#b) I have spent so long learning how to draw his stupid face | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

canonobsessions · 3 years

Note

Hey there and welcome to tumblr!! i’m a huge simp for Julian lol im so happy to see somebody writing for TPB! <3 i was wondering if you could write something involving Julian and a cudding -> confession -> sex sort of situation with a female reader?

a/n: I'm so sorry for this late response! I'd be so happy to!

Fandom: Trailer Park Boys

Word Count: 4,243

Scenario: Julian and Reader have an impromptu cuddling session that results in a confession and subsequently, a steamy encounter.

Julian didn't know how it got to this point, but he wasn't about to complain. Sometimes everything just fell into place, so when you arrived that night at his trailer on a cold, dark winter's night he rolled with it. It was just a mishap, your car breaking down before you were able to get home. Like many people, you came to him with your problem.

Unlike with some other people, Julian was happy to help you out. He didn't hesitate when he stepped aside and let you track slushy snow into his home. It didn't even cross his mind until he was stepping in it himself. Even then, it only made him more aware of your state of dress.

You definitely hadn't intended to be out long, with your short sleeves on and little to no protective clothing. You looked frigid and he had just the remedy for it.

So, you wound up on his couch, wrapped up and sharing a blanket with him while watching some schlocky action film. Nothing he was actually paying attention too. How could he be with you in the room, taking a small sip of his Rum and Coke with that pretty smile on your face.

It was almost like a dream.

"Julian, I really can't thank you enough again. I'm sorry to just drop in on you like this," He'd just gotten ready to go to bed when you'd arrived, but even then, it wasn't any kind of a bother with you around. But, he had to play it cool as he always did.

"It's no trouble, [Y/N]. Stop worrying about it," He reassured you for the fifth time, taking the moment to wrap his arm around your shoulder and squeeze reassuringly. "You couldn't help it, probably the cold messing with your car. I'll get some of the guys to help get it fixed in the morning,"

And there was that damn smile that roped him in from the moment he'd met you. At first he'd just thought he was drunk, but he'd come to learn you were as capable and friendly as you were pretty. You were one of the few people who came around the Trailer Park and helped him and his friends out on occasion.

The situation had gotten twisted up to where it almost seemed awkward to pursue you with how close you'd gotten to Bubbles and Ricky as well. That being said, he was also always in a relationship when you weren't. Nothing really ever seemed right until now.

Now. He had to find the courage to say it, but there was that pitch of anxiety in his stomach, the one he thought he could stamp out in almost any occasion, but you were special. He didn't want to mess this up.

"You're really too good to me, Jules," A damn shiver nearly crawled up his spine when you said that. That and the way you were shaking just sent a small thrill through him.

Were you still cold or were you nervous to have his arm around you? With the way you leaned into him further, it couldn't have just been nerves. You did still feel chilly, so he gently rubbed your upper arm. He wasn't just feeling your soft skin under his rough finger tips. This was just part of helping you.

Man was that stupid, he was acting like he hadn't had his fair share of pretty girls over. But, you were more than pretty, you were beautiful. Classy and sweet.

"Just doing what any good friend would," The word friend had a near sour note to it, not from leaving his mouth, but it just rang oddly. He wasn't malicious about it. It just wasn't right.

"Yeah, right!" There was an awkward inflection in your tone, but he wasn't going to push it. You were probably just more comfortable with being friends after all.

"Damn, my feet are still freezing," You'd complain quietly after a brief silence and Julian reacts without thinking about it.

"C'mere," He reached down to your ankle and grabbed it, gently coaxing your feet up onto the couch. You adjusted to the hold folding your legs off to the side. Your [E/C] eyes are filled with curiosity. He offered a smile before drawing your feet into his stomach, where he was more than warm enough to help bring you up to temp.

"When I was a kid, my grandmother would do this for me when I'd come inside after playing in the snow," He recalled the late nights he spent watching old movies with his grandmother, eating snacks and keeping warm and cuddled up together. Of course, she'd been plenty warmed up from the brandy she'd consumed time and time again.

That sweet smile of yours was back once again, but accompanying it was a pretty blush that colored your face perfectly. He couldn't help his mind when it wandered to a less wholesome thought. What would you look like, red and panting under him? What were other ways you of all people could let him warm you up?

"That's really sweet. She must have been one hell of a lady to raise someone as gentlemanly as you, Jules," You might have been somewhat teasing, but he felt warm from the compliment. She had been as good of a role-model as she could be, doing everything she could for not only him, but for Bubbles as well.

"Thanks, [Y/N]," He patted your blanket covered calf with his hand and left it there for a moment, idly tracing his thumb over your muscle in a soothing manner.

Things got quiet again as you both sat there, watching the screen with little interest in what was going on. Julian was far more focused on how good it felt to have you curled against him and to feel your legs move. You were warming up and you were tantalizingly soft. It was driving him crazy, but he was being good.

You didn't drink much of his Rum and Coke, but you did have a sip or two, just to stave off any lingering cold.

"Julian, can I ask you something?" You'd knocked him out of his thoughts with that soft inquiry. He looked at you and felt his stomach flip, seeing your uncertain look.

"Anything," It was one small word, but he put a lot of feeling behind it. It sat heavy between the two of you for a heart-beat. Time really seemed to slow as he felt the way you were starting to shake again. The way you bit your lip and fluttered your lashes, looking at him with those eyes. It really felt like you told him everything he needed to know through body language alone.

Julian leaned in, his dark eyes searching yours for a solid answer, something more than just the way your body was calling out for him.

"Do you like me, just as a friend?" He wanted to kiss the uncertainty right out of your mouth and swallow it. How could someone as beautiful and amazing as you be so unsure of what you did to him?

"More than that," His words came out softer, rougher as he tried to reign himself in. "Does that make you uncomfortable?" He didn't want to scare you. You didn't have a ride home, it was too cold to walk off. He didn't want to misread what was going on. He was playing it safe.

"No!" It was like you were yelping, like he’d hit you in the stomach with that simple question. It gave away how eager you were and Julian couldn’t help but chuckle when you clasped your dainty hand over your mouth. “No, I’m sorry. You could never make me uncomfortable. Well, not like that,” The words fell from your lips like snow from the sky. “So I do make you uncomfortable?” He was teasing you now, relishing in the fact that you’d made that first move. You’d been the one to bravely ask him just what he thought of you and it made you flustered. You weren’t uncomfortable and you didn’t feel unsafe. Good. He wouldn’t have been able to handle it otherwise. “I like you too, Julian,” Finally, you’d admit it yourself. You’d put it out there that you were interested in him and he was interested in you. It was like that last wall came tumbling down. It made you look bare and vulnerable and unsure. That just made him want to scoop you into his arms and show you just how sure he was of the situation. “So, what now,” You’d asked, looking to him for guidance. Those big, beautiful eyes drew him right in. He wasn’t going to answer you with flowery words, he was going to show you. Julian made slow moves, roping you into him with room enough to say no if you wanted to. His large palms felt right at home, gripping your thighs and tugging you to where you were seated firmly on his lap. That little gasp that left your lips only made him drag you down harder onto him, letting you feel just how much he liked you. “What do you want, [Y/N]?” He felt the way you were shaking against him, the way you tilted your pelvis to align yourself with him. As if he were a virgin again, you had him shuddering with his restraint. He palmed your thighs, rubbing them soothingly. “I-I mean, I want you, Julian, b-but not just, ah,” He couldn’t help but to rock himself up into your core when you admitted you wanted him. There was no missing that you wanted more though, so he stilled, his dark eyes searching yours again, wondering what had you hesitating. “I don’t just want to be a fling,” Of course you didn’t, he didn’t either. But, it wasn’t like he had a particularly strong history of long, stable relationships. He had more one-night stands than he did real girlfriends he’d kept in his life. How could you not see you were different than those other girls was lost on him. Both of his hands traced up from your thighs, jumping to smooth up your arms and to your neck. He savored touching you while he thought about just how deeply he wanted to reassure you. He traced a path up to your neck, where he threaded his fingers into your hair, his thumb resting on the slope of your jawline. You wouldn’t be able to look away if you tried. He met your gaze, dark brows set into a serious furrow. “Never. [Y/N], you could never be just a fling for me,” He admitted, his voice hoarse with desire and love. He didn’t want to give you a chance to respond. Gently, he pulled you into a solid, warm kiss. Your lips molded to his perfectly. Just slightly wet from how you’d licked it only moments before. He poured his passion and love for you into it, hoping to smooth out any worries that he wasn’t dead serious on how much he liked you. Julian pulled a weak moan from you when he pulled away, your lips sticking together for a split second, sending a firework of pleasure down his spine. He wanted to devour you. His big hand cradled your head as he went in for another kiss, mouth opening just slightly to mouth your lips, to trace your tongue with his own. Just the coupling, the breathy noises and moans he pulled from you were drowning out the sound of gunfire from the busted up looking television just behind you. Nothing could distract him from how perfect you felt seated on top of him. How delicious your lips were, how easily you opened up to him. How many times had he dreamt of this? Could he even count the times you’d been at the forethought of his mind when he’d jerked himself off in the shower? Now that you’d both been honest, he could make those wild

fantasies real. “Julian,” Your voice was quaking, full of lust and need that he felt hit right through him. If that wasn’t enough to tell him you needed more, the way you were grinding on his hard cock was. A near growl left the dark haired man as he greedily grasped your ass, hoisting you further onto him. He stood up with ease, the blanket covering the two of you quickly forgotten. Any previous cold having been ripped away by red-hot need. That squeal had him chuckling between your dainty kisses. He easily brought you down that narrow hall, taking just a moment to push you against the paneling to indulge in tasting you. His tongue was more than eager to tangle with your own, the sloppy noises louder still now that you were away from the TV. Back on the move, Julian kicked open his bedroom door, relishing in the way you giggled at how forceful he’d been. Instead of throwing you onto the bed, he moved all the way to it’s edge, lowering you down onto it like you were the most precious thing he’d ever held in his hands. “God, you are beautiful, [Y/N],” Julian rasped as he admired how perfect you looked on his bed, flushed and lips swollen from how excited the two of you had been to do something as simple as kiss. “Julian,” Your voice took a serious tone, your own brows ticking down as you reached up with your now warm hands, letting them rest on his face, thumb tracing along the sharply trimmed line of his beard. “Julian, you’re beautiful too, so handsome. I can’t believe you want me too,” You were gushing, about him of all people. Shaking his head, Julian took your hands into his own, placing a kiss on your knuckles. He allowed himself the chance to really look at you, just as you were. His heart filled with affection for you. For just the way you spoke to him, marveling at him. “I can’t believe an angel like you would want anything to do with a man like me,” Julian’s voice was low and dark as he leaned back in, dying for another taste of you. This time, things went further, his hands roaming eagerly while your mouths met passionately in their own special patterns. He squeezed your shoulders, massaged down your arms and to your stomach. Testing the waters, his thick fingers peaked under your flimsy shirt, stroking at the soft skin of your belly. The way your muscles flexed and you moaned made him take liberties, inching up your ribs to rub smooth, firm circles there. With your last chance squandered through a needy moan, Julian’s large hands cupped your breasts for a firm squeeze, savoring in a moment he’d imagined just a short time ago. Julian swallowed every needy noise you made as he massaged your breasts, his hips rolling down to meet your needy movements. All at once there was too much fabric in the way. You were pulling at his shirt as soon as he move away, pulling it off of his body and revealing his strong chest and shoulders. Just as excited, Julian hooked his thumbs into your shirt, pulling it up and hooking your bra with it, baring your chest to him in one smooth motion, proving just how experienced he was. God, you were a delicious sight. Your breasts heaving in the dim light of his room. Gravity knew what it was doing and it had Julian speechless. Before long, the temptation was too strong, he dove in for another kiss, smoothing over your shy features with a reassuring kiss. His lips were eager to move, leaving a damp trail of kisses down your jaw and neck. He licked at the dip of your clavicle and relished in the way you shook and gasped. Smirking up at you, dark eyes smoldering with lust, he licked a trail to your right breast, nipping at the flexible flesh he found there. Every little sensation was drawing up for the moment he took your nipple into his hot mouth, tongue lapping as he suckled. He made sure your left breast didn’t go unattended, his thick, rough fingers plucking at the pert tip, rolling the bud in between his fingers, toying with you as he enjoyed himself thoroughly. “God, Julian, your mouth is so warm,” You whimpered, egging him on, your legs curling

