#Sneakers Market Uses | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

Text

Dow promised to turn sneakers into playground surfaces, then dumped them in Indonesia

Dow Chemicals plastered Singapore with ads for its sneaker recycling program, promising to turn old shoes into playground tracks. But the shoes it collected in its “recycling” bins were illegally dumped in Indonesia. This isn’t an aberration: it’s how nearly all plastic recycling has always worked.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/career-criminals/#fool-me-twice-three-times-four-times-a-hundred-times

Plastic recycling’s origin story starts in 1973, when Exxon’s scientists concluded that plastic recycling would never, ever be cost-effective (#ExxonKnew about this, too). Exxon sprang into action: they popularized the recycling circular arrow logo and backed “anti-littering” campaigns that blamed the rising tide of immortal, toxic garbage on peoples’ laziness.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/14/they-knew/#doing-it-again

Remember the campaign where an Italian guy dressed like a Native American shed a single tear as he contemplated plastic litter? Funded by the plastic industry, as a way of shifting blame for plastic waste from the wealthy, powerful corporations who lied about plastics recycling to the individuals who believed their lies:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-indian-crying-environment-ads-pollution-1123-20171113-story.html

When I was a kid in Ontario, we had centralized, regulated, reusable bottle depots — beer and soda bottles came in standard sizes, differentiated by paper labels that could be pressure-washed off. When you were done with your bottle, you returned it for a deposit and it got washed and returned to bottlers to be refilled again and again and again.

After intense lobbying from soda companies, brewers and the plastic industry, that program was replaced with curbside “blue boxes” that promised to recycle our plastic waste. 90% of the plastics created has never been — and will never be — recycled. Today, the plastic industry plans on tripling the amount of single-use plastic in use worldwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/26/plastic-fatalistic/#recycled-lies

You know those ads from companies like Bluetriton (formerly “Nestle Waters”) that promise that your single-use plastic bottles are “100% recyclable…and can be used for new bottles and all sorts of new, reusable things?”

Bluetriton is a private equity-backed rollup that has absorbed most of the bottled water companies you’re familiar with, including Poland Spring, Pure Life, Splash, Ozarka, and Arrowhead. When they were sued in DC for making false claims about their “recyclable” water-bottles, their defense was that these were “non-actionable puffery.” According to Bluetriton, when it described itself as “a guardian of sustainable resources” and “a company who, at its core, cares about water,” it was being “vague and hyperbolic.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/26/plastic-fatalistic/#recycled-lies

With this high standard for plastic recycling, Dow’s Singapore scam shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it seems to have surprised the government of Singapore. Writing for Reuters, Joe Brock, Yuddy Cahya Budiman and Joseph Campbell describe how they caught Dow red-handed:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/global-plastic-dow-shoes/

The method is actually pretty straightforward: Reuters hid tracking devices in cavities in the soles of sneakers, dropped them in one of Dow’s collection bins, and then followed them. The shoes were passed onto Dow’s subcontractor, Yok Impex Pte Ltd, who sent them hopping from island to island throughout Indonesia, until they ended up in junk-markets.

Not all the shoes, though — one pair was simply moved from Dow’s collection bin to a donation bin at a Singaporean community center. Of the 11 pairs that Reuters tracked, not one ended up at a recycling facility. So much for Dow’s slogan: “Others see an old shoe. We see the future.”

Dow blamed all this on Yok Impex, but didn’t explain why its “recycling” program involved a company whose sole trade is exporting used clothing. Dow promised to cancel its deal with Yok Impex, but Yok Impex’s accountant told Reuters that the deal would be remain in place until the end of the contract. Yok Impex, meanwhile, shifted the blame to the low-waged women who sort through the clothing donations it takes in from across Singapore.

Indonesia bans bulk imports of used clothes, on the grounds that used clothes are unhygenic, displace the local textiles industry, and shipments contain high volumes of waste that ends up in Indonesian incinerators, landfills and rivers.

In other words, Singaporeans thought they were saving the planet by putting their shoes in Dow bins, but they were really sending those shoes on a long journey to an unlicensed dump. Dow enlisted schoolchildren in used-shoe collection drives, making upbeat videos that featured students like Zhang Youjia boasting that they “contributed 15 pairs of shoes.”

Dow does this all the time. In 2021, Dow’s “breakthrough technology to turn plastic waste into clean fuel” in Idaho was revealed to be a plain old incinerator:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/environment-plastic-oil-recycling/

Also in 2021, in India, a Dow program to “use high-tech machinery to transform the [plastic from the Ganges] into clean fuel” was revealed to have ceased operations — but was still collecting plastic and promising that it was all being turned into fuel:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-plastic-insight-idUSKBN29N024

Dow operates a nearly identical “shoe recycling” program in neighboring Malaysia, and did not return Reuters’ requests for comment as to whether the shoes collected for “recycling” in the far more populous nation were also being illegally dumped offshore.

The global business lobby loves the idea of “personal responsibility” and its evil twin, “caveat emptor.” Its pet economists worship the idea of “revealed preferences,” claiming that when we use plastic, we may claim that we don’t want to have our bodies poisoned with immortal, toxic microplastics, that we don’t want our land and waters despoiled — but we actually love it, because otherwise we’d “vote with our wallets” for something else.

The obvious advantage of telling people to vote with their wallets is that the less money you have in your wallet, the fewer votes you get. Companies like Dow have used their access to the capital markets (a fancy phrase for “rich people”) to gobble up their competitors, eliminating “wasteful competition” and piling up massive profits. Those profits are laundered into policy — like replacing Ontario’s zero-waste refillable bottle system with a “recycling” system that sent plastics to the ends of the Earth to be set on fire or buried or dumped in the sea.

The ruling class’s pet economists have a name for this policy laundering: they call it “regulatory capture.” Now, when you hear “regulatory capture,” you might think about companies that get so big that they are able to boss governments around, with the obvious answer that companies need to be regulated before they get too big to jail:

https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e

But that’s not how elite economists talk about regulatory capture: for them, capture starts with the very existence of regulators. For them, any government agency that proposes to protect the public from corporate fraud and murder inevitably becomes an agent of the corporations it is supposed to rein in, so the only answer is to eliminate regulators altogether:

https://doctorow.medium.com/regulatory-capture-59b2013e2526

This nihilism lets rich people blame the rest of us for their sins: “if you didn’t want your children to roast or freeze to death in the climate emergency, you should have sold your car and used the subway (that we bribed your city not to build).”

Nihilism is contagious. Think of the music industry: before Napster, 80% of the music ever recorded was not for sale, banished to the scrapheap of history and the vaults of record companies who paid farcically low sums to their artists.

During the File Sharing Wars, listeners were excoriated for failing to pay for music — much of which wasn’t for sale in the first place. But today, fans overwhelmingly pay for Spotify, a streaming service that notoriously pays musicians infinitesimal sums for their work.

Spotify is a creature of the Big Three labels — Sony, Universal and Warner — who own 70% of all the world’s recorded music copyrights and 65% of all the world’s music publishing. The rock-bottom per-stream prices that Spotify pays were set by the Big Three. Why would the labels want less money from Spotify?

Simple: as co-owners of Spotify, they make more money when Spotify pays less for music. Musicians have a claim on the money they take out of Spotify as royalties — but dividends, buybacks and capital gains from Spotify are the labels’ to use as they see fit. They can share that bounty with some artists, all artists, or no artists.

Not only that, but the Big Three’s deal with Spotify includes a “most favored nation” clause, which means that the independent artists who aren’t under Sony/UMG/Warner’s thumb have to take the rock-bottom rate the Big Three insisted on — likewise the small labels who compete with the Big Three. The difference is that none of these artists and small labels have massive portfolios of Spotify stock, nor do they get free advertising on Spotify, or free inclusion on hot Spotify playlists, or monthly minimum payouts from Spotify.

The idea that we shop at the wrong kind of monopolist in the wrong way is a recipe for absolute despair. It doesn’t matter whether you listen to music with the Big Tech-owned monopoly service (Youtube) or the Big Content-owned monopoly service (Spotify). The money you hand over to these giant companies goes to artists the same way that the sneakers you put in a Dow collection bin goes to a recycling plant.

Think of the billions of human labor hours we all spent washing and sorting our plastics for a recycling program that didn’t exist and will never exist — imagine if we’d spent that time and energy demanding that our politicians hold petrochemical companies to account instead.

At the end of Break ’Em Up, Zephyr Teachout’s outstanding 2020 book on monopolies, Teachout has some choice words for “consumerism” as a theory of change. She writes that if you’re on your way to a protest against a new Amazon warehouse but you never make it because you waste too much time looking for a mom-and-pop stationers to sell you a marker to write your protest sign, Amazon wins:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#break-em-up

The problem isn’t that you shop the wrong way. Yes, by all means, support the creators and producers you care about in the way that they prefer, but keep your eye on the prize. Structural problems don’t have individual solutions. The problem isn’t that you have chosen single-use plastics — it’s that in our world everything for sale is packaged in single-use plastics. The problem isn’t that you’ve bought a subscription to the wrong music streaming service — it’s that labels have been allowed to buy all their competitors, creators’ unions have been smashed and degraded, and giant accounting scams by big companies generate minuscule fines.

The good news is that after 40 years of despair inducing regulatory nihilism and “vote with your wallet” talk, we’re finally paying attention to systemic problems, with a new generation of trustbusting radicals working around the world to end corporate impunity.

Dow is a repeat offender. A repeat, repeat offender. Chrissakes, they’re the linear descendants of Union Carbide, the company that poisoned Bhopal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

They shouldn’t be trusted to run a lemonade stand, let alone a “recycling” program. The same goes for Big Tech and Big Content company and the markets for creative labor. These companies have repeatedly demonstrated their unfitness, their habitual deception and immorality. These companies have captured their regulators, repeatedly, so we need better regulators — and weaker companies.

The thing I love about Teachout’s book is that it talks about what we should be demanding from our governments — it’s a manifesto for a movement against corporate power, not a movement for “responsible consumerism.” That was the template that Rebecca Giblin and I followed when we wrote Chokepoint Capitalism, our book about the brutal, corrupt creative labor market:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

We have a chapter on Spotify (multiple chapters, in fact!). For our audiobook, we made that chapter a “Spotify Exclusive” — it’s the only part of the book you can get on Spotify, and it’s free:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Next Thu (Mar 2) I’ll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who’s-who of European and US trustbusters. It’s livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free. On Fri (Mar 3), I’ll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival.

[Image ID: A woman kneeling to tie her running shoe. She stands on a background of plastic waste. In the top right corner is the logo for Dow chemicals. Below it is the Dow slogan, 'Others see an old shoe. We see the future.']

#pluralistic

919 notes · View notes

octuscle · 6 months

Note

My wrestling coach of 6 years has been on my ass trying to get me to join him as his assistant coach. I’m not so interested as I have to prioritize my studies.

The problem is he keeps sending his dirty compression gear to my flat — I don’t get that. But something about that smell… it reminds me of him, his manliness… And I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t had a crush on him for the past 4 years… maybe I should accept his offer…

Well, crush is a harsh word… I mean, you started on the youth team in elementary school with your coach. You're a sophomore in college now. Sure you had a little crush on him when you were in high school. But you weren't really in love.

Since you've had a laundry basket full of his dirty clothes in your apartment, that's changed a bit. You dream about your trainer all the time. And the dream usually ends with rough sex. And a nocturnal ejaculation on your part. You're already sleeping in one of his wrestling singlets so you don't have to keep changing your bed. This prevents bigger messes.

When you get out of the shower this morning, freshly shaved all over, there's a knock at the door. Someone has left a package in front of the door. A wrestling singlet. It's still warm and damp with sweat. And someone has recently squirted into the singlet. It's actually disgusting. You actually have to go to class. But you have to try on the singlet. Now. Damn, it feels so great. The cum from Coach sticks to your smooth cock. You can feel his sweat on your skin. You smell your freshly shaved armpits. It's a good thing you haven't used deodorant yet. So you can smell Coach's musk and imagine it's yours. You have a boner. You play with your nipples. Your precum mixes with Coach's cum. And shortly afterwards you cum. An incredible amount!

You don't have time to shower. Your first marketing lecture starts in half an hour. You pull on a pair of jeans and a hoodie over your singlet, slip into socks and sneakers, grab your backpack and make your way to campus.

You could have saved yourself the day at university. You couldn't concentrate. You went to the toilet three times to have a wank. And as soon as you get back to your apartment, you wank the next time. It feels so great to come in Coach's singlet.

The next morning you wake up in your own university team singlet. You must have changed into it at some point while you were half asleep. Phew, you stink of sweat and cum. Yes, you remember… After training yesterday, there was a private wrestling session with Coach. He tried to use gentle force to persuade you to take on the job of assistant coach. The fight was great. But you don't want to. The fact that you let yourself be persuaded to switch from business studies to sports science a semester ago is the furthest thing from your mind. First lecture this morning is athletics. Not your favorite sport… But at least you don't have to shower. You take a deep breath from your bushy armpit. Fuck, yes! No wonder it drives Coach crazy. If you could, you'd fuck yourself.

Coach is still lying next to you, snoring. Today is your last fight as a student for your university. You're still wondering whether you should cut your hair for the graduation ceremony. Since you've been Coach's assistant, you've let your curls grow. But when you graduate, you'll also lose your assistant position. In two months, you will become a coach at your old high school. Best job you can imagine.

Pic found @athletic-collection

#male tf #muscle tf #reality change #wrestler tf #age progression

183 notes · View notes

gatheringbones · 7 months

Text

[“My girlfriend (I’ll call her Rachel) and I have been riding the same bus to the Metro station together nearly every weekday morning for the last two years. After a few weeks, all the commuters on the bus start to look familiar. You begin to notice who travels with whom. You start to give people secret nicknames (Franklin Planner Guy, Park Service Guy, Beautiful Woman, Vancouver Boy). Pretty soon you start noticing each other around town, start saying hi at the farmers’ market. You don’t know each other’s names, but if someone disappears from their regular bus for more than a few days, you begin to wonder if they’re okay, if they’ve moved or changed jobs. It’s an odd sort of community.

Rachel and I wondered sometimes if our fellow workers had nicknames for us, too. What would we call ourselves? Dress Alike Girls? We’ve committed the Ultimate Lesbian Sin—dressing alike—on more than one occasion. We have totally dissimilar clothing tastes, but an unfortunate affinity for the same colors, so we’ve been known to show up at each other’s houses in the morning to find one of us wearing tailored silk khakis, black pumps, and a dark blouse—that would be Rachel—and the other (that would be me) in khaki shorts, black sneakers, and a dark blue T-shirt. Embarrassing. We finally decided that our bus gang would call us Jointed at the Hip Girls. We’d sit at the back of the bus, hold hands sometimes, whisper. We didn’t need to wear T-shirts that said “Dyke.”

But we didn’t actually think about it very much either. We felt safe enough in our little bus world to be “straight acting” (ha ha).

And one morning, when we were standing on the platform at the Metro station, one of our bus buddies approached. She’s tall, light-skinned African-American woman with a penchant for outfits that Rachel admires, and we had wondered if she were family; she had that look about her. She apologized for interrupting and said, I just wanted to tell you guys that it’s so nice to see you in the mornings. I looked at Rachel, a little puzzled. I mean, the woman continued, You both just look really happy when you’re together, you sort of glow.

I started to blush. My ears got very, very hot.

Umm, I umm, I said.

Rachel was more composed (although she was blushing too). She thanked the woman graciously, and asked her name. Kara, she told us. I actually ran into Kara the other day at the grocery store, and we rode the bus home together. I found out that she’s a poet and a sculptor, and she lives three blocks from me. I told her I was writing about her in an essay I was doing for an anthology. She laughed and said, Oh, because of that thing I did that morning?, and chatted for a few more minutes. I don’t remember the rest of that conversation either, really. After all this time, is it possible that I’m still traumatized at the thought of coming out?”]

kanani kauka, from freedom rings, from a woman like that: lesbian and bisexual writers tell their coming out stories, 2000

#kanani kauka #lesbian literature #currently reading

313 notes · View notes

csuitebitches · 1 year

Text

How To Make Full Use of Networking Events

Networking events and conferences are great because you get to meet and learn from experts but also connect with peers. I recently attended one and I wanted to share things I wish I had done before and what I learned.

1. Define an Objective

You have to determine why exactly you want to go to the event. Are you looking for a career change? A job? Advice on how to be better at your current job? How to tackle some issues in your start up? Networking? Make a list of the reasons.

