence to press charges on me. I mean, it didn't happen and I'm still confused how I could have had charges pressed on me. When he contacted me I called him a POS, groomer, and other colorful things. Sorry, everything I knew about him and what he did to me made me feel bitter against him. I don't know if what I did may have broke laws? But who cares, this isn't what this is about. AITA?

What are these acronyms?

#aita #am i the asshole

[hotvintagepoll]

Propaganda

Myrna Loy (The Thin Man, Manhattan Melodrama, Mr Blandings Builds his Dream House)—Started out a slinky silent screen vamp. Became a screwball lead who had a blast drinking, being married to William Powell, solving mysteries, and taking her dog everywhere in the Thin Man Movies. Broke our hearts in The Best Years of Our Lives and played a string of dream wives. Remained hot the entire time. Decades of hotness.

Gracie Allen (A Damsel in Distress, Honolulu)— The funniest woman who ever lived, she was the brains behind an absolutely brilliant radio show that she did with her husband George Burns. The radio show was later turned into a television show (which you can find on Youtube) but during the radio days, it was announced that Gracie would be running for President of the United States for the year of 1940. She was running for the Surprise Party, and refused a Vice President as, according to her, there would be no room for vice in her white house. Her slogan was "Down with common sense -Vote for Gracie Allen." [more about this beneath the cut]

This is round 1 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]

Myrna Loy:

Myrna Loy excelled at playing coy women, so common in screwball comedies in the 40s. She batted her lashes, and shrugged with grace, and made her costars look like foolish heels next to her. She charmed with sneaky elegance, well-placed pouting, and repartee. Besides, she was sultry AF.

While Myrna certainly looked hot in some her earlier vampy exotic bad girl roles, I think shes hottest when her comedic chops got to be displayed. Her dry wit, comedic timing, and subtle facial expressions make her the queen of deadpan snark.

She's just very Mother

So beautiful and popular she was crowned Queen of the Movies in 1936, Myrna Loy was also an amazing actress. She's best remembered for The Thin Man and sequels, where she gets to show off her comedy skills, adding irresistible impish charm to her classic beauty and dancer's figure.

THE SASS

One of the few actresses who managed to successfully transition from silent to talkies, never won an Oscar but was at one time the highest paid woman in Hollywood. Advocated for better roles and pay for Black actors in the 1930s, so passionately anti-Nazi in the 40s she made Hitler's blacklist, spoke out against Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare, and advocated for fair housing in the 1950s and 1960s, all while being hot as fuck opposite William Powell, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy and a whole galaxy of the Hot Vintage Men Poll all-stars.

Cute as a button with so much RIZZ! She and whatsisname in The Thin Man are relationship goals.

She was literally called the Queen of Hollywood! She is so sassy and funny in the whole Thin Man series. Absolutely hot in those, and who doesn’t love a woman who can laugh? She had the sultriest gaze and that style! Also before she was a star she sat as the model for an iconic statue for a school (representing “Fountain of Education”).

the glamour!! the banter!! the comedy!!

She's got this cute kinda scrunched up face AND shes funny AND shes got a bangin body.

Gracie Allen:

Continued from previous propaganda: "We don't want to get rid of men entirely," Allen said, according to a story in the April 22, 1940, Indianapolis Star. "All we want to do is make them unconstitutional and keep them out of circulation, but have them handy when there's no place else to go."

On the Neutrality Bill pending in Congress: "If we owe it, let's pay it." On recognizing Russia: "I don't know. I meet so many people." On which political party she was affiliated with: "I may take a drink now and then, but I never get affiliated.""

She did have to drop out eventually, with World War 2 being on and all, but thousands of people still wrote her in anyway, even if the FDR won the popular vote in the end.  (https://www.jsonline.com/story/life/green-sheet/2016/03/31/that-time-a-comedian-won-the-wisconsin-presidential-primary/84944806/)

#gracie allen #myrna loy #hotvintagepoll #fuck that old woman #ladies 1

[smoothies-are-cool]

kiss me thru the phone

boyfriend! matt sturniolo x reader

summary: reader and matt do long distance until reader surprises him on tour.

warnings: swearing, pet names (baby, beautiful), kissing.

a/n: i love this song ❤️❤️

READERS POV

“i miss your beautiful face.” my boyfriend, matt says.

we were on facetime because he moved to los angeles with his brothers to pursue their career. we met in middle school in boston and i still live there.

“you’re looking at it.” i giggle.

“i know but i miss kissing it. hopefully i’ll get to see you while we’re in boston.” he says. matt and his brothers were about to go on their second tour. little did matt know, i had tickets to the boston show AND the des moines show in iowa.

pretend there was a boston show on the versus tour.

“i know baby. even if you don’t have to time to stop home i’ll camp outside the venue even if i’m able to see you for only a minute.” i tell him.

“kiss me through the phone.” matt randomly says.

“what?” i ask, making sure i heard him right.

“kiss me through the phone, come on.” he repeats, moving his lips closer to the phone. i giggle and do the same.

4 days later

📍des moines, iowa

“okay and before we go we have one more person we want to come out and say a few words.” nick says into the microphone, grabbing another microphone from one of the venue workers. nick and chris were in on the secret.

matt sends chris a confused look and chris just shrugs.

“i’d like to welcome y/n l/n to the stage!” nick smiles and the crowd goes crazy as i walk out onto the stage. i wave to the crowd before locking eyes with matt. he stands there, his eyes wide and his mouth open. chris quickly grabs matt’s microphone as matt makes his way towards me.

“you’re here.” he says softly.

“congrats on the win baby.” i smile. matt pulls me into him and places a quick kiss on my lips. we keep it brief because we’re on stage.

“okay let me talk.” i whisper pulling away as nick hands me the second microphone.

“okay hi everyone! i want to apologize now for any stuttering or anything i’ve never spoke in front of a crowd this big. if you don’t know me, hi i’m y/n, matt’s girlfriend.” i speak and the crowd screams. chris, nick and matt make their way to my sides.

“these boys mean so much to me. like more than words could explain. i’m gonna tell the story on how we met, but i’m gonna keep it brief because i could talk about it for literal hours. i actually met chris first. we were in the same class in second grade and we were both alone at recess so we just became friends with each other. chris has been the person i went to for anything from that moment on. he was the first person i told about my huge crush on matt.” i say, giggling softly.

“he has always supported me through everything and when i was in the wrong he always told me so i really appreciate that.” i look at chris as i say this, pulling him into a hug.

“woo i will probably end up crying so ignore that. nick is genuinely the love of my life.” i say, laughing when i see matt’s offended look. “all jokes aside, i know nick would do anything to protect me and he has done anything to protect me. i remember this one time a guy wouldn’t leave me alone and when he tried to pull me to his car nick literally tackled him.” i said, causing the crowd to laugh.

“i really appreciate everything you do for me.” i hug nick and move to stand next to matt.

“oh god matt where do i start.” i mutter softly. “my crush started on matt during the summer of 8th grade. we didn’t end up getting together until senior year but that’s besides the point.”

“seeing matt grow up and over come his fears makes me so proud. i remember when he would never order his own food and now he’s talking to and standing in front of thousands of people everyday. so i’m really proud of him for that. i remember when i realized that i was in love with matt. i have a little sister and one time she fell and when i had turned around to help her matt was already helping her. and then he cleaned up the cut on her knee and put a bandaid on it. i don’t know why but that was when i realized i was in love with him. matt is my best friend and lover all in one. he knows me like the back of his hand and he can so easily read my emotions.” my eyes slowly start to fill with tears and matt wraps his arms around my waist from behind me.

“i don’t have much time left so i have to word this strategically. the fact that they’re just three boys from massachusetts is crazy to me. i don’t think they’ve realized how many people they’ve helped, including myself. these three boys right here are living proof that dreams do come true and you can do it so don’t let anyone tell you differently. they are my people, the one ones i actually want to be around and the ones i would do anything for. and i want this forever.” i say, my voice cracking as tears falling down my cheeks. i notice nick and chris both have tears too.

“nick, matt, chris. i’m so beyond proud of you and i love you more than life itself. i’m so grateful that i met you guys because i would not have made it today without you guys.” i speak, my voice cracking. i see matt’s eyes have tears but he’s trying to not let them fall. we all do a big group hug, say goodbye to the crowd and walk off stage.

i gasp softly as matt pulls me back into him. his arms go around my waist and mine go around his shoulders.

“you okay matt?” i ask. he doesn’t respond and i feel hot tears on my shoulder.

“baby..” i say softly, pulling him impossibly closer.

“i’m really glad you’re here.” he tells me, pulling away but he keeps his arms around me.

“surprise!” i giggle as he places his lips on mine.

yn.ln

🏷️ christophersturniolo 🏷️ nicolassturniolo

🏷️ matthew.sturniolo

liked by: mattandynfp27894 , christophersturniolo and 154,927 others

yn.ln - so beyond proud of my boys <3

65,204 comments

matthew.sturniolo - i love you so much

↳ yn.ln - i love you more.

user - her speech that she gave 🥹🥹

christophersturniolo - tried so hard to keep it together during your speech. love you always ❗️

↳ yn.ln - love you chris 🧡

user - the way they all cried during her speech. they all mean so much to each other.

*liked by yn.ln*

nicolassturniolo - my mf soulmate. I LOVE YOU FOREVER

↳ yn.ln - I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU 💜

matthew.sturniolo - so lucky to have you ❤️

↳ yn.ln - you mean so much to me ❤️❤️

a/n: hi !

#matt sturniolo #matt sturniolo x reader #chris sturniolo #nick sturniolo #sturniolo triplets #sturniolo fanfic #sturniolo fandom #sturniolo x reader #spotify

[aikoionic]

I WANNA GROW UP ONCE AGAIN [ L.MK ] : TEASER!

yes it’s based loosely (heavily) on 3 idiots 👽

★彡 In college, you and mark form a strange relationship. (you think) he hates you for competing with him for being the smartest in class, while you’re just trying to get a your degree so your parents don’t marry you off to another rich families son. Years later, an old bet gives you and his two friends a chance to look for your long-lost acquaintance, who’s existence is rather elusive.

engineering major!mark lee x engineering major!reader (fem)

★彡 academic rivals, where tf did mark go after college, readers gettin married, johnny stops a plane, haechan forgets his pants, yuta is annoying, mark is gone. reader is the college headmasters daughter sorry if it isn’t obviously lol

「September 5th, Present Day, Johnny. 」 - You attack my heart, you attack my heart!