around his thighs, beckoning him in for more. But, yet again, there were too many clothes in the way. But, he was a practiced man, he wanted to rile you up. There was an art to getting a woman ready. He switched to the other nipple, leaving the right to tighten and harden in the cold air. Your fingers found his normally tidy black hair, mussing up the styling by tugging him closer. “P-please, stop teasing me,” You needed more, that much was obvious with how insistently you rolled up into him. He could feel just how hot and burning you were at your core, the heat between the two of you felt like it was enough to burn the clothes right from your body. Julian chuckled lowly, shaking his head as he pulled away from your breast. His eyes locked onto yours once more and he gave you a dark smirk. “No need to rush, [Y/N]. You’ll be here until your car is fixed after all,” He teased. You looked so cute when your covered your face, no doubt feeling embarrassed for your needy reaction. He took his time with you. He tasted you, licking a path down your ribs and your stomach, coming to the button of your pants. He didn’t take too long to pull off both them and your panties, revealing your glistening petals to the cool air. You groaned at the sensation and he marveled at just how beautiful you were. Thick fingers traced lazy circles into your inner thighs working their way to your core. He wasn’t ashamed as he looked at your folds, the way your clit was already swollen and eager from the bare minimum frotage. His thumbs swiped along the outer lips, pulling them apart, making way for his broad tongue as he licked a line up from your core to your clit, popping it into his mouth swiftly for a change of pace. You tasted delicious on his tongue, tart and sweet all at once. Greedily, he buried his face into your core, his tongue diving into your soft folds. The tight ring of your cunt was no match for him, the muscle pushed as deep into you as it could, the pad of his thumb taking up stroking your taut pearl in tandem with his thrusts. He listened to your moans as he worked you over, dragging more of your wetness out, preparing you for him. And when it sounded like you were just at your apex, he pulled away. “Oh god, Julian,” It was nearly scolding the way you said his name, but he wasn’t going to leave you wanting for long, deciding to instead unfasten his pants, eagerly ridding himself of his pants and underwear. He stood nude in front of you, taking his large, girthy dick into his hands, stroking it slowly at the debaucherous sight of you, of all people, spread out on his bed, all for him. “Please, I need you, I need you,” That could’ve nearly done him in there, just the way you were pleading for him. Telling him you needed him, and god did he need to be needed. The fact it was just in this way was icing on the cake. Not wasting anymore time, Julian’s hands gripped your hips, lining you up just the way he wanted you. He bent over and steadied himself, peppering your lips with kisses as he guided himself in. Already he could tell you were going to be a tight fit, there was going to be some discomfort, but not for long. It didn’t seem like you minded much, with how eagerly your heels dug into the strong muscle of his back, eager to sink him in. His swollen head pushed into you, sinking deeper with one slow push that had him groaning, his head tilting back as he savored the squeeze around his manhood. His free hand massaged lazily at your stomach as he sunk in. You let out the most tantalizing little grunts and moans, soft hisses as your body adjusted to take his massive size. “Soo big,” You whimpered. God if only you knew what you did to him with that tender little voice. He wanted to bury his cock in you forever and stay there until the day he died. Gritting his teeth, he pushed the last few inches in, steadily massaging you while holding himself back. It wasn’t until you tested the fit by rocking your hips back and forth that he finally allowed himself to take pure pleasure in your body. It wasn’t the

slow pace he’d initially wanted. No, as soon as he was in you, he realized how badly he needed this. For every smile and sweet word, he wanted to set a punishing pace. He wanted to completely fold you in half and hammer his way into your body and show just how badly he needed you. But, for the sake of your health, he set a steady pace. He leaned back to look at the place where your body met his and nearly came right there. “Fuck,” He cursed, staring at the lewd way your cunt was stretched out over his cock. “Sit up, just a bit, fuckin’ look at it,” He coaxed you into sitting up, his hand finding its way to the back of your neck again. Your eyes almost glazed over with how eagerly you looked at your coupling. Your plump, tantalizing lip was gnawed at between your pearly whites. Julian drew back his cock with a hiss, his head rolling back again, only to snap to attention, watching the show as he sunk back into your hot, silky insides. “You’re taking me so well, [Y/N]. You’re doing so good,” He grunted out praise after praise, his pace rocking steadily now, your wetness coating him and guiding him in with more ease. Finally, it seemed you couldn’t hold yourself up any longer, instead falling back to moan his name. He doubled over, catching himself again, bracing himself on either side of your head. His pace quickened, he could feel the way his balls slapped against your ass, damp from how wet you were. It made degenerate sounds, slapping skin against skin. It drove him up a wall, almost as much as your blissful expression. He burned the memory of you savoring his cock into the back of his mind, before hooking both of his hands under your knees. With his strength, Julian nearly folded you in half, angling you to where his cock would hit your deepest, most sensitive parts. When he found the place that made you sing loudest, he hammered into it. Not to be ignored, he hooked one of your legs over his shoulder, freeing up a hand so that he could reach between the two of you and work diligently at your little bud. “Oh god, oh god, Jules, Julian, fuck, fuck, fuck! I-I’m gonna cum,” And he could feel it when it started, the way you arched your back, your hips taking a mind of their own, jerking up to meet his deep thrusts. Your walls clenched so tightly around him he could barely pull away, but he managed to keep his pace, drilling into you. “Fuckin’ cum around me, cum around me, [Y/N], just like that, just like that,” He grunted, thrusting so hard he was shaking the bed beneath you, the sound only adding to the symphony of sex. The rush of sticky fluids made him pound that much harder into you. Your crying, writhing form the perfect state for him to hammer at until he felt his own familiar band pulling tight, eventually snapping as pleasure overwhelmed him. He didn’t pull out as his cum filled your tight little body. He empty his balls as deep into you as he could, his pulsing manhood twitching with every stream of the load. He only realized as he began to come down from his high he’d came right against your cervix. He shuddered out another low groan, joining your soft panting in the air. “Fuck, Julian, ah, hah. I love you,” You were unabashed now, looking at him with your dazed look, as if he were a god and not some backwater trailer park boy. “I love you too, so much,” He hung over you, his sweaty forehead coming to rest against yours. He breathed with you, coming down from his high to finally ease out of you, ignoring the mess he made in favor of pulling you into his arms. The air slowly quieted as you both lay there, basking in bliss, warm and naked despite no blanket. It was hard to believe that he’d been uncertain of your feelings for him. Just an hour ago, neither of you had been aware of just how quickly things would go. But, there were no regrets. Only love and a sense of safety.

#Trailer Park Boys #tpb julian #FRISKY CONTENT #under eighteen dni #canon/reader #canonxreader #imagine #one-shot #confessions #romance

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sevlgi · 3 years

Text

the florist

requested: no

group: dreamcatcher

pairing: jiu x fem!reader

genre: angst, questionable fluff

contents: hanahaki!au, florist!jiu

warnings: death

synopsis: When you find a beautiful death sentence clustered in your lungs, you can only visit the legendary florist. But is JiU herself as strong as she seems?

a/n: hiatus who? we don’t know her 🤡 i was actually gonna post this when it struck 12 on december 1st for me, but tumblr’s telling me it’s already december, so here we go!

word count: 3.3k

In all the years that the Hanahaki Disease had existed, there had never been a cure. And on the day that you coughed up the first blood-stained carnation, it became certain that you weren’t about to be the one to break the record.

You considered yourself to be decently cautious about the disease. After all, since you were a child, the only love lesson that you had ever been taught was to never, ever, be the first one in love. Your mother drilled that lesson, telling you that love was a poisonous thing to be avoided at all costs until you believed her.

And yet, you were stupid enough to allow her to wreck you, to allow yourself to become consumed by her.

It was unexpected, to say the least. Lee Siyeon had been a close friend for years, the two of you meeting during college, and she had been in love with someone else since then. You knew Bora well too, actually, and had always rooted for the two to get together.

Had it been anyone else, you would’ve still held the hope that your love could be returned, but Siyeon despised you with all the might of her soul ever since she had found out about the yellow petals floating in the toilet bowl at midnight. Had it been anyone else, you wouldn’t have faced the sheer mortification of begging Gahyeon for the address of the person who saved her.

“Y/N...” she had hesitated when you asked her. Siyeon’s younger sister was the only person that you knew of who had survived the disease without getting the dreaded surgery, but she was incredibly touchy about the subject. Indeed, you didn’t even know who she had fallen in love with so many years ago.

“Please, Gahyeon,” you begged, chasing to maintain eye contact with her. “I can’t die like this. You-- you won’t let me, will you? Not when it’s your sister.”

You didn’t want to guilt-trip her like you did, but it worked. Gahyeon texted you an address and a name, the ping noise of the notification sounding more like your saving grace than anything. “You can’t tell anyone else once you’re healed,” she warned. “She’ll know who you are as soon as you say my name.”

To outside eyes, the Love Blossom looked like a normal flower shop. The narrow storefront, sandwiched between a coffee shop and a bookstore, was painted a faint pink and chipped with green on some edges. There were flowers stuffed everywhere you could see-- exploding baskets on the windowsills, colorful wreaths hung everywhere, even a huge L and B made of blooms on the window.

Even when you pushed the door open, it gave no indication of being anything other than a flower shop. The scent of flowers was heavy, some rock song playing from the peppy pink speakers dangling from the ceilings. “Hello?” you called out, hands tightening on the strap of the bag slung over your shoulder. “H-”

Suddenly, you coughed out again and held your sleeve up to prevent any flower petals from fluttering out; the constant itch in your throat only served to make you more anxious to find the florist that Gahyeon had referred you to. “Is anyone there?”

“Hi!” You yelped and jumped back when an invisible door just next to you randomly opened, the shelf concealing it nearly colliding with your face. “Oh, I’m sorry! Were you looking for me?”

The girl who opened the door looked like the literal manifestation of sunshine; her smile took up half her face, the brown of her half-moon eyes seemingly lit from within. She balanced a flowerpot on her hip as she bowed to you in apology, long hair almost sweeping the floor. “Are- are you JiU?”

“Yep!” She moved to set the pot down, cocking her head slightly to take you in. “How can I help you today?”

“I... I’m a friend of Gahyeon,” you explained, watching as the smile on her face lessened slightly in understanding. You fished out the plastic bag from your purse, the almost-dry crimson inside overpowering the yellow petals. “Can you help me?”

The brunette accepted the bag, flashing you another bright smile as she opened the secret door again. “Well, let’s take a look. Follow me, please, and call me Minji.”

The narrow doorway led to what seemed to be her living quarters, or maybe an apothecary; the walls were almost completely covered by the forest-green painted shelves lining them, mismatched books and trinkets filling the spaces. Incredibly detailed drawings were tacked everywhere, a ladder folded behind the hidden door, presumably to access the blank walls up near the ceiling. A loft area was most likely where she slept, though she led you to a large and cluttered desk to examine the flowers you had given her.

“Yellow carnations. These symbol rejection and disdain, you know.”

You winced at the girl’s bluntness, though it wasn’t meant as a jab, still staring at the multitudes of drawings tacked everywhere. “Yeah, I know. Gahyeon told me.”

She smiled at the mention of the younger girl, setting the bag with your blood down to fiddle with a notebook. “I taught her well, then.”

“Taught her?” You watched her shift jars of petals around on the shelves, scribbling something down on a sheet of ironically pink and cutesy paper. “I thought you healed her.”

“Well, the Hanahaki disease doesn’t heal easily,” Minji responded, gesturing for you to follow her into a tiny kitchen area. “It took months, actually, and she spent almost every day in here. She might as well have become an apprentice, with how much I taught her.”

“Months?” Fear rose up in you at that, apparently not affecting the other girl as she hummed. You’d been in one of the later stages for a good couple of months now, though you couldn’t tell which one without visiting a doctor. “Minji, I don’t have months.”

She raised an eyebrow at you, tying the strings of her apron behind her. “Well, are you willing to get the surgery? Spend thousands of dollars and go through such a rigorous process, and then be left with a cold heart and unhealable scars?” At your silence, she chuckled, tying her hair up in a plait. “That’s what I thought.”

You sat on the stool at her kitchen table, watching Minji busy herself at what looked like a stovetop, albeit littered with glass bottles and half-hearted bouquets. “What makes you certain that this’ll work, then? How’d you even learn to help people like me?”

Minji bit down on her lower lip, the dark red color remarkably not transferring onto her pearly teeth. “Well. My mother died from the disease, so I was originally going to study it in school. But I had to help Gahyeon somehow. When she fell in love with someone who’d never love her back... I couldn’t just watch her die.”

Smiling slightly, you watched her scatter the same petals as you had coughed up into a pot, freshly plucked from stems that she threw onto the counter next to her. “What about you? What’s the story behind “rejection and disdain”?” she asked suddenly, smiling prettily. Something about her was a bit ethereal in the kitchen’s LED lighting, though maybe it was the fact that she was literally saving people that doctors couldn’t.

“Ah. I fell in love with Siyeon,” you answered, placing your hand into your chin as you watched her work. “She loves someone else, and I got between them. It’s not her fault.”

Frowning, Minji uncapped a jar that smelled strongly of rose, practically upending it in her pot. “Gahyeon’s sister? Does she know that you’re going to die because of her? I’ve met her before, and I didn’t think she’d be so cruel. ”

You nodded silently at that. The whole reason you were in such a predicament was that you loved Siyeon and she hated you; there was no way you were going to ask her to turn her entire heart on its head just to save you. It was unlikely that she’d want to do so at all, anyway. “I’m sorry, Y/N,” the brunette sighed sympathetically. “Love really hurts sometimes.”

“Yeah,” you smiled drily. “It’s just all too literal for me.”

“Hey, Minji!”

The girl turned from her flowers to wave excitedly at you, her smile painted bubblegum pink this time to match the faded apron she wore. She held trimmers in her hands, clumsy with the thick gloves she wore. “Y/N! Good to see you again, come in?”

“Yeah.” You smiled just seeing the interior of the shop, as decked-out as it had been in your first visit. Instead of the purple theme last week, Minji seemed to have gone with yellows, the peonies and roses tainting the cold air. The apartment, however, looked the same, almost comforting in its maximalism. “I’m done with the vials,” you mentioned, taking the freshly-washed glass bottles out of your bag along with a fresh bag of bloody flowers.