2. Research

You need to research the speakers extensively. Go over their Wikipedias, LinkedIns and other social medias. Read their company websites from top to bottom. If they’ve released a book, take a look at the summary and read the reviews. Read some of their published articles.

Take this time to prepare at least 3 questions per speaker. Try to make at unique and interesting as possible, don’t ask the usual generic ones.

3. Business Cards

Definitely carry business cards. Make sure that your email, LinkedIn is mentioned clearly. Even if you work at a different company, that doesn’t matter- show your job title on the business card. Better yet, ask your HR if they can give you business cards as you would be promoting their company through your event. If you’re a student, I’d recommend you make a portfolio website of your internships/ project/ past work/ volunteer work/ hobbies/ interests.

4. Actually Talking

During the event, don’t be shy to ask questions. It doesn’t matter whether the rest of the audience thinks they’re stupid. You have spent your money to come there for your gain. Make full use of it. Ask questions. Meet the speaker after the event. Thank them for the insight, introduce yourself, ask them questions related to your objective of coming to the conference. Exchange business cards.

5. Utilising Coffee Breaks

Coffee and lunch breaks are a great way to talk to people. You may feel shy or awkward to talk to new people, but there’s very high chances that they feel the same way. You can start off by asking someone how they heard about the event, what they thought of the speaker, or pass a remark on the question they asked the speaker. Keep in mind that if the event has multiple speakers, there could be a chance that you’re talking to a speaker, even if you don’t recognise them… so be on your best behaviour.

6. Questions

Ask questions that are beneficial to you. During my conference, we had a women-leaders panel. An audience member asked the speakers how they divided their work between family and work. The speakers looked visibly annoyed at the question - because how generic is that?

Ask questions that could help you grow. If you’re in marketing, ask about their tried and tested marketing strategies. If you’re an early stage founder, ask them how they sourced their VC. If you’re struggling with time management, ask the speakers how they manage. Ask the questions for YOUR own benefit.

You can ask difficult questions but make sure you do it respectfully and tactfully. Best to start with a compliment and then ease into the question.

7. Dressing

Business casual, unless mentioned otherwise. What this means: blazer/ jackets/ trousers/ pencil skirts/ shirt/ co-ord sets/ no sneakers.

It doesn’t matter what other people wear. The way you present yourself is your brand. It also shows the respect you have for the other person - you respect them enough to not come shabbily dressed.

1K notes · View notes

bidisasterevankinard · 2 months

Note

for the prompts can you do 1 and 8 I feel like they fit so good together

Nonnie, it's a little got way from me (1211 words) because I have strong Tommy feels so. here you are(I know it's not just fluff and I'm so sorry)

Sometimes there are days Tommy just doesn’t want to get up from the bed. It can be simply because he is exhausted after a long and hard shift or because it’s rainy, and cool wind, which walks all around, makes his bones and old wounds ache. Those days are pretty easy to get through. Just take it easy, take painkillers, make sure you’re warm and watch Love, Actually in bed with cocoa. Simple and comfy.

But they're also days when he can’t get out of bed, not because of a little pain, or at least it’s not because of physical pain. There are days in his life when his head attacks him with memories of the army, or bad calls, or all the years he was looking for someone to love him, and, most importantly, for a reason to love himself. Because there were more than enough days he was rough, rude and just simply awful to himself. And all this darkness around him forever found a place in his heart and head, mainly staying low, being overpowered by his self-growth and reasons he founds to love himself anyway, by hanging outs with Eddie, sometimes with Chim and even Hen, and of course, by dates and smiles of Evan.

Evan, this adorable dork, found the way to give him the sun to light his life enough that darkness is scared to get out. But it still is waiting for the moment when he will be too distracted and unprotected to hit again.

Like today.

Yesterday was … a lot. He accidentally met his mother on the market where he went to get some good groceries for the meal he was planning to cook for Evan to make him feel good after the shift. The literal bumping into each other near the vegetables quickly became a screaming match, mostly from his mother’s part, because Tommy way long before stopped to try to to prove that just because he likes men, doesn't mean he's a bad person, or son, or chose the wrong way. Eventually, he just ran away from there.

Then the dish he tried to make burned because he was too distracted crying in his bathroom. He had to order take out.

And then Evan texted him that he couldn't come tonight because they had a long and hard call, and the only thing he wanted was to fall into his bed.They changed plans from a little dinner together yesterday to spending all day together today.

Yesterday ended as awful as it was all day. The nightmare of one of his close calls made him sleep badly after, turning half the night in his bed, trying to get the best position for sleeping, but not succeeding for more than two hours.

So, here he is, miserable and alone in his bed, looking at the clock which shows him that Evan will be here in less than five minutes, but he is still in his bed, in his the most comfy, but really old hoodie and boxers.

Tommy kind of wishes Evan would text him now and rain check again, not wanting to drag the man into his mess, but of course as he thinks about this, Evan opens the door.

“Hey, sleepy beauty, I brought us coffee and your favorite burgers from this cafe you like so much,” Evan’s voice, as always sunny as his face and smile, spreads throughout the small house.

The sound of the sneakers being taken off, then steps to the, as Tommy suspects kitchen, as next he hears sounds of the plates taken out. Next he hears footsteps again and then his bedroom’s door is open, to reveal his boyfriend in his dark skin jeans and burgundy hoodie, Tommy pretty sure Evan was wearing during the tour.

“Hey,” Evan smiles at him, putting plates and coffee on his nightstand, and sits down near his face, putting his hand to stroke his hair.

Tommy will never admit he melts into the touch. But he melts and ready to purr like a kitten being pet.

“Are you having a blanket burrito day?”

“Blanket burrito day?”

“Yeah. I call the bad days, when I can’t get out of the bed because of my leg or because of bad mood, or both, ‘blanket burrito day’,” Evan kisses his forehead. “Are you having this today or you just want me to jump into your bed?” his boyfriend smirks and winks at him and Tommy smiles a little too.

He knows he can joke about that. Say that yes, it was his way to get Evan into his bed and maybe make out or even something more, but he doesn’t want something like that.

He needs someone to hold him. Just hold him and show him he’s not alone and it will get better.

“Can you hug me?” Tommy doesn't like how small his voice sounds and he hates how quick he folded looking at his boyfriend who with one glance knew he was having a bad day. “If-if it’s ok.”

“Are you kidding me? Of course it’s ok. I love cuddles,” Evan smiles at him, taking his jeans off and lying down behind him, putting his hands around his waist.

He makes sure Tommy can feel himself touching every part of Evan’s big body behind him and Tommy wants to cry from the feeling of being safe. Protected. Loved.

They stay like that for half an hour, not talking and Tommy breaks the silence, needing to know.

“You don’t ask questions. Why am I having a bad day? What happened?,” Tommy plays with Evan’s fingers on his waist, “Or you are not even trying to tell me to stop. You aren’t telling me to male up,” he whispers it but in silence and with how close they are he knows Evan hears him.

Hands on his waist only squeeze tighter and then he feels a careful little kiss on his neck.

“We all have bad days. Especially on our job, with everything we saw. It’s normal to have them and you deserve to let yourself be sad if you feel it without trying to move on. You deserve someone to take care of you. And the reason for your bad mood isn’t so important for me to find out, if you don’t want to talk right now. You can do it on your time. Just,” Evan turns them so he can look him in the eyes. Blue to blue. “Don’t push me away. I want to be here, with you not just on good days. I want bad days too. Because you can’t live without them. But,” Evan smiles at him and kisses him so chaste Tommy wants to cry, “you can be not alone. Especially on bad days. You can share the pain with your person, making the burden easy to bear.”

Tommy just nods and lets himself get comfortable in Evan’s hands, feeling how slumber takes over him because the warmth from Evan and his breath lull him into sleep.

“I’ll tell you after the sleep,” Tommy mumbles before falling asleep.

“Take your time, baby,” Tommy feels the kiss on his shoulder, “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

Tommy knows it’s not the promise only about today.

read on ao3

prompts

#my fics #evan buckley #911 #evan buck buckley #911 abc #tommy kinard #tuck #bucktommy #tevan #kinkley #911 on abc #bucktommy fic #buck x tommy #buck buckley #9 1 1 #evan buck buckely #911 show

143 notes · View notes

wmarximoff · 2 years

Text

𝐝é𝐣à 𝐯𝐮 | 𝐰. 𝐦𝐚𝐱𝐢𝐦𝐨𝐟𝐟

summary: as you slowly reconnect with Wanda, you feel a familiar feeling of déjà vu.

warnings: making out, smut, strap-on sex (Wanda receiving) mentions of smoking, mentions of drinking, canon typical violence, angst.

pairing: Wanda x fem!reader

word count: 10k

main masterlist| series masterlist|

༺ᱬ༻

A carton of almond milk, a jar of peanut butter, a dozen eggs, a stick of butter, a can of peas, a bag of soft multigrain bread and a sizable bottle of wine are the components of the plastic basket that Wanda carries slung over her right arm. She doesn't know that she forgot to get a can of corn too. But the basket is kind of weighty and she might as well use her magic to levitate the items around her own silhouette, but she prefers that way, holding them down herself with her own arm strength.

Sometimes it's good to keep the sense of normality active. Even if normality just means carrying a basket full of groceries around the supermarket. She then looks at the face of the brown watch buttoned at the base of her left wrist and checks the time, blinking her greenish eyes after squeezing a long, full yawn in the back of her throat.

A gray-haired old lady (Mrs. Sharon Davis, an elderly widow, all wrapped in her pale blue cardigan) in front of her appears to be in a conflict with herself to find some of the change interred in the lowest of her silver wallet. And Wanda scrutinizes the establishment around herself, between the shelves stocked with groceries and the glossy linoleum floor; the weary gaze wavering absorbedly over her own white-fabric sneakers and contingently fixing on a dark, even smear on the floor between them.

Old Mrs. Davis still hasn't spotted her desired coins, and she's been digging into her wallet for the silver pennies for a good few minutes now. Wanda listens over her shoulder as someone pulls into a shopping cart right behind herself and lets out an audible groan, evidentially annoyed at the delay of the old lady with her change, but Wanda doesn't see the point in bothering to torment herself.

It's not yet six o'clock and she'll be peaceably walking home, for Westview is a small, undisturbed, reticent suburban town where everything is so close and easy to find. And she knows that, with her house being just a few blocks away from the locality of the modest market, she won't be long in coming to prepare dinner for her and her boys (whom she has left securely at the house, both doing their math homework). She smiles tenderly to herself when she thinks about Billy and Tommy.

After all, she knows she's never loved anyone as passionately as she loves those two little boys (the grace of her life, the reason for her morning smile and for the blaze of keenness pulsing within the fond fortifications of her warmish heart). For her they are everything, and that is why she would do anything for them – they are the epithet of the purest form of love that Y/N had ever gifted her with; the culmination of their love converted into two vulnerable little creatures that are made up of the best of the two of them.

She just knows, like a good mother who understands both her children so well, that at that moment, the twin boys are probably watching some silly cartoon on the television set beside the broad fireplace found in the corner of the commodious living room. And she is placid in a supermarket line, getting a whiff of the eccentric consequence of the odd combination of the full-bodied aromas of cleaning product and some sturdy feminine perfume – an even slightly nauseating aroma, kind of overpowering and suffocating. In some aisle away from her, a child is heatedly asking his mother to buy him some treats.

Wanda then ponders about making something a little special for dinner, and recalls about the delicious kugel recipethat her mother used to prepare in the length of her childhood days, back in devastated Sokovia, so many years in the remote past that encompasses the beginning of the disasters that marked her life.

The memory that gushes over her is sentimental and bittersweetly recurring to her core; she deliberates about the sporadic months of starveling and a small humble family of four, when her father was lucky with his sales and there was a sufficient amount of money left to buy the soldiers' leftover ingredients.

But then, she retrieves back to the years of her late youth, all lived in the restful caresses of the compound in upper Manhattan. She was still understanding about how to breathe without having Pietro to hold her hand. She was learning to live on her own. She was coming to terms with the truth that living didn't inevitably have to be a bad experience at all; not when Y/n showed her that there could still be delight in the little things in life.

And it was Y/n who used to marvelously praise the dish when Wanda found comfort in the act of cooking, and she always repeat a few slices every time Wanda cooked it so long ago, when they were just two teenage lovers (and eventually also young wives, both living in a small bubble of love and companionship on the edge of a comfortable wooden cottage surrounded by dozen of yards of apple orchards).

There was the sweet virtuousness of the warmth of two young girls' lives at that time. It was the first time that Wanda was really fond of being young (of breathing and having a beating heart, of having a life to live valuing every little detail of it).

She memorizes the exultant smile of her ex-wife, looking so light and beautiful even while talking with her mouth full (a half-crocken smirk drawn to her left-side, like the smirk also articulated in the innocuous characteristics of her little Tommy after he was born, which reminds her so much of the radiance that used to gleam in the sweet features of her former companion). Her ex-wife wasn't always a lonesome and distant creature creeping in the corners of her mind, and it genuinely aches inside her chest to remember that.

Y/n always devoured lavishly every traditional Sokovian dish she has ever prepared and promptly asked for more – and then thanked her with a chaste kiss placed on the pulp of her lips, which promptly evolved into the building of an intimate, sweaty moment with two bodies rubbing greedily against each other. But she soon lets out a crestfallen, rather disillusioned sigh, repressing herself for having gone back to those secluded memories amorously stored in the edge of her brain in the first place (of the concept of two adolescent girlfriends absorbed in love in the purest sense of the word, emulating the seriousness of a relationship with adult bearing, but never losing, at its core, the youthful sweetness worthy of teenage lovers). Two girls playing love in a world that was a little too hard on them.

She glares ruefully at the bulbous base of the red wine bottle and then lets out a sorrowful exhalation. Her relationship with Y/n felt like it was straight out of the old sitcoms that she always appreciated so much, where no problem was a genuine obstacle and that, by the end of the day, the two lovers would be in each other's affectionately secure arms again (and that perhaps she let have an effect on her a little too much, when dealing about decisions made early on in her adult life).

But then she reminisces that she was merely turning eighteen years old when she became a wanted on an international scale, and that, prior to that, she had also grown up in a war-torn country. She never knew how to behave like a normal person per se – whether that was before or after she became able to expel bolts of magical energy from her fingertips. She never quite knew how to fit into the role of a child or a young adult in the first place. Not by herself.

There was no time in Wanda’s life to understand precisely how to fit these labels (she was protesting with so much loathe constricted within her heart, volunteering to save her homeland, being made of little more than a lab rat by the clutches of a bunch of mad men, being used by the being that promised her greatness, but only ended up costing her the life of her darling brother).

In the cramped confines of a bleak, sullied cell, with only a modest television in the corner to entertain her mind away from the needles and the brutality, there were not many allusions of love and passions that elapsed through her life outside a square screen.

Wanda was aware that she just mimicked other people's movements and transcribed them into her own actions, as if it was all just a show and she was its young star, trying to intomb in her core the path of catastrophe and violence that had always shadowed her closely; it was only the years of strict therapy, self-knowledge and self-care, right after being blipped and coming back, that edified her to be her own person in a truly healthy way. There would be no more extremes in her life.

Her cohabitation with Y/n at the time facilitated, of course – even though her wife had changed a lot in the time that followed since the blip, at first, things had worked out well between them. Or as well as possible under the anomalous circumstances. The two of them took care of the (still) newborn twins and of each other, always with great tenderness and affection while they did it. At least that's how it worked for the first year after their reunion – until Y/N got into alcohol's graces for good, that is.

Their relationship had always felt rather light and jovial before Thanos snapped his fingers. And after that she might even have come back, but it was indeed her marriage that had turned to dust in that remote dreary day in Wakanda. In all honestly, she's not quite sure what's changed in that meantime that she's been away (dead, she was dead). And it's uneasy to ponder about it, but sometimes she does – she can’t help it.

Her corporeal existence had disintegrated into a sift of life, crumbling into her own ashes. There was color, and then the dreadfully wide expanse of emptiness (death); she, as a self-aware being, ceased to exist with just a thought and a snap of two fingers.

Her consciousness faded before she could even realize she was doing it – the palms of both her hands constrained firmly against the wound in YN's stomach that was leaking bundles of fresh blood. And Wanda never relatively questioned her existence before that (she only questioned why she ceased to exist in the first place). Returning to dust, as people of faith would say. Five long years that slipped through her fingers and dripped onto the floor in the form of a veil of dust.

It still feels odd in her guts, even ten years later, to remember that there's a void somewhere in her life that would be filled with the time that was thieved from her by the Infinity Gauntlet. A void that had once been filled by the subtle presence of Y/n's love.