“in any case of an emergency landing, there are marked exits on either side of the plane.”

it’s days like these that johnny is reminded of how much his job absolutely sucks. it wasn’t his phobia of planes or the fact that he is thousands of feet up in the air and anything could go wrong at any time, it was the fact that he couldn’t keep any friend/relationships going as he was expected in a new country or city every week. the only thing that’s funded is the plane ride, not his entertainment, and the book infront of his face is no longer a story but instead just a bunch of letters on a page.

he often daydreams about what his life could’ve been like, you know, if he stayed with engineering and didn’t follow his passion of photography. he often thinks about college and all the great memories, along with the bad ones, he often thinks about his old friends. he often thinks about mark. mark was a strange, but a once-in-a-lifetime kind of friend, he always talked about the future and how he would love to go fishing every weekend when everybody was well in their forties. johnny feels stupid for believing that mark was right, that everyone was gonna stay friends forever. he recalls the last time he saw him, graduation. everyone was ecstatic that it was finally over, all the exams, all the stress. exactly one week after he was on a video call with haechan, complaining that mark wasn’t answering his phone. it was another week after that the messages stopped going through, and it was another month before he gave up all hope of ever seeing mark lee again.

“we kindly ask that all passengers put phones and laptops on airplane mode for the duration of this flight to new york, we wish everyone happy trave-“ , johnny feels the vibration of his phone through his pocket and the deafening ringtone follows immediately after. he bought this phone three years ago and still doesn’t know how to turn down that damn ringtone. he smiles apologetically at his neighbouring passenger as they grumpily twist and turn to get comfy again after being awaken.

“hello?”

…

“yeah, this is johnny..”

…

his face drops.

“sir, can you please put the phone away.”

“yeah, yeah, one second, please.”

he looks around frantically, he needs to get off this plane, and it’s not because he’s scared. he hastily unbuckles his seatbelt, he needs to get off this plane. he stands up quickly and wobbles, it’s about to take off.

“sir, please sit down, you could get hurt!” the flight attendant yells at him to be heard over the horribly loud plane engine.

“i-i..” he grasps his chest, trembling as if he’s in pain. all the nearby passengers shoot worried looks at the airline staff.

“i don’t- i nee-“, the plane jolts aggressively and he stumble to the ground, grip still tight on his chest.

an attendant reaches up from her seat to grab the phone next to her.

“captain, there’s is a medical emergency on board, you must stop the plane.”

~

johnny is slumped over in a wheelchair as two members of staff and an on-hand doctor rush through the terminal to get him to the hospital, he looks dead, i mean he hasn’t replied to the staff screaming in his ear to wake up. johnny slowly opens up one of his eyes, his plan worked! he’s off the plane! but how the hell was he supposed to convince the staff he’s fine and is just gonna go look for a taxi to take him home. maybe if he tells them all he needs is some rest? REST? YOU JUST FAKED A HEART ATTACK AND YOU THINK THEY’RE GONNA BELIEVE ALL YOU NEED IS REST?? johnny stops scolding himself and gets to thinking of another plan.

“wait!” suddenly, he jumps up from the wheelchair and puts his hands out to stop them. he breathes deeply a couple times, does a few jumping jacks. what is he trying to prove with this whole performance?

“i’m completely fine now! thank you! you guys carry on, i’ll handle myself from here!”

“sir, wait a minute, you’ve just had a heart atta-“

he ran.

he ran all the way down two escalators, three sets of stairs and out the main entrance. what a shit plan. now he just needs to get home, wait.., he feels around his pockets, where the fuck is his wallet? is he supposed to walk home or something? maybe he should’ve just stayed on the damn plane.

he sees a sign held up by one of the drivers sent for important businessmen, or rich kids who study abroad and get their parents to send them a driver when they come on their annual trip back home, mr. zhong chenle.

“heyy man, long time no see! where’s the car at? i’m super tired!”

“uhh… mr. zhong? is that you?”

“yeah! why, do i look different or something?”

“a lot taller than i remember..”

“growth spurt. now, where’s the car?”

“straight home, sir?” the driver asks after approximately 7 minutes of uninterrupted silence.

“yeah, but go through the downtown first, wanna see it all again, ya know.”

“whatever you say, sir.” the driver sighs, he must’ve never looked at the kids face if he thinks johnny looks anything remotely like a college student anymore. johnny picks up his phone and dials a number he’s dialled about a thousand times.

incoming call, johnny, 12:08pm.

the noise of ruffling bed sheet and pillows fills the room, and a hand groggily slaps the desk to look for their phone without using their eyes.

call accepted

“yeah, johnny, what do you want.” he says while stretching. haechan doesn’t do much on his off days but sleep in until one and play video games. he knows that as soon as he leaves his room his mother is going to give him about fifteen things to do, so he decides to just lock himself up in his room for the weekend.

“get ready in five minutes, i’m coming to pick you up.”

“why, what happened.” there was nothing johnny could say to get him out of his bed.

“yuta called, remember him?”

“yeah, ‘the silencer’” he smirked, the dumb nickname still remembered by the pair even after all these years.

“yeah well, he said that..”

“what, he said what?”

“he said.. that mark’s coming.”

haechan shot up from his bed, making his head rush at the speed.

“WHAT?”

“yeah, he said come to the campus at 1, meet him on the roof.”

he looks at the time on his smartwatch. 12:46pm.

“oh shit..”

“bro, just get ready, fast.”

“yeah, yeah i will!”

he ran toward his bathroom, brushing his teeth and washing his face simultaneously. his sister watched him curiously, confused at why he’s up and out his room at 12.

“listen, i’ll be back soon, tell mom okay?, wait, shoes.” he hastily put his shoes on and wrestled a shirt over his head. “marks back!” he grinned at his sister but she just silently stared at him, biting back a smile.

“wait, but where are you going?”

“just tell mom i’m coming back, okay?”

“‘hyuck, wait!”

“can’t, johnnys here!”

“but you don’t have pants on! donghyuck!”

her shouts fell to deaf ears and haechan raced out the house, looking around for johnnys car. he waved down the car after he saw johnny through the window. the door swung open and haechan jumped in, not even giving it a chance to stop.

“now you want to go home, right, sir?” the driver asked johnny, while haechan was busy tying his laces and trying to contain his excitement.

“yeah but go via the imperial college of engineering.”

“well.. ok sir.”

“ugh, forgot my socks dude!”

“you forgot more that just your socks, hyuck.” he stifles his laughter and points down at haechans legs.

“oh my god..”

the car swerves around a sharp corner and through the gates of the courtyard to the ICE, imperial college of engineering. johnny looks out the window in awe of his old college, which was probably the prime of his life.

the car stops and the boys jump out of the car, johnny goes around to the drivers window.

“thanks so much, now you can go back to the airport and pick up my brother, same last name - zhong!” johnny runs after haechan as he makes his way to the roof entrance.

they sprint up the steps, johnny taking down two at a time, all so that they can see their long-lost friend. they have so much to ask him, where the hell did he go, why’d he stop talking. johnny wanted to slap him and hug him at the same time but haechan just wanted his friend back. they were very close in college, they even shared a dorm room. haechan knows mark didn’t want to cut off contact from them, he knows there was something stopping him.

they make it to the roof right on time, and see yuta standing there with his back to them, staring off into the distance and checking his watch.

“mark?!” johnny completely ignored yuta and instead starts running around the roof after seeing no sign of his friend.

“hey yuta! where’s mark?!” haechan yelled, his eyes looking all around the roof, trying to find him.

yuta smirked and slowly pulled out his phone, still not facing them, waiting for them to realise he isn’t there and come over.

“welcome, guys, long time no see, huh?.” he was dressed up nicely, in a suit with the top button undone, sporting expensive shoes and jewellery, his hair was slicked back, a big difference from the untidy thing he had on his head in college.

“want something to drink?, isn’t this the same beer you guys used to drink up on this roof, late at night?” he forces them to think back to their college days, when they sat upon the roof of the engineering building and drank up to early morning, running to make it to their classes on time, hungover as fuck. he tosses the beer bottle toward haechan and he catches it right before it hits him in the stomach.

“where’s mark.” johnny was getting frustrated now, he stopped his plane with a fake heart attack to be here right now, all for mark.

“patience please, first, i want you guys to look at this.” he holds his phone up close to their faces. a picture of yuta shaking hands with a realtor infront of a big house was on the screen.

“check out that mansion behind me. $3.5 million.” yuta smiled with his teeth while showing off to them both. “swimming pool? heated. living room? oak wood flooring. my new 6496 cc lambourgini.” he swipes through a whole array of pictures showcasing all his luxuries.

you see, mark’s only academic rival wasn’t you, there also was yuta. he was an absolute pain the ass, annoying as fuck but too smart and good-looking for his own good. you, mark and yuta were fighting all year to earn the valedictorian title. always trying to out-do each other with project and homework for a good recommendation from your teacher. of course mark ended up getting it, he was so charming to some of the teachers but so insufferable to others.

“why’re you showing us all this, where’s mark?” haechan interrupted yuta’s spiel about his achievements, demanding to know why he went through all this just for mark to not even be here.

“you don’t remember?” yuta pulls up the date on his phone, the 5th of September.

haechan looked closely at the phone, “yeah that’s todays date, and what?”

yuta smiled and the two then pushed through them, walking up to a part of the wall around the door of the entrance to the roof, that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years, covered in green stuff you could only hope was moss. yuta pulls out a handkerchief from his pocket, kicks over a ladder covering part of the wall, and starts cleaning it.

haechan and johnny following closely behind him, curious to see what his explanation was for this.

there, carved onto the wall, was a date,

Sept 5th

“i bet you. ten years from now, we will meet here. same day, same place! and we will see who’s mor- who’s more successful” yuta slurred as he yelled sternly.

“d’you have the balls?! c’mon, tell me! tell me you’ll come back here!”

“remember now? i made a bet with that idiot right here. i kept my promise, i’m back.”

johnny threw the beer bottle at yuta’s feet and started marching towards him.

“I made my plane land, he forgot his pants, all to meet mark, we’ve searched for five years, we don’t know if he’s alive. but you think he’ll show up for your silly bet?”

“no i knew he wouldn’t.” yuta smiled. “he’s too scared.”

“am i gonna punch him or are you?” johnny turned to haechan then turned on his heel to grab yuta’s shirt. haechan stopped even though he really wanted someone to punch yuta.

“well then why’d you make us come here if it was just a bet between you two?” haechan asked.