“Did they help?” Minji asked, accepting both with a quiet “thank you”. “Gahyeonie always told me that they taste terrible, but sugar cancels out all the good properties.”

“They aren’t that bad,” you lied, sitting down at the same spot in the kitchen and opening your bag. At her questioning look, you explained, “Oh, I thought I’d bring my laptop this time and keep you company. You said you were bored last time...”

Part of you wished she would turn you away, just so that you wouldn’t become attacked to someone who’d eventually leave you behind too. But she smiled, turning on her stove and hefting the same ceramic pot on as she did the last time. “That’s perfect, Y/N. When you’re done, you can come help package some bouquets for a break, okay?”

You nodded, sighing in content at the smell of flower petals boiling once again in the shop. “Okay. Thanks, Minji.”

“No need to thank me,” she replied, turning back to the ingredients that she fiddled with. “No need to thank me at all. How’s Siyeon?”

Shrugging, you swept some papers off the table to place your laptop down. “I don’t really know. She doesn’t talk to me. I only have contact with her through Gahyeon now, but it’s not really like I want to talk to the person killing me.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say “killing”,” Minji pouted, teasing you with a long flower stem. “It makes me think that you don’t believe you’ll live.”

“No, I trust you, I--” You stopped in your tracks when you realized that the other girl was joking, rolling your eyes before turning back to your computer. “Real funny, Minji.”

She giggled, placing a mug of coffee on the table beside you. “I like to think I am. You can call me Minji, by the way. Only customers call me Minji.”

Instead of responding, you sipped at your coffee, falling into a comfortable silence once the florist turned back to her stove. With the cool fall sunlight streaming in through the window and the heavenly aroma inside the kitchen, you suddenly thought that you could get used to a scene like this. More than that-- you liked it.

A good 4 weeks passed without incident. Your weekly visits were always filled with musical laughter and pretty grins whirling by in an instant. Minji only looked more beautiful each time, the pain in your chest somehow lessening each time you saw her wave to you with all the enthusiasm that Siyeon lacked. Part of you wondered whether the bitter concoctions that Minji had you drink were the thing at work at all, but you continued to take them, and you continued to improve.

Of course, everything good had to come to an end.

“Y/N,” Minji gasped as she kneeled next to you, hands hovering over your body as you hacked again, red dribbling from your lips to the floor. Your fingers curled weakly around your phone, tears escaping your eyes with how hard you squeezed them shut. “Gahyeon called me, what happened to you?”

With the clusters of carnations fluttering in your lungs with every breath you took, you weren’t able to respond. The other girl seemed to realize that, digging through her bag for something. Before she could take anything out, though, you wheezed for air again, throat swollen to the point of suffocation.

She acted quick, turning you onto your side to let full blossoms slip from between your lips. The yellow blooms were dauntingly bright against the dark wood, almost a serene picture if not for the violent crimson staining the petals. Tipping a vial of golden orange into your mouth, Minji ordered, “Swallow. Come on, you can do it.”

As soon as the poppy syrup was gone, your eyes fluttered shut and you slumped against your arm, breathing rattled but steady. Sighing, the brunette wiped a remaining petal from your lips, sliding her hands below your knees and your neck to pick you up. “You’re going to be okay. I’ll make sure of it.”

When the sun began shining unbridled through the cracked curtains of your bedroom, you woke from the longest sleep since you started choking at night. Someone had taken the liberty of folding the clothes scattered across your chair, as well as placing your fully charged phone, a purple-colored glass of liquid, and a note by your side.

Y/N,

I have to go back to the shop, but Gahyeon or I’ll stop by later today to bring you some more medicine. Next time, call me first!

xx,

Kim Minji

There was a ridiculous smile on your lips just holding a pink piece of paper imprinted with the girl’s kiss in lipstick, as well as a remarkable lack of flowers in your lungs. Indeed, you couldn’t taste copper coating your tongue, or feel petals stuck to the back of your throat, and it felt even better than you had remembered.

When you checked your phone, you realized that a certain contact was missing, A phone number that you had long since given up on contacting. There was a gap in your carefully curated picture gallery, Siyeon’s pictures with you taken off your wall, too. In their places were various pictures of Minji and Gahyeon, sometimes together and sometimes apart. In one of the selfies, you noted with a grin that someone had scribbled a Sharpie mustache over Minji’s face.

Since when had the florist replaced her in your life, and since when were you absolutely okay with that?

Minji smiled as soon as she noticed that the door to the Love Blossom was already open, the lights on inside the shop and some sweet smell wafting out. You hadn’t talked about the time she saved you in your apartment, but ever since then, the florist had noted that you were opening up more. You were happier, more willing to crack jokes and visit her on your own accord. “Y/N, is that you?”

“Morning, Minji!” you answered, spinning out of the apartment with a grin. The apron that Minji usually wore to make her syrups was tied around your waist, the faint pink of it white with flour. You held the door open for her and moved to take her jacket off for her, a gorgeous smile on your face as you did. “I let myself in early to make you some bread, I hope you don’t mind!”

“I never mind bread,” the brunette laughed, her heart already warm when she inhaled honeyed air. “Today isn’t a checkup day, though? You stopped by 3 days ago, did you run out of syrup or something?”

You pouted, in a remarkably good mood as you twirled around the kitchen. The counter was finally free of flowers and glass vials, replaced instead by a huge bag of flour and trays of golden-brown pastries. Minji didn’t remember having those supplies, but she wouldn’t put it past you to restock her kitchen just for fun while she visited her friends. “What, I can’t come and see my friends? I’m off work today, so I thought I could bake for you and learn about your bouquet orders.”

Sighing in false exasperation, Minji patted you on the head and tied her hair up to start working, flipping the sign on the door to read “OPEN”. “Of course you can come and see me whenever you want, it’s just rare that you come by like this.”

“I guess we’ll have to change that then,” you shrugged, plopping three pastries on a plate for the other girl. The kitchen looked like a completely different place without the usual bloody petals scattered all over the place, and to be honest, Minji loved the change. For once, she wasn’t in charge of saving your life-- she was just a florist, and she was just your friend.

There was no way she could keep the smile off her face, not when you sang exaggeratedly into a filling spoon, and not when you baked all the things she mentioned that she liked.

Something felt tight in her chest when she inhaled air perfumed by butter and roses, but Minji could only smile. For you.

The next time you baked for her was bittersweet. Once again, you were already in the apartment when Minji came back from her morning visit.

“I’m healed,” you sobbed as you catapulted into her arms, a slight poof of flour exploding when your chest met hers. Minji stood still in shock, hands resting softly on the small of your back as you cried, “Minji, I’m healed. You saved me.”

“For real?” she whispered, pulling back to cup your face in your hands. You nodded tearily, makeup-tinted tears mixing with flour as the other girl hugged you again, something clogging up her throat as she tried to breathe. “I... I’m so happy for you.”

You grinned despite your tears as you brought a cake out of the fridge, the pretty lavenders and blues of the frosting somehow reminding Minji of a goodbye. She turned out to be right. “They’re forget-me-nots,” you explained when you gestured to the pretty piped flowers on the cake. “Um, so you don’t forget me.”

“I could never forget you,” Minji blurted, feeling a sting at her own nose. “Come back sometime, okay, Y/N? You don’t forget me either, got it?”

“I won’t.” Despite all the sincerity in your gaze, your promise was hollow to the florist’s ears. You were already tugging on your jacket again, leaving her standing in the middle of an all-too-clean kitchen with a beautiful cake in her hands. “I’m sorry, Minji, I have to get back to work. But I’ll be back soon,” you smiled, watching her carefully for a reaction.

Minji nodded, knees almost trembling as she watched you turn back to wave one last time. “Okay.”

As soon as the glass door slammed again, she rushed to place the cake down, tucking her face into the crook of her elbow as she was hit with yet another uncontrollable fit of coughing. She crouched, free hand gripping tight on the legs of the table near her to steady herself as flower petals dotted with red fluttered softly onto the ground.

“Mallow,” she recognized as she scrambled to pick up the purple-veined blooms, vomiting out yet another. “Mallow...”

Scooting back so that her back could hit the kitchen cabinets, Minji watched the candles atop the cake burn out, blood dripping from her lips onto the pale fabric of her sweater. She didn’t care, though, as she stopped a shallow breath from escaping, finally remembering the meanings of the flowers in her shaking hands.

“Consumed by love.”

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tailorvizsla · 4 years

Note

You didn't think I wouldn't ask for some Boba Fett though now did you? (Of course not, he is the new shiny for me iuwhei) ✨ HC Of my Choice... What about having your first kiss with Boba and he doesn't #know it is your first one till part-way through or after? Am I projecting? Yes, yes I am.

Title: HC – Boba Fett and First Kiss Pairing: Gender neutral Reader x Boba Fett Word Count: ~1700 Rating: PG-13 Warnings: Boba Fett is a grumpy bastard, but you hold your own against him. Boba also gets injured, but there aren’t any graphic descriptions of the injuries. Author’s Notes: Okay, my Angle, I’ve been thinking about this one for as long as it’s been sitting in my inbox. I’m not familiar with Boba Fett’s character, so I wanted to make sure this was good for you. So, without further ado, here we go with the Big Green Grumpy Jerk who has somehow inexplicably charmed his way into my heart with a few gruff comments.

Tagging @princessbatears because chaos? :>

📚 My Master List 📚

Boba Fett isn’t a man of many words. It’s not that he’s shy or anything – he just doesn’t like talking to people beyond what is necessary. He has worked alone his entire life, so the sound of others’ voices just sort of grates on him. He especially does not like being crowded by people.

So, one day, while doing his thing, he ends up injured. It’s not even due to combat. His jetpack just…sputters out. His beskar’gam turns what should have been a fatal fall into a very painful one. He knows he has broken a lot of bones, but Boba refuses to die like this. He crawls his way back to his bike, calls for medical aid, and prays to the Maker that someone in town will come help him.

You are the only person who does come to help him. Most other people are too afraid of the Imperial remnants to work with a Mandalorian. Others are too afraid of Mandalorians to work with a Mandalorian. You? You are not afraid of much. He is not sure if you are brave or stupid. After splinting the worst of the damage, you get him onto the bike and get him back into town. It is at this point that Boba finds himself leaning toward thinking you are stupidly caring and trusting.

You inject him with bacta – the good kind that makes him giggly, sleepy, and numb – and get to work. When he wakes up, he’s wrapped in an annoying number of casts and splints, but at least he’s still alive. However, you then give him the bad news: the fall has damaged many of the delicate nerves in his back. If he fails to undergo physical therapy, there is a real chance he may never walk again. He’s no medical expert, but when he looks at the scans you took, he knows you aren’t lying.

So, Boba resigns himself to having to deal with you on a regular basis. The first physical therapy exercises are simple, yet they exhaust him to the point where he just passes out. As the days go by, he starts putting up the walls to keep you out. (Spoiler alert: you manage to find your way through the cracks in the wall, annoying him with barely any effort on your behalf.)

Now, under ideal circumstances, this shitshow would end with Boba Fett getting back on his feet, paying you handsomely for the amount of time you have spent getting him put together, and going back to bounty hunting, never to think of you again. But of course, the universe throws an even bigger wrench into his carefully thought-out plans. Someone finds out that you’re taking care of him and a whole bunch of angry townspeople converge on your little clinic. He grabs you and the two of you run. The last thing you see is your clinic going up in flames. (Boba can’t believe the shortsightedness of these people – they’ve driven off their only competent medical professional. What are they going to do next? Kill their only competent mechanic? Di’kute, every last one of them.)

And so, the two of you go off on a merry adventure, annoying the absolute shit out of each other on a regular basis. Boba especially is concerned at how easily you have managed to find every single weak point in his defenses – physical, mental, and emotional. You are a fair shot with your blaster, so when he got fresh with you that one time, telling you that your ass looked downright edible in the trousers you had borrowed from him, you drew your blaster and fired a shot off at his feet. He laughed so hard his bucket nearly fell off. (You are not sure if you are disturbed that he finds being shot at amusing. He does scold you a bit, but you do notice that he does not talk about your ass anymore.)

With your knife? You’re lethal, and he learns that the hard way when he fails to announce his presence behind you. One moment Boba is reaching to touch your shoulder and the next moment, he’s got your elbow in his face and your penknife embedded in his flak vest. Fortunately, the blade’s too short to cause serious damage, but he does not let you forget that you kriffing stabbed him when he was only trying to ask you what you wanted for dinner.

Even though Boba would rather cover himself in tiingilar sauce and crawl back into the sarlacc pit headfirst than ever admit it, the two of you make a damn good team. He goes off to hunt bounties, you stay in town to provide your medical services for a fair fee. Sometimes, when your services are not needed, you’ll hang back at the ship and do some basic accounting to keep him within his budget.

Boba grumbles when you ask to accompany him on a hunt, but he figures you really do need to learn how to defend yourself if anything should happen to him. When the two of you were surrounded by goons, you naturally fell into place behind him, your back to his, covering his shebs while he provides the heavy firepower. When the numbers are thinned to something more manageable, he sets you loose on them, letting you practice your knife skills. And by the Maker, he is impressed with how much you have improved since the last time you stabbed him.