Once, when the twins were about a year old after the blip, Y/N drunkenly knelt down with her face defectively reclining on Wanda’s thighs and questioned her as to why Wanda and the babies where the ones erased from existence while she stayed behind, abandoned like an old piece of furniture that no one wants to use anymore. Wanda never knew how to answer it, but they got divorced about a month later or so.

But she imagines that it, the crumbliness of their relationship, has something to do with the fact that they were both a little precocious in getting married before their twenties properly speaking; maybe if they were older and more experienced before doing it, she thinks, standing in line at the supermarket, maybe then they wouldn't have had the sorrowful culmination that they did (the crying faces and the broken hearts).

Maybe they could have risen together, and not just drifted further and further away as the days passed. Maybe Y/n didn't feel guilt-ridden every time the twins cried in need to be held or fed. Maybe Wanda wouldn't have queried her for the love she no longer knew how to give – she is fully aware of the fact that she has always had a somewhat pushy nature, after all. Maybe this, maybe that.

She doesn't know why she's been thinking about maybe so much these past few days. But it's not her fault that her ex-wife happens to be so pleasing to the eye. The person behind her in line grumbles again, and there is a mischievous chuckle that reaches her ears with airs of grace. Wanda is sincerely considering summoning some coins with her magic for Mrs. Davis.

“Oh my God, this wine is divine!”

It is Sarah Proctor who addresses Wanda, the key to undeniably everything in this town. Wanda knows it's the other woman because a sudden pulsing urge to fade away takes over her nervous system as soon as the voice echoes behind herself.

She is the high-nose blonde woman who lives up the street, is a devoted member of the Westview Elementary School parent-teacher association (in the year before Wanda had witnessed her make a young teacher leave the room in tears after a meeting), proudly cultivates the most exquisite yellow roses in the neighborhood and wears a pair of classy yoga pants that would fit a young teenager with half of her age. A self-proclaimed wine mom.

Her daughter is a classmate of Billy and Tommy, and the children often attend both the Proctor and Maximoff residences – which occasioned in Sarah a vague idea of intimacy that only endures in the head of the blonde woman with bobbed hair.

She has already invited Wanda several times to Westview Pool Club girls' gatherings, but Wanda politely declined with an odd smile and a trivial wave of her hand, because she's never been the socially outgoing kind of type—and she's always been under the impression that every attempt Sarah made from approaching her were due to the fact that the other woman knew of her past as an Avenger (as did most of the small-town citizens), and so was trying to turn her into a kind of living-tourist-spot for the eyes of the rest of the world to witness.

Rumors had it that Sarah would run for mayor in the upcoming election, and having a former Avenger as the face of her campaign certainly sells well with the predilections of the American public. Little does she know that Wanda won't vote for her.

“Oh yes, it's one of my favorites,” Wanda retorts, talking about the dark tall bottle of red wine prudently deposited inside her plastic basket, “It's been a while since I've had a drink, so I decided to buy a bottle to open this weekend.”

“Some special occasion, I suppose?” Sarah articulates a suggestive grin, but Wanda just frowns uncertainly, half squinting at her neighbor, “Maybe some... special visitor? I always knew you had it in you, Wanda. You know what they say about the quiet ones...”

“What– no, no. No,” she flashes a half embarrassed, half awkward smile, chuckling nervously while doing so, “Y/n is staying with the boys for the weekend, so it's just a special little thing for me. All by myself. A quarantine-style staycation. A whole weekend... just to myself.”

“Y/n, huh?” Sarah raises a well-crafted eyebrow in a pique of curiosity, “Your ex-wife, right? I remember seeing her at the twins' birthday party. I mean, she's pretty, yes, but she's quite the quiet type, huh... just minding her own business with a cup of soda.”

“Yeah, she was never one to talk much in public, even when we were with our teammates… but neither am I, honestly.”

“A pair made in heaven, indeed,” Sarah then flashes a smile, but the taste that slides across Wanda's tongue is bitter and kind of hard to swallow. Wanda shifts her body weight uncomfortably from one leg to the other.

“But wait, she's also an Avenger, isn’t she? Yeah, she's the one in the black and white outfit! Oh my God! Who wore a jacket over it and had that kinda mean attitude, all punk rock and stuff?”

“Herself,” Wanda agrees, pressing her lips together in a long, clumsy line. She just wants to go home and cook her damn kugel.

“My my, how did I not notice this before? I remember seeing her in the news once, when I was in college. I also had quite a taste for delinquents back then, if you know what I mean. And, well... I explored a lot in college.”

Wanda feels a hot twinge high in her face and she bites the inside of her cheek in a rather timid act (but there's no denying that Y/n's somewhat rebellious attitude has always had a lewd effect on her legs as a young teenager with a schoolgirl’s heart).

“She and Black Widow, I think, saved the life of the mayor in that bombing on the Fourth of July in... ‘15, ‘16, maybe? Yeah, I remember that! She's the one who's super strong, isn't she? Who held up a scaffold once and saved those kids!”

“That's her, yes.”

The brunette muss in a limp voice, which seems to draw a slightly indecent laugh from the blonde woman with her shopping cart full of knick-knacks and silver hoops clicking in her earlobes. It is from her that the aroma of sturdy perfume comes.

“Well, I imagine that super strength of hers comes in handy in some… situations.”

“Situ–” but then she blinks just one time, “Oh,” Mmrtification hangs over Wanda like a bucket of paint spilled over her dark-haired head.

She opens and closes her mouth like a golden fish, frowning, and her cheeks don't take long to reach strong shades of scarlet, glowing red like one of the tomatoes inside Sarah's cart.

It's inappropriate, and she knows it, but she can't help but feel a certain tingle in her breasts as lapses of memory enlighten her thoughts with the ghost of touches coursing along her body. Then she thinks of Y/N's warm, measured breath against her earlobe (of strong hands pinning her wrists above her head, of a tense, impassive hip against her own hip, of the cracked headboard and the broken bedframe). A movement and a moan. An electrical discharge in her bowels. And then, fuck... just Y/n tearing her insides apart.

The other woman smiles viciously, and Wanda suddenly wishes she hadn't put on a sweater before leaving the house, because she can actually feel herself starting to perspire at the expectant look her neighbor bestows on her.

She's never been one to deal with such intimacies with anyone other than her ex-wife (merely some casual, unsuccessful and sporadic blind dates that's never been more than a few kisses and a few touches here and there, by no means ending up in her or anyone else's bed). But she permits herself only to flash a wan grin towards the other woman when she realizes that, in front of her, the old lady has lastly found her damn change. Fucking finally.

And then, with the memory still boiling hungrily in her innards, like a hungry beast devouring her from the inside out, she takes a large step in the other direction, trying to walk away from Sarah as humanly possible, as if the other woman carries with her a toxic cloud that sickens everything that comes in contact with her. If Wanda couldn't probably get a nice lawsuit for that (or worst), she'd turn Sarah into a disgusting slimy frog.

“Well, I, I, I need to go, Sarah, but it was really nice meeting you around here. Bye,” the enchantress raises her wrist, bidding the blonde woman goodbye with a wave of her hand and a small, introverted (half-awkward) grin.

There is barely time for an answer to be formulated on the part of the housewife. Wanda's cheeks are still red hot as she (virtually) dashes through the small supermarket's automatic double doors like a fugitive on the run. Mrs. Davis drops a coin on the floor on her way out.

ᗢ

You don't know exactly how long you've been raising and lowering the joint of your bent elbow above your head. It doesn't feel right to do it, just as it doesn't do it if it feels wrong. It's just necessary – it’s like cracking some eggs if you're in the mood for an omelet for breakfast. You just have the fullest conception that a few good minutes have passed since the beginning of all the activity, and as in the rehearsal of a play, you are repeating the gestures until you overcome them with great proficiency and your culmination comes out perfect, from your liking.

And you don't bother to intend to stop doing it anytime soon – such a guttural, animalistic and barbaric action. At this point, the movement is already instinctive after being recorded in at the core of your memory, an automatic message engraved between the ligaments of your neurons. You've done it innumerable times before, and you know you'll do it a few more times after this one.

You lift your right arm, lowers your implacable fist constricted like a steel ball, the resonance of smashed cartilage and wrecked bones echoing in your eardrums, all instructed by the figure of a bloodthirsty invisible conductor within the ramparts of your own cranium. The face of the bewildered guy lying beneath you looks like a loaf of raw, misshapen meat as you repeat a cadence of sequentially delivered punches against his facial bones. And he, who is at least twice as big as you, lets out a piercing howl of pain from the cavernous depths of his throat, as even a wild bear would do if attacked deep in a forest.

But in that alley on Long Island there is not a soul available to help him to get rid of your uncomplacent fists – not at the end of a passage that is unpopulated, far from prying eyes that could creep in your direction during the action which takes place there, a beacon of environment squeezed between two amorphous walls of scorched bricks, which gives the illusion of a single long, damp, narrow street.

A sphere of blood is clotted on your face, like an eccentric gemstone, a dark red pearl splattered under the arch of your left eyebrow. And you pant heavily, your veins stiffening.

You've never been one to refuse punching a motherfucker in the face – your forte has always been pounding up things, whether on the countless missions conveyed alongside your teammates or at work during your teenage years, taking advantage of your inhuman gifts to have something to eat at the end of the week.

You've never had a dilemma in whacking someone’s ass. Even more so when that said someone had committed a hate crime against a racial minority and got away with the trial, because that's the way it is in New York City. The recurring metallic scent of fresh blood squirts in a jet of reddish color, thick and gleaming across your rigid, compact knuckles. The gruesome fragrance is no stranger to your sense of smell, and you're not quite sure whether you want it to be or not.

But it is what you are; as an inherent component of your biological chemistry (like the serum gushing through Steve's veins, altering him from inside out, or the magic pulsing within Wanda's core, changing the structure of her brainwaves), you know that hostility is a primeval part of your nature longer than the placid ends of an ordinary, quiet life.

The peaceable domestic life lived alongside Wanda is long gone, and desolation and wrath are your only roommates within the walls of your morbidly valueless apartment. You've been living like a cornered animal for fifteen years in programmed mode, always exposing your fangs and your claws at any sign of danger, just self-destructing, dying little by little, not craving to exist for one more day after laying your head on the blandishments of your pillow and staring blankly at the ceiling, whirling through your usual drunken state. Just desiring to somehow wreck your imperishable body that can't be cut or torn by human hands or tools.

People much well-intentioned than you are long gone, and you, by some implausible probabilities, were (cursed) fortunate to have endured thorough all the catastrophes that life directed at you. The car accident as a child. The blip as a mother and as a wife, as a friend.

The damn journey by the mountain of Vormir, in which three of you went in the grip of that appallingly isolated planet, and only two came back with a chest full of oxygen and life pumping through your nervures. The avid combat for proprietorship of all the six Infinity Stones, and the provenance of the final snap that brought back peace to the equilibrium of the universe by eliminating the existence of its greatest known threat at the time.

You just seem to live confined in this unbearable cycle of misfortune, and it's not fair to others that you are the person left to tell the story of those who are gone. If only you could, you would swap places with the true heroes who gave their lives for the greater good. You would even be honored to do so yourself.

Your chest heaves and deflates severely within the molds of your leather jacket fitted around your shoulders over a short-sleeved plain shirt, your veins bulging with rushing blood, and you rise to your feet, setting up your knees, and step back to inspect the big man who lies defeated to the floor of the alley, amidst a pool of his own blood and filth typical of places like this — your jacket sleeve shimmering with bundles of fresh blood, a coat of gleaming sweat limping glistening on the beam of skin on your forehead, near your hairline.

He is still alive, groaning in a vital position, and is severely battered. And it was never your intention to kill anyone. He probably learned his lesson. Maybe you should break his legs, just in case. A tremor rolls under your black sneaker feet as a loud motorcycle passes by in the distance. Sirens also pass presently afterwards, coming and going with their blue and red outcome.

But there, squeezed inside the claustrophobic walls of the dim alley, you are far from any possible intervention. You then register a single shake that travels along the outline of your left leg as your cellphone pulses inside the back pocket of your old jeans, shivering against your hip bone.

You take an elongated gulp of air before diving into your flickering pocket and hooking the device through your fuming, blooded finger length. You know your pupils are dilated and dark. Your gaze is empty and brittle as you scrutinize between the digitally formed words before your motionless eyes. Frequent bursts of oxygen are a method of neutralizing the pulses of adrenaline throbbing in the artery inside your neck. But the taste that slips between your teeth is acid and sour, and you lock your jawbone at the information that is cognitive to you.

Hey, Y/n. Are you really going to come get the boys tonight? I saw somewhere that it will rain later, so I wanted to check with you just to make sure.

(seen)

It’s Wanda.

(seen)

By the way.

(seen)

Yes, you know it's Wanda (your sweet Wanda, the trace of humanity lingering inside your icy chest), that she texted you. And it doesn't astonish you at all (not anymore), because not many people contact you lately during the sunny period of the day. You two have been keeping in touch the last few days, after all, you told her that you wanted to be more present in the twins' lives. And it's not an untruth at all, but your sly creaking anxiety makes you feel like it's a kind of uncertainty inside your throbbing stomach walls.

Maybe it's not the right decision, the voice inside your head spoke. Maybe at this point in life they don't need you anymore. Maybe this is a breakthrough, or even the commencement of a calamity worthy of a Greek novel, you're not quite sure yet. You turn on your heels and spin your back on the battered man, so you can send your reply to your ex-wife's number without looking at the ferocious outcome of your latent tantrum.

yup, your avid thumbs type along the digital keyboard provided on the screen of the small electronic device, i’ll be there in 1 hour or so. hope they like cheeseburgers.

And then you slide your upper teeth along the flesh of your lower lip, somewhat unsure of how to proceed.

try to enjoy your staycation btw. you deserve it

(seen)

You don't know why you sent her that stupid emoji. It's not like you're a teenager reproducing a failed flirtation attempt with the girl you have a crush on anymore.

But a lapse of realism is present as your vision aims on the blood folds on your stinging fingers folded around the cellphone, and you feel a heavy ball of constricted lamentation taking shape in the back of your throat when your sorrowful eyes scrutinize thorough the lines of your hands and find there only odious signs of a cavernous viciousness (a raw, physical cruelty also reflected within the mirror of your shattered soul).

In the background, the man is still groaning in pain. And you're not sorry you broke him in a beating. No, no. You're just sorry for yourself, because you didn't bat an eye when you did it. Vaguely the memory of Wanda placing chaste kisses along your hands invades you, and you realize you wouldn't want her to kiss your unseemly fingers right now (because you find her too pure to dwell on the filthiness of your touch).

The skin on your hands abruptly itches and feels dull, and you don't feel like having those plagued fingers around your children’s immaculate faces anymore.

ᗢ

The twilight of dusk breaks with the trepidation of an ingrained thunder, which rumbles all in a glow of white light that splits along the longitudinal path that comprised the pleasant suburb that is Westview. So, this is an opaque afternoon resulting from the middle of the rainy day, gray and hazy in its chilly essence, with tenuous threads of a torrential drizzle protecting the foundations of the two-story house on the slopes of the street, making the dewy ivy rustle on its ground, dripping slowly from the eaves of the ceramic tiles.

Standing on the porch of Wanda's house, you ponder that you should have listened to the weather forecast when it was said that during the afternoon there would be a period of rain. Your dark hoodie is really soaked through and your hair, pulled back in a high half ponytail, is damp against the skin of your own forehead. You feel kind of stupid.

Compact, opulent, slate-colored clouds were uneven against the emerald green of the panorama of howling houses, hills and trees, like the leaning of thick smoke from a desolate fire. A fierce storm, nevertheless, is not anomalous in the face of the oscillating spring climate of the state of New Jersey, which is not a real stranger to the rainy weather of the season. Thus, the nonstop drizzle is not the atypical episode of the day altogether.

The conquering event of such a rank happens when Wanda opens the door and finds you there, standing with your elbows dripping cold droplets water in the light wood entrance, and then pulls you into the cozy embrace of the pleasant climate established within that domestic environment of her own home.

“For God’s sake, Y/n, you're soaking wet!”

She reiterates, surveying you with an apprehensive gaze that runs the length of your head to toe, her slender ringless fingers still pressed worriedly around the outline of your right forearm tucked beneath the humid fabric of your damp blouse – but Wanda doesn't seem to realize as she's still carries with the action, and you kind of don't want her to let go of you anytime soon, so you say nothing about the warm touch tingling on your cold skin.

“Yeah, the rain started when I was halfway there and there was no way for me to avoid it, so I just went with it,” you mutter, with a certain lack of interest smoldering in your quiet voice “Sometimes I wish I still had a car...”