“to meet mark.. and to see where i’ve reached and where he is.”

“wait, so you know where mark is?”

yuta slowly started nodding and smiled. “well, yeah.”

“w-where is he?”

“he lives up in the mountains now, probably works in some rich guys house or something.”

johnny and haechan turn to each other and smile, they’re gonna go find their friend.

“[name], are you ready to get the dress?!” your mother screams up the stairs even though you really aren’t that far away.

“yeah mom, just gimme a minute!” it’s been five years since you got your engineering degree. you got a good job, with good money, and a good life. but, something’s always been missing from your life, something that stops you from feeling like everything was worth it. you don’t like to think it, but it’s mark. mark was someone who you hated so much in your first year, you didn’t think you would make it to graduation. your past with mark lee is strange, to say the least. you never want to admit that you found yourself falling for him in your last year. he had you thinking your life was going to be amazing forever, that you would fill the gap that been empty this whole time.

yet, here you are, about to go pick up a dress for a wedding you really, really don’t want to be apart of.

your own.

you see, you thought that getting your degree and showing that you can take care of yourself would bypass the need to get you married off to another wealthy family like yourselves, clearly not as your father doesn’t have a son and needed someone to pass his college down to, it’s been passed down by his father and his father before that and his father bef- you get the point. but they thought the best idea was to get you married. it was supposed to be your sister, but she convinced your parents that they can try again with you after she found a man, an art student, to be precise, to marry instead of your family friends son, doyoung. the same doyoung who is going to be your husband in a few days.

you miss all of you friends and especially mark. maybe you wouldn’t feel so lonely if you had kept messaging mark. a little bit after graduation, you and mark got into a fight, something about him not spending enough time with you. you can barely remember what it was about, so clearly it wasn’t important enough to be the reason your whole life changed. the last message he ever sent you was asking for forgiveness and saying something about how you should leave with him. he said he had something to tell you. but of course, you were stubborn and didn’t even check his messages until a week after and when you tried to reply, you found out he blocked you. you don’t remember his number anymore, even though about six years ago it was one you thought you could never forget.

you think of johnny and haechan. two of the funniest guys you knew. haechan was great to study with and always had a great supply of energy drinks in his bag for those all-nighters. johnny was great for advice and pep talks before big exams, if it wasn’t for him your sure you would’ve pissed yourself during your final.

but, we’re they ever really your friends? mark’s blocked you and nobody knows if he is alive or dead, and johnny and haechan slowly but surely fell out of your grasp, the less and less the phone calls and hangouts got, the more you wanted everything to go back to the way it was. when mark was here.

your phone dings, pulling you out of your trance. it’s your sister, texting you that she’s outside waiting to go dress shopping with you, wedding dress shopping.

your phone reads 2:23pm, September 5th.

a/n : yay this is gonna be really good i hope, also it’s my first kpop fic i’m sorry if it’s bad, the whole fic will be out soon but i don’t have a date. honestly if this flops i might not post it lol. also you will find out why they call him silencer later :)! if you wanna be on my tag list for when this drops just ask :)

BYE 😘

#mark lee x reader #mark lee #nct fic #nct x reader #mark x reader #johnny x reader #nct mark #haechan x reader #yuta x reader #doyoung x reader #johnny nct #haechan #yuta #nct 127 #nct dream #nct #mark lee fluff #mark smut #mark angst #mark #kpop #kpop fic

[everythingne]

marketing ploy - ln4 ch7

Lando recovers. McLaren and Red Bull own up. Olivia and Lando decide the future, and give Oscar a heart attack while doing so. We get our happy ending.

piastri!oc x lando norris, bestfriends brother/fake dating

warnings/notes: hospital visits, mentioned injuries, loopiness from medication, pregnancy/sex jokes, media being bitches, lando going 'guys i gotta keep her' and doing the absolute MOST lmao, this is also TECHNICALLY the last chapter but im gonna write more for olivia and lando most def (also olivia will feature as oscars sister in other fics bc i love her)

prev |

-

I haven't run in years.

I can feel the burn of the air in my lungs as I force them open, adrenaline making every rib shake as I suck in a breath and force it back out. My shoes slam into the floor of the paddocks, sending jolts up my legs as I whisk my bag over my shoulder and 'just go' as Christian had said. My mind is swimming with a thousand thoughts. What if he was seriously injured? He was able to walk, but he collapsed, was it his legs? Or his ribs? What if it's his back? Or his arms? How long will he be out? Is this a whole-season issue or just a few weeks?

Fuck, I cannot be thinking about this right now.

I sweep the room quickly to make sure I have everything, patting my pockets to check for my phone--which is nestled in the back left pocket of my jeans, before whirling around and out of the room.

Once I'm out of the paddocks and towards the exits, where it opens a bit more, the wind whisks into my skin and bites me as I use one hand to dig through the side pocket to find Lando's car keys. I can't steady my hands, even when I'm trying to control their shake, they just get worse. Whether it's fear or anxiety, I find it plain annoying as I struggle to get the small keychain out of my bag. Lando had driven me here from the hotel and shoved the keys in my bag since he didn't walk in with his bag and didn't want to lose the car keys.

Luckily, he had, because talking to anyone in this state would be a bust. I could feel my attitude snipping at my heart as people shouted my name at me. I couldn't stop. I had to find Lando. I knew what hospital he'd be taken to, I had to get there in one piece.

And it was going to be hard with the fucking media right here.

A few reporters try to follow me, but I'm able to slip through the crowds like water. Once I make it to the parking lot, a woman steps in front of me with her camera held high and I shout.

"Can you fucking move?!" And shove her to the side as I zip out of the lot. Fuck the standards, fucking being polite, I'll ask for forgiveness later. And apologize, probably.

Throwing my bag haphazardly into the car, I follow suit and slam the door. There's time here for me to scream, cry, and rage in semi-private, but I bite back the bubble in my throat, throwing my seatbelt on and turning on the car's engine. I wait no time to slam the car forward into first gear, pulling out of the lot with shaking hands. My hands slip with sweat as I try when I remember his McLaren's manual. Cursing, I force myself to revert back to the car I drove in high school as my hands dance across the car in perfected practice.

Thank god I still have that going for me.

The highway is empty, where I thought there'd be lines of traffic there are only a few sparse cars. I slam the car as hard as it can go, watching the ticking of the speedometer, 50... 60... 70... 80...

I look behind me, merging into the fast lane and gunning it even harder. The car sings, and I feel an odd rush of momentary euphoria.

I hit around 165kpm at some point. The car doesn't even shake, it seemingly glides along with my movements, I hear sirens, I don't know if they're for me but I'm not staying to find out. I press harder, merging to the off-ramp and taking it, barely registering what's around me as I slam on my brakes and slip into the traffic near the hospital.

It feels good to drive like that. Maybe I should get back into racing at some point.

Once the McLaren is parked in a back corner of the hospital lot, I grab my bag, rip myself out of the car, and slam it shut, and triple-check it's locked. I turn and book it into the hospital, trying to breathe steady enough to keep myself from losing my shit. It feels like I can't run fast enough, slipping into the hospital and around people who dodge my clearly rushed pace. I pause in front of a desk, panicked and out of breath when someone comes to my side.

"Hi, honey, who are you lookin' for?" A kind nurse says, her hand finding my arm to apply soothing pressure as she notices the fear in my movements. I thought I was hiding it better than I was, I guess. I take a slow breath and let the shake in my hands come in, no longer holding everything back.

"Lando Norris, he just came in with Formula One?" I ask and the woman nods. She asks to see my ID and I fish out my license and Red Bull card to verify my employment.

"Olivia!" A voice shouts as my items are handed back when I'm cleared, and Jon comes up to my side, pointing at my head.

"You still have your headset on." He says softly and I look him up and down, pointing at him.

"So do you," I say. We pause and fall into soft laughter as I pull the headset down to my neck. Jon takes me by the elbow further into the hospital, out of the view of some of the reporters who try to snap photos of us as they're shoved out by the security. I hadn't even seen them when I made my way inside. Through the winding halls, and down to a smaller section of the hospital, Jon brings me to the door to what I assume is Lando's room.

"He's fine." Jon starts with, which eases me immediately, "He's a bit banged up, they think he might have broken or bruised one of his ribs. He's really out of it, the painkillers made him super loopy. Just a forewarning, he's also been dipping in and out of consciousness so don't be alarmed. It's just the painkillers."

"Is his family here yet?" I ask, looking at the door, and Jon shakes his head no once I look back at him.

"They're driving at normal speeds, so no. I don't wanna know how you got here so fast." He steps forward and knocks. A nurse pops open the door and welcomes us inside, Jon stays back while I make my way to the bedside. Lando's wearing a tee shirt and some loose sports shorts, he looks exhausted. I can see bruising on his legs as I nurse tosses the blanket over him as if trying to hide it from me.

"Here!" She pulls up a chair happily and I thank her as I sit down on it, taking my bag off and setting it on the floor, dropping my headphones in. I sigh, taking Lando's hand and feeling his pulse as if the machine that literally tells me that is lying. It feels good to feel his heart thrum under my skin and I kiss his wrist where the pulsepoint is.

"My girlfrien's not g'nna like you doin' that." Lando tries to take his hand from me, Jon snorting in the doorway. I let go of him and laughed softly, leaning up to brush his hair back from his face, the longer curls sticking to his forehead. He's still got the lines from his helmet and balaclava, and I trace one with my finger as he gives me the nastiest stink eye I've ever seen him muster.

"Hi, Lando." I croon, and he whines, slowly rolling his head to the side.

"I have a girlfriend." He states, poking my hand to push it away from him and I send him an odd look. Jon walks over and I can see he's recording, which makes a small amused smile poke at my lips.

"Lando," I laugh softly and Lando whacks my hands away softly, fighting through the weariness of his pain medication to wave his arms.

"I have a girlfriend." He pouts, laying his hands still at his side. I just laugh again, and Lando shouts in his dreary state, "It's not funny! I do!"

"Shush, shh, Lando." I stand and push my chair back a bit as I stifle my laugh into the back of my hand.

Jon calls from where he stands, attempting to help me not laugh by giving me something new to focus on, "Who's your girlfriend, Lando?"

"Olivia. Oscar's sister, which he was actually not happy about at first but I convinced him I was cool--" Lando keeps rambling on until I lift my hand and cup his cheek, running my thumb under his eye as I speak softly.

"Lando, baby, I am your girlfriend." I put a hand on my chest, "I am Olivia."