Between hunts, you get his shebs back into fighting shape. Hell, he thinks he’s even better than he was before. The exercises you insist on forcing on him have made him more flexible than he was before, and his bones no longer creak first thing in the morning. One particularly hot, muggy day, you try to make him drink that vile green vegetable concoction you call a smoothie. Smooth his shebs, there are chunks in that liquefied animal feed. Sometimes he wonders if you’re trying to kill him on purpose.

(You don’t know this, but Boba has already arranged for everything in his possession, ships and banking accounts included, to be transferred to you in the event of his death. Hell, he has even started negotiating with a friendly Tribe to make sure you have a home to go to and your pick of their warriors for marriage, should you be interested. Boba justifies it this way: the last time his jetpack mutinied, he ended up several hundred thousand credits in debt to you by his estimation. By ensuring you have a safe place to go, and a family ready to welcome you, he can offset the immeasurable debt he owes you. It hurts to think of this, but Boba genuinely cannot bear the thought of you being alone in this cruel galaxy, the same way he had been when he was a child. So, if he ever does piss you off to the point where you off him in his sleep, you’ll be fine.)

You keep pushing and pushing, insisting that he needs B-vitamins or some other bantha-shit he’s sure you’ve made up for the sole purpose of annoying him. When you start going on about macronutrients and essential vitamins, Boba loses it. He tosses his cutlery down and goes stomping off toward the cockpit. You follow him, blathering on and on about the last blood panel you had pulled – HDLs, LDLs, and a whole slew of acronyms later, he loses it. Rather than snap at you, he shuts you up the only way his poor sleep-deprived brain can come up with.

Boba pushes you up against the wall, gently to avoid hurting you. You don’t seem at all phased. In fact, you start waving the paper at him as you try to draw his attention to his sodium levels. Boba leans in and presses his lips to yours. You finally stop talking, your entire body going stiff in response. He takes a moment to nibble along your lower lip before parting your lips with his, tongue probing a bit deeper in, and you still aren’t responding. Boba draws back and stares down at you. You’re wide-eyed and clearly in shock.

He leans in again. This time you respond clumsily, your hands clutching at that stupid piece of paper. He gently wrestles it out of your grasp and crumples it up. Then he tosses it over his shoulder, not caring where it lands. He cups the back of your head and deepens the kiss. Still, you’re not responding the way he wants, so he draws back.

“What, never been kissed before?” he asks.

Before he can say anything else, he realizes that that was your first kiss. While Boba has never wanted to be anyone’s First Anything, he realizes that he wants to make an exception for you. There’s no one in this entire galaxy who can annoy the shit out of him in one breath and then worry about his health in the next. You are his little baar’ur. After you have wormed your way under his plating and so selfishly made yourself a fixture in his life without his permission? Oh, no, no, you are not going anywhere.

He cuts off your stammering with another kiss. He takes this one slow, moving your hands to where he wants you to touch him – one at his nape, the other at the small of his back, right over that spot that makes his knees weak.

This time, you respond. Slowly, hesitantly, but as you grow more confident, your hands begin to stray. You worm your fingers up the back of his shirt and dig your nails into the sensitive skin there, making him gasp in pleasure. Then you dig your fingers into his long hair and tug lightly, earning a low growl from him. You freeze and stare up at him with wide eyes until he leans back in.

Fortunately, your big smart science brain learns his likes and dislikes very quickly. When he finally pulls away, he finds that he really likes what he sees – your shirt’s rumpled, your hair is sticking up, and your lips are red and swollen from his kisses. Then and there, he makes a vow to make sure you always look like a mess.

(Spoiler alert: quite a few more of your firsts happen right here in the cockpit.)

#star wars #boba fett #boba fett x reader #boba fett x gender neutral reader #boba fett x you #first kisses #implications about first times #asks #my angle is so good to me #i love this grumpy green butthole already

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themangolorian · 4 years

Text

look how long this love can hold its breath

Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five

pairing: javier peña x reader

summary: (slow burn/fake married) When Pablo Escobar escalates his war on Colombian law enforcement, the DEA is getting desperate to pin down his location. Reader is forced to go undercover with another agent, one she can’t stand, Javier Peña. Worst of all, she’ll have to try to infiltrate the Cali Cartel while pretending to be Peña’s wife.

warnings: mild language

a/n: i know it’s a generally overdone trope but i couldn’t resist doing my own version of fake married Javi with a pretty antagonistic reader. hope you all enjoy!

You’d been assigned to an undercover assignment of sorts. You were infiltrating the Cali Cartel. Sort of. The mission was simply to gain inside information on Escobar’s whereabouts. To finally bring that hijoeputa down.

The only problem was your assigned partner.

Javier fucking Peña.

You’d never worked with him, but you knew his reputation as a womanizer. His machismo. And, worst of all, he was an American.

You’d encountered him briefly on separate occasions in the briefing room and each time he’d rubbed you the wrong way. He had a habit of talking over you and every other woman in the unit. Well, honestly, him and his partner Murphy liked to talk over everyone but- to put it plainly, you didn’t like Javier Peña.

“What’s the plan?” You asked in your typical no-nonsense way as you joined him and Murphy in the briefing room.

Incredibly, the up aboves had put these two pendejos in charge of the operation.

“Hola amor,” Peña lilted at you with a smirk from his seat across from you, raising his eyebrows suggestively.

You glared at him. “What the fu-.”

“You’re married.” Murphy tossed the manila envelope on the table in your direction, interrupting your outburst.

He knew you and Peña got on each others’ nerves. This was his way of avoiding the inevitable bickering. It was a shitty way of doing so though.

You cursed under your breath as you fell into a chair and swept the envelope open.

The other two were quiet as your eyes scanned the documents.

“Fuck no.” You pushed the papers containing your’s and Peña’s aliases back at them.

Señor y Señora Villalobos. Dealers disguised as diamond salespeople. Married. To each other.

“Told you.” Peña told Murphy, his tone all-knowing.

“Cállate,” you snarled at Peña.

“You first,” he glared back.

“Hey,” Murphy exclaimed. He rested the tip of his index finger on the files and glared at you both now.

“This isn’t a request. These are orders.” He rubbed at his mustache and this time directed his gaze at you. “You either follow the mission or find another job.”

You glared from him to Peña who didn’t meet your gaze, too busy staring at a point on the table.

You threw your hands up in defeat, reached across and snatched the folder then huffed out of the room, muttering all the while. “Estos tontos Americanos vienen a mi país y piensen que tengo miedo de ellos, malparidos...”

Murphy looked from your retreating figure to Peña who was watching you walk away with amusement in his eyes. “What was that? What did she say?”

“She’ll do it,” Peña said, smirking. He stood and picked up his own file. “And learn Spanish while I’m gone, cabrón.”

Peña rapped Steve on the arm with the file affectionately and then he was gone.

Steve rubbed his face again, tiredly, worried that given the short fuses of both you and Peña, the DEA was making a huge mistake.

*****

“¡Apúúúúúúrateeee!” You dragged the word out, tapping your foot impatiently against the brake.

You were in an agency assigned car waiting around the corner from Peña’s flat for the pendejo to come outside so you could start the long drive to Cali.

Finally.

He threw his bag into the backseat then slid onto the passenger’s seat.

“Amor,” he greeted you with a sardonic smile as he slipped his sunglasses on.

“¿Y por qué tardaste tanto?” You ignored the stupid nickname he was no doubt using to taunt you in order to ask him what had taken him so long.

“I couldn’t find the rings.” He held up a shiny golden wedding band, and you saw a matching one already around his own finger.

For a beat you merely glared at the ring as if all of this was its fault, then you were taking it and roughly sliding it onto your own finger.

“Careful,” Peña said as he inclined his seat so he could sleep. “Keep being so charming and all the narcos are going to want to marry you.”

You revved the engine and took off jerkily, turning the volume of the radio up to drown him out.

The trip was a long one. You both took turns driving. Peña kept turning down the radio while you drove so he could sleep, and you kept changing the station while he was driving. You argued over where to eat and what temperature to keep the air at or whether to open the windows.

“We’re supposed to be married, not divorced,” he’d quipped at you once while he was driving after you’d knocked his hand out of the way of your water bottle as you reached for it.

You turned the heater up then, knowing it would bother him, even though you were already sweltering. He left it though, too stubborn to engage you at your game.

Until you opened your window. Then he was slamming the shut off button for the heater.

You glared at him...then- A mansion outside his window caught your eye. You watched it whiz past.

“What?” He slowed and turned the radio volume down.

“You passed it.” You sat back in your seat. “Coño.” You muttered under your breath.

He pulled the car over. When he let the car idle instead of turning around, you looked at him to see him already watching you, sunglasses off.

“What?”

“This is it. One wrong move and we’re both dead.”

You couldn’t believe your ears. You glared fiercely his way. “Are you reminding me how to do my job, Peña?”

He sighed. “Just- I know we don’t get along, but this weekend, we don’t have a choice.”

You rolled your eyes. “Look just because you swooped in from the grand US of A to save all us heathens,” you fluttered your hands mockingly, “doesn’t mean I need you to remind me of my job. I’ve been doing this for longer. If anyone in this car understands what’s at stake, it’s me.” You finished, angry.

“That why you hate me so much?” He asked thoughtfully in a tone so soft you had to look at his face to discern his intent for asking.

He wasn’t glaring anymore. If anything, he seemed curious.

“I don’t hate you,” you muttered but your tone belied your words.

He chuckled. “That’s a good start.” He started turning the car around. “Amor.” He added and suddenly you were fuming again.

*****

The introductions with the narcos and their wives went well enough, better even than you’d hoped. They accepted you as one of their own. It wasn’t hard for you to fit in, you were Colombiana to the bone. Peña on the other hand… But he’d sold it well. Almost too well. This had been your first opportunity at seeing how much he’d picked up during his time in Colombia so far. And it seemed like he’d picked up a lot.

Peña hadn’t been wrong when he’d indicated some of the narcos would take an interest in you. They greeted you both warmly, but their hands enveloped yours tightly and their eyes lingered just a moment too long. You thought Peña must have noticed too, and surely he worried that allowing such blatant flirting would endanger your cover.

That must have been why you suddenly felt his arm encircling your bare shoulders. You tried not to tense in surprise, so much so that you let yourself relax against him in a natural manner. He continued the pretense, kissing your forehead as he made a joke with the narcos about keeping the wife happy.

Inside, though, you were having a crisis and you hoped the look on your face was one caught between amused and loving. A shock had gone through you when Peña’s lips had met your skin. His act was so convincing; how was he so good at this?

You thought back to the first stop you’d made earlier on in the car drive. When you’d gotten out of the car, Peña had whistled softly upon seeing your sundress, warming your cheeks and angering you simultaneously. But he’d said nothing else. And you’d thought on it during the ensuing drive. Normally you wore suits to the office, pants and skirts, but suits all the same. And you’d made a point of never going out with Peña or Murphy. So he’d never seen you in anything else. Against your will, you wondered what the whistle had meant. Not that you cared, but you didn’t need to add one more thing to the long list of things you already had to think about.

You smothered the thoughts. They were distracting and unnecessary and right now you were lucky that Peña was so good at this because he was carrying you both.

As you trailed the narcos out back to sit and have drinks by the pool, you slipped your arm around his waist, needing to carry your weight in the farce and not wanting to have to hear later from Peña about what you should have done.

“Así,” you heard him murmur approvingly.

You dug your nails into his side and heard him grunt in pain.

Your smile then at the wife of one of the narcos holding out a drink for you was genuine.

You spent an hour bantering back and forth with the other couples.

If you didn’t know any better, you would think Peña was happily married in his private life. He played the part perfectly.

As you were both sitting at the poolside table, he would reach over absently and take your fingers in his. The first time a jolt went through you again. But you took the cue. You alternated touches. You would rest your hand on his thigh. You swore he jumped the first time you did that, but he hid it well. He took long draws from your glass. Once he even fed you an olive. If you didn’t know any better, he was enjoying torturing you. He knew you hated olives. But the gesture drew laughs from the men and awwws from the women. It was then you noticed how they were swooning over Peña. It upset you only because you realized that if the pinche idioto was in the position to do it, he’d sleep with all their wives.

Finally and blessedly, your hosts suggested that you two retire to your room before dinner. Peña was to join the other men in Pacho’s office just before dinner for a discussion. You assumed that was when any useful information would be recovered. You realized then that you were here more for decoration than anything.

You fumed as you let Peña lead you by the hand up the mansion’s grand staircase. You both followed the housekeeper who led you to your room.

You dropped Peña’s hand the second the door closed behind you. He gave you a look but then the two of you were scouring the room, searching for any hidden recording devices. You shook your head at him, but he put his finger to his lips and tilted his head toward the bathroom. You raised your hands questioningly but followed him all the same.

He was reaching into the shower and turning it on full blast.

“¿Qué haces?” You hissed at his ear, having to get close to be heard.

“We don’t know for sure it’s clear. We only talk freely like this.” He murmured into your ear, his breath tickling your skin. You shivered involuntarily at the sensation.

You both established that your cover had been bought. And what most likely awaited him at the meeting. You left him to take a shower and went to lounge on the bed.

Several minutes later, the door to the bathroom opened releasing a wall of steam and-

You sat up, glaring, “What are you doing?”