“But you didn't bring an umbrella?” Her gaze is accusatory in your direction, the tone of voice sounding dangerously concerned inside your ears, “Wait, you walk all the way over here?! I could have gone to get you!”

“Well,” you kind of sigh, shrugging your shoulders within your hoodie, without looking her straight in the eye “You see, I, hah… I didn’t think it was actually going to… you know… to rain. And technically I have some level of super speed in me, so...”

And then you look at her, and the exact facial expression you'd expect to find there makes its way until it slides all over her face. She’s pissed off.

“But I told you it was going to rain!” she then frowns at you, looking a little exasperated while doing it, her beautiful features drenched in an irritated tone of incredulity, “Seriously Y/n, you need to listen to what I say more! What if you get sick?”

You flick an eyelid at the grumpy figure of a very upset Wanda standing right in front of you, exhaling aromas of tea and crimson color. It's funny how the pique of nostalgia slips through your bones – there is an air of familiarity when a subtle sense of déjà vu settles into your cognitive system, like the feeling of coming home after a long trip. You feel at home. You feel belonging.

This image is very cherished to your spirit, and you can't help but to articulate a small grin that feels light in your heart in front of your ex-wife, who then aims towards your gaze with a gleam that is an assortment of misunderstanding and irritability flickering in the greenish irises, the color that look like two emerald stones embedded within her eyeballs, curving a single one of her sharp dark eyebrows in an high arching cut.

You feel married to her again for half a fraction of a second – it's like your remote newlywed routine all over again. And the feeling is actually good. She looks so pretty. It's like you could kiss her lips right there.

“What? What's so funny?”

Wanda questions you in an almost petulant way, and you let out a pleasant chuckle as she tilts her head slightly to the side of her right elbow, her chin pointing toward the tip of your nose – her typical irritating movement as the harbinger of an angry reaction to anything that troubles her spirit.

“You know I'm physically incapable of getting sick, don't you?” you declare, still with a smile carved along the outline of your own lips, and Wanda crosses her forearms close to her chest in an even vaguely embarrassed way in front of you. She was always a stubborn type anyways.

“It's that super durability mutant thing or some shit like that. At least that's what Banner told me once, and he's a smart guy y’know, so I believe him,” you casually shrug, “I haven't had a cold since I was, like, thirteen. Shit, I don't even know if I remember what it's like anymore. You don't have to worry about me, Wanda.”

“W-well,” she exasperated in a timidly cute way, even a little childish in essence, pressing her open palms against the sides of her hips well-guarded by a pair of pale mom jeans – the attire so far from the miniskirts and chains and torn clothes she used to wear when she was younger, at the apex of her mean girl phase.

Today isn't the first time you've noticed that her waist got wider as a result of the prudent ripening endowments of late adulthood blossoming into her beautiful body-type. It suits her well. You want to touch her skin through the fabric of those flimsy jeans and the thin white cotton blouse; your fingers itch to do it.

“Just because you don't get sick like other people it doesn’t mean you can walk around in the rain whenever you feel like it. You look like a wet dog right now, you know.”

“Alright, alright, I get it,” you raise both your hands to shoulder height in a placid gesture of surrender, “No more walks in the rain, I promise you.”

“You're impossible, Y/n,” she then rolls her green eyes into their sockets, but you just smirk jokily at her reaction.

It only takes a nonchalant magical flutter of Wanda's wrist, with her right five fingers all enveloped in a fading mist of crimson steam, for the well-versed witch to make your garments still swell on your body, expelling from the bristles of fabric, as even in a chemical separation reaction, the water molecules that soaked them in the first place.

It's like a huge hair dryer blowing hot air the entire length of your body and then unexpectedly stopping as if pulled from the socket, making your skin temperature pleasant again like a sunny embrace all around your body. You find yourself dry in a matter of seconds, from your socks to your underwear, thanks to her remarkable magical gifts.

The tingles consequential from the scarlet mist touching your skin still slither down the length of your body. It is familiar and eccentrically comforting – it's like eating again a candy that you used to eat during the preludes of your childhood; tastes like home and happiness.

“You know what, your powers come in handy sometimes, I’ll give you that,” you say in a mocking tone of voice, and she raises a single eyebrow in response.

“You’re annoying. I'm still considering throwing you out back in the rain for dripping water all over my carpet, just so you know.”

“All right, mom, relax. I won’t do it again, girl scout word.”

“You were never a girl scout, Y/n.”

Wanda just casts a weary glance in your direction, but there's a slight lighthearted tone that resides in the green outline of her graceful irises, as if an inside joke has taken hold between you two. She smiles, and so do you, because you feel comfortable while doing it – a pair of complicit grins from someone whose chest is filled of joy and fullness. The atmosphere that sets in is comfortable, and you feel more relaxed being close to her.

You don't really do it, but it feels like your fingers are entwined with the fingers of her own hand – the specter of touch is written between the two of you, and it's as if your soul can really feel hers at its core, like two magnets that can't stop attracting each other instantaneously. You've always gravitated towards Wanda's overwhelming presence, and things won't be any different now.

“Come on, the boys are watching cartoons in the living room,” Wanda says, then turning her back on you so that you follow her lead to the intimates of the house, “You can stay until the rain stops.”

You follow after your ex-wife without further circumlocution, the two of you passing through the small and comfy entrance hall as you go after Wanda into the large rectangular living room, your hands always tucked inside the single pocket of your hoodie as you accompany her with phlegmatic steps in your essence. Your shoulders feel even lighter as she turns to you and casually offers you the sweetest smile you've ever seen in your life.

Torrential rain is still pouring down from the sky outside the house, and the boys Billy and Tommy can be seen wearing warm, comfortable clothes, both the twins snuggled up against the back of the gray linen sofa, their little smart eyes looking smilingly at each other’s faces and not towards the television screen, where some cartoon that seems unfamiliar to you is shown.

They seem to share some secret that only two people with some primal connection as to what unites them would be able to do it, but the sounds of banter irrigated in the air of childish shenanigans reveals the mockery between their giggles.

They are brothers and they are twins, yes, two parts of a whole, born of the same womb that they shared from the beginning of their existence as two living beings, but you were always a little happier to realize the closeness established in the friendship between your children. Billy and Tommy are each other's best friends.

The pair then seem to make themselves aware of the presence of their two mothers as they enter the room, and the smiles of both children scintillate in enthusiasm as the pairs of eyes look up and acknowledge your appearance a little further behind Wanda's still figure, following her very closely, ceasing the small section of chitchats they had between the two of them.

“Mom!”

“Mommy!”

From the sofa the boys joyfully call out to you, beaming in your direction. You can't help but do the same to them.

“Hey, my demons spawn. What are you up to there, huh?”

“We were preparing something! Okay, so, mom,” Billy speaks in response, barely seeming to be able to contain the glee of excitement inside his tiny body.

“Listen to this-!” Tommy complements his brother's phrase, in a tone of enthusiastic anticipation.

"Hey, I want to start it!" but the other twin intervenes promptly, almost indignantly.

Tommy frowns, turning up his freckled little nose towards a rather annoyed Billy, who is sitting next to his left elbow. The little boy briefly tilts his head to the left side towards his brother, and you know you've seen similar action in Wanda's characteristic mannerisms.

“No, I want to start it!”

"I want to start it!"

“But I want to start it!”

“I want to start it!”

“Why don't you both,” Wanda then promptly interferes with the small disagreement between the boys, increasing her mother's reproachful tone of voice a little, preventing, at the beginning, that the intrigue takes a somewhat bigger proportions, “Start it together?”

“Yeah,” you support her in a complacent tone of voice, “You two came up with the idea together, so the right thing would be to do it together too. Whatever it is, I mean.”

"Okay."

"Okay..."

The two of them mutter almost in almost defeated tune, fidgeting together on the couch. You think that they look cute while they're there, tiny and sitting like two baby rabbits.

"You ready?" Billy questions in a low voice, turning to the brother beside him.

“Yeah,” Tommy mussed back, nodding in agreement.

“Okay,” says Billy then, almost proudly, “Three, two, one, go.”

And then, you can barely contain a smirk when the boys, in different and discrepant voice tones, begin a silly chant in their thin children's voices. In the corner of your peripheral vision, you notice that Wanda also lets out an amorous smile, melting into a comfortable puddle of kindness, dying in love with her two singing little children sitting across from the two of you.

“We like ice cream like any child should,” they hum together, vocalizing playful tones as they proceed through the song's component words, “And if we get some ice cream, we pro-mise to be… good!”

Then they look towards the two of you, displaying expectant smiles written all over their childish faces. And you and Wanda exchange glances, and the smile she offers you is very similar to the one that graces the curve of Billy's lips.

"Nice try, smarty-pants, but you haven't even had dinner yet."

“But mama,” Tommy replies in a pleading tone of voice, “We really want ice cream!”

“Yes, we want ice cream!” exclaims Billy in agrément, "We can't wait!"

“Well, we can have dinner first, then ice cream. What do you guys think?" you offer them, your eyes darting towards Wanda's face, "But you need to have dinner first to grow to be strong and healthy, and ice cream is for dessert only. Right, mama?"

Wanda looks in your direction, and then smiles. And you smile back, because the situation is prone to do so. You, for the first time in so long, feel welcomed and hassle-free in the presence of others. The air inside the house is blissful and warm, so unlike your empty, disdainful apartment forgotten somewhere on the West Side of Midtown Manhattan. Wanda doesn't feel like your ex-wife right now – at least, that's not how she looks at you.

“Right,” her eyes flash pale green beams towards you “Let's have dinner first, mommy.”

ᗢ

You wake up in the middle of the night, but maybe you just haven't fallen asleep at all. The sheets that grace the bottom of your body are soft and comfortable, and the pajama set you wear is not your property. It's late in the course of the long night, and like so many that have passed before this one, you just know you wouldn't be able to rest your relaxation anytime soon.

How could you even do it? Perhaps you stayed longer than you realized detailing the gloomy ceiling of Wanda's guest room, counting in your mind as you scrutinized every passing second so that you still had control over something (time being something), so that you wouldn't go mad at being dismembered alive by each of your own inner demons.

If the beginning of the night was watered in jubilation and a serene comforting coziness on your part, the firstfruits of the dawn soon came to frustrate you in the form of intrusive thoughts quite harmful to your twisted mental health.

The torrential rain didn't stop anytime soon, and after having dinner with Wanda and the boys (in a very warm congregation, you were sitting at the table with your family, eating the same food as them and breathing the same oxygen, always supported by grins of pleasure as you chatted eagerly with each other), and the twins were slow to fall asleep after two generous mugs of chocolate mint ice cream each.

Your ex-wife insisted that you stay for the night after the two of you carried them upstairs and deposited them in their respective tidy beds, showering each of them with chaste kisses to the tops of their childish heads – Wanda's little staycation was long-forgotten by then. You let out a disturbed sigh, both palms of your hands polishing the length of the dull face of yours.

What the fuck, you think, what the fuck are you doing there? This may even be your family, but this is not your house. It's not your home. Not anymore. Reverberating through your insides you find the throttling need for a drag of a cigarette eating away at the bottom of your lungs like a harmful parasite sucking the life from its source, and then you get up to do it, because lying down feels like it consumes you from within in a profuse haze of bubbling anxiety that bursts from your stomach to your mouth, making you feel so weak inside.

It has always struck you as a somewhat ironic cynicism on the part of the universe that you, who are possessed of an impenetrable shell on the outside, suffer so much from the brittle fragility of your own interior – hard skin does nothing to protect a broken mind.

The lavender bedclothes had begun to tighten the muscle in your neck after a while, and in the room just down the hall, you assume Wanda sleeps comfortably cuddling in her bed. When searching inside the single pocket of your hoodie, the well-folded garment on top of a plain desk in the corner of the room, soaked in the darkness of the shadowy environment, the absconse pack of cigarettes from a brand that you are quite familiar with, that keeps you company in the acrimonious moments of solitude, you take a single cylindrical unit towards the spaces open to your drooping mouth and then you find the cold lighter with your fingertips, leaving for the entrance door of the room offered to you by your ex-wife.

After descending the stairs, stepping one step at a time with your bare feet, you are surprised that the door leading to the backyard is already open before you are even there, and the cold night wind has blown inside the house like a curious, invisible animal, installing an icy feeling of dysphoria within the broad walls.

But before you could search with your watchful eye for some intruder who went beyond the icy specter of the night, in avid state of alert, you notice an apollonian silhouette hunched outside, sitting on the step outside the door, with a long waterfall of soft hair in the color of a raven's down running halfway down her spine.

The restlessness that weighed heavily on your shoulders eased as the familiar full-bodied scent of hibiscus tea mixed with the sweetness of a mild strawberry shampoo slithered into your nostrils and filled your lungs thirsty for smoke and tobacco. As you approach, you see that Wanda, wearing a sheer silk robe over a red nightgown, is accompanied by a large cup that exhales small clouds of steam, with the tiny bundle that carries the tea herbs submerged into the hot water inside the dark container.

"You really have loud thoughts," Wanda's small, soft voice ripples through the air and then hugs your body as your ex-wife turns toward you with a lingering slowness that, to you, is as familiar as the taste of your unsmoked cigarette.

Her eyes glow an intoxicating green hue amid the darkness of the night, only supported by the silver light of the moonlight coming from outside the residence. You feel like a frog being studied on a silver platter in some high school biology class.

Wanda's diligent gaze always seemed to be able to penetrate through the cracks of your soul – she always understood you as if she were an expert when dealing with any subject concerning you. You let out an uneasy sigh, oddly scratching the inside of your throat as you do.

"Sorry if I woke you up, it wasn't... it wasn't my... intention."

“It’s okay,” she mumbles serenely over a sip of hot tea, the pulp of her nacarine lips being moistened by the hot liquid she's ingested, “I still haven't been able to sleep anyway.”

And it's no surprise to you, because you slept and woke up next to this woman for several of the component years of your life span, and it was always well known to you that Wanda is a woman quite affected by long sleepless nights, not being able to afford to actually close her eyes and be fortunate enough to have a good night's sleep.

Countless were the nights turned to morning dawns, when you both resided under the same roof in the compound back at the Avengers Tower, so many years before you were there, standing in the middle of her kitchen, silently watching her perform the simple act of drinking tea at her backyard door.

“Still having trouble sleeping?”

“Once in a while,” Wanda answers you, and with her eyes she indicates the empty space next to her right elbow so you can sit there, “Sometimes I need to relearn how to sleep all by myself. And... It's not easy, when I’m under the same roof as you again.”

Without saying a word, you cross the entire length of the kitchen, passing by the island and the marble sink, to be seated on the marble step that freezes your warm skin, next to the woman who smells of hibiscus with strawberries and deep scarlet tones.

Her eyes recognize the figure of the unsmoked cigarette between your fingers, unlit and forgotten like the insignificant little rolled-up tobacco paper that it is, and then she looks toward the profile of your silhouette, blinking once with her thick eyelashes as she does so.

“You start smoking again?”

“Yeah, it's been a while, actually. A couple of years to be honest. Not that I'm proud of it, but,” your gaze shifts to the small cylinder, turning it between the digits of your index and middle fingers of your tender right hand, “This little shit here helps me calm down, I guess. Or at least I like to think so. I don’t know."

Silence touches both of you shoulders, and there is a moment for Wanda to sip more of the tea that has spilled into her cup. When the drink is gone, then all the way into her stomach, she places the container on the floor, close to her left ankle like a tame kitten, safe from her company. You are still hesitating in the uncertainty of whether or not to light up that damned tempting cigarette.

“Earlier today,” she begins, immediately drawing your attention to her pretty face, and you're met with her pink lip as she clamps her upper teeth over the contour of her wet mouth.

“You and me and the boys... it was good. They like having you around. And I... I like it too, Y/n. It felt right.”

She hums in the sigh of the night. You feel a crackling feeling swelling inside your swollen chest, but you don't say anything in sequence, because it's Wanda who continues to talk in her silver moonlight monologue.

“I had forgotten what it was like to feel like this. Me and you acting like family with the boys the way we’re supposed to be. And it's good, Y/n. It’s… really good. I missed that, you. I missed you.”

You choke relatively. For Wanda, a heartbeat rumbled in her ears. And then she looks at you, and you look at her.

And suddenly, you don't want to light that cigarette anymore – because she leans her chin forward, leaning her head towards you, and you do the same when your body cries out for her, lips colliding in midair like the consolidation of a wish, a scarlet fever supernova bursting within your own chest.