Lando blinks, eyes settling on me before he gasps and leans up to grab my face and pull me down for a litter of soft pecks to my cheeks and face. I catch myself on the bed and laugh, catching his lips as he happily grins up at me. It's all doe eyes, lovesick smiles on his lips as he keeps his hands tight on my face.

"Hi, baby." He whispers, bringing me in for another kiss and I detach one of his hands so it can rest by his side. I slowly situate him against the blankets with the help of Jon, and sit a bit closer to the head of the bed so Lando can be close enough to me. He keeps one of his hands in mine and I slowly run my thumb along his knuckles.

"Well, Mr. Norris!" A piercing voice calls, a young woman stepping into the room with a bit of an excited flourish, "You are all set! Jon's gonna look over your scans, specifically for those bruised ribs. We're thinking it'll be about three or four weeks of healing, and he's gonna make that like--workout plan and stuff with your personal doctor."

"Ah, thank you, Doctor." Lando smiles, watching as the doctor hands Jon some papers to look over. She smiles at me, a hint of recognition in her eyes.

"Olivia, right?" She asks and I nod, shaking her outstretched hand.

"I'm glad you made it here, Lando was waiting for you a bit impatiently." She kept her happy smile, rocking from foot to foot, "Kept asking us where you were, or when you'd get here. You've got a good man on your hands here, sweetheart."

"I know." My heart is bursting, "He's shown me that over and over."

--

11 JULY, ENGLAND. ↴

oliviapiastri and landonorris have posted new stories!

mclaren has made a new post!

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Thank you once again to @ oliviapiastri for taking care of our #4 and providing the team with love and some pics while he was recovering! Lando is at home now, and our official statement on the accident and other situations this season has been posted on our website.

View the story: McLaren.uk/formula1/landoolivia...

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mclaren.uk...

OFFICIAL STATEMENT ON SITUATIONS BETWEEN LANDO NORRIS AND OLIVIA PIASTRI THIS SEASON.

WRITTEN BY STEVE ATKINS (M), ON BEHALF OF ZAK BROWN (M), ANDREA STELLA (M), ALICE MCLOUGHLIN (ORBR), ASTRID MARINA (UNAFF.), ADA LUANNE (UNAFF.), CHRISTIAN HORNER (OBRB), AND HIMSELF.

On the 22nd of February this year, Lando Norris (MCLAREN F1 TEAM, DRIVER) and Olivia Piastri (ORACLE RED BULL, HEAD OF ANALYSIS) were pulled into the office of Christian Horner (ORACLE RED BULL, TEAM PRINCIPAL) in Bahrain. A deal was struck between both parties and their corresponding teams to create a fake dating scenario, capitalizing on the tensions between Oracle Red Bull Racing and the McLaren F1 Team to push ticket and merchandising sales. This fake relationship was planned to eventually leak in PR and Social Media Strategy, however, due to Norris' crash in Silverstone, the entire program has been canceled. The program was also discovered by F1 Stewards upon investigation after Olivia's reaction to the accident cemented rumors in the media of the two dating. Both the McLaren F1 Team and Oracle Red Bull are under investigation, and fines are yet to be announced.

Norris and Piastri chose not to be a part of this statement and can be expected to make their own statements in the coming weeks.

On July 9th of this year, Lando Norris was involved in an accident in the pitlane of Silverstone. Engineers have determined this was caused by an overheating of brake lines that didn't allow Norris to stop his vehicle along with worn tires. No fines have been placed at this moment.

Olivia Piastri will return to work with Red Bull remotely immediately and will be in-person by Zandvoort. Lando Norris will return to racing with McLaren by Zandvoort and will be replaced by reserve driver Bianca Bustamente for the time being. Neither Norris nor Piastri will be fined for involvement with the media stunt, or with the accident as of this moment.

20 JULY, LONDON ↴

There’s a sort of haze around me as I blink sleep from my eyes. A warm pressure on my left makes me look to the side. Lando’s face is squished against my chest, soft snores leaving his slightly parted lips and rolling across my bare skin that pokes out from under my tank top. I take a moment to take it all in, how we’d gotten here, how we were, and I can’t help but roll to pull him closer to me and curl him inside my arms as I pepper a few kisses to his hairline.

How did I ever not like him? He's a fucking saint.

Lando, a heavy sleeper until I started sleeping in the same bed, noticed immediately and grabbed my waist with groggy whines about how tired he was. I coax him back to sleep, kissing his hairline and gently massaging his back until the snores return and I smile at Lando’s sleeping face.

“Awake yet?” Oscar calls from the door, and I wave. He laughs under his breath, waving me over, and it takes a bit of grace to detach myself from Lando. Once I do, I grab one of the spare throw blankets off the floor from where Lando had kicked it and slip over to where Oscar is standing by the door as I wrap it around me to keep out the morning chill.

“He’s exhausted. I think all the stress of the season is catching up on him.” I rub sleep from my face, and Oscar nods, handing me a piece of toast like a peace offering. I take it and tilt my head at him.

“They’re fining McLaren and Red Bull a lot for this stunt. It just came out.” Oscar hums, “said it’s a breach of contract and a risk for documents to be shared amongst the teams…”

My heart jumps to my throat, and I look at Lando’s sleeping form as he rolls into where my fading body heat is still in the blankets, “they want us to split?”

“Well. Lando’s contract ends with McLaren this year.” Oscar paused to take a sip of his coffee before leaning in to whisper, “and you didn’t hear it from me, but Christian has been looking at grabbing him for a few years now.”

“Is Checo moving?” I ask because I know Max wouldn’t leave Red Bull unless we forced him out by dragging him by his ankles.

“I dunno.” Oscar grins, stepping back and whacking my shoulder, “but you can date within your garage, so.”

With that, he walks away and I turn back to Lando as he starts to stir. I lean on the doorframe and watch as he blearily blinks his eyes open, hands searching for me in the covers until he lifts his head to see me off in the doorway.

“C’mere.” he croaks, and I smile, pushing off the doorframe and walking over to sit on the edge of the bed as he wraps his arms around my waist and rests his head on my thighs.

I can’t imagine him in navy. But it might look good on him.

25TH JULY, LONDON ↴

“is Max positive?” Lando pokes his head into the kitchen doorway, looking at the island where I’m staring at my laptop. I look up and shrug, sending an email back to Christian about the fines and the media being on his ass for the whole stunt.

“Kylie said it’ll be here in five minutes,” I reply, refreshing my email as if that will make the minutes suddenly not matter and for the email to pop up. Apparently, Max had gotten sick right before the next race. While I was home with Lando to make sure he wasn’t being strenuous and to keep media off my back until everything died down, they had to do a COVID test on Max and isolate him just in case.

“It would suck if he's out for his home race this year." Lando wanders into the kitchen and pulls up a stool next to me as he sets his phone down on the counter. He’s been living in Oscar and my apartment for the past few days, just until next week when he goes back to McLaren's training center for a bit to do a lot of physical therapy before getting in the car next weekend for Zandvoort.

Oscar calls my phone, and I stand up, telling Lando to keep checking my email as I make my way over to the other side of the kitchen to grab my phone.

“Yes, bitch?” I say into the phone and Oscar laughs at my sharp tone.

“Just checking in on Lando for Zak,” Oscar says and I look behind me and my boyfriend—like, actual boyfriend now, and smile.

“He’s been fine, ribs are still a little sore. I had him doing cardio earlier and he was faring pretty well so I—I think Jon said he can go back to training a bit earlier. He’s still coming back in Zandvoort though.” I hum, “how’s Bia faring?”

“She’s having the time of her life. I gotta start bringing her around more. You guys really would be an unstoppable duo.” Oscar laughs, “But good, Jon is off today so I’ll let Zak know to reach out to him and ask.”

“Ollie!” Lando whines and I turn.

“Yess?” I draw out as I walk to his side.

“It's negative.”

“Oh, thank fucking god.” I breathe, “That makes everything a lot easier for me.”

Oscar is quiet on the line for a few moments before asking in a small voice, “What’s negative?”

“Max’s COVID test. He’s just got the flu.” I say without thinking much of my brother's hesitance before he lets out a soft laugh.

“I thought you took a pregnancy test or something, I was about to start judging the type of cardio you’ve been doing,” Oscar says and I shout,

“Dude!”

“I feel like that’s a reasonable thing to be worried about!”

“Oh my god, we’ve only been actually dating dating for like two weeks!” I groan and Lando sends me a confused look, so I pop Oscar onto speakerphone.

“It only takes like—five minutes to make a kid!”

“Hello?!” Lando shouts and I sink to the floor in a fit of laughter, trying to bite back the volume of my laughter before Lando shouts, "Do you think I fucked your sister?!"

"No! Stop! Stop talking Lando!" Oscar shouts over the phone and now I'm hysterical on the floor in tears as Lando tries to backtrack and Oscar keeps shouting for him to just-- "Shut the fuck up, Lando!"

"Both are you are going to kill me, I'm losing it." I wheeze from where I'm now lying on the floor, Lando laughing alongside me as Oscar groans.

"First the house, now this?" He says and Lando makes some noise in the back of his throat as I manage to calm myself down enough to stand.

"What about a house?" I wipe under my eyes, leaning my head on Lando's shoulder as his arm wraps around my shoulder and he kisses my head, his fingers poking at my side and making me squirm as I push him away with a laugh.

"Nothing, love." Lando sighs, "Remember when they gave me those painkillers that made me super loopy the first night, and Oscar was watching over me?"

I nod, remembering how halfway through my grocery trip he had to call me because Lando was so loopy he thought that I was gone forever. And he had literally cried tears of joy when I answered Oscar's phone call.

"Well, I kinda... oh my god this is so embarrassing." Lando sighs and Oscar tells him he now has to tell the story and Lando hides his face in my hair as he recounts, "I was looking at apartments in London for us."

"Stop, oh my god." I whine, turning to Lando so I can kiss his cheeks and his forehead, pulling him down when he tries to move back so I can't, "That's so cute."

"No, it's embarrassing." He grumbles and I laugh, pulling him closer and kissing along his jaw and then the apples of his cheeks and the tip of his nose.

"I wouldn't mind that," I murmur to him and his eyes widen to the size of dinner plates, his hands find my waist and he presses a kiss to my lips.

"Ew, I don't like that I can hear him kiss you over the phone." Oscar groans, "I'm hanging up now, don't do anything too strenuous."