Peña put a finger to his lips furiously. “Adonde está mi maleta, amor?” His sweet tone was a direct contradiction to the furrow in his brow. He shook his head at you, gesturing to his suitcase as if to ask how you expected him to get dressed without clothes.

“Allí, corazón.” You said for show, just in case, glaring at him as he took his time going through his bag to find an outfit. Your eyes tried not to linger on his bare skin and the way water from the shower trickled down his toned back.

You averted your eyes when he turned back, but he was smiling as if he knew you’d been watching him, so you flipped over on the bed to face the other direction.

When Peña left the room with the sound of a fake kiss, you were too nervous to sit still. You had to get ready for dinner anyway. But you were anxious all the same. Your cover could be blown at any second. You stored a handgun under the bathroom sink before getting into the shower and kept an ear out for any strange noises. But nothing happened. You dressed and put your perfume and makeup on. Still Peña was absent. You slid a smaller gun into the holster on your inner thigh and went to join the other wives wherever they were.

They turned out to be in a bar off the kitchen. Luckily already tipsy and talkative. They handed you a drink, but you took only tiny sips as you engaged them in conversation. You struck gold when one of them brought up Tata, Escobar’s wife. They were gossiping over who had a better kitchen. You hung onto every word while providing input as shallowly as possible. Apparently your and Peña’s kitchen was inlaid with marble and dark hickory wood.

Nothing they said gave up the location of the Escobars though and the subject soon turned to jewelry, at which point the women fawned over the diamond necklace provided to you by the agency. Which was your cue to try to sell them diamonds.

Soon enough the staff came in to lead you all to the formal dining room where the men were waiting. They all stood but it was Peña’s face you were focused on.

His lips parted when he saw you and his brow smoothed over. His eyes traveled from yours down along your entire figure. You couldn’t help but get the slightest bit flustered. You avoided his gaze, but he was coming your way to take your hand and lead you over to the seat next to his. It was strange. Surrounded as you both were by actual enemies, it felt like you were the only two in the room. It confused you and irritated you, but you managed to catch your breath again once you were seated at the dinner table. You ignored Peña’s dark eyes on you and took a long sip from your wine glass, trying to focus on the mission at hand.

“Not too much,” you heard him whisper as you placed the wine glass back down.

And there he was.

Underneath the table, you adjusted your feet, “accidentally” stepping on his shoe with one sharp heel.

The curse he muttered in pain under his breath had you smiling as you dove into the conversation, ready to take on a room full of the people who had played the bad guys in your life for so long.

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lunarliza · 4 years

Text

Fake Boyfriend | Chapter 4: Kook Conventions

JJ x Kook!reader

series masterlist | prev. chapter| chapter one

my masterlist

You’re a Kook Princess who has everything you ever wanted... until your handsome Kook Prince dumps you for a hot new fling. To save your reputation, you bribe the one person he hates the most, JJ Maybank, to pretend to be your boyfriend for the summer. All’s fair in love and war. But where do you draw that line when you’re suddenly wishing your fake boyfriend is your real one?

note: slight mention of panic attack

If there was anything you learned about JJ that Friday, it was that he was the absolute worse at sticking to the plan.

For one, he spent so much time looking for the tennis courts, instead of following your clearly written out instructions, that he ended up being late altogether to pick you up. What was supposed to be a grand gesture turned into you sitting on the front steps, while the sun was near done setting, waiting for stupid JJ while everyone else had already left.

“What the hell took you so long?!” you scolded, slamming the truck door shut in annoyance once he finally showed up.

“This place is confusing as hell! I kept having to make loops. It is called Figure Eight for a reason,” he tried to justify, pulling out of the lot.

“JJ I texted you specific instructions on how to get here!” you groused, rubbing your temple, “Anyways, it’s fine, whatever. Let’s just hurry home so I can get ready. My house is just a little bit up that way.”

“Yeah, uh, about that,” JJ mentioned sheepishly, keeping his eyes on the road, “I kinda have to help Pope and Poppa Heyward with something right now. It will only take an hour tops! I’ll just meet you at the party after I’m done.”

You groaned loudly, face-palming yourself. “JJ what the hell! I told you specifically to cancel your plans tonight. It was supposed to be our debut!”

“I did! I just,” he scratched the back of his neck, “kinda broke one of their carts this afternoon, so I have to help them fix it for tomorrow. I think they’re catering your little brunch thingy.”

“How did you even break the cart to begin with?!”

He hid his face from your dagger-eyes and admitted in a low voice, “I, uh, tried to surf on it down a hill when they weren’t looking.”

You had to fight the urge to smack him upside the head, but you didn’t want to risk him veering off the road. Lucky bastard.

“Fine,” you grumbled, “Just make sure you’re on time to the party.” You then eyed his outfit up and down. Even in the little sunlight that emitted from outside, you could tell it was all dirty from his day activities. “And please change into something a little nicer,” you added, “These Kooks would run you to the ground with that on.”

JJ dropped you off at your house and sped away as you unlocked the door into a near empty house. Looks like it would just be you and Alfred for dinner.

Your parents were headed off to the mainland for some business convention. Thankfully, your presence was not needed which saved you an entire day of pretending to be a perfect obedient daughter. It was an exhausting act.

Most teens your age would kill for a night alone, but after countless nights sleeping isolated in a big empty house, it got old and depressing. Most of the time, you’d sleep over at Sarah’s for some kind of company. You were always welcomed at the Camerons’.

Greeting Alfred your usual hello at the foyer, you darted upstairs to wash off and get ready with the little time you had left. The aroma of filet mignon and freshly seasoned veggies filled the house air.

“Oh and Alfred,” you called out over the intricate metal banister, “It’ll just be me eating tonight, so just set the table for one please.”

“Miss Y/n, your friend is not coming?” he asked with hints of concern. You just shook your head with a sad smile. “No, he had to run last minute.”

Alfred gave you a curt nod, making way back into the kitchen while you dashed into the bathroom.

—————————————————

Instead of throwing JJ straight into the shark’s tank (even though, given his already poor track record, you strongly contemplated throwing him to literal sharks), you decided it was best to ease him into the whole boyfriend role.

You figured he’d be more in touch with his aura if you invited him to a Kook party first— which was exactly where you were, furiously texting him where on earth he was.

It was already ten o’clock. The party started hours ago, and he was nowhere to be found. An hour with Pope your ass!

Flopping onto the giant living room couch in Billy Irvine’s mansion, you frowned amongst the throng of drunk privileged kids. Around you, the Glossy Posse was gossiping with other Kooks about some of the summer newcomers while sleazy guys from out of town tried to grab their attention. It never worked.

“So y/n,” Chloe asked next to you on the couch, “I have some great news! It’s no secret that you need a date to the all the fundraiser events, and I might just have one for you! My cousin, Gerald, is coming into town next week, so I can totally set you guys up!”

She proceeded to show you pictures on her phone of a lanky tall guy with discolored hair and a creepy smile. You resorted to taking a gulp of your drink to hide your horrified expression. “Thanks, but, uh, no thanks. I actually have a date already,” you informed, typing away heatedly at your phone for JJ to arrive that instant or so help you.

“Ooh, who is it?” Ivy nosily chimed in at the mention of you finally having a date. From the couch over, you also saw Anne-Marie and Warren lean their heads closer to get the scoop.

Jeez, were people really that interested in your love life?

“It’s-”

Before you could reveal the name, a loud ‘ding’ went off from your phone followed by a text from JJ to alert you that he was out front. “Oh! He’s actually here right now,” you announced, hopping up from your seat to collect your very problematic date.

“You’re late, again!” you scolded to the blond standing all gloomy at the front of the stone curved driveway. He changed into a nicer grey long-sleeve with khaki shorts and his signature red snapback, much to your relief. It didn’t quite match with your intricate white romper, but it would do for the time being.

“The guard wouldn’t let me in the gate! I ended up having to sneak through one of the fences,” JJ explained. You rolled your eyes at his ridiculous excuse. “Then why didn’t you just call me to let you in?” you pointed out.

“It was more fun this way,” he peskily grinned, earning himself a smack on the arm. The guy was impossible. “Ow!” he whined, rubbing the spot. Ignoring his complaints, you seized his hand and led him inside. It was about time!

The foyer flashed with various-colored LED lights while thundering rap music echoed from basically every corner of the house. All around, eyes gawked at you stepping through the Victorian-style entryway with a Pogue of all people. It was like walking into a cave of bats.

“Anyways,” you began, disregarding all the probing eyes, “This is Billy Irvine’s place. It’s the nicest house on the Eight. His parents are out of town right now, so we’re celebrating the Glossy Posse’s birthdays.”

It alway was a coincidence to you how all three of them had birthdays on back-to-back days. Witchcraft, honestly.

“Those bitches?” JJ grimaced at the mention of his sworn female enemies, “Ew why? They hate the Pogues.”

“Just shut up and suck it up. Here,” you grabbed a glass from the champagne tower in the middle of the spacious room, “Have a drink to get your mind off it.”

“Champagne? What the hell is this, England?” he yelped, taking a swig. Rolling your eyes, you hoped the alcohol would alleviate his irritability for the night. Fortunately, the blaring music was enough to drown out his constant bickering.

“Now put your arm around me! It’s time to make our rounds,” you demanded. He obliged and you turned on your best lovestruck game-face, giving him the grand tour of the mansion.

Billy’s mom was also one of the important people of the Island Club, so you had been going over there ever since you were nine being that your moms were friends. Still, you were always amazed by the extravagance of their house. You could tell JJ was also in shock of it all too.

It looked like a castle with two grand marble staircases circling the front with a tall vintage Tiffany chandelier hanging over everything. The floors were the shiniest white marble even with hundreds of teenagers recklessly dancing and slipping all over it.

“Damn, so this is how the other side lives,” JJ commented, marveling at how the LED lights reflected off the diamonds on the chandelier.

He slid his hand down to your waist as you stood closer to his side, taking a whiff of his teakwood cologne. Deep down, it was nice to have someone to attend parties with you, even if it was fake and with JJ.

You took him up the right staircase where plastered kids— some you recognized from school, some just in town for the summer— stumbled up and down the stairs or sloppily made out while pinned to the side walls. Realistically, it didn’t seem that off-brand to JJ’s party scene.

“We’re only staying an hour right?” JJ reminded in your ear as you approached the open bar upstairs. Yes, the Irvine’s had a literal bar in their second level.

“Yes, grumpy!”

“Do you know if Sarah and John B are coming?” JJ continued to question. You settled on top of a retro bar stool as he leaned against the Irvine’s prized rustic bar.

“No,” you answered, “Sarah doesn’t come to these because Topper’s here. And she hates Kooks.”

“She’s the smarter one of you two!” JJ shouted among the loud music. You shook your head and whacked him again, but lightly this time. Seemed that would be you guy’s thing— hitting.

Even in their inebriated states, Kooks were still staring at you like you had grown a third arm. Which, honestly, was what being with JJ felt like half the time. From the corner of your eye, you caught a glimpse of the Glossy Posse and Warren making their way to you with either wide or curious eyes.

Oh boy.

“Y/n!” they exclaimed, shoving through the crowd. You matched their seemingly gleeful expressions, though you knew deep down they were judging you hard.

“You must be y/n’s date,” Ivy stated without much of a formal introduction.

“Aren’t you that Pogue from the Boneyard that always tries to hit on us?” Chloe brought up once she got a better look at JJ’s face. You snorted, but no one heard you.

You were slightly worried JJ would take their snarky comments the wrong way and lash back, but his cocky grin still laid proudly on his face as he held his hand out to your girl friends. “Name’s JJ. And yeah, I’m y/n’s new man.”

New man. Well, that was certainly a title. All of the Glossy Posse’s threaded eyebrows shot up at the word.

“Y/n,” Anne-Marie said in amazement, “You didn’t tell us you were dating again.”

“Yeah, well, I wanted to keep it kinda lowkey,” you lied, signaling JJ to put his arm around you again.

Expecting your friends to stick up their nose at him or give you guys condemnatory looks, you were surprised to find they were more stunned than snobby. Intrigued, you caught them eyeing JJ up and down as if he possessed some kind of magical charm.

From behind the group, you saw Warren trying to stick his hand out at JJ to introduce himself as the girls did kinda take center stage earlier, shielding him out. “Don’t believe we’ve met yet. I’m Warren, Warren Van Doren.”

JJ had to hold back a laugh at the sound of his rhyming name. So immature.

“Hey man, I’m JJ. Nice to meet you,” he greeted, shaking his hand, “Wait a sec, aren’t you that quarterback that got in that fight at regionals last year?”

Warren smiled sheepishly and looked away. “Yeah, that was me.”

You remembered that fight. The video of it actually went viral for like a week. Warren was a very nice guy, but pissed of, he was an animal. He pummeled the shit out of some of other players during that game. The topic of fighting seemed to bond the two boys as they unknowingly drifted away in their own conversation. Thank God, you were glad that at least one of the boys there would be friendly towards JJ.

“Wow, look what the cat dragged in,” Chloe announced, gesturing towards the stairway. All four of your heads turned to see Max and Anya parade up to the top step linked to one another.

That was the cue.

Furtively, you nudged at JJ’s side, interrupting his football conversation. You gave him an alerting look that said ‘look like you’re in love with me ASAP’ and he quickly enveloped his arm around you to pull you close.