And then, the full-bodied freshness of hibiscus darts into the half-open breach in the gap between your lips, pressing a velvety tongue against the slit between your teeth, discharging into your mouth a red-sour-sweet flavor, definitely good though, but rougher than usual as the two of you now share a needy, somewhat sloppy, even animalistic kiss.

Even if there is indeed a need on Wanda's part, and you just need someone to scare you away from the evil inside your head. Your ex-wife, in a thoughtless act, dives with her clever hands into the thin fabric of the tank top that clothes your impenetrable skin, grabbing the sides of your waist in a needy way, as if all she wanted at that moment was to feel you, as if her entire existence existed based on physically feeling you snuggled into her icy body.

She blinks, consenting to the overflow of her feelings, enraptured by the image of your cheeks burning and your chest heaving. And she does what she thinks is right to do, which seems to be the only option possible in this small moment of affection and dedication, filled with an ember that if she could name it, she would call it love - because she knows she love you, even if she didn't say it out loud yet. You are the love of her life, and she is the love of yours.

Wanda then hurls herself even farther forward, a nymph figure smitten with idolatry, and takes her prize, pressing the commission of her red lips against the outlined mouth with the flavor of melancholy that could belong to none other than you, so exotic, and never the same.

You feel the smart hands rest at the end of your spine with an almost practiced disregard, seeking nothing but feeling at first, far from the lascivious idea of consolidating the carnal act. Wanda just wants to feel you close, all to herself, comfortable in her grip. Between a set of pink lips, a tongue is present, and this tongue curls up in another in a not hasty and exaggerated way. It's elegant. It's careful. It is harmonious.

But a slow kiss unravels, and Wanda holds her breath and returns in search of more of her favorite flavor to keep in her mouth, only to be promptly reciprocated by a devoted you, a soft nostalgic familiarity edging your silhouettes connected by the lips beneath a star-studded sky, with an absorbed perfection that no one else but the two of you would be able to achieve.

Up and down, side and side; surrounded by genuine attunement, lips moved carefully, following an invisible line that dictates your not so reckless actions. A waltz of delicate, tangible lips that still fit together so perfectly, so neatly, that you might as well cry.

But the pacified kiss soon takes the form of a fervent kiss as you pant hot against your ex-wife's lips, and the fervent kiss becomes little kisses sprinkled around her neck that soon dissolve into a hollow moan, into a world where there didn't seem to be any more worries as long as you were in each other's arms.

In her own time, Wanda drags her teeth along the lower lip of your mouth, which groans deeply in response with a tingling in your throat, a tiny fraction of time passing until, like a buzz, quick, rough lips take refuge again in a tongue inside your mouth, and you feel an icy hand grasp your breast in a primitive way.

Clever fingers, soaked in crimson, traveled to your scalp, and a light mouth caresses yet another moan of yours. In a heartbeat, Wanda swings a leg over your knees and sits right on top of your lap, grabbing your wrists to put your hands around her waist.

“Please,” she cries against your lips, “Please, Y/n, touch me. Make me feel you again.”

The feeling is familiar. Toxically familiar. It is the red invading your senses, intoxicating you with dense doses of scarlet. You know very well that, even before the enticements of alcohol and cigarettes, your primary vice has always been the crimson sweetness of Wanda's body. And, well… you're not known for being resistant to the temptations of your addictions.

ᗢ

A crimson marble glow glistening under the palms of both your hands. Sweat glistened in the hollow of your groin across your burning hips. Wanda riding on your lap, naked as a Renaissance painting displayed in the dim light of a museum, her chest heavy like a marathon runner. The long, thick length of the red strap brushed against a specific spot on her inner walls that made her delirious and increasingly pivot her hips toward you, seeking more, brushing against each other like two animals in heat.

There was nothing rational in that animalistic act. The symphony in the room was that of skin beating wet against skin; of her lascivious wetness voraciously swallowing your cock.

You could see it from the single, retracted drop of sweat that poured into the valley between her own swollen breasts, the two mounds swaying just before your lascivious eyes; a delight modulated to your stormy gaze, profuse as sea water, which clouded your young girlfriend's body with a predatory look, immersed in illicit labor.

Your insides tingled in a white-hot tingle, both clits sliding through the material of the strap, the insides of your thighs strong and wet against Wanda's pulsing center.

Her tight pussy pressing against the erect silicone phallus between your legs, the red of the material buffed with the sticky juices from inside of her. That was her bed, her sheets wet beneath your sweaty bodies, the walls of her room reverberating the pornographic grunts and moans from deep in her throat.

“F-fuck-!” she clenched her teeth, her nails lacquered with black nail polish carving red paths in the muscles of your back, “Y/n, fuck, right there, ah-!”

Her thick Sokovian accent spilled into your ears, and something primal and cavernous rumbled inside you, like a spark that explodes in a raging fire. You wanted to own her. You wanted to consume her.

You wanted to eat her alive; fuck her until the mold of your strap was forever etched into the walls of her greedy cunt, which was increasingly squeezing the silicone phallus, a delicious pressure forming a red knot just below her belly button.

“Ah-! Ah-!, pozhaluysta, pozhaluysta-!” she gasped in her native dialect, loud and clear against your ear as you fucked her as hard as possible “Trakhni menya... ya pochti u tseli, ya po-pochti u tseli... Ugh, dorogaya!”

“Fuck, are you close?”

“M-mhmm! ” she kind of moaned, both eyes squinted two lewd lines “Please don't stop, don't stop Y/n, ah-!”

The scream was loud as you dropped her suddenly onto the sheets, her sweaty back slamming against the thick material of the mattress, her dark hair spilling across the pale material of the pillow.

You slipped your hands between the folds of both her knees and brought her lower back close, barely giving her time to miss your strap inside her dripping cunt before guiding the red material between her sticky folds, resuming the vigorous action of fucking your way against her cervix.

Your strong hand pressed itself (as did the bone of your jaw) against the upholstered headboard, and there a rip was deferred by your own touch – as it had done to a plucked pillow, and a lampshade shattered to the ground.

The lamp above your heads flashed white. Wanda's eyes glowed a profuse scarlet that swallowed the moss green of her irises, the darkening of her dilated pupils making her eyes look like two bottomless wells of lust. You buried your face against the beam of sweaty skin that joined her neck to her collarbone, and placed a generous, savage bite there.

“Fuck- I’m gonna cum, I'm gonna– fuck! Y/n! Oh, fuck!” she decreed, panting against your bare neck, pressing her fingers against your buttocks in an incitement to the act they so indomitably committed.

“Come for me Wanda,” you murmured against her ear, “Come on my cock, pretty girl, make a mess for me. I wanna hear you fucking scream my name.”

The bed hit the wall again. And again. And again. You didn't stop at the first orgasm. Nor in the second. Nor on the third. Until you abandoned her in the middle of the night.

653 notes · View notes

takecareluv · 11 months

Text

꒰ how to feel like a princess this summer ꒱ؘ ࿔*:･ﾟ

`✦ ˑ ִֶ 𓂃⊹ you don't need a castle, a fairy godmother or a team of helpful little mice to make you feel like a princess in your day to day life. all you need is your sweetest, most confident self and you are good to go .ᐟ here are a few tips & fun activities to do by yourself ( because a princess always enjoys their own company ! ) or with a friend, whether it's the furry kind or a fellow princess.

✧ ˖ ° ₊ ⊹ : ˚ ೀ ⋆

⨾ first things first, while a princess loves to spend their days frolicking in nature and soaking up the sun, they always protect their skin using spf. so whatever adventures you decide to take on this summer ( and all year round ) , be tedious about applying sunscreen. i promise, your future self will thank you for it.ᐟ

⨾ princesses have a natural glow about them. whether it be from the graceful manner in which they carry themselves, their beautiful smile that lights up a room, or the radiance of their skin - a princess takes care of themself, inside and out. so, to feel like one, be sure to prioritize self care & self love. create a skincare routine that works for you. keep a rose water spray with you for a quick refresh throughout the day. wear light, glowy makeup like cream blush, a lip tint, and a good mascara to emphasize those doe eyes. and find a signature scent people will remember you by.

⨾ wearing soft and light fabrics - like lace and linen - will keep you as cool as possible, while also feeling cute during these hot summer months. whether it's flowing dresses or light linen pants ; sandals or sneakers ; florals & pastels to more natural, earthy tones - wear whatever makes your inner princess shine .ᐟ

⤷ plus, adding little accessories such as frilly socks, ribbons, pearls and other dainty jewelry can be a fun, but simple way to add an extra bit of delicacy to your day to day look.

⨾ try putting your hair up in loose styles - such as a braid - or keep it down and flowing with beautiful, bouncy curls. and again, the simplest style can be elevated to 'princess level' with little details like decorating your hair with flowers, butterfly clips or a headband; tying ribbons and bows into your up-do, or even adding a satin scarf.

.𖥔 ݁ ˖ જ⁀➴

✿. summer can be the perfect time to find a new passion, or perhaps reignite an old one .ᐟ for example : taking up a language , learning about greek mythology , writing & reading poetry , learning to sew or crochet , or learning to play an instrument ( piano, flute, violin, etc. ) - there are so many different hobbies to try this season.

⤷ and even better, with the warm weather, you can do them all outside surrounded by the beauty of nature - birds chirping in the distance, a gentle breeze dancing through the trees, and the sun shining down on you.

✿. like i mentioned earlier, a princess's best friend is mother nature. they love to spend time engaging with any and all of nature's elements. here are some ways you can do the same . . .

✿. start your very own garden .ᐟ

whether it be filled with an assortment of vibrant flowers, or even a mix of fruits, veggies and herbs, a garden is a perfect way to create a serene and magical place to spend your summer days. you can even add a chair or maybe lay out a blanket for a quiet little reading spot. plus. . . with a garden in your midst, you can pick as many flowers as you'd like to create your own bouquets or make flower crowns for yourself and friends .ᐟ ⤷ filling your space with flowers will definitely make you feel like you are living in a fairytale 𓍢ִ໋🌷͙֒

✿. visit a farmer's market or go berry picking .ᐟ

🍓 picking your own strawberries, blueberries, or any other fresh fruit & veggies can be a cute way to stock your fridge and find the ingredients for your next recipe. 🫐 baking is another great hobby to pick up - especially for during those stormy summer days you have to stay inside. breads, muffins, cakes, and jams - there's so many things you can make using the fruit you hand picked; and an added bonus, it will keep your kitchen smelling super yummy .ᐟ

✿. have a picnic .ᐟ

take yourself on a date or round up a group of friends for a picnic at the park or on the beach. you can pack a basket of macarons, sparkling cider, and any of your other favorite treats ; find the perfect spot to lay your blanket, and maybe even bring some reading material or a journal to write in .ᐟ

✿. feed the ducks .ᐟ

if you have a pond nearby, you can take a walk & bring something to feed the duckies, turtles, or any of the other sweet creatures swimming around in there. if not, you can also make homemade bird food and treat those hungry little birdies singing outside your house every day. it could also be fun to take a trip to a local farm or petting zoo and feed some animals that way .ᐟ ⤷ if you do any of these things, please remember to do your research on what foods are good for our little friends, be respectful, and clean up after yourself. princesses don’t litter .ᐟ

.𖥔 ݁ ˖ જ⁀➴

if the sun is not shining or you are looking for other ways to spend time like a princess, here are a few more ideas to add to your summer bucket list. . .

ᥫ᭡. take a trip to a museum and wander its halls, admiring the magnificent artwork in all its beauty.

ᥫ᭡. visit your local library or bookstore and spend the day picking out your next read.

ᥫ᭡. play dress up with your closest friends and have a tea party.

ᥫ᭡. try painting pottery. you could even paint & personalize your very own tea cup or jewelry box .ᐟ

ᥫ᭡. send a handwritten letter to a loved one or a pen pal. and while you’re add it, you can get some practice writing in cursive .ᐟ

ᥫ᭡. pamper yourself a little extra with a bubble bath - adding in rose petals, filling the bathroom with candles, and treating yourself to a plentiful amount of ladurée macarons - in good ole blair waldorf fashion.

࿐a princess always walks with their head held high. they know what makes them feel like their most confident self, and they don't shy away from it by trying to be anyone else. with that being said, always be your true, and authentic self - don't change just to fit a certain 'aesthetic' - take what you like from it, and leave the rest. it is important to do & wear whatever makes you feel comfortable, because in turn you will also feel your most beautiful - as a princess always should .ᐟ

xoxo, meg ♡

220 notes · View notes

frshsoles · 2 months

Text

#best fresh feet insoles #scented shoe insoles #eco-friendly sneakers us #eco friendly shoe insoles #marketing #outfit #sneakerhead essential shoes #comfortable shoes on feet all day

0 notes

bitchlessdino · 1 year

Text

TPC: Seungcheol hot tub sexcapades

Series

Pairing: afab!reader x seungcheol

Genre: smut

Word count: 2.6k

tags: virgin!reader, mention of body image issues, mention of adult content, mentions of tresspasing, mentions of drinking alcohol, smut but not sex? nag!seungcheol, heavy making out, oral (reader rec.), fingering

Summary: At the grown age you are, you were very much ready to lose this social construct that is your virginity, and who better to lose it to than the hottest guy at the party.

author note: i haven't touched this in so long. Happy to have them back and with cheol of all people. hopefully finishing this soon bc it looks like I have another mile stone Im about to hit.

Tag list: @iwouldbangchan @1uvlywon @just-here-to-read-01 @candidupped @minnie-mouser22 @shiningstar-byulxx @90s-belladonna @misssugarlips @tommolex @hoeforhao @honglynights @homerunhansol @dkakapizzaboy @junhui-recs @svtup @buffhoshi @meowmeowminnie @caratochan @lovebot4han @lovelyhan

The only times you’ve cum were by the will of your own hand. It’s embarrassing to admit, but you are painfully a virgin.

High school wasn’t great to you and neither is college, but it came at a point in time you were ready to get it over with. God, did you sound like some cliche. Not any more cliche than this party you’re at though. Drunk, horny, high. Almost everyone there was one, two, or all of the above.

You aren’t all that different. Especially after landing your eyes on possibly the best lay you could have. His eyes round like planets, shining brighter than any star in the sky. His hair is coiffed more perfect than the head of any Ken doll. And his lips, so naturally pouty and biteable, sinking your teeth into his bottom lip would taste sex alone.

“Ooh, he's a good one. Nice eye.”

“Em, I can’t,” you say, shaking your head at your friend. “Look at him. He’s too out of my league. What would I even say? Hey, you’re really hot, wanna take my virginity sometime? Are you kidding me?”

“Why the fuck not? You’re hot, he’s hot. You would make the hottest porno ever to exist—if that was your plan.” She adds that last part after seeing the panicked look in your eyes.

“Yeah,” You reply, rolling your eyes. “Hot stud steals V card from loser virgin.”

“There’s a market for that,” she nudges.

“Whatever. I’ll probably just look for someone more approachable.”

“Hey, the worst thing about coming up to him is he says he isn’t interested.”

“And how is that not at all traumatizing?”

“It’s life. Just be willing to walk through it.”

With a bit more convincing, somehow she’s managed to push you toward him. Your sneakers dragged against the floorboards, hands shaking in anticipation. In a split second, his bored gaze lands on you, and a chilling strike runs down your spine. It halts your step. Time slows down as the corner of his lips slowly turns up. His chin lifts up to greet you nonverbally, waiting for you to come closer.

You finally reach him, eyes following you like a hawk, you try to relax in his presence. Emphasis on try because besides the music, all you can hear is the pounding in your chest that travels to your ears. You release a shallow breath before saying “hi,” really wishing now you accepted that drink earlier when you arrived.

“Hi.” His voice was deep, yet mellow. “Having a good night?”

“I think so. You?”

“You can say that.” He briefly nods off to scan the party. “Could be better though.”

“How so?”

“It just,” he simply shrugs his shoulders, “could be better.”

You take a second to think about how you can turn this around in your favor. Strategizing happens to be one of your many amazing qualities. Like a light bulb appearing above your head, you remind yourself of the neighborhood you’re in and how familiar you are with it than you realize. “What if I told you I knew a place we can use a hot tub? No one home, all to ourselves.”

“I’d say, ‘hi, I’m Seungcheol. Pleasure to meet you. What’s this about a hot tub?’”

You make your grand escape from the party to take Seungcheol to a neighbor's house that you’re used to babysitting. As far as you know, they’re on a vacay to the Bahamas and won't be back until next weekend. That means you have all the freedom to hop over the fence to their backyard with an unlikely chance of getting caught.

“So, how do you know this place we’re trespassing?”

“I know the owners. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind.”