"Fuck you, Oscar!" I laugh as the call hangs up, Lando keeping his arms firmly around my waist. We sit in silence for a few moments before his hand ghosts up the side of my neck to take my jaw in his palm, thumb hooking on my chin to pull me down to look at him.

"Would you seriously not mind?" He asks softly and I grin, leaning over to pop a quick kiss on his lips.

"Getting to have you with me every day?" I bring our foreheads together, his curls against my own as his hands find my waist to hold, my hands resting on his shoulders as I grin and flutter my eyes closed, "That's paradise."

"I'll literally buy one right now, don't even test me." He groans, pulling me closer and I laugh.

"Let's get Zandvoort out of the way first, yeah?"

JULY 28TH, TWITTER ↴

AUGUST 27TH, THE NETHERLANDS ↴

Luckily for me, I made it into the paddocks long before any media people. Max welcomes me with a slap on the back as I welcome him to his home race, and then I'm greeted by the Ferrari drivers once again as Checo laughs at my bewildered expression.

"I'm gonna tell the Tifosi on you both." I huff, but let both Charles and Carlos wrap me in tight hugs of congratulations as we laugh. Once the two are carted off to go do their actual jobs, I get settled in my chair and glance down at my desk before laughing.

A vase of freshly cut flowers and a little cup of coffee sits there, waiting for me, and I turn to look at Max who just grins.

"He's determined." Is all Max says before slipping away as he's called over to get dressed. I laugh and send Lando a quick thank you message, before taking a sip of the perfectly made coffee and settling down to finally get back into gear.

"Welcome back," A voice chimes and I glance up to see Christian in the doorway. I offer him a small smile and a nod.

"Good to be here." Is all I say in reply.

-

Lando and Max seriously just want to kill each other in these cars. Max takes the win at his home race by some insignificantly small number, they had to literally watch multiple playbacks to see who crossed first, which means Lando is still in good running for World Champion. Luckily, somehow a mix of car issues and the pure energy from Oscar, Charles, Checo, and Carlos managed to keep Max in P2 for most races, leveling out the chances for Lando to recover his lost points.

As soon as most drivers have returned to their paddocks, I'm mid-packing up when I'm ushered off by Logan, who finished P6. He quite literally hoists me off my feet and carries me into the crowd for the podium. A few other drivers lag back, and I look over to Oscar, who'd finished P4 behind Charles.

"Where's Lando?!" Logan shouts over my head at Oscar, who points, and then leans over to me.

"Here's that kiss they promised you'd have to do," He shouts in my ear and I laugh as the two lift me so I can be partially over the barrier holding back the audience from the racers. I wave Lando down and he laughs, slipping away from a reporter as he finishes an interview. Biting off his glove as he walks over, he drops it into his helmet and then grabs my jaw with that now gloveless hand, pulling me into his lips for a quick peck. I don't let him leave though, grabbing his jaw and pulling him back in for a few more deeper kisses.

Oscar cheers and Logan laughs before Lando secures one arm around me to pull me over the barrier. Logan and Oscar immediately hop over after me.

There's warmth in my chest as Lando keeps his hand on my lower back, pulling me through the crowd of drivers and up to where Max and Charles stand. A giddy excitement thrums across my skin.

I could do this forever.

--

SEPTEMBER 3RD, INSTAGRAM ↴

oliviapiastri made a new post!

liked by oscarpiastri, landonorris, charlesleclerc, and 876k others...

oliviapiastri: 6 months <3

charlesleclerc: damn y'all move fast

oscarpiastri: DUDE THIS IS THE FIRST TIME WE ARENT LIVING TOGETHER IN OUR WHOLE LIVES. CHEERS!

maxverstappen: cheers!! looks lovely

user1: THEY LIVE TOGETHER?

alexalbon: DUDE ITS BEEN SIX MONTHS??

⤷ landonorris: I KNOW??

landonorris: omg i can post this publically now

landonorris: i LOVE YOU OLIVIA<333

user2: lando going bat shit in these comments is so real

landonorris: I LOVE U SM DARLING

⤷ oscarpiastri: i liked it better before the FIA made them announce it. i wanna go back in time to before that happened.

⤷ oliviapiastri: get me a tardis then

⤷ bbcdoctorwho: we can make that work ...

⤷ oliviapiastri: HELLO?

user4: dying dead gone deceased i love them

landonorris posted a new story!

#f1 fanfic #ln4 fic #f1 smau #f1 fic #lando norris au #lando norris fanfic #lando norris fic #lando norris imagine #lando norris x oc #oscar piastri fic

[sorencd]

could we get dating wilson hcs😼

ofc 😏😏😏 he's so pookie wookie i lovf him

dating wilson headcannons

you two love watching sitcoms every night (if the both of you aren't tired) like seinfeld, the mary tyler moore show, fasier and friends while cuddling in bed! usually since he's the first one to leave in the morning, he'd prepare your coffee for you and wake you up with a kiss on the forehead, telling you that he's off to work and u should wake up soon. he’s like ur personal alarm clock!! he even calls a few minutes later from his office just to make sure you really woke up, because you have a habit of waking up but as soon as you check the time and decide that it's still early, you would immediately fall back asleep so easily. he’s amazed honestly.

"yeah, 'm awake.."

"are you sure?"

"...mmh.."

"you're still in bed aren't you?"

"no..'m up i swear.."

so you end up having no choice but to get ready for work because now your brain is no longer sleepy :( you love trying new restaurants and food with him. if there's a new restaurant, no matter how bad the reviews are, that won't really stop you two from eating at the place, you'd still go there. but it does often result to never returning there ever again. and when you don't feel like going out of the comfort of your home, you would instead cook something up together. matching aprons and all that stuff!! while preparing the food, u can never cut the veggies properly without some good music playing in the background! there'd be songs from artists like the beatles, abba, huey lewis and the news, daryl hall & john oates, and the beegees!

i can see him singing and dancing to 'more than a woman' while straining the pulp from the tomato soup and you have to get him to stop moving too much or he'll burn himself in the process.

"james!"

"i know that in a thousand years, i'd fall in love with you again~"

"be careful! it's going to pour out!"

if u don't know how to play poker, wilson will gladly play something like monopoly or uno instead. though monopoly is more fun with a lot of people, he’s happy to do anything with you! one time, you played snakes and ladders instead of uno and each time wilson went down the snake he'd shout 'what!?' and sneakily try to change the number he rolled on the die without u noticing. he always plays like his life is on the line.

"another five?!"

"down you go, james!" you evilishly laughed and moved his piece for him, feeling triumphant. while you were dancing in joy because you're so close to winning, he tried flipping the die.

"i saw that."

"no you didn't."

stealing his clothes is a must! you've reached a point where u even hide his stuff as soon as they're fresh out of the dryer so he won't beat you to his own shirts. singing doesn't only limit to the kitchen, it also extends to the car and late night drives after work! you two would have songs blasting and the windows rolled down!!

masterlist

© sorencd . 2023 ─ do not copy, repost, translate or claim any of my works as your own.

#james wilson #james wilson x reader #house md

[uzumaki-rebellion]

“The Offering” Part 1 of 3 (A Namor of Talokan Fic)

My first Namor story! Masterlist HERE.

Summary:

A young Wakandan woman attends an annual Mama Wati celebration to honor the sea spirit and surf with friends. She encounters a strange man in the ocean who claims to be from a land as powerful as hers. A man who calls himself, Namor.

NSFW. Smut. 18+. (7,330 words) Namor x Black Female OC

"You're ruling the way that I move And I breathe your air You only can rescue me This is my prayer"

Sade – "Cherish The Day"

It was the day of offerings for Mama Wati.

No time of the year ever made Lebadi happier than the first days of summer in Wakanda when the Border Tribe region celebrated the deities of the deep waters. Bast, Sekmet, and other higher powers were recognized inland, but on the sea, Mama Wati ruled everything. From the fishermen and fisherwomen to the military patrols on the ocean by the military, and everyday citizens, the big water was respected and revered. Mama Wati held sway there, and the annual offerings and celebration excited Lebadi beyond belief. Birnin S'Yan faced the sea and thousands of Wakandans made the trek across the mountains to the shorelands to dance, pay homage, and leave offerings to the mother of the sea.

Lebadi loved the trip because she loved to surf with her friends.

Every year T'limiwati—Revering the Mother of Waters—started the journey of packing up her father's Stealthmaster van with surfboards, firewood, and food. Lebadi drove around to pick up her four friends before they stopped at a temple to pay for blessed offerings to put into the sea. Mama Wati liked sugary treats, blue flowers, and small puff pastries shaped like seashells.

The drive would only take two hours, so her friends, N'ku, Pule, Ausi, and Benya would sing songs with her, eat snacks, and hope to find decent parking.

"We should've taken the monorail," Benya complained, as Lebadi tried her best to find a parking situation large enough for her father's van, but not too far away for them to trudge along with all of their gear.

"Not with all this stuff," N'Ku huffed.

"How about I drop you all off to find a suitable camping spot, and I'll catch up later," Lebadi offered.

Her friends agreed, and she pulled up near a sea wall where they offloaded their things. She happily drove away, knowing she wouldn't have to lug anything, not even her own stuff once she parked. Mama Wati must've known they had a great offering for her because Lebadi was able to snag a parking spot that was only a twenty-minute walk back to the beach.

The pilgrimage that year ran deep. The splendid weather, warm water, and balmy temperature brought out a dense wave of Wakandans for the celebration. Lebadi ran her fingers through her shoulder-length goddess braids she decorated with shells and blue flowers. It was the perfect style for swimming and surfing in seawater. Her skin was already turning a darker red-brown hue from the sun as she tapped her kimoyo beads against her father's car, sending up a protective shield that kept sand, sun, and seawater from damaging the paint.

Tugging on her short shorts that her plump ass cheeks tried to swallow, she checked her bikini top to make sure her plum-sized breasts weren't popping out like they were in the car. The top was a size too small on purpose, but it gave her the desired effect she wanted on N'Ku. He checked her out in the car despite his insistence that they stay friends after a not-so-successful try at a relationship. She thought that being out of college would make her love life easier, but the men around her were pitiful.

The walk to the beach thrilled her by seeing all the elaborate altars and gifts being brought to the beach for Mama Wati. She wished her grandmother was still alive. Their family used to show off by building a giant altar, but once Umi became an ancestor, her family didn't go to the ocean anymore. A pity. Umi taught Lebadi how to surf and she was going to keep up the tradition of surfing for Mama Wati until she was an old woman, too.

"Kgopo molemo!" Lebadi cried out when she caught up to her friend's campsite.