Given the fact that you and JJ hardly knew each other, much less touched, it was a very ungraceful and awkward gesture. Even Warren shot you both a weird look. Either way, you figured it would be perfected after going at it a few times.

Just as the Hollywood couple sauntered in to the packed bar area, JJ dipped his face closer to yours. It was a nice touch to the act. He started whispering some stupid joke in your ear that you could hardly make out among the music and chatter, but you went along with it anyway, playfully slapping at his chest. He even placed his snapback on your head backwards. You almost yelled at him for ruining your hair, but for the sake of the show you were putting on, you pretended it was the cutest thing.

You tried not to look at Max as he passed, as you didn’t want to make things so obvious. But in the split second you did glance his way, his mouth flew agape. In that moment, you knew you had him right in the palm of your hand from twenty feet away. The evil laugh cackled inside your head while you raked your hands through JJ’s hair. It was surprisingly soft.

For the next few minutes, you could feel Max’s stare bore into you back as you leaned closer to JJ, kissing up his jawline and cheek.

“Damn, y/n, didn’t know you felt like this about me,” JJ teased.

“Shut up. I’m giving them a show,” you hissed with an infatuated smile to mask your threats.

“They’re gone now,” JJ noted lowly in your ear. You both detached like repelling magnets.

Fortunately, the posse and Warren dispersed among the crowd while you and JJ acted out your little PDA scene— it was probably from discomfort, if you were being honest. You did make sure not to hold anything back while you were draped all over JJ.

“Is that it?” JJ droned, back to his normal whiny self, “Am I done? Can we leave?”

Clicking your tongue, you shook your head, but with a grin this time. “Yes, you idiot, we can leave now.”

“Finally!”

JJ’s hand crept to your lower back as you both weaved through the mass of people to the exit. Before you could make it halfway down the staircase, however, you heard a rumbling behind you that stopped both your tracks. Warren’s six-four gigantic self was rummaging down the stairs, leaving booms in his wake.

“JJ! JJ!” he called out, grabbing hold of your fake boyfriend’s arm, “JJ dude, you gotta check out this new game system Billy has upstairs in the game room. You can play live Madden!”

“What?!” JJ’s eyes lit up like a kid on Christmas as Warren tugged you both back up the stairs with his giant football-player muscles.

“Dude it’s fucking sick! You gotta try it out,” Warren kept insisting. You knew JJ wouldn’t be able to resist. His eyes were practically glowing with excitement when he turned back to you as if to ask for some kind of approval.

“Okay, I’m just going to stay for one game,” he swore but you were a hundred-and-ten percent sure he’d be hooked and you could stay for much longer.

“Knock yourself out, Maybank,” you responded with a knowing smile, shooing him off to some depth of the Irvine’s enormous home. When he disappeared, you took the liberty to go search for your friends and finally enjoy the party for yourself.

As you predicted, one game turned into thirty real quick. It was well past midnight and JJ was still buried away somewhere doing who knows what. You didn’t mind. Warren was very responsible and you trusted him to take care of your date.

Plus, it gave you enough time to take rounds of various colored jello shots with Billy, dance on Mrs. Irvine’s countertops with the birthday girls, and devour the four-tiered tiramisu cake with fake-puking Barbie doll toppers that you helped pick out at the bakery.

When it got around one thirty, you grew a little concerned about JJ’s whereabouts so you sent him a quick text just to make sure he was okay and not shoving his head down a toilet. Your phone chimed back instantly—

Im jus fine y/n!!! One mor game! I almos beat War Ins Ass! Fuckin kwarter back!

Oh yeah, he was definitely gone. You texted your family’s driver to come by in about thirty minutes to make sure he’d get home safely. Then, you proceeded to dig in to your third slice of cake. Unlike the rest of your friends, you embraced the joy that was carbs— especially when you were drunk and there was chocolate involved.

JJ came downstairs a few minutes later and found where you were sitting on the couch surrounded by your circle of friends. Even amid the dark yet colorful beaming lights, his hair was still its usual sweaty mess with eyes a tad droopy, indicating just how drunk he was.

“Y/n! There’s my baby!”

He walked up and collapsed right onto your lap, tossing a dangly arm around you. You kept his snapback on for the entire night, assuming your hair was probably a bird’s nest underneath it. Everyone around seemed amused at the sight, and a few girls from school even began asking how you two started dating.

Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

Well, that was until your thigh circulation began ceasing due to JJ’s bony ass on it. You immediately demanded that you switch places with him, and he sloppily obliged. The throng around you giggled, intrigued by the new lovey-dovey couple. Secretly, you ate up the attention and knew JJ did too.

He was in the middle of telling everyone a dumb Boneyard party story when Max and Anya entered the living room premises. They looked like they were fixing to leave. Your date felt you tense a little in his lap and caught on to your sudden judder.

Boldly, JJ made direct eye contact with Max and threw him one of those ‘what’s up’ nods. Then, out of nowhere, in his completely trashed state, JJ cupped both of your cheeks and planted a very brazen kiss on your lips for everyone to see. Shutting your eyes, you heard a few whistles from the crowd around you, especially when he, very obviously, added his tongue to the mix.

JJ was a good kisser, you had to admit. It quite literally, took your breath away when he pulled back. Biting your lip, you mimicked his shit-eating grin while he pressed his perspiration-filled forehead on yours. It was a huge acne-hazard just waiting to happen. But, like the snapback, you didn’t care. It was the most thrilling thing you had done in months.

“Don’t look now, but Vega and his girl have their jaws dropped to the floor behind you,” he muttered in your ear. You giggled and held onto him closer, leaning your head on his chest.

It was probably be best fifteen hundred bucks you had ever spent.

—————————————————

The next morning was your mom’s weekly Saturday brunch. By default, you showed up an hour early to help greet the guests, frequently checking your watch and phone to see when JJ would arrive.

You had a tennis tournament earlier that morning, however, you didn’t even bother making your fake boyfriend go. After the events of last night, you knew he’d be too hungover in the morning and wouldn’t wake up in time for it. He was getting to be very predictable.

At t-minus five minutes until the brunch started, everyone had already made their way into the ballroom. That left just you waiting in the lobby area for your date. The look on your face was just about ready to kill JJ whenever he walked through the door. You also didn’t see Sarah and John B arrive either, so you assumed they would be a no-show yet again.

About a minute past noon, the blond sauntered past the doors wearing a black suit that looked two sizes to big for him with hideous shoulder pads. You presumed it was his dad’s old one. He also had on jet black sunglasses to mask the grogginess from the party, but it was pretty evident he looked and felt like shit.

“You’re late again!” you hissed through gritted teeth, snatching his hand like he was an uncontrollable child. Maybe you should invest in a leash and collar for him since he could never get his attendance right.

“What do you mean? You said noon,” he yawned, unfazed at your irritation.

“The brunch starts at noon!” you jeered, “That means you have to show up early!”

“Well you failed to mention those rules,” he tried to bicker back, but you flashed him one of your bitch-looks before he could go any further. That had him shriveling at the sight.

“Whatever, just hurry up and let’s get seated,” you ordered, leading him through the majestic looking double doors, “And take off those sunglasses!”

Much to your dismay, the doors made a very loud creaking noise when they opened. Just about everyone did a double-take to see you arrive late and with a woozy-looking boy shoving sunglasses in his suit pocket.

Eyes were glued on you while judgmental whispers filled the already tense air. There was a small churn in your stomach as you weaved through the round tables. Something was also gnawing at your brain, telling you that it was a terrible, terrible idea. You attempted to brush it aside, though, as you and JJ took your seats.

For some odd reason, the Glossy Posse didn’t show the same enthusiasm towards JJ like the did at the party. They were back to their pretentious ways— you figured it was probably just their hangover attitude.

On the other hand, Warren happily greeted JJ when he sat down, exchanging one of those typical ‘bro’ handshakes. They started chatting on about the previous night while you tried to make small talk with the girls. Unfortunately, they were still being short with you and were, very obviously, throwing looks at JJ, along with their dates.

Glancing to your parents’ table, they didn’t look like they cared too much about your situation, having just flown in from their trip. They were too engrossed in entertaining their friends to really pay you any mind. Sometimes you were grateful that they were oblivious to some things. When you look over at the Vegas, however, Mr. and Mrs. Vega both sent you a disapproving look. The other families followed.

You couldn’t help but feel like you were in over your head at that point. Was it a mistake bringing JJ to this event?

The servers came out and made their rounds at the tables, setting bowls of water in front of everyone.

“Thank God, I’m starving,” JJ piped, taking his dessert spoon to sip water from the finger bowl.

“JJ,” you yelled-whispered as guests continued to stare.

“What?” he chided back with an attitude, completely unaware of his surroundings.

“The water is for your fingers.”

His face shot up from the bowl and scanned the room at people dipping their fingers into their respective bowls. “Oh shit,” he sputtered as your entire table tried to hide their snorts.

When the food finally came out, it didn’t really get any better. Baked chicken was on the menu and, well, JJ was the only one in the room who didn’t use a fork and knife. Everyone stared at him incredulously as he used his hands to gobble up his plate. Though, the boy didn’t seem to notice any of the baffled eyes.

Attempting to shield your red face, you continued to take tiny bites from your food, hoping the next hour would go by fast.

You hoped too soon.

As soon as JJ was done eating, he let out a loud belt to where the tables around you could hear. Warren high-fived him. At least someone got a kick out of it. You, along with the rest of the guests, had nothing but revolt on your faces.

Once the plates were cleared, the servers brought out creme brûlée for dessert. You were grateful it was something semi-clean to eat. JJ seemed to get a knack out of all the food. He even leaned over to you with his mouth full and muttered, “This food is fantastic! My compliments to the chef.”

You half-smiled back in embarrassment and took a spoon-full of your dessert. Thankfully, your mom waltzed over when you were half-way through to ask for your help carrying in the posters and stands from the lobby that displayed all the charity and donation information.

Immediately, you rose and scattered out, away from all the the dense room.

At the front, you began picking up the easel stands to bring inside until you spotted the jet-black locks of the last person you wanted to run into that afternoon. You almost dropped the large items in your hands when he came up to you.

“So, I see you brought Maybank here. Looks like he’s really enjoying himself in there,” Max commented dryly beside you. Mrs. Vega must have asked him for a hand as well.

You winced at the oozing criticism in his voice. It was the first time you had spoken to him one-on-one since the breakup.

”Yeah, we’re, uh, kind of together now,” you mentioned, lugging a display. He grabbed the two remaining and rushed to keep up with you, following you back in.

Out of nowhere, he let out disbelieving laugh, “You can’t be serious, y/n, you and Maybank?”

Taken aback by his brashness, you stopped right before the ballroom doors, frowning. “Yeah,” you shot back sternly, “Why not? I get along with him fine.”

“Doesn’t look like it to me. The guy’s a total tool. I’ve told you that from the beginning. Trust me, I know.”

“Know what? What’s good for me?” you pressed, growing more and more exasperated at the sound of his deep and raspy voice.

It was sexy, no doubt, but just the things that were coming out of his mouth made you want to slap him silly. How dare he prance up to you in his gorgeous light blue Armani suit and tell you what’s good for you!

“I just know who you are, y/n,” he went on calmly, with not an ounce of anger present in his tone, “And JJ’s just not a good guy for you.”

You were seeping with outrage at that point. Hiking in a breath, you spoke with the speckles of tranquility you had left in you. “Well I appreciate your concern, though I hardly understand why you have any for me. But we broke up, Max. You completely lost the right to tell me any of that.”

With that, you furiously stomped into the brunch and set the displays at the front for your mom. Max looked dumbstruck as he trailed behind. But you didn’t care.

“Everything okay? Did something happen with Vega?” JJ asked when you got back to your seat. You remained silent. It was the only way to keep yourself from screaming.

It was all too much— the piercing stares, the messy eating, Max.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” you informed to JJ as he listened to another one of Warren’s football stories, “And then we’re leaving.”

Before he could respond, you were already racing to the bathroom as fast as your Jimmy Choo wedges could take you.

You needed air. And fast.

Bursting through the bathroom door, you heaved yourself into the biggest stall and flopped down on the toilet seat, taking in deep breaths to calm yourself. It didn’t help much. The room was still twirling like you were on the Graviton at a carnival. Too nauseous from it all, you didn’t even care that you were ruining your new white Valentino dress.

You just wanted to hurl inside the antique-decorated bathroom but couldn’t. It was miserable. But at least the bathroom was empty.

All the seeming success of last night crumbled away with every disapproving look or whisper of the guests. And then Max— that fucking asshole. Your head was thumping endlessly as you felt the stress knots crawl up your spine.

What were you thinking? Maybe you were in over your head. No one was believing it. Not for a second.

Even JJ was terrible at playing along. You should’ve known it was just wishful thinking. You knew you had to throw in the towel and told yourself you would call it off once you found some way to stop the hot tears that were streaming down your made-up cheeks.

As you felt your breathing start to normalize, you slowly lifted from the toilet seat and smoothened out your dress. When the bathroom door slammed open against the wall, you immediately fell back down, wanting to avoid any form of human interaction for the rest of your life.

Titters and snickers echoed the air as two girls stumbled in, mid-conversation. They didn’t seem to notice you in the stall at all. Thank God.