You turn on the hot tub and watch as the bubbles start to form, your smile doing just the same. Your eyes shift from the water to him nervously. “Just takes a few seconds. Meanwhile…” Your fingers fiddle with the bottom hem of your shirt, raising it past your mid-drift. Your nails graze up your sides as your shirt is pulled over your head, revealing imperfect skin, an imperfect body, scantily clad by beige–your safe color–lace and ribbon. “We can’t get our clothes wet.”

It took time for you to give your body the love it deserves and some days you still feel it’s not worth it, but at the end of the day, you’re the one living in it. You had it only in yourself to love it the most, even if you made it the reason you’ve gotten this far without popping your cherry. Your worst critic would always be yourself, after all.

Even in this backyard, where Seungcheol can't even bear to tear his eyes away from you. He draws in a breath, quietly scoffing to himself as he outlines the shape of your body. To him, the evening air smells delicious with the addition of the view. And no, he wasn’t looking at the full moon tonight.

The sensation in his chest deepens when your shorts are released from their top button, falling to your ankles after the zipper is pulled down. “Well?”

He looks up after your eruption of giggles, watching as your toe is first to dip in the warm water. Inch by inch, your body gets submerged, raising your internal body temperature by several degrees. He breaks away from your gaze with a smug smile, finally removing articles of his clothes, starting with his shirt.

An Adonis body perfectly matching his Adonis face. Chiseled all over, his muscles stood taunt on his figure. He joins, sitting across from you, sharing the heat of the surrounding water, now glistening his skin in the beautiful twilight. You could devour every inch of him.

“This is nice.”

“I told you. Would take this baby out when the kids I babysit are asleep. Let my mind go blank for an hour or two.”

He nods at that, silent after.

“This is actually the first time I brought someone, always too scared about getting caught on the job. Haha.” Why would you say that?

You shut your eyes in embarrassment but tried to get over the initial cringe of your words before changing the subject. “So, do you always follow strangers at the mention of a hot tub?”

“Not always, but I find it better not to question most things. More fun that way. Do you always lure strangers into intimate and private settings?”

“No, but so far I have no complaints.”

He gives you a closed-mouth grin, now making you wonder about the smile he’s hiding behind those lips. “Let’s hope I keep it that way.”

The air is thick with tension, even six feet apart from each other. Most men would pretend not to look, but not Seungcheol. His eyes stayed stuck to you, dark and stormy in stark contrast to the clear skies faintly illuminated by the lawn lights and barely there stars. You are almost sure he wants you at least a third as much as you want him, but he made no gesture in approaching you first, so you dangle yourself in front of him.

Lifting off your seat, your breasts bounce up from the water it once floated in into the cool, crisp air. You saunter in his direction until you're mere centimeters away from him, supremely conscious of the pure sex radiating off his pristinely large build. “It’s gonna sound like a cliche, but I don’t do this kind of thing. I’m usually a by-the-books person.”

“What’s changed?”

Your hand reaches for his bicep, hard and pulsing under your fingertips, and you pull yourself towards him, knees bent on either side of his thick thighs until you're straddling him. Your eye level ascends until you’re looking down at him, his irises dilating once he sees you and feels your soft curves meet his deep hollows. “You look more fun than books.”

“So what, you’re gonna do things differently with me?” You feel the pad of his fingers ghost over your spine, shivers following, causing you to arch into him with a gasp. “I don’t know if I’m worth all that.”

Your hands trickle on the nap of his neck, threading in his dry hair, and excitement bubbles inside you. “The call I get to make.”

His lips, pink and plump, meet yours when you lean in. Like pillows, they cushion the impact and hug the curve of your lips before they start ebbing with carnage. His hands press into the solid of your lower back, fusing into like a tense thread has snapped loose. Your tongue beckons him for access, cheeks flushed against him. You whimper as he holds you tighter, his erection digging into your crotch, and you can somehow feel how wet you are. You’re wet all over from the water your party submerged in, but the lining of your warmth contains a more viscous fluid.

Eventually, Seungcheol pulls away, earning your bemused expression. “I’m not taking your virginity.”

“What?” You ask, shocked, backing away. “How—Why the hell not?”

“I overheard what you and your friend said. Not very subtle. As to why…you deserve better than that.”

You roll your eyes, “Ugh, you’re one of those guys. Remember that not everyone holds the value of sex to this same high standard.”

“But you do, given you feel so pressured to do it for the first time.” He lays an awkwardly platonic pat on your arm, discomfort apparent on your face, but he shows no sign of caring. “I’m not going to let you throw something…heavy away to someone you met—what, 15 minutes ago—to cater to a societal norm. Depending on the person, they would have hurt you. I could’ve hurt you.”

“Look.” Your hand presses against his bare chest. “I approached you. I chose you. Who I decide to have sex with is up to me. I’m grown enough to make that decision.”

“I’m not telling you to promise your body to someone you plan on marrying. What you deserve is to have it to be with someone special, at least someone you trust. Why would you let me even this close to you?”

You scoff. “You had no complaints when we were making out. So don’t use this generic ass excuse that it should be ‘special’ or someone I ‘trust.’ If you don’t want to sleep with me then don’t.”

“You don’t listen.”

“I’ve complied with most things in my life. This will not be one of them. Now, if you don’t want this, it won’t be you. I’ll move on to someone else…I’d just hoped it’d be you.” You lift yourself onto the ledge, only your feet in the water. “Seeing as this is going nowhere, thanks for wasting my time. Good kisser though. Three stars.”

You’re about to leave when his hand stops at your knee. You look down at him expectantly as he gets closer. “Stubborn too.” He stands in the pool to meet your eyes, lips pursed in an amused smile. “I followed you so no one else would. I plan to keep it that way.”

You raise a brow, unsure where your surge of confidence came from, finally feeling the tremble of your hand as it covers his. “What makes you think after this I plan on staying with you?”

“Because although I won’t be having sex with you, I can give you something just close enough.”

Now both hands are on your knees, lips colliding with yours once more, just as hot and sweet as the first kiss. You moan as his teeth dig into your bottom lip, his hands finding your unbreached heat. Then there's that familiar reflex of pulling away, the situation dawning on you now. You blink back at this beautiful man that takes your breath away just from his mere presence and get that same feeling every other time you come close. “Seungcheol…”

“You backing down on me, virgin?”

“Okay, that hurt.”

He chuckles. “I’m teasing, but not the kind I should be doing.” He lands a kiss on your nose. “I’ll be careful. If you let me, that is.”

“I am. You just make me really nervous.”

“I understand. I won’t do anything you wouldn’t want me to.”

You nod, a little too eagerly. “I want you. I-I’m letting you.”

“Good, then relax.”

He parts your legs further away, hand firmly pressed against your warmth, seizing the oxygen from your lungs, and he kisses you tenderly. Your hand clasps over his cheeks, deepening your liplock, and you feel the courage seep out of his fingers as they push aside your damp panties. His digits glide over your moisture, coating himself in the arousal built over your time together and you feel him smile against your lips. “That’s definitely not water, but I have a feeling you know that already.”

“More teasing?” You ask in a weak breath.

“I’ll make sure it’s worth it.”

He bows his head, his knees hitting the plastic bottom. His hands glide over your thighs, a tingling sensation follows its path. His kiss marks your skin in a way that wasn’t visible, only burning you with an unreplicable heat. His touch—gentle and firm—makes your head go to places you usually go to when you’re alone. His eyes tell you comfort and safety, but conflict with the glint of hunger that shines through.

He kisses the center of your folds, easing at you with light flicks of his tongue. Although delicate, it drives you insane, wanting you just to bury his face inside you already. Patience eventually rewards you as his tongue runs stripes over your bordering thighs—small jumps on your end—then your slit. He coats himself in your translucent nectar, sighing in your heat. Mewls then leave you like a nursery rhyme, haunting yet addictive. “Delectable just as much as you look.”

There’s a slow rise and drop of your chest watching him devour you. His lips purse to your core, darting in you to lap your insides, and you whine from his vigor. Your thighs press against his hot, red cheeks as water splashes around him. You shake—vibrate actually—speaking his name like it was the only thing that makes sense, and somehow you still feel how gentle he is with you.

This stranger is meant to be a stranger, so why did he make you feel special?

With the curl of his fingers, they plunge in you, feeling how you pulsate around him as he sucks on your clit. You buck into his face, a wreck, hands glued to the edge of the tub in anguish. Your moans are a grand symphony on loop, the background music to the beautiful moment he’s savoring. How you gush feels him with pride, tightening his core as you push his head closer with your knees. “I-I’ma cum…”

He says nothing, only rummaging faster, deeper, holding on to the pace until his gums are filled with your climax, not minding how it makes him a mess. Your hips hit his face in an erratic beat, only settling down after he licks your thighs clean. You gasp in amazement, only for that gasp to be swallowed by Seungcheol as he sticks his tongue down your throat; you taste his promise.

You part in thick, glossy ribbons, eyes fucked from–you still can’t believe you’re saying this–orgasming by someone other than yourself.

“T-thank you,” you say with gratitude you conjured from the pit of your stomach.

“If you really want to thank me,” he leans in closer, “Let me take you out sometimes and I’ll let you experience it all over again.”

387 notes · View notes

jimmy-dipthong · 4 months

Text

罠英語・Trap Words pt 5

ソース → ❌ Sauce → ✅ Japanese style worchestershire sauce

In Japanese common usage, the word 「ソース」 only refers to a specific subcategory of sauce - japanese style worchestershire sauces. Although in certain technical circumstances, 「ソース」 may also carry the broader meaning that the english equivalent does, calling something like soy sauce 「ソース」 in a regular conversation won’t get your meaning across.¹

We can see this in the Japanese Wikipedia article for ソース. Though the article is about the broader definition of sauce, there is a notice at the top of the page:

“This article is about the general name for a liquid or paste used to season food (the broad definition of 「ソース」). For Worchestershire Sauce (the narrow definition of 「ソース」), see Worchestershire Sauce.”² (my translation)

Side note: I know it's a meme but "Worchestershire" isn't hard to say. It's just "wooster-sheer".

Though ソース can be found as a part of various other words ( ミートソース/meat sauce; ホワイトソース/white sauce; トマトソース/tomato (pasta) sauce), when it is used just by itself, it almost exclusively refers to worchestershire sauce varieties. For example, you can’t abbreviate ミートソース to ソース, even when the context is clear.

Within the category of what Japanese speakers mean when they say ソース, we have ウスターソース, which is similar to the thin English Worchestershire sauce; 濃厚ソース, which is sometimes marketed as tonkatsu sauce and is very thick and viscous; and 中濃ソース which is somewhere in　between. お好み焼きソース is also a type of ソース, similar to 濃厚ソース.³

グリーンピース → ❌ Greenpeace → ✅ peas

Yep… the word グリーンピース doesn’t refer to the environmental activism organisation Greenpeace, which I discovered to some surprise during an actual conversation with my Japanese partner. Since Greenpeace is famous for its anti-whaling stance, and Japan is the country with the highest levels of whaling in the world,⁴ it was only natural to assume that it was a direct transliteration of the organisation’s name. Maybe it’s a common point of discussion in Japan, I thought.

In reality, it literally just means peas. Green peas. An instance of the plural being built into the transliteration (like バケツ), since Japan has no plurals. It’s weird that it’s not グリーンピーズ though, don’t you think? I guess we can just chalk that up to an initial pronunciation error that carried though to the modern day.⁵

Why hasn’t it been shortened to ピース? Well:

Because ピース means “the peace sign”. This word/pose is so common in Japanese culture that shortening グリーンピース to ピース would likely be confusing.

To be clear, the organisation’s name is also transliterated as グリーンピース, but overwhelmingly in regular conversation, グリーンピース will mean “peas”.

トレーナー → ❌ trainers (sneakers) → ✅ sweatshirt

This might not necessarily be a trap word for people from the US, but it is at least a funny place for 和製英語 to show up. According to this source, this word was invented by a fashion designer named Kensuke Ijizu, who was apparently a big boxing fan, and noticed that the trainers always wore sweatshirts, and so decided to name the clothing 「トレーナー」 when he released his designs in Japan⁶. It’s rare that a trap word has such a clear explanation for how it came about! めっちゃスッキリした！

However, スウェット and スウェットシャツ are also both commonly used in Japanese, meaning the same as トレーナー, so this is really only a problem while listening, not while speaking.⁷ It’s also worth noting that トレーナー does mean “trainer” as in like, a personal trainer. That’s where the weird word for sweatshirt comes from, after all.

Sources

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLpub5uXA1A

[2] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ソース_(調味料)

[3] https://www.kurashiru.com/articles/b3134417-fc0e-4782-a5d8-40932613ea79

[4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-08/whaling-around-the-world-how-japans-catch-compares/5361954

[5] https://twitter.com/japanese_eng/status/1562198000411193345

[6] https://zatsuneta.com/archives/007218.html

[7] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/スウェット

#langblr #japanese #japanese language #language #language learning #linguistics #learning japanese #trap words #jimmy blogthong

56 notes · View notes

bwabys-scenarios · 11 months

Text

Reunited

Part 30

Illumi x Reader x Feitan

part 29

part 31

taglist: @tsukilover11 @mercyboluthecrazychicken @sxyriii @shidoni-san @living4tomrua @lemonslut @honeylunalove @sugarrushdaydream @canthebest1 @whorermoviestar @fabitheraven @ashdownunderscorebeloved @astresoleil @ranzxki @smuttysammie22 @yandere-enthusiast

if you’d like to be ADDED to the taglist, please comment a red heart ❤️, make sure you’re able to be tagged/mentioned, and have your age in your bio(IF YOU ARE ALREADY ON THE TAGLIST, YOU DON’T NEED TO ASK TO BE ADDED AGAIN!!)

warnings: suggestive, also uvogin is his own warning

PRESENT TIME

She clapped her hands together, smiling down at the man. “Let’s go on a date, then!”

Feitan stared at the girl, wondering if she realized what she had just said.

“… date?”

She nodded. “Yes, a date! It’ll be a lot of fun!”

He set his fork down. “(Name). Do you know what you’re saying?”

She tilted her head. Feitan knew she could say weird things sometimes, not completely understanding what she actually meant.

“Yeah? We can walk around town, shop a little, and have lunch together!”

Feitan rubbed his temple. “(Name).”

He leaned forward, just inches away from her face.

“If date, won’t end very… friendly.”

Feitan eyed her lips for a moment, before pulling back. (Name) stared at him confused, her cheeks heating up.

“But… friends can go on dates too!”

Feitan hummed. “We can if you want, but us going on date means I get to kiss you, touch you.”

“Fei.”

He glanced at her face, his eyes softening. She was blushing, her eyebrows furrowed.

“I don’t like being teased.”

He laughed and pinched her cheek. “Who said it’s teasing? Silly girl.”

Her mouth dropped open, her hands swatting at his hands. “What?”

He snickered, pushing himself out of his chair. “Joking. Go get ready, we leave in 10.”

——————

(Name) walked out of her room in a pair of jeans and tshirt. Feitan had just put on the coat he always wore, waiting by the door for her.

“Take forever to get dressed,” he grumbled. She folded her arms over her chest, giving him a pout.

“Well I didn’t know if I wanted to wear jeans or a skirt. But it’s cold today, so I chose jeans.”

Feitan raised an eyebrow. “Could just wear my coat if cold.”

“Fei, you coat would NOT fit me.”

He shrugged. “Steal you jacket.”

“Don’t steal on my behalf, Fei. We don’t need a repeat of the McDonald’s incident.”

“I thought it was a success.”

“You threw me out of a window!”

“Too slow.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t respond fast enough at you throwing a burger in my face and screaming ‘RUN!’. I was banned from that location. They have a picture of our faces on the front window!!”

He rolled his eyes. “Baby.”

She let out a sigh and grabbed her purse. “Let’s go. I want to try and check out the market before it gets too crowded!”

The two left her apartment, Feitan following behind her. It had been a year since he’d last seen her, so he wanted to take in every detail of her appearance.

She wore a different pair of sneakers than she had before. He already knew this, she’d texted him whining about her old ones being too worn out to wear anymore, but it was different in person.

All the little differences in her appearance were noted in his mind. The little scratches on her legs, her hair a little longer/shorter than it had been before, and a change in her aura.

She knew nen now, her aura controlled around her instead of steadily leaking from her body. He felt… conflicted. He didn’t know if he should be proud of her progress or worried.

(Name) hadn’t told him what her nen ability was yet, and he wouldn’t ask. That was dangerous, sensitive information. He wouldn’t blame her for not wanting to tell him, he wouldn’t tell her his.