Wicked Good indeed.

They found the perfect location up against a sea bluff that protected them against any wind and was also far enough away from dense crowds hunkered down on the sand. There was a lot of dried and rotten seaweed separating them from folks that attracted flies and a subtle stench that was bearable to them, but unpleasant to others. She didn't care. They had room and privacy for their tents and boards. Gazing across the shore, families erected altars and there was a large old-fashioned blue and white boat decorated with blue flowers and filled with gifts for the sea, waiting to launch beyond the waves.

Wiggling out of her shorts, Lebadi made a show of jiggling her backside. N'Ku ignored her, his eyes fixated on the waves. They were big enough. Over six feet high. She held a hand above her eyes, shading them from the sun to see how far out the swells were, and how fast they were rushing in. Her board rested on her beach blanket, already waxed and ready to go. Checking her kimoyo, they had about ninety minutes to surf before the official ceremony began. They all stretched and put on rashguards, except for N'Ku and Ausi. He had on a full black wetsuit, and Ausi wore a short dark blue wetsuit that hugged her heavy curves.

"Last one in!" Lebadi shouted, kicking up sand.

The others chased after her with their boards and they spent a cracking good time snagging waves left and right until her kimoyo lit up. It was time for the offering ceremony. Lebadi twirled her finger in the air to let the others know it was time to stop. She paddled toward the shore fast when a wave lifted her. She popped up on her board like a rocket shot, balanced her arms, and took a quick glide along the lip of the wave, doing a three-sixty spin before dropping down. Her fingers skimmed the wall of bluish-green water that almost curled over into a nice liquid tunnel, but she overcompensated her balance and fell headfirst, knocking into Pule, whose husky voice shouted her name before he plummeted into the water too.

Soaking wet and full of laughter, the five friends scurried to their campsite to change into ocean-blue cotton tunics. Carrying the small offering basket they purchased at the temple, they delivered it to the large ceremonial boat. Several elders watched over the boat and accepted the gifts people brought. Seven djembe and talking drum leaders beat out a loud drum call and an old woman draped in an eggshell white dress with aquamarine flowers in her hair sang an ancient song to Mama Wati that Lebadi knew by heart. Two men and a woman paddled the offerings away and all the spectators onshore watched it sail far out to sea. The elder continued to sing and in the distance, they humbly observed all the offerings dropped in the water by the small boat crew.

When ululations ripped out from the throats of the onlookers, the drummers kicked up their pounding and Lebadi danced around her friends. They took time to admire the altar displays by families who decorated their own praise for Mama Wati. There were so many dotting the seawall.

They shared a fancy lunch together, and Lebadi relaxed into the fun for the rest of the day. By early evening, families left the beach for the inner-city entertainment. Soon, it was time to spark up a campfire and roast seasoned chicken kebabs and yams after a good surf day.

Lebadi reached into her open tent-flap door for the small paper napkin filled with sugar and special spices for Mama Wati that her grandmother used to make. She pulled off her tunic, revealing her bikini again.

"Be right back," she said.

"Hey, Lebadi. You're not surfing again, are you?" N'Ku asked as she lifted her board from the bluff wall.

"Just putting something out in the water for my Umi. Won't be long," she said.

N'Ku nodded and watched her carry her board back to the ocean. She felt self-conscious about her booty because she knew he was checking it out. Glancing back, she waved at him. He shook his dark locs threaded with shells, and she admired the lean muscular physique he showed off with his delicious sable skin. Bright white teeth gleamed at her. Her heart skipped a little. Maybe something could jump off later.

The far side of the beach was cleared of people, and the dull sound of music and carnival festivities echoed far behind her. Sunlight glinted off of the water with a final showy display of magenta and a sliver of blue for the sunset. She dropped her board on the water and skimmed over small waves, her strong arms paddling toward the orange sun. Straddling her board, she checked her leash, loosening it before she pulled out Umi's offering. She sprinkled the mixture gently into the water. The sugar dissolved, but the spices floated before being washed further out to sea.

"Mama Wati, I know this is your day, but my Umi, she was special to me. She taught me about you… she taught me how to love the ocean and ride the waves. Forgive me for honoring her with you. I don't know when I will be out to the sea again. Bast be blessed in your holy waters. Yibambe."

Lebadi dipped her fingers in the cooling water, cleansing her hands of sugar and spices. Reaching into her hair, she unfastened a flower and dropped it for a small wave to catch. It floated around her surfboard and a peace came over her. She sprawled out flat on her board and let her eyes gaze at the languid water, feeling lazy and free. Drifting off to a mini-sleep from a long day, her board rocked and lifted, gently pacifying her mind.

Minutes later, she opened her eyes and nearly fell off of her board. Two piercing dark brown eyes stared back at her from the water. They were attached to a handsome young man's tawny brown face. His ears were pointed and his dark wavy hair sat plastered around his forehead. A jade septum piercing captured her attention, and then her eyes drifted down to look at the most kissable lips that were parted slightly. His gaze had her transfixed. She held her breath, and he reached for her hand.

Lebadi sat up quickly, and a fresh wave rocked her, throwing her off the board. She splashed around, looking for the man, and glimpsed his feet diving below the surface. Were those tiny wings on his ankles?

She gagged on seawater because her mouth sat agape, and the shock of being spied on subsided. The man wasn't Wakandan. He didn't look like a citizen of their border country neighbors of Canaan or Azania. The man clearly wasn't African of any kind. He didn't look like the colonizers she learned about either, their pale flesh naked and strange like food without seasoning.

Something moved under her.

Lebadi scrambled onto her board and tried to catch the next wave back to shore, berating herself for not hitting her kimoyo quickly enough to film the man on a holo pic. She tapped it before she popped up on her board. A small wave rose and Lebadi rushed to snag it, but her leash stretched behind her and it dragged her off her board. She smacked hard into the water. A dorsal fin popped up, and terror hardened like cement in her stomach.

A great white shark.

Normally, they were confined to Southern Africa, but the shark circling her missed the memo. She struck the water to scare it away, and amazed herself by not screaming. Panic would overtake her if she did. She lunged for her board again and pulled herself out of the water, lying flat and still. The fin came around again and she could only guess at how big it was under the dark water.

"Mama Wati, help me," she whispered to the sea.

A thrashing in the water scared her shitless. She wanted to paddle away, but her arms would look like a tasty snack. Teeth chattering, Lebadi took a chance, sank her arms in, and stroked. A wave lifted her, and she jumped up quickly, focusing on getting to shore. She did no tricks or special moves, just rode the wave straight. Her board fins struck something, but she kept her balance, twisting her body to maintain control until she arrived on the wet sand that snaked between her toes.

"Holy Bast!" she shouted.

Running with her board back to her campsite, she kicked up a fuss. Her friends were tipsy from sharing a bottle of liquor.

"A great white attacked me!"

Her friends stared at her from around the fire. Benya held out the liquor to her.

"Well, shit!" N'Ku said.

Lebadi took a swig of plum liquor, and her friends followed her back to the water. They used lights from their kimoyos to illuminate the waves, but there was nothing out there.

"There was a strange man out there, too. I wonder if he was injured," Lebadi said.

"I don't see anything. Maybe it swam away," N'Ku said.

"I hope so. I'd hate to come all this way and can't surf because Jaws is swimming around," Ausi teased.

They searched the water with her for ten minutes until they grew bored.

"Maybe it was a dolphin, yeah?" N'Ku said.

"No. I know a dolphin fin when I see it. That was a shark out there," Lebadi said.

"And a little merman," Benya snickered.

Lebadi threw up her hands, and they returned to the fire.

More drinking commenced, with Lebadi partaking heavily, and after midnight, they were inside their tents asleep. Everyone turned in except for Lebadi. She let the fire burn down to the hot, glowing red coals before she took a walk along the shore away from their tents. Moonlight turned the peaks of the water into glowing white slashes of silvery light. Checking her kimoyo beads, they didn't do a great job of capturing anything because she didn't change the setting to get a wide 3D view of her surroundings.

Wait… there!

She froze the image. It floated in front of her, and she took her index finger and thumb to enlarge a section and cleared it up.

His eyes!

The static image seemed so strange. Water surrounded his face, with his hair swirling around. His body sat hunched forward like he was riding something…

She covered her mouth with her hand. The great white shark was underneath him. He straddled it like she did her own surfboard. There were no more images better than that one. Perplexed, Lebadi glanced at the water. Moonlight bathed her in tranquil blush-white light, and the soft sound of foamy water tickled her ears. He couldn't be human. Not with those ears. She could swear that she saw non-human feet, too.

She gasped.

He was there.

In the water.

Lebadi stepped forward until her toes were coated with foam and surging water, but she remembered the shark and kept the water at knee level.

"Hey!" she shouted, waving at him.

She didn't expect him to come to her, but he did, striding out of the sea in small tight trunks dripping wet. His hair was slicked back from his face, and it allowed her to observe him in the moonlight and the glow from her kimoyo beads. He was just under six feet, maybe three inches taller than her in comparison. His eyes made him seem larger than life, and their darkness penetrated every inch of her. His shorts hid nothing of the dick print bulge. He studied her too, taking peeks at her body and the lack of clothing she had on with her tiny bikini set. An elaborate choker necklace draped around his neck and she could make out gold cowrie shells, small beads, and strings of—

"Is that vibranium?" she said.

The shock of her tone startled him, and he looked at his jewelry.

Wakanda was the only nation that had vibranium.

"You're bleeding," she said, pointing to his side.

He turned around, and she saw the deep gash in his back.

"How did that happen?" she asked.

He pointed at her and his lips quirked up. Was he smirking?

"Me? How?" she asked.

He moved his hands to tell a story, and she made out that her surfboard had crossed over him and her board fins underneath cut him up.

"Can you understand me, or am I just thinking you can?" she said.

"Tene Tin na’atik … I understand," he said.

His voice scared her. It was forceful and slightly seductive. There was an accent, but she gawked at his ability to know her language. She eased back from him slowly.

"We are isolated from other places. How can you know Wakandan? Where did you get that vibranium? Did you steal that from us?"

Lebadi's voice grew haughty and protective of her country's secret resource.

"My people have our own."

"Rhino shit! It's native to our country. You stole—"

His hand went around her throat, preventing her from talking or yelling for help.

"My people don't have to steal," he said through gritted teeth.

"Take your hand off of me."

His head tilted and she swallowed as best she could.

"Watch what you say to me," he said.

The growl in his throat made her stomach jump. He released his hold on her and she rubbed her neck.