“Would you believe y/n? Bringing that dirty Pogue here? She’s gone insane!” A nasally voice spoke by the sinks.

You scrunched your nose, trying to catch a glimpse of their shoes from the opening underneath the stall. You nearly puked. Nameless brand heels? Unacceptable.

“I know! He’s so disgusting and that suit is just repulsive! Does she not have an ounce of embarrassment?” the other one added.

You didn’t recognize their voices, but assumed they probably went to your school by the way they knew you and JJ. A part of you wanted to charge out of the stall and drag their pitiful selves to the ground. But seeing as you were just recovering from a near panic attack, you didn’t have the energy. And they didn’t deserve your breath.

Nevertheless, they still went on.

“Ever since Vega dumped her for California girl, she’s completely gone off the rails. First the hair change and now she’s dating a Pogue like Sarah Cameron is. It’s so pathetic!”

“Seriously, train wreck of the year if you ask me.”

Train wreck? Pathetic? You’ll show them what pathetic is! Especially with those god-awful shoes. Do they have an ounce of embarrassment showing up here with that kind of atrocity?

You were seconds away from emerging from your ashes to put them in their place. But, lucky for them, they escaped before you could come out of confinement.

Huffing, you stormed out of the stall and towards the mirrors to fix yourself. God forbid you’d ever let anyone see you with smeared mascara!

Dabbing a wet cloth on your cheeks to soothe out the redness, you heard the creak of the door opening behind you and immediately tossed it into a bin. You pretended to fix your hair. Fortunately, the redness faded to a soft pink to look like blush.

Anya strolled in the bathroom behind you. Ugh, the cherry on top of the cake.

You faked a tight smile at her. She threw a cheery one at you, walking up the sink next to yours to toss up her bouncy, voluminous hair. “So, I thought you said that guy out there wasn’t you boyfriend,” she pointed out, not taking her eyes off her own reflection.

“Oh, psh, well you know,” you sputtered, not expecting the sudden inquisition, “One thing led to another that night at the Boneyard and it just kinda… happened.”

It was the first real conversation you had with her, and you wanted to hold your breath at the awkwardness. Anya nodded at your answer, puckering her lips slyly. “I just think it’s cute that you’re trying to make Max jealous.”

You almost did a double take. It was so subtle and smooth, her comment almost flew right over your head. “Excuse me?” you shot back, turning to the blonde-haired home-wrecker.

She didn’t even flinch a muscle at your snub expression, just continued to ogle at herself. It was menacing. Evil really did take form in Anya Carmichael.

“Oh, did I need to spell it out for you?” she blinked, “Y/n, you’ve been out of the picture. If you think showing up with that god-awful guy in his dad’s raggedy suit is gonna change Max’s mind about you, I assure you it won’t work.”

She crinkled her eyes in a hateful smile.

What was with people and their audacity that afternoon? Whatever was in their water, you were not about to have any of it. No one spoke to you like that.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” you said blandly, wanting to get under her skin.

“Yes you do,” she snarled back, placing both hands on the sink in a threatening manner, “Look. Max and I are together now. You need to get that in your tiny pea-brain head. Do not play dumb with me. I see you looking over at him every five minutes. Get. Over. It.”

“Like I said,” you responded back in a fake-innocent tone just to push her buttons some more, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Anya. I think all the hairspray is really getting to your head.”

Two can play that game.

She narrowed her almond eyes at you and straightened up proudly. Even though she was way taller than you in her six-inch heels, you still stood your ground, blinking up at her tauntingly. At least your swanky parents taught you that much.

She scoffed. “Give it up, seriously. Using that guy to try to get back at your ex is just pathetic. Max was right about you. You’re just a shallow virgin with a handbag.”

With that, she tossed her hair behind her shoulder and strutted out the door. Your blood was boiling, having half a mind to go out there and rip the bottled-blonde right off her head. You should’ve known it was all an act!

Fuming, you treaded back to the brunch table, your face doing a complete one-eighty once you stepped through the doors. A lady never showed her seething anger underneath.

JJ spotted you and promptly stood up, snatching your purse, and getting ready to leave.

“Sit,” you demanded, pushing him down by the shoulder so his ass plopped back firmly on the chair. The look of utter shock flashed on his face, but he just took it.

“I’m feeling better now. We’re staying,” you informed as if you were a commander at war. You glanced over at the Vegas’ table where Anya hung her arm proudly on Max’s bicep as he made some joke to his table. She threw over a glare at you. No one but you noticed.

You draped an arm on one of JJ’s ridiculously large shoulder pads, nuzzling your nose to his neck. He was still as confused as ever though, but still went along with it, digging his fork into your half-eaten dessert which he later finished.

If Anya wanted a war, you’ll give her one. May the best bitch win.

---------------------------------------

note: YES SHE WENT THERE! you kno i had to stir in anya- y/n drama!!!

pls message me to be tagged!

next chapter

tags: @2kayla64 @jewel25 @rudyypankow @rafecameron @ultranikilove @wicked-laugh @outerbankslut @agirlwholovescoffee @tovvaf @obxlife @ilovejjmaybank @celestialmaybank @erraaxh @poguecollins @jolomez @x-lulu @danicarosaline @teamnick @outerbankslut @sweetlysilent @5am-cigarette @n1ghtsh4d3-67 @duskangxl @hollandary @rudths @meaganjm @bluesiderudy @http-cherries @allycat449-blog @pink-meringues @mendesmaybank @lunaposey @natsiboo @primroswx @wtfkie @heyitsmeimdead @ilymarkchan @drewwbabyy-blog @kookkyra @mayybankz @ifilwtmfc @annedub

#outer banks fanfiction #outer banks imagine #outerbanks #Outer Banks #obx #obx fanfiction #obx imagine #jj obx #jj x reader #JJ Imagine #jj fanfiction #jj #jj maybank x y/n #jj maybank fanfiction #jj maybank x you #jj maybank imagine #jj maybank

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sadistgalore · 3 years

Text

Chapter 12: Burn Together, Friends Forever

Previous | Next | Masterlist

Taglist: @elliei-m

Please let me know if you would like to be added/removed from the taglist.

CW: Heavy dehumanization, pet whump, torture, burning, branding, conditioned whumpee, slapping, verbal abuse, kicking, referenced whump of a minor (nonsexual), implied starvation, Luther is his own warning, boils, impalement, left outside in the cold, implied noncon

Harper’s stomach dropped as soon as she heard the bastard’s voice, and heard a hard whimper behind her.

“Naughty, naughty girl, Harper. I don’t think your master would approve.”

Harper huffed. “You lied. You said you had a dog, not a human!”

Luther glared. “What’s the difference?”

“The difference? You people are fucking impossible!”

“I would watch your attitude, kitty. You’re just making this worse for yourself.”

“H-Ha-Harper,” said a voice behind her. The girl turned around, seeing Killian look up with tears in his eyes, trembling. “D-D-Don’t m-m-make h-“

“Doggy.” A voice cut him off. “That sounds an awful like talking to me.”

Killian lowered back down. Harper noticed this, and her police instincts kicked in once again. “Stop talking to him like that. You’re mad? Then take your anger out at me, you’ve hurt him enough.”

Luther smirked. “Fine, kitty. Come here.”

Harper looked once more to the shaking boy, then followed the orders given. Luther went across the room, looking towards the wall lined with Dark’s torture devices. He finally picked a long metal cord with a wire attached to it, and plugged said wire into the wall.

“I don’t know why Edward insisted on picking a defiant one like you, there’s so many other trained pets with black hair he can just buy for a few hundred bucks,” he muttered, beginning to loop the cord around her right arm.

“Sorry that me trying to preserve my dignity is a problem for you,” she spat.

Luther chuckled, hand moving to a button attached to the cord. “We’ll see about that,” he finished as he pushed the button.

At first, Harper didn’t feel anything, but soon felt a warm sensation after thirty seconds or so. That sensation only kept growing into a burning pain. She gasped, soon realizing what Luther was intending to do, and began trying to pull it off.

Luther grabbed her hand, “Bad kitty. You better stay still unless you want Doggy to have this looped around his throat.”

Harper looked up, eyes beginning to form tears, and put her hand down. She soon screamed as the heat only increased, the hot metal burning into her arm.

“Ruff!”

“No, doggy. Your punishment is later.” Luther said without even looking up, admiring the smoke coming from the kitty’s arm.

“S-stop, please! I’m begging you!” Harper screamed, beginning to grow nauseous as she smelt more and more of her burnt flesh.

“Just another minute,” Luther hummed, causing Harper to yell in frustration.

That minute felt like hours, during which the pain became too unbearable and she fell to the floor. She writhed on the ground, other hand burning as she tried to pry the clip off to no avail. Luther bent down, ignoring her defiance, and pushed the button on the wire.

“Such a crybaby,” he said as he walked towards his shackled dog.

Killian began whimpering loudly, crying out as Luther began to unshackle his wrists.

“You’re a very bad doggy, you know that?” Luther said as he cupped his face, feeling the tears streaming down his pet’s eyes. “How are you going to make it up to me?”

“B-bark-“ Slap.

“Stupid mutt. Use your words.”

“I-I’ll,” Killian started, not quite sure how exactly he was going to make it up to his captor. “I’ll be a b-bet-ter dog-“ Slap.

“Well you’re pretty fucking terrible at that, aren’t you?!” The man yelled, making Killian flinch back. “Answer me! Aren’t you a bad dog?”

“Yes sir-“ Instead of a slap, Luther punched Killian hard in the face. He got up, beginning to kick him to each word he spoke. “Stupid. Fucking. Dog! Why are you using your words?!”

“I don’t know what you want from me!” The young man screamed, Luther seeing a defiance in his eyes that he hadn’t seen since he was 17. Killian soon snapped back to reality, cringing at the cruel smile of his captor.

“No, no, I’m sorry. Please, I didn’t- ruff! Ruff, ruff, bark, woof!-“

Luther grabbed his hair and began to drag him upstairs. He stopped as he passed the girl on the floor, the coil around her arm now turning into a dull red instead of the fiery orange. “I’ll be back kitty. Once I’m back, I expect you to have dinner prepared for me only. Neither you or the doggy are getting food for a while.”

He didn’t stop to hear the choked gasps of the kitty as he walked upstairs, ripping the poor boy’s scalp as he continued to be dragged. Once they reached the kitchen, Luther threw the dog on the ground and stepped on his neck to prevent him from escaping.

The man grabbed a pot and filled it with water, setting the gas stove burner to high as he waited for it to boil. The boy was crying openly, not bothering to whimper or whine as he saw the rare aggression in his captor’s face.

“Oh, Killian,” Luther sighed as he leaned against the counter, foot still pressing on the dog’s neck. “You were doing so well, I thought I finally broke you.” Killian’s cries filled the room. ��Still, you’re too incompetent to follow the rules.”

After a few minutes of more sobbing and the man’s silence, the water finally stopped boiling.

“You need to learn, pup,” Luther said as he grabbed the pot handle with a towel. “The only one who can give anything in this world,” he dumped the pot on the boy, ears straining at the blood-curdling scream that came with it.

“Is me.”

____________

“Wonderful dinner, kitty,” Luther complimented as he finished the last few bites of his steak.

The girl said nothing, completely exhausted from trying to ignore the unbearable pain on her arm and using what little energy she had to cook a meal for the bastard.

She can’t imagine what Killian must be going through, though.

The said boy was still on the kitchen floor, screams long since stopped and have resorted to painful crying. His face was an angry red, only a few boils on his face since he covered most of the splash with his arms. But those were scaly and irritated, raw skin being exposed. Harper had mentioned giving him some medicine, but one angry look from Luther was enough to shut her up.

Luther stood up from the table, and snapped his fingers. Harper moved hesitantly towards him, Killian didn’t. “Your punishment isn’t over. Since you two want to bond so much, you can bond in the cold outside. And no meals for three days. Clear?”

Harper nodded, dreading the thought of being chained up outside into the freezing cold.

Luther gripped her chin. “I said, are we clear?”

“Y-Yes, sir.”

Luther said nothing as he walked towards a drawer, pulling out chains that had very thick cuffs attached to the ends. He tightly gripped her burned out, smiling as she screamed in pain. He dragged her outside and pushed her to the ground outside the porch, connecting the cuff to her ankle and linking it to the wall. He left, and came out with Killian who was also crying out in pain. He did the same procedure with him, and then flipped a switch on each of their ankle cuffs.

Harper flinched as she felt spikes just grazing her skin, regretting that as they seemed to break contact and draw blood.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Luther smirked, seeing the girl’s face in pain. They are spikes embedded into those cuffs; the more you struggle, the more they get into your skin. So you don’t try to run away, of course.”

Harper resisted the urge to roll her eyes and looked towards Killian, who was now crying again.

“I hope you learned your lesson today, kitty. I’ll be sure to tell Edward about this.”

“You branded my fucking arm,” Harper growled. “Dark said not to scar me.”

Luther gave the girl a cold glare. “You’re gonna learn, like all of his other pets did, that I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want with you despite if your master likes it or not. I’m sure you’ll see that in the nights we’re going to spend together, kitty.”

With that, the man walked back inside, content that his new playthings wouldn’t try running away.

Harper tested Luther’s claims by doing little movements with her ankle, but the spikes only dug into her skin more.