“Fei?”

He was pulled from his thoughts by (Name) waving a hand in front of his face.

“What?”

She gestured around them. “We’re here!”

The crowd was already huge, (Name) holding onto Feitan’s arm to keep from being trampled. People seemed to give Feitan a good amount of space due to his intimidating aura.

“Fei, what do you want to look at first? Oh my gosh!”

She didn’t let him answer, dragging him to a stall selling accessories and makeup. Feitan watched as she browsed the wares, her eyes settling on a silver bracelet.

It was simple, with a bunny charm hanging from it. Feitan could picture it on her wrist, of course she would be drawn to something so cute.

“Ma’am, how much is this?”

The woman behind the booth smiled, tilting the box containing the bracelet to the side so she could see.

“It’s 30,000 jenny!”

‘30,000!? That’s enough to pay for all my monthly bills…’

(Name) looked for a moment longer before sighing and walking to the next booth.

“I didn’t think everything would be so expensive…”

(Name) sulked on the side of the road, crouched down and poking at the dirt with a stick.

“Should’ve let me steal for you.”

Feitan leaned against the wall of a nearby building, watching her as people passed by.

“They’re small businesses, that wouldn’t be right.”

The man scoffed. “Some aren’t, like jewelry place. Obviously steals goods and spikes up the price.”

He could recognize it, as Chrollo did the same thing.

“Well… I don’t want to be the reason you steal, anyways.”

Feitan scowled. “Why you even care? I steal all the time. Easy.”

She poked her lip out in a pout. “I don’t care if you steal. I just don’t want to be the reason you get in trouble, or god forbid hurt.”

She glanced at him, smiling softly. “You’re important to me. I won’t tell you what to do with your life, I know you’re strong. Just… just…”

Feitan placed a hand on her head, rubbing it. His touch was rough, but (Name) leaned into it anyways.

“Sensitive. Fine, won’t steal for you.”

He helped her to her feet, leading her by the hand away from the market and to the department stores.

“Tourist trap. Let’s shop there instead.”

———————

“Fei.”

He looked up from browsing the lingerie section to see (Name), a few items of clothing over her shoulder.

“Can you come in the changing room in a minute to zip me up? I need a nice dress, and the only one in my size has a zipper.”

He stared at her for a moment.

“… sure?”

She sighed out in relief. “Thanks!”

He followed her and waited outside the dressing room as he listened to the sound of her clothes dropping onto the floor.

‘Does she enjoy getting me riled up?’

He folded his arms over his chest, only moving when he heard (Name) call for him through the cracked door.

(Name) stood in front of him, wearing a floor length lilac colored dress.

“Does it look okay? God I hope it fits…”

It took him a minute to answer, his gaze focused on her boobs squishing against soft fabric.

“Looks… good.”

“Thank you. The zipper is back here.”

She turned, revealing her bare back to him. Had she taken off her bra, or had she not worn one at all? He didn’t know and didn’t care.

‘Focus. Just zip her up.’

He stepped forward and ran his hand along her back, sending a shiver up her spine. Feitan smirked at her reaction, reaching out to pull the fabric together.

He began zipping her up, but at the middle of her back it stopped.

“Feitan? Is something wrong?”

He tsked, attempting to zip her up again to no avail. “Won’t zip.”

(Name) sighed, letting go of her dress. “Oh… I wonder if I…”

She sucked in, but Feitan shook his head. “Not stomach, this.”

He couldn’t help but grin when he reached up and cupped her chest, squeezing the soft flesh of her boobs.

Her reaction was delayed, the girl seemingly in disbelief. When she regained her composure, she smacked his hands away.

“Feitan, you perv! Why-“

He cut her off by wrapping his hands around her waist and pulling her flush against him.

“Shh. Overreacting.”

She squirmed in his grip, her face heating up. “Feitan, wh-“

He let her go suddenly, giving her an innocent look.

“Look.”

(Name) blinked, looking at herself in the mirror. From her position, she could see that her dress was now zipped up.

“Wait… how-“

“Squished them down so I could zip it up.”

(Name) covered her face. “Oh Fei, I’m sorry I assumed you were being a pervert. Thank yo-“

“Who said I wasn’t? Enjoyed every second.”

(Name) paused, her jaw dropping. He was looking at her with a smirk, leaning against the wall.

“You look good. Suits you.”

With that, he unzipped her so she could change back into her clothes and left.

——————

(Name) crossed her arms.

“Feitan. Why?”

He tilted his head. “Why not?”

Feitan held a set of lacy black lingerie. “Would look good on you.”

The girl pushed the lingerie away, glaring at the man. “Not funny, Fei. You know pink is my favorite color.”

He was a bit taken aback by her comment. Was that what had irritated her?

She joined him in browsing the lingerie section, picking up a few pairs of panties and bras.

“Should I get the ones with the bows or lace?”

She’d really flipped this on him, the man glad he had his coat to hide his blush behind.

“Don’t care.”

“You seemed to care earlier.”

Was she teasing him?

Feitan groaned, pointing to a random pair before storming off. He didn’t want to get a boner in the middle of a department store. He was already struggling with the memory of her breasts in his hands, he didn’t need to imagine her in different sets of lingerie.

“Feitan wait up!”

(Name) ran behind him, carrying her shopping bags in one arm and her purse in the other.

“You’re so fast. If you’re going to run off at least bring me with you.”

Feitan grabbed her shopping bags with one hand and her hand with the other.

“Shouldn’t tease me. Wouldn’t leave if didn’t.”

“To be fair you teased me first.”

He couldn’t argue with that, only glaring at her from the corner of his eye.

“… where next?”

She took a second to think before responding.

“How about some lunch? I’m starving!”

He rolled his eyes. “Not starving.”

She pouted. “But it feels like I am!”

A small smile pulled at his lips. God, she could be so cute sometimes.

“Alright. I pick.”

Feitan lead her to a random restaurant, allowing her to get them a table. He didn’t like talking, reserving his words for the Spiders.

And (Name).

They sat down, a waitress asking what drinks they wanted and leaving them to look over their menus.

“Mmm…”

(Name) scanned the menu, noting a few things she might like. As she mulled over her choice, she peeked over her menu to look at Feitan, only to have to hold back a giggle.

She knew he was short, however she couldn’t but snicker at the fact the menu covered him completely. His grip tightened, the man placing it on the table to glare at her.

“Why laugh?”

She put a hand to her mouth. “Just remembered a joke someone told me.”

Before he could question her further, the sound of her phone buzzing caused her to jump.

“Oh, maybe it’s my friend! He’s supposed to be here too…”

He watched her take her phone out, the smile on her face fading to a frown quickly. She sighed and typed out a response before stuffing her phone back into her purse.

“Who was that?”

A sigh left her lips. “Someone that’s coming to York New and wants to meet up with me.”

Something harsh bubbled up in Feitan’s chest. “Who?”

“A friend.”

He frowned. “Name?”

She tilted her head. “Do you really need to know?”

“Yes.”

(Name) tapped away at the table with her nails, staring at Feitan with her pretty (e/c) eyes.

“It’s Illumi, the assassin.”

Feitan’s head whipped around to give her an incredulous look, a scowl on his face.

“The creep that kidnapped you? Not going to see him, right?”

(Name) didn’t meet his eyes, playing with the hem of her sleeve.

“Well… he said it was important…”

“(Name).”

He was serious now, his eyebrows furrowed. “Don’t. What if he takes you away again? Hurts you?”

“He wouldn’t do that, I-“

“You don’t know that. He’s assassin. Good at tricking people. Smart.”

She folded her hands over her chest. “I’m not going to fall for something like that. I think he’s an okay guy, before I left he was really sweet to me…”

She had a soft look in her eyes, something that made Feitan seethe. He didn’t want anyone else to make her look like that.

“Sweet to you? What happened to make you leave, then?”

(Name) stayed silent, looking down.

“Something bad, huh?”

Feitan scoffed, running a hand through his dark locks.

“If he hurt you, I kill him for you. Just say the word.”

(Name) began to giggle, but stopped when she met his dark eyes.

He was being completely serious.

“Fei…”

She took his hand, the man stiffening. “You’re my sweet Fei, you know? I don’t want you hurting people because of me.”

Her sweet Fei. Him.

“Yours?”

“Of course.”

He let out a shaky breath, his hand trembling slightly. Feitan hated how happy being called hers made him, even if she only meant it in a friendly way.

“Excuse me.”

The two glance up to see the waitress standing there with their drinks. Her cheeks were a faint pink, with her eyes on their hands.

“Apologies, but I brought your drinks!”

She placed the drinks down, (Name) using her free hand to sip on it.

“You two look so cute by the way! Probably the cutest couple I’ve seen in a while!”

The waitress was gone before (Name) could correct her.

“This is the second time a waitress mistook me and a friend for being a couple.”

“Second?”

“Yeah, happened when Illumi took me out for dinner.”

His frown deepened. He’d taken her out for dinner? Like… as a date?

“Anything else happen?”

“Oh, um…”

‘I wonder how well he’d react to knowing I’ve basically been engaged to him by his parents…’

“Promise you won’t get mad?”

This took Feitan by surprise. What had happened to make he ask that?

“Try not to.”

She sighed. “Well… his parents KIND of want us to… get… married.”

The silence that followed her sentence was so thick that you could hear a pin drop from a mile away.

Feitan’s eyes went from surprised, to confused, to angry, until settling into an unnerving glare.

“Do you want to marry him?”

“Well… I’m not sure.”

Feitan blinked at her. “Not sure? You actually want to marry assassin?”

“No, I mean… I don’t know. He’s nice, or well… he was for the most part.”

“Barely know him.”

She sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. We hadn’t even gone on a date, but the butlers said he was like… madly in love with me or something. I don’t think it was true though, he’s gorgeous. I’m not sure how he’d fall in love with me.”

‘I know why.’

He looked her up and down. Feitan didn’t understand why she was so self conscious, she was gorgeous.

His eyes lingered on her lips again. Today, they were shiny, covered in that peach flavored lipgloss she liked so much. The first time she bought it, she couldn’t stop talking about how soft it made her lips feel.

“Fei? The foods here.”

He blinked, dragging his eyes from her lips to the waitress who sat down their food in front of them.

——————

(Name) walked along the city with Feitan right behind her. You’d think from the appearance of Feitan alone, no one would dare to approach them.

Sadly, some people are stupid.

“Hey, broad.”

(Name) continued walking, not thinking the rude comment was aimed at her.

“Hey, I’m talking to you bitch!”

(Name) felt someone put a hand on her shoulder, her hand immediately grabbing Feitan’s and squeezing it.

With a look, he knew what she was trying to say.

‘Stay calm.’

But it was hard when some random thug was grabbing her like he knew her.

“My apologies, is there something you need, sir?”

The man laughed. “Yeah, I need you to come back to my place for a fun time.”

She frowned. “Sorry, but no thanks. I’m out on a date with my husband.”

‘Husband?’

Feitan was too shocked to breath, his face going red.

The man looked to Feitan, snickering. “This your husband? Little shrimpy wouldn’t be able to do a thing if I decided to take you all for myself.”

The girl pushed his hand off of her, (Name)’s once calm face twisting into one of anger. “Don’t talk about him like that. We’ll be leaving now.”

She pulled Feitan behind her, the man grabbing her again soon after.

“Where the FUCK do you think you’re going, bitch? I said you’re coming with-“

Before Feitan could unsheathe his word to sever his arm, (Name) turned and kicked the man between the legs so hard that even Feitan hissed out in pain.

“Come on Fei. Let’s go.”

She kicked the man in the stomach for good measure before grabbing Feitan’s hand again and continuing in the opposite direction of the man.

Once they were far enough away, (Name) let out a sigh before collapsing. Feitan caught her, picking her up and sitting her down at a nearby bench.

“That was terrifying. You alright Fei?”

She was shaking, her hands trembling as they cupped his cheeks.

“I’m fine… you look like you’ll throw up.”

“God, maybe. Did you see how big that guy was?”

She sighed and leaned against Feitan’s shoulder. “He was a real asshole. I was okay until he insulted you. Pissed me off…”

Feitan glanced at her from the corner of his eye.

‘She… did she do that for my sake?’

“Don’t worry. Weakling’s words don’t bother me.”

She sighed in relief. “Good.”

“But…”

Feitan grabbed her chin, forcing her to look at him.

“Called me husband. Don’t remember consummating any marriage.”

He grinned down at her, his eyes narrowing. “Jog my memory?”

She tilted her head. “Fei, I was lying. We’re not actually married.”

She smiled. “Unless you want to be.”

Feitan let her go, turning away quickly. “Wanna marry me Fei? Don’t you loooove me?”

“Shut up.”

“Come onnnn~ the chapels only a block away!”

He stood up and began walking away.

“Hey, wait! I’m sorry for teasing you, slow down!”

Feitan and (Name) sipped on boba as they strolled through town, stopping at a store every once and a while before (Name) suddenly stopped to check her phone.

“Oh! My friends want to meet up! Sorry Fei, but I gotta go!”

He tilted his head. “I go with you?”

“No, sorry you can’t. I don’t want them to potentially recognize you and get you arrested.”

He huffed. She wasn’t wrong to worry, but he wanted to stay by her side just a little longer.

(Name) gave him a quick hug before jogging off to where she was supposed to meet her friends. As she did, he got a text on his phone from Chrollo.

Boss: we need you at the hideout, Feitan. You can bring your woman if you want.

Feitan groaned. When were they going to stop teasing him over that?

Feitan: be there soon, she left to meet friends

The short man watched (Name) until she was out of sight, then turned to go in the opposite direction.

He was already starting to miss her, but bringing the peach lipgloss he’d snatched from her purse to his tongue to taste, he relaxed.

‘So that’s what her lips taste like…’

———————

“Leorio, Gon, Killua!”

The three boys looked up to see (Name) approaching, the girl waving.

“(Name), it’s been forever!”

Leorio jumped out of his seat and pulled her into a hug. Killua frowned from his seat.

“You were supposed to be here 15 minutes ago.”

(Name) broke away from the hug to plop down into a chair next to the boy. “Sorry, I was with a friend.”

“Friend? Who?”

“The grumpy one.”

They all nodded in understand.

‘She still hasn’t mentioned him by name. Weird.’

“So, is Kurapika coming?”

The three glanced between each other.

“Ah, is he not answering your calls either?” (Name) asked, a look of concern on her face.

They shook their heads. “Not even a text back.”

They all sighed together.

“Well, we just ordered lunch, do you want me to call the waiter?”

“No, it’s fine, I already ate!”

The group talked for a bit, the other three eating their lunch before they went back to the place the boys were staying.

“Greed island? What’s that?”

Leorio and (Name) sat next to each other, the girl holding a pillow to her chest.

“A legendary game.

“We’re trying to get a copy at the auction.”

Leorio hummed. “But why a game?”

“I think this game holds a clue to finding my dad.”

“Huh? The game holds a clue to finding your dad?”

(Name) tuned out of the conversation, scrolling through her phone. Gon and Killua had already told her everything before.

She stared at the message Illumi has sent her as a reply.

Illumi: I will text you a date and time. Be safe.

She reacted to the message with a thumbs up as a response.

(Name) watched the boys look up different terms for auctions, giggling to herself when Leorio got an idea.

——————

“Come on down, let’s have some conditional auctioning fun!”

(Name) stood beside Killua as Gon sat at a table, holding his arm out. They had decided to have Gon arm wrestle people in an attempt to make money.

“Here’s what’s up for bid! A Diamond worth three million. Comes with appraisal of the store where I just bought it! Arm wrestling will decide the winning bid. The first person to beat this boy wins the Diamond! You must pay a 10,000 Jenny entry fee!”

A crowd had gathered as Leorio yelled out the conditions for the auction. (Name) and Killua gave each other a look as people lined up to try and win the Diamond.

They watched as Gon arm wrestled a man, his fake groaning almost comical.

“He’s really bad at lying.” (Name) whispered to Killua. The white haired boy snickered.

“Yeah, he’s way too honest.”

Hours passed by with little luck for Gon’s challengers. (Name) groaned, leaning against the wall.

“How long are we gonna go at this?”

It’s was (Name)’s turn to hold the Diamond now. Killua shrugged. “Until Leorio lets us stop.”

“Okay, next person!”

A woman appeared from the crowd, (Name)’s eyes widening at the sight. She held out the money, Leorio smiling.

“Well, we have our first female challenger!”

The crowd cheered for her, but (Name) was silent.

‘Is that… Shizuku?’

She handed Killua the Diamond. “I’ve got to go, sorry!”

(Name) left as Killua yelled after her, chasing a familiar aura.