"The shark didn't attack you," she said.

"It knows better than to bite me. I raised it."

"Like a pet? Serious?"

He looked over her shoulder, and she glanced behind herself. N'Ku was up and about, kicking sand on the coals. Lebadi turned back to the man, and he was gone.

"Wait! Don't go!" she called out.

She ran toward the water. There was no splash. She would've heard that. Looking around, there was only the high bluff he couldn't climb up. He didn't run down the opposite side of the beach either.

"What are you doing way over there?" N'Ku cried out.

She ambled over to him on the cool sand.

"Walking around. Couldn't sleep."

"Stay close, yeah?" he said.

He rubbed her hair, flicked one of her decorative hair shells, and crawled back into his tent. She walked back to where she last saw the stranger.

"Where did you go? Am I drunk?"

The plum liquor had been strong. Maybe she had too much. She turned toward the bluff and—

"Fuck!" she shouted.

The man stood there, a sly smile on his face.

"How did you… do you have a camouflage shield or something…?"

"Bix a k’ a’aba’? What is your name?" he asked.

"Tell me yours first."

He stepped closer to Lebadi until his nose was an inch from her face.

"Eeen kaah-bah eh … K'uk'ulkan by my people. My enemies know me as Namor."

"So what am I to you?" Lebadi asked.

"I don't know yet. Who are you?"

"Lebadi."

He circled her, and the skin on her arms pricked with goosebumps. Not because it was cold, but because she found his behavior unnerving. He sniffed her hair, then stood in front of her again.

"Where are you from?" she asked.

He held a hand up to stop her from talking.

"I am looking for someone. A man was out in the water earlier. He dropped offerings into the sea with other people. I need to find him."

"I don't know anyone from earlier. I'm here with my friends to celebrate Mama Wati."

"Your God?"

"The mother of the waters," she said.

"Ixchel."

Lebadi shrugged, not understanding the new language he spoke.

"You are not afraid of me," he said.

"You rode a great white shark. If you wanted me dead, I would've been dead out there."

The intensity of his gaze became too much.

"I can't help you," she said.

She turned away.

"Would you like to ride him?"

Lebadi laughed in her mind at the nasty thought that ran through her brain about him when he said that. He had a solid body that would tempt any woman to climb on it. Fuck that shark.

"Me ride a shark?" she said.

Lebadi sucked her teeth.

"I'd rather know why you're here. What do you want from that man you're looking for? Are you a spy for the Americans?" she said.

King T'Chaka had begun a series of visits to the United States and the Wakandans worried about the west encroaching on their secrets. Lebadi pulled her hands in toward her chest. This was a national security situation. Liquor had her slipping up big time. She tapped her kimoyo to summon the authorities. Namor pulled on her beads and they fell apart, dropping onto the sand with soft plops. She dropped to her knees and gathered them back up onto her wrist. He held one away from her.

Lebadi ran back toward her camp, her hair shells jangling across her neck as she fled, and Namor's right arm encircled her waist. His left arm pointed above his head and they both lifted off the ground, racing upward fast, flying past the high bluff until they reached the top. Air breezed past her body and she closed her eyes from her fear of falling out of his grip. He dropped her on the soft tufts of grass at the edge. Too frightened to move, she stared at Namor's body floating in the air near the ledge. The small wings on his ankles fluttered like a hummingbird's wings. He glared down at her, daring Lebadi to move. She stayed on her rump.

"I must find this man soon. His name is Owiti Kiprono—"

"That is not a Wakandan name. I think you came to the wrong country," she said.

His eyes narrowed, and his lips became a tight line.

"I'm not lying. That name sounds Kenyan. You made a mistake coming here," she said.

She scooted backward slowly, and he crouched down to meet her eyes again.

"I cannot stay here long," he said.

"I don't know what to tell you."

He closed his eyes and sighed. Plopping down next to her, he plucked at the grass and threw it over the side of the bluff. That action alone made him seem so young. He looked her age, perhaps early to mid-twenties. There was peach-fuzz soft facial hair, and despite the maturity in his dark eyes, Namor acted as if he had a curfew, like he had to do something before his parents found out. How would an elder punish a flying fishman?

"You live out there?" she asked, her chin lifted toward the sea.

"I must leave," he said, raising up.

Lebadi grabbed his arm and held him. His skin felt cool and smooth, the muscle in his arm hard. He looked down at her hand gripping his flesh and jerked it away.

"Sorry," she said.

They sat together in silence, the crash of waves growing more frequent as a high tide rolled in. Far out in the sea, giant swells teased her eyes.

"You want to be on that?" he asked, nodding toward the large swells.

"Too far. I have a flying glider board that can take me out there, but it broke. We aren't allowed to go beyond five miles with our tech in the open."

"Because you hide yourselves?"

"Yes. If people outside knew about what we have…"

"My people are the same. It is forbidden… forbidden to be so far away… here."

"What do you call your home?" she asked.

"Talokan."

"Talokan… K'uk'ulkan… Ixchel …" she said, sounding out his language.

She looked at his ears and then gazed down at the wings on his feet.

"Do all your people—?"

"No. I am different."

She left the word mutant alone, not wanting to offend him. He flexed his fingers, stood up, and his body rose above her, those wings whirring fast.

"Wait, you can't leave me up here!"

Lebadi jumped up, and he flew past the ledge with a sly smile on his face.

"It'll take me forever to walk all the way down and back to my camp!" she whined.

"I need time to disappear before you tell the others."

"You haven't really done anything for me to tell them about."

He moved his hands in a wide arc while flying, and she put a hand on her hip.

"Okay, yeah… the flying thing is gossip-worthy. But you didn't hurt me, and nothing major happened… wait!"

He floated back six feet, and she stomped her feet.

"Come on!" she said.

"I like when you pout," he teased.

A smile lit up his face, and the moonlight gave his skin an eerie glow. She didn't want to grovel, but she also didn't want to make a long ass trek either.

"I'm scared," she said in a hushed tone.

"You faced a shark and didn't scream."

"I was in shock."

Namor held his hands palms up.

"Take my hands," he said.

Lebadi shook her head, but her feet had a mind of their own walking toward the ledge. Her hands ignored her brain signals too and reached for him. Clasping his hands, she curled her fingers in his and let out a nervous breath. Stepping out into the air with her right foot, she made the mistake of looking down.

"Namor!" she yelped.

Namor held her up and flew backward fast before tossing her in the air, her arms and legs flailing about before he caught her by the waist. He guided her down, not toward her camp, but across the dark waters dappled with moonlight and holding secrets of the deep.

"Easy, breathe easy, Lebadi," he cooed in her ear.

They dipped low and her stomach seemed to fall behind her as he whipped them across a giant wave that she saw minutes ago from so far away. He slid his hand from her waist up along her arms until she dangled below him, her legs swinging against wind and ocean spray. She whooped it up as he lowered her so that her feet skimmed across the top of a giant wave, cooling her feet and making her laugh hysterically. He swung her in another direction gently and her heels surfed the crest of another wave like she was water skiing. Dropping her into the ocean from twenty feet high, she splashed around frantically, terrified that his shark buddy would leap out and swallow her. Namor landed above the water, standing on top of it with his hands on his hips, looking down at her. He sank down into the water as her panic escalated and she threw her arms over his shoulders when the shark's fin appeared behind him.

"Take me out! Please, take me out!"

"He won't hurt you. See?"

The shark nestled close to Namor, and the man stroked the slippery cold skin.

Lebadi pressed her face into his neck and shivered in fear.

"Nothing will happen to you."

He stroked her hair and lifted her chin up.

"I promise," he said.

She wiped her eyes of water and nodded her head to him. Glancing to her side, Lebadi regarded the shark with trepidation, but she took a chance and stretched out her trembling arm toward the sea creature. Like dolphin skin, it was slippery, like wet rubber, and pliant when she pushed on it. She stroked the dorsal fin and nearly passed out when its head splashed toward her and she saw one of the cold black eyes staring back at her. Shoving her face back into his neck, Lebadi was done with the marine life show and tell.

Namor patted the shark near its gills, and the beastly animal went under the water and away from them. He lifted Lebadi in his arms, cradling her against him like a baby as he floated above the surface, flying them back to shore. She held onto his neck, watching the sand and bluff grow closer until they were back on land.

Face to face, they stared at one another.

"Good luck with your search," she said.

He touched her cheek, and the heat of her wet skin swallowed his damp coolness up. Those dark flashing eyes caused her insides to tumble and quake, making her feel a thick anticipation. Their attraction to one another was unquestionable. He slid the pad of his thumb across her top lip, following along its full shape before he leaned in and kissed her. The soft hairs of his light goatee tickled, and she smiled, opening her lips, allowing him to slip his tongue into her mouth where he explored every part. She gave back in return, sucking on his lower lip, fusing them together with slow succulent kissing. Her arousal triggered something in him as he pressed into her body. Firm muscles molded against her breasts, and the thin material of her bikini top revealed taut nipples. His right hand moved across her chest until it fondled a left breast, plucking at her nipple with gentle pinches. He slid the bikini bra cup aside, lowering his head to suckle. His tongue was incredibly warm dancing around her areola and her knees buckled when he lifted to kiss her again, his tongue snaking in and out of her mouth to taste every molecule, making her mouth water.

Her pussy already felt engorged, and every time he thrust his tongue between her lips, it throbbed with wanton need. His carnal desire for her curled her toes as his tongue and lips created a wet trail of gentle kisses along her neck. He moaned in her ear and her stomach became a swarm of butterflies trapped inside of her.

Their necks twisted from side to side, trying to find the best way to kiss more passionately, and she loved the failure of it. It seemed to irritate him, and he pulled back to stare at her with brooding arousal. She glanced down at his trunks and the thick erection protruding out toward her made her frantic to kiss him more. His dick pressed into her and Namor wanted Lebadi to feel it. He rubbed against her and she ground her vulva on it. When she looked down at his trunks again, he had his hand down there, tugging on the length. The tip peeked out and a heavy mushroom cap dripped pre-cum.

Lebadi moved his hand to her mound, and he took the invitation to heart by sliding his fingers down her scant bikini bottom. He stroked her clit first, his index and middle finger working tight gentle circles before touching her slippery wet folds. She was a frothy ocean down there and Namor pulled out his fingers to lick up all of her essence, making eye contact as he did it to show her how good she tasted to him. He smacked his lips and went back for more, tracing odd shapes along her folds and clit, teasing her with so much pleasure that she squealed out loud. He clamped a hand over her mouth and looked toward her campsite. No one was awake or searching for her. Moving his hand, he crashed his lips over her mouth, kissing the living breath out of her. Namor fondled her clit with expertise, and she thanked Mama Wati for the gift of her offering to the sea.

"Oh, my Bast!" she cried out.

Namor dropped to his knees and slid her bikini bottom to the side and feasted on her swollen clit, kissing and sucking to his heart's delight. His hands reached up to cup her ass cheeks to keep her in place. Lebadi stood and watched the ocean waves crash to shore as an orgasm surged. She grabbed for his hair and held his head against the clipped hairs of her vulva, panting and saying his name under her breath, willing herself not to scream. When his plush lips held her clit, and his tongue slurped all over it with warm saliva, Lebadi threw her head back and jammed her fingers in her throat to stifle the scream that she let out. She fell apart all over his mouth, the deep throbbing of her release reaching all the way to the back of her pussy. His seductive, penetrating eyes watched her cum all over his lips and tongue, extending her release, the orgasm rolling across her flesh in heated waves that made her scalp tingle and her eyes roll back.

His lips moved away from her pussy with a wet smacking sound, and they glistened with her sticky juices. He grinned and slid his tongue across his slips to swallow up every drop of her. Lebadi staggered back from him and Namor jumped up quickly to keep her from falling flat on her ass. Her entire body trembled with aftershocks, and the throbbing between her thighs wouldn't stop. She craved him.

Slamming her lips over his, she sucked her own taste from his mouth while he lowered his trunks and fisted himself. He coated his dick with all the pre-cum that dripped down from a deep slit and lifted Lebadi up by her hips, positioning her over the head of his erection. Sanity and thoughts of protection left her brain as she slid down his thick, brown dick. She wanted to be fucked good and proper by a man who laid her pussy out.

Namor's thrusts into her hot, gushy pussy had her mewling into his neck. He held her up easily, like she was a feather floating on the wind. His balls slapped against her ass cheeks, and she thanked all the Gods on land and sea for letting him stretch her pussy out on the beach. He grunted, the pleasure enveloping him too. He spoke to her in his own language, and she could only guess that he was telling her how good she felt on his heavy erection. His plundering of her pussy only made her more vocal, her yelps and wailing in his ear encouraging him to thrust with more conviction.

"Oh, Bast… Namor!" she shouted.

Weightlessness.

She clung to his shoulders as she gazed down at the sand he was not standing on anymore. Namor flew up along the bluff, still fucking her as he flew, and pressed her back against the hard wall of rock halfway from the top.

"You are too loud," he grunted, twisting his sinewy hips and pumping her full of Talokan dick.

Her pussy made squelching noises, and he slowed his strokes to tease her before flying them up again. He landed back on the soft tufts of grass at the top, but kept her on his dick. His breath was hot against her skin, and Lebadi's pussy clenched, making him shout her name from the pleasure of the tight grip. Laying her down on the grass, he pushed her thighs back and wiggled out of his trunks, giving her time to untie her bikini from top to bottom. She cast caution to the wind. Dick that good wouldn't come around that often.

He smiled at her as if he had read her thoughts. His beauty in smiling had her all soft and gooey on the inside, like she wanted to run home and tell her Mama that she finally met the one man to change her entire life forever. Lowering his face to hers again, Namor kissed her cheek and then her forehead. He turned his head as if he heard something.

"What is it?" she asked.

He shook his head, "Nothing."

He peppered tiny kisses across her clavicle and dragged his lips to her belly button, where he tongued it playfully, tickling her and making her giggle. Lebadi rubbed his head, letting her fingers caress his hair, and he looked at her again. She touched his nose piercing and the fire in his eyes reflected moonlight and a yearning for something beyond his grasp. Moving lower on her body, he kissed her thighs and the fold of skin near her vulva.

"I like the taste of saltwater on your skin," he said, licking her more.

He positioned himself between her legs and lined up his dick with her opening. Penetrating her gently, the bulbous tip parted her folds and her legs shot up straight to the moon.

"Ooohhhhh," she groaned.

He held her thighs with reverence, pumping in and out with delicate strokes. There was no fast fucking this time. He wanted to etch their lovemaking on the stars above them. It was so slow that it brought tears to her eyes. She whimpered his name, and he closed his eyes, his lower lip housed between his teeth, seawater dripping from his hair. He hunched over Lebadi and rocked into her body a little faster, the quicker pace forcing moans to fall from his lips.

She wrapped her legs around his waist and he repositioned them so that she was on top, riding him with feverish intent. He palmed her breasts and stroked her nipples, watching her pussy slide up and down his length with vigor. She was so close to cumming again. Namor played with her clit, rubbing it softly and edging her closer to paradise.

"Fuck!" she yelled.

Flipping her over, Namor planted himself deep, stroking her at an angle that had her squeezing her eyes shut, thrashing under him. The beads from his choker dangled and scraped across her skin. He tossed her legs over his shoulders and tongued her down between giving her praises in his language. The man talked her pussy into letting go again and her walls clenched all around him, his strength and weight the only thing keeping her from shooting over the cliff.

"Namor… fuck me good… fuck me… oh, right there… stay right there… please… that's my spot!"

His name became a holy mantra on her lips. She felt his dick swell inside of her and he cried out her name, his cum warm and thick inside of her. He collapsed on her, and she stroked his back, feeling sweat pooling on his lower back. His mouth found hers again and his kisses were sweet all over her face and neck, bringing forth calming energy to her body and mind.

"That was incredible," she whispered into his ear.

His smile lit up his face again, and those sexy eyes drank in her naked charms under him. The smile faded when his eyes looked out toward the sea. His body grew stiff above her.

"What is it?"

He crawled off of her and pulled on his trunks. She rolled over and looked out to sea. The large leviathan body of a humpback whale floated in the distance; its long wide body visible from so far away in the moonlight. Fear shined in Namor's eyes.

"K’a’ak’ate," he said, stroking her cheek.

Lebadi scrambled to put on her bikini and Namor was already flying away from her, heading toward the sea and the whale waiting for him.

"Come back! You have to take me down!" she yelled.

He spun around to face her.

"I won't say anything. No one will see you," she pleaded, tying her top.

"Ma’taali’teeni’," he said, sounding regretful.

Namor shot away so fast that Lebadi took several seconds to blink. He vanished.

"Dammit! You bastard!" she said.

Storming away in the opposite direction, she made the long trek down the tricky bluff, cursing the man out, while also enjoying the tingles that ran up and down her body from their lovemaking. She took a long restroom break behind some bushes to urinate. By the time she made it to the bottom and found the trail that led back to the beach, her cheeks were warm and tight from smiling so much. No matter what she said, no one would believe her. She glanced at her kimoyo beads.

"Ah, shit!"

Namor still had one of her beads. The main one she needed to turn the kimoyo on. Oh, well.

Lebadi searched the water for signs of the whale or glimpses of her otherworldly lover. There were only waves and foamy water lapping on the shore. She trudged over the sand back to her tent. Unzipping it, she crawled inside and fell fast asleep.

The week in Birnin S'Yan went by so fast to Lebadi that she thought they had been there only three days instead of seven. She surfed so much that her skin flaked with sunburn and pruned feet. She felt gorgeous with her darkened, sun-kissed skin. But it was time to get home, remove shells, and unbraid her hair for a thorough washing and conditioning. She would rest her normal curls inside a satin bonnet.

Lebadi spent her last day on the beach surfing and scanning the water for signs of a great white shark, whales, or a set of pointy ears rising from the sea. She found nothing.

Her board skimmed across the warm waters, and she practiced neat footwork on it to impress her friends. A miscalculation sent her sailing over her board into a whitewash of liquid heaven. She laughed and shook her braids when she broke the surface. Another high wave towered over her and she duck-dived underneath, clutching her board with her hands as she held her breath. For a split second under the wave, she thought she saw Namor floating before her, and she broke the surface, startled and gasping for air. Releasing her board and letting her leash tether her close to it, Lebadi dove under again, searching for her lover. The sunlight that struck the water gave her enough light to see an expanse of the blue-green ocean and nothing else.

The next morning, she set about packing up her belongings before breaking down her tent. Her friends wanted to stop at a restaurant in town to eat a meal before the drive back to Birnin Zana. Rolling her sleeping bag, she found her missing kimoyo bead and a gold cowrie shell from Namor's necklace. There was no way for him to place it there while her friends were up, so he must've brought it to her in the middle of the night when she was fast asleep. Slipping the loose bead onto its rightful place on her wrist, Lebadi held up the cowrie shell. The craftsmanship rivaled her own people's artisan skills. Palming it, she stepped out of her tent to gaze at the horizon.

"All good?" N'Ku asked, staring at her as he buried their old coals.

"Yeah."

"We'll be ready soon. I can drive to give you a break," Benya offered, tying up her wet hair.

"Cool," Lebadi said, holding the cowrie shell close to her heart.

She later passed Benya a kimoyo bead to start up the van. Sitting on the sand with her legs pulled into her chest, Lebadi bid a silent farewell to the beach.

"Next year, I'm coming back, and you better show up again," she huffed, reminiscing over his touch all over her skin.

Just thinking about him aroused her, and she stood up, tugging on her shorts, trying to keep her bikini from sticking to her folds.

"What's that?" Ausi asked, looking at the gold cowrie shell she fingered in her hand.

"I found it in the water," Lebadi lied.

She pocketed the shell in her cut-offs and lifted her board and tent, following her crew to the seawall so they could wait for Benya to pull around. Lebadi glanced over her shoulder, and a shiver went through her.

"Mama Wati, when I give you a bigger offering next year, please send that man back to me," she whispered.

The sound of the waves crashing down loudly on the shore made her believe Mama Wati heard her request. No matter what, Lebadi was going to come back.

And she would ride the shark, Namor, and anything else he shared with her.

Part 2 HERE.

Author’s Note: If you liked the story, please share by reblogging, commenting and all that good stuff. Follow me for new updates and more content. I would love to see the Black Panther fandom come alive again. I haven’t seen the “Wakanda Forever” movie yet, so this story takes place twenty years before that. Just so you know, I make my own canon, lol! 

Also, I switched up the spelling of the actual Mami Wata to Mama Wati to give myself space to reshape my ancestor’s actual African/African Diaspora spiritual water being into a fictional Wakandan one. 

The Masterlist for more of my content is  HERE. Be on the look out for part 3 soon!

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@thickemadame​

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