“Feitan!”

The man was waiting with one of the spiders, Franklin. He turned, his eyes widening when the girl appeared in front of him.

“(Name)? Why out so late at night?”

She waved her hand. “Oh, I was just in the area with a friend when I sensed your aura.”

He frowned, leaning forward and sniffing her. “Smell like cologne. Your friend a man?”

(Name) pursed her lips. “You shouldn’t sniff people, Fei. It’s creepy.”

Franklin snickered as Feitan turned red, seemingly embarrassed.

‘Creepy? She thinks I’m creepy?’

“Tch, answer my question. Stupid.”

“Yeah, they’re all men actually. I don’t really have any girl friends. Oh, I guess besides Pakunoda.”

Feitan stared at her. “… do you like any of these friends?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Why does that matter?”

“Answer.”

(Name) rolled her eyes. “Well, maybe one. He’s a pretty blonde. Very cute.”

“Name? Occupation? Address?”

“Fei!”

She laughed, but again, stopped when she noticed he wasn’t.

“Oh, you’re being serious.”

They stared at each other, the silence only being broken when Franklin spoke.

“Well?”

(Name) blinked, turning to see Shizuku walking towards them.

“I lost. He’s strong.”

(Name) internally praised her friend, a small smile on her lips.

“That little boy?”

Shizuku frowned, looking at (Name). “Weren’t you over there a moment ago?”

The two men immediately turned to look at the girl, her eyes widening. “Oh, um. Yes I was. I was going to challenge him, but after seeing so many people lose I gave up haha.”

Shizuku tilted her head. “Weren’t you holding the Diamond?”

(Name) froze. She wasn’t sure why, but it didn’t feel safe for them to know her friends. Although she trusted Feitan, she knew he was a thief capable of murder. Especially if he got jealous.

“Oh, yeah. I wanted to check it’s authenticity so they allowed me to look.”

Shizuku hummed. “Makes sense.”

Feitan watched her from the corner of his eye. She wasn’t telling the complete truth.

‘No matter. Get it out of her later.’

“I sort of wanted that Diamond.”

“You should have used your right hand.” Franklin put a hand on her head.

Feitan nodded. “Yes, why didn’t you use stronger hand?”

“Oh, right… he extended his right hand, so I did the same. I’d like to challenge him again.”

Feitan sighed. “You can’t, no time. We have our job.”

“Yes. Besides, buying and bidding would be wrong. We’re thieves.”

Feitan glanced at (Name). “If we want something, we take it.”

——————

“No.”

They had returned to the Phantom Troupes hideout, Chrollo having just finished exposing the plan.

“Why not? You know I worry about you. I can-“

“You’re not coming.”

The two had begun arguing once Chrollo suggested (Name) tag along to see the spiders in action.

“Why? Can you give me any good reasons?”

“You’re weak. Don’t even know your nen.”

“I do! My nen is actually super useful I’ll have you know!”

This caught the rest of the Phantom Troupes attention.

“Useful? Can you explain how?”

Chrollo had stood up from his seat and began approaching her. She nodded, looking around the room.

“Does anyone have anything sharp I can borrow?”

They regarded her with wary eyes.

“I’m not going to try anything stupid, there’s like… at least 10 of you here. I’m not strong enough to take you out with a single sharp object.”

Chrollo handed her a knife, much to Feitan’s annoyance.

“What are you-“

(Name) held the knife in the air and stabbed it into her own arm, sinking through into the other side.

“(NAME)!”

Feitan rushed forward, his eyes wide with panic. There was so much blood pooling onto the floor, all of it hers.

She stumbled a bit, gritting her teeth as tears fell from her eyes. “Shit, this does not get any easier with time. Hang on Fei, just wait a minute.”

Chrollo watched with great interest as she pulled the knife out and let it drop to the floor with a clang.

“Oh wow, now this is a show.” Hisoka purred from his seat. Feitan shot him a deadly look, barely able to hold himself back from grabbing (Name) and rushing her to the nearest hospital.

He needed to trust her, but god was it hard when the entire room smelled like her blood.

(Name) closed her eyes in concentration, raising her arm up shakily to her lips, where she planted a kiss on the wound.

To everyone’s shock, the stab wound began to heal instantly, stitching itself back together as she sighed in relief.

“You’re a healer. Interesting…”

Feitan was by her side before she could blink, grabbing her arm and flipping it just to see it had been completely healed.

“Told you I’m useful.”

She smiled at him, proud of herself. He pulled her closer to him, squeezing her tight.

“Scared me, never do that again.”

She patted his back before pulling back and standing in front of Chrollo.

“So, yeah. That’s how my nen works. Kind of.”

He held his hand out for hers, inspecting her arm. “I see… not a scar in sight. You can’t even tell you’d just stabbed yourself.”

He dropped her arm and grinned. “Well, I think it would be a great idea for you to accompany them tonight. That’s an order, Feitan.”

The man didn’t respond, only staring down at the pool of blood with worried eyes.

For a man so used to blood, the sight of hers unnerved him more than he cared to admit.

——————

(Name) sat in the hot air balloon, pouting. She’d been ordered by Feitan to guard it, saying a healer wouldn’t be needed inside.

She didn’t really mind all that much. After all, she assumed they would be stealing or killing someone.

She didn’t want to see Feitan kill.

Bored, (Name) scrolled through her contacts and clicked on Kurapika’s name.

‘Might as well try again. What harm can it do?’

She called him, half expecting him to not pick up.

“(Name)?”

(Name) jumped at the sound of his voice. “Kurapika? You picked up! Oh my gosh I’ve missed you so much.”

Her words caused the Kurta to blush, Melody smiling beside him.

“I’ve… missed you too. Are you doing well?”

“Yeah, so are the others. Have you been remembering to eat?”

The man sighed. “Yes. It’s hard not to when you text me everyday during meal times.”

“Hehe, sorry. I just worry about my sweet boy.”

His face turned a dark red. Did she say HER sweet boy?

“I-I-I apologize for worrying you.”

She sighed. “Don’t. It’s fine. Anyways…”

(Name) leaned against the basket of the air balloon, using Feitan’s coat as a blanket.

“When will I get to see you again? I miss your pretty face.”

Melody giggled next to him.

‘He’s talking to someone he loves. How cute.’

“As soon as my job allows it. I promise.”

She giggled. “I’ll hold you to it.”

Kurapika groaned when he heard the sound of his boss beeping in.

“Sorry, I have to go. Boss is calling.”

“Oh, that’s alright. Be safe, love you!”

Kurapika froze, his jaw dropping. Before he could respond, he accidentally ended the call.

“Shit- Hello, Boss.”

The girl giggled. ‘I bet that made him blush. What a cutie.’

The girl sighed. They said the job might take a while, so she rested her head against the basket of the air balloon.

(Name) soon fell asleep, cuddled up under Feitan’s coat.

——————

“Ouch!”

(Name) woke up to being flicked on the forehead.

“Fell asleep during job, stupid girl.”

Feitan hovered over her, the other spiders climbing into the basket.

“Oh, Fei, you’re back.”

She rubbed her eyes, yawning. The man patted her head. “Tired?”

“A little.”

He smacked the top of her head, Shalnark snickering in the corner. Feitan had been so gentle with her, it was amusing.

“Well wake up. Job not over.”

She whined. “So mean…”

Feitan grabbed his coat from her and pulled it over his shirtless form. “Hey, I’m cold!”

(Name) pouted up at him, crossing her arms over her chest.

He huffed. “Baby. Should have brought jacket.”

He ended up dropping the jacket of his tuxedo into her lap. “Use this.”

Feitan inhaled the lingering smell of her scent on his jacket, a small smile on his face.

“Thank you, Fei.”

He looked down at the girl to see her cuddled up under his jacket, smiling up at him.

“This is much better.”

It was hard to control himself, but he did. He didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of the other Troupe members by pouncing on her like a wild animal.

“Tch.”

Shalnark plopped down beside you. “Hey, share. I don’t have any sleeves.”

He pulled a bit of the jacket towards him, getting awfully close to (Name).

Because he didn’t want to make a scene, Feitan stayed quiet.

But one look at his eyes would tell you he was beyond furious. He knew Shalnark didn’t mind the cold.

‘Bastard. Touching what’s mine.’

(Name) moved closer to Shalnark. “You’re cold? You’re so warm!”

She leaned against his shoulder, smiling up at him.

“Oh. You’re pretty too.”

“Pretty?”

Feitan sat next to (Name) and pulled her towards him with more force than he had meant, the girl nearly falling across his lap.

“Hey, my blanket!”

Shalnark whined and attempted to join (Name) again, but stopped when Feitan glared up at him.

‘Aww, play time is over.’

The blonde rolled his eyes and leaned back.

But a part of him felt weirdly… warm.

‘Pretty, huh?’

———————

(Name) quickly fell asleep again, occasionally nuzzling against Feitan’s shoulder. It was quite the sight, the other spiders stealing glances at the pair.

Uvogin had just ended his call with Chrollo.

“She’s really asleep, huh? Must trust us an awful lot.”

Uvogin let out a laugh, instantly causing the girl to shoot awake.

“Mom I’m awake-“

Instead of her mother shaking her awake, she was surrounded by the band of thieves she’d been accompanying.

Her face instantly heated up, and it didn’t help that Uvogin and Shalnark were laughing at her.

“I guess Uvogin is a mom now!”

Nobunaga snickered, Uvogin clapping him on the back.

The girl hid her face in Feitan’s jacket. The short man held back a laugh himself, patting her shoulder.

Soon after they landed to air balloon, Feitan pulling a ski mask over her head.

“H-hey! What-“

“Hides your identity. Use In.”

(Name) huffed, using In as he helped her out of the basket. “Fine…”

They stood on a cliff, looking over a large crowd of people in suits. “What, are they the mafia or something?”

She had been joking, but no one laughed.

“Yeah.”

“Fei. You pissed off the mafia?”

“Not just me.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Uh huh.”

“COME DOWN HERE!”

“WE’LL EVEN LET YOU DECIDE WHETHER YOU’LL BE DROWNED OR BURIED!”

Shalnark laughed. “There’s a whole crowd…”

“I don’t have to suck them up, do I?”

“No, they don’t matter.”

(Name) looked at them incredulously, though it was hard to convey with her face concealed.

“Hey!”

They all looked to Uvogin who stepped forward. “Stay out of this. I’ll handle it…”

He slid down the cliff, the mafia raising their guns. Feitan turned (Name) around. “Don’t wanna watch.”

(Name) could hear the sound of flesh being ripped apart and bones cracking, and for once she didn’t question Feitan. She had seen Uvogin eat a live chicken in front of her, she knew what he was capable of.

“His philosophy is to be the strongest of them all. An ordinary gun wouldn’t even scratch him.”

“Physically, he’s the strongest.”

“It’s like a gorilla stomping on ants.”

(Name) pouted, glancing at Feitan.

“Oh? More of them!” Nobunaga said.

“They came all the way here, merely to be killed.” Franklin stated. (Name) leaned against Feitan, the man holding her up with ease.

“Just watching isn’t fun, let’s play cards.”

(Name) perked up. “Ooo, sounds fun!”

The group sat in a circle, Feitan standing watch. As the group played, he’d steal glances at (Name). He couldn’t see her face, but he could practically sense her hesitation.

“Uvo will be okay, right?”

(Name) placed another card down, a frown on her face.

“Are you kidding? He’s the strongest in the troupe, physically.”

She sighed. “I know, I heard earlier. Even so…”

Shalnarks eyes softened slightly. “He’s tough. You don’t need to worry.”

Feitan patted her head. “Like we said earlier, gorilla stomping on ants.”

———————

Some nen users began fighting him, Uvogin not allowing his fellow Troupe members to join the fight.

From the sound of it, (Name) didn’t think he’d need their help.

“11.”

(Name) set down another card, glancing at Feitan again. “Fei, how’s the fight going?”

“Just ate someone’s head.”

(Name) shivered. “Like… a persons head?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Can’t be good for his stomach.”

Shalnark chuckled. “That’s what you’re worried about?”

“Well. He did eat my chickens alive without getting salmonella so…”

“Don’t try to figure her out. Strange girl.” Feitan stated, a smile on his lips.

They continued playing, until all of a sudden Shalnark covered his ears.

They all followed suit, (Name) quickly doing the same.

An ear splitting roar echoed through the desert, potentially deafening anyone that hasn’t covered their ears in time.

(Name) felt Feitan tap her shoulder a moment later, signaling it was over.

“You idiot! Give us a warning first!” Franklin yelled.

“What if our eardrums had burst?”

“Sorry, sorry. But that would’ve given my plan away. Besides, you guys had plenty of time to cover your ears before the sound reached you.”

“That’s true.” Machi said.

(Name) peeked over the edge, Feitan holding onto the back of her shirt.

“Are you alright, Uvo?”

He grinned up at her. “Better now that I got a pretty lady worrying over me.”

“Yeah, he’s fine.” (Name) said, Feitan pulling her back up. “Hey, you’re going to rip my shirt!”

“Better than you falling and busting your skull open.”

(Name) brushed the dirt off of her pants, looking over the group. “I wish I would have brought some snacks. Then we could of had a picnic.”

Feitan smacked a hand over his forehead as Shizuku nodded. “Should have. I’m hungry.”

“Shizuku! Would you suck the poison and leeches from my body? Your vacuum will do the trick.”

She finished picking up the cards before answering. “Blinky can suck out poison, but nothing alive.”

“What? Then what am I supposed to do?”

Shalnark leaped down, (Name) blinking in surprise. He’d landed over 30 feet below them without any issue.

“Let me see.”

Shalnark picked up the leech and inspected it. (Name) squeaked and hid behind Feitan.

“This is a spotted leech… it takes one day to migrate to the bladder, before laying its eggs and dying.”

“So?”

“The eggs will hatch shortly after, exciting through your urinary tract. It will cause enough pain to kill you.”

“Hey, don’t joke around…”

“However, they require a specific ammonia level to hatch. If there isn’t enough, the eggs don’t hatch, and can be excreted harmlessly. So until this time tomorrow, you should drink pee non-stop and be sure to urinate frequently!”

He squished the leech, giving Uvogin a smile.

“Don’t scare me like that… Shizuku, can you take care of the poison?”

“Yes!”

“Someone go to the city and get lots of beer.”

Franklin nodded. “I’ll go.”

“Make sure they’re ice-cold!”

“Don’t get too greedy!”

Shizuku joined the two, Blinky out and ready to work.

“Okay, get that poison out of me.”

The sound of chains wrapping around something caused the three to pause.

When they turned to see what was going on, they saw Uvogin covered in chains wrapping around his body.

He was launched into the air with a yell, quickly disappearing from sight.

Feitan grabbed (Name), throwing her over his shoulder as he jumped down.

She held on, trusting him enough to not scream.

“Did you see that?” Shalnark asked.

“Yeah.”

“Those chains came out of nowhere to wrap around his body.” Shizuku said.

“Is it a new shadow beast? Uvo can’t move because of the tranquilizer and the leeches still inside him.” Nobunaga stated plainly.

“Then that’s that… let’s go and save him.”

Feitan sighed while patting (Name)’s butt. “Good grief. He’s so much trouble.”

“Hey!”

She wiggled out of his grasp, the man holding her by the waist as she pouted down at him.

“I have a trace for now. I used In to conceal the thread, so as long as they don’t use Gyo to spot the needle, I can follow them anywhere.”

Machi held an invisible thread, (Name) quickly suing Gyo to spot it.

“Okay, let’s find them before they notice it.”

“This is our chance to finish the remaining Shadow Beasts.”

(Name) furrowed her eyebrows.

‘That aura… felt familiar.’

——————

A problem quickly arose when the group found a car to steal.

“Not enough seats.”

Feitan glanced between (Name) and the car, sighing.

“I can just stay behind.”

“No, dangerous.”

“Then I can ride in the tru- OW!”

He flicked her forehead. “No. Dumb ass. Hurt yourself.”

“Just have her sit in your lap. She’s your woman, isn’t she?”

Feitan shot Nobunaga a look, but couldn’t deny his statement.

“Wouldn’t it make more sense for Feitan to sit in my lap? He’s lighter than-“

Feitan grabbed her wrist and dragged her towards the car, pulling her to sit in his lap. She squeaked, struggling against his iron grip.

“Stay still.”

(Name) whined and wiggled a bit more, until she felt Feitan’s fingers dig into the soft flesh of her thighs. She glanced back at him to see his face hidden behind his coat.

“Face forward, stay still.”

With not many options, (Name) decided to listen.

186 notes · View notes