“Shit,” she whispered as she slumped against the porch behind her. “We’re gonna be impaled even if we moved an inch.”

Killian whimpered, but remained still as he curled up against the porch wall. Harper looked over to him, seeing spike-like scars on his wrists and ankles. “This isn’t the first time he put these damn cuffs on you, isn’t it?”

The boy shook his head.

Harper looked at him with a sorrowful look; she spent mere hours with this man, how long had Killian been with him? “Hey, we’re gonna be okay, alright?” Harper started, gently placing her arm on his non burnt shoulder. “I’m a police detective for Washington, D.C. My friend has been investigating this group for years, a rescue will come for me soon.” She said it more to herself than to Killian. “I promise.”

Killian listened to her words, but couldn’t get himself to believe her. He might have been a street rat, but he’s been missing for seven years. He’s met other pets like her, with reputations and hopes of being rescued. But he’s also met other masters, ones that have too good of a reputation to ever be met with repercussions for what they’ve done to their pets, like Luther.

But Harper was nice, nicer than most people he’s met in almost a decade of hell. Maybe the cycle will change. Maybe his torment will finally end.

He looked up at her, and smiled, and was met with a warm smile back. He nuzzled into her, and closed his eyes when he felt her arm wrapping around his back and running it gently. Together, they could try their best to remain warm.

Harper rested her head on Killian’s, and yawned as she prepared for an uncomfortable and cold night of sleep. “One day, Kill-”

Killian groaned. Harper chuckled nervously. “Sorry, I like giving people nicknames. ‘Kill’s’ not a good one?”

The boy shook his head, Harper thought some more.

“How about Ian?” She got a head nod in affirmation.

“Okay, Ian, one day we’ll get out of here together. From now on, I’m gonna do whatever I can to protect you, alright?”

There was silence for a moment, just their steady breaths filling the space, then a very silent,

“Alright.”

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olivia-anderson-fanfic · 3 years

Text

Another One?!, Part 5

First > Previous > Next

It turns out that people with access to military-grade equipment are not the type of people you want to dislike you.

Really, the only reason she was still alive was because being Ladybug made her marginally more lucky than the average person.

From people in holding randomly getting out from time to time and somehow managing to get their hands on a weapon, to getting shot by ‘malfunctioning’ firearms, to constant bomb threats, to the one time someone actually tried to drop an anvil on her head, things were just not looking good for Marinette.

And, it turns out, being a boss is just a hard thing in general. When they weren’t attempting to kill her, they were coming to her with questions. She spent most of her day in the office, scanning through manual after manual. She got basically zero breaks, because even when she had a sign on her door saying she was eating lunch they still came in to ask her things.

And then, at the end of the day, she’d get home… things weren’t great there, either.

Barbara had moved in after a year of dating Dick (Marinette had been stunned to learn that their relationship was actually real but that had quickly been dropped when she realized that Barbara was actually a responsible adult that could take care of herself). She had banned caffeine in the house when she’d seen Marinette and Tim’s coffee habits and, unfortunately, everyone else had been perfectly happy to enforce this for her.

This meant that she only had about four hours when she got home to patrol before her exhaustion caught up with her and she’d be forced to go home and collapse on the couch.

On top of that, tensions in the house were high. It turns out that one of the biggest problems with avoiding your problems for years is that emotions get pent up inside and it gets harder and harder to ignore. No one had completely snapped yet, but even the densest person in the world would have been able to recognize that it was coming.

It didn’t help that she no longer had time for baking, which was her normal way of relieving stress…

And let’s just say they were lucky none of them were going on patrols together, those kinds of high-stress situations do not help.

Adrien needed sleep.

He worked ten hours a day, which isn’t that much longer than average but was still emotionally taxing considering his job was teaching.

Then, he’d go on patrol for a few hours. He liked patrol, beating up random people is great for stress, but it was physically exhausting.

Then, he’d come home.

And he’d have two kids and an adult to keep alive.

(Barbara had the night shift, which meant that Adrien was alone for this. He swore it was on purpose.)

He’d go to his room and find Dick swinging around on the indoor gym they’d had installed (they were getting tired of him breaking light fixtures and had given in and put little hand and footholds on the ceiling for him to climb around on).

And then Dick would fall asleep, often hanging from the ceiling still, and Adrien would pick him up and take him to his room and tuck him in.

He’d rush back to his room, desperate to get there for just a second of sleep, only to find that, no matter how quick he was, Jason would already be on the bed. You would think that Adrien would be able to sleep. After all, Jason would be reading a book... that’s supposed to be a quiet thing…

Well, you see, the problem is that Jason reads books like people watch soap operas. He’d curse out characters and call them stupid, tell Adrien contextless jokes, and occasionally close his book to vent about what was going on.

And, eventually Jason would sleep. Adrien wouldn’t move him because a) it would wake him up and b) on the very small chance it didn’t wake him, Jason sometimes half-joked that when he woke up alone he feared that they’d left him behind…

So, yeah, Jason got to stay in the room.

Adrien would blink and then he’d find Tim in the door with his computer.

Tim, it seemed, would actually wait to see if Adrien was okay with it if he came in. He always stood in the door, hugging his laptop to his chest, and wouldn’t dare come inside until Adrien said he could.

Of course Adrien would sigh and nod his head yes, making a joke about how his kids were sleeping in shifts to annoy him, and move over on the bed a bit to let Tim on.

And then Tim would do homework or play games on his computer.

Adrien hated the sound of clicky keyboards. He’d had no clue he was alone in this until one day he complained about it and everyone in the room had stared at him like he was crazy.

But, yeah, the keyboard made him want to die. He just wanted to sleep...

And then Barbara would poke her head in after a long night’s work to tell Adrien that it was time for him to get ready for work.

Sprinkle in one or two probably life-threatening accidents and you’d have a typical night for him.

Now, you might be thinking, why doesn’t he just fall asleep on the couch?

Beyond the fact that the kids would just… follow him there, Adrien was also a rich kid growing up. He couldn’t sleep on couches. They’re uncomfortable.

No, now his only saving grace was the fact that Barbara didn’t have a way to monitor the coffee machine at his work.

… Oh kwami, he had become what he’d hated.

She dropped onto the bed -- she’d had enough energy to make it all the way there for once -- and glared at the mostly empty bulletin board on Antony Agoura. The man was smart, unfortunately, opting to keep his identity a secret as much as possible. He used a fake name. He wore gloves no matter what. He used solely cash…

And it wasn’t like she was going to be able to lure him out again. That had been an intimidation tactic, a way of saying ‘leave it alone or you’ll see exactly what I can do’.

And, as much as she hated to admit it even to herself, she was a little bit scared of him. For the first time since Zucco, the person she was facing knew who she was as a civilian, and she hated that she’d lost that advantage. Even if her family was better trained in self-defense than most, they weren’t invulnerable and they couldn’t be careful every second of the day.

Part of her was tempted to pack up and go on the run like they had done with Zucco… but the situations were different. With Zucco they knew they would eventually be able to catch him but with Agoura...

She closed her eyes, unable to look at it any longer.

Fuck. She was really screwed this time, huh?

She felt someone sink into the bed next to her and reached out for them. She didn’t really care who it was as she buried her face in their shoulder.

Sleep…

Less than a minute later, her phone buzzed to tell her that it was time to start cooking everyone’s meals for the day and she mumbled a curse before peeling herself away from the person. She squinted a little bit in the dark to see who it was. Tim.

She yawned and pressed a kiss to the top of his head. “Want to cook with me?”

“I’d burn the house down.”

“Probably. Want to stand nearby and make sure I don’t fall asleep while cooking so nothing burns?”

He shrugged a little bit. “Don’t see why not.”

They both crawled out of bed and she used him for support as they made their way down to the kitchen.

Adrien had been on patrol when she’d appeared.

And ‘appeared’ was definitely the way to describe it. He’d been relaxing on a rooftop, giving himself a few second break to just breathe in silence for once… and then he’d felt a hand shaking his shoulder.

He fought the urge to jump or lash out, his head whipping around to look at the person who was shaking him.

It was… a girl?

Actually, she looked about Jason’s age, so maybe a woman?

It didn’t matter. She looked terrified. Her eyes were so wide it looked almost exaggerated, her lips drawn into a deep frown.

The more he took in about her appearance the more concerned he was. Her stance was wide, which likely meant she fought often. Her clothes were ratty and torn. The little parts of her skin that weren’t caked in dirt were split with cuts that were either infected or about to be infected.

He rested a hand over hers as gently as he could and looked at her. “How are you up here? Actually, that doesn’t matter. What’s wrong? Are you okay? Are you hurt? Is your family hurt?”

She waved her free hand around frantically. Wordlessly.

He raised his eyebrows.

“Do you not speak English? Or are you mute? Deaf?”

He realized all these questions weren’t going to get answers and he sighed. Crap, what could he do?

He mulled it over for a second before snapping his fingers. He held up a finger for one minute, then held up his hands and made a tiny ‘stay’ motion with them just in case, and then ran to the nearest convenience store.

He didn’t care enough to detransform. It got him through the line quickly, at least.

He found a pen and a pad of paper and returned to the rooftop…

She wasn’t there anymore.

He sighed, a mix of frustration and concern coursing through him. He closed his eyes and shook his head. He should get back to patrol. Maybe he’d find her and/or whatever situation she was trying to get his attention for…

He opened his eyes and actually did jump this time. She was right in front of him. What? He hadn’t heard her…

He shook off his growing unease and handed her the notepad and pen.

She frowned, her face a little more than confused. Had she never seen a pen and paper before? Surely that couldn’t be right…

Still, he gently took the paper and pen back and wrote a tiny question mark.

He handed it over again and she looked at the mark like she’d never seen it before. Maybe her language didn’t have question marks…?

Then she started doodling.

Well, his plan had been for her to write whatever it was down and he would see if his phone would translate it, but he guessed this would work, too.

The first drawing explained some of the girl’s problems with communication. It was a little doodle where the mouth and ears had been X-ed out. She couldn’t speak or hear… or, at least, that’s what he’d figured.

He searched his memory for his old sign language lessons. Unfortunately, though, sign language is something that has to be practiced. All he could do is fingerspell “U O-K?”

She didn’t seem to understand.

Fair enough. He was pretty sure he was using LSF, anyways, and he didn’t exactly know for sure how close that was to ASL… or whatever other language she could have known. He couldn’t really tell much about where she was from, her skin was covered in dirt, okay?

She started doodling the rest of her life story and he nearly punched something. Probably would have if he hadn’t been scared he’d startle her or scare her off.

Whoever her dad was, he was committed to killing him if he wasn’t dead already.

He smiled at her and tried to think of a solution. He couldn’t take her to the police. Even with Marinette in charge, there was only so much she could do to keep the kid safe. An orphanage wouldn’t accept her because he doubted she was a legal US citizen.

He sighed. Marinette was going to kill him…

He reached out a hand to her to tell her to follow and blinked in surprise when she actually took it. Wow. He trusted her.

He tried not to feel proud as he led her home. He probably should have been scared that she was a spy or lying, but he found himself trusting her…

Weird, but he had bigger problems.

He detransformed a little bit outside the house and slowly walked to the door. He pushed it open and cringed when it creaked. Please don’t be home…

Marinette shifted under her blanket and opened an eye to look at him.

He quickly pushed the girl behind himself and smiled at his wife. “Wow, it’s you. You’re home. Wow.”

“Yeah, amazing, right?” She rubbed her eyes and gave him a tired smile. “How was patrols?”

“Great. Uneventful. Definitely good.”

Her smile dropped into a frown. “You’re acting weird.”

“What? Me? Acting weird?”

“Yeah… are you coming inside?”

“Uh… no. Actually, I think I’ll go back on patrols.”

She clicked her tongue. “You’re hiding something. I’m too tired for this, Adrien. Fess up.”

He cringed a little bit and slowly led the new adoptee inside.

The girl clutched Adrien’s shirt sleeve anxiously. He did not think this was a good thing.

Marinette stared at the girl in front of her for a while before a way too wide smile crossed her face. “Adrien…” She began slowly, before shaking her head. Her smile widened, somehow. She looked up, her voice sickly sweet: “Hey! Sweeties! Come down here.”

The reaction was instantaneous. There was a mad scrambling noise and they appeared in the doorway, expressions frazzled.

“Whatever happened, it was Dick!” Said Tim before anyone could speak.

Dick gasped. “No! It wasn’t!”

Marinette gave a pleasant laugh. “You’re not in trouble. Boys, could you help her get cleaned up for me, please?”

“Why is there another kid? Why does he have another one?” Said Jason incredulously.

When neither parent answered, they started ushering the girl away.

She grabbed Adrien’s arm when he tried to disappear through the door with them. “Not. You. Transform, we’re going out.”

He tried not to look too scared as they both transformed. She kept a way too tight grip on Adrien as they made their way through the town, as if she thought he was going to suddenly run away.

Fair enough. He was absolutely considering it.

But he didn’t. That would only make things worse.

They stopped at a relatively abandoned part of town and she turned to him, letting go to cross her arms over her chest.

“Explain.”

Did she feel bad for the kid that Adrien had adopted? Sure. No one deserves that kind of life…

But that didn’t calm her down in the slightest.

She was trying to relax herself. Her lips pressed into a thin line as she heard him out to keep herself from yelling or interrupting, her nails dug into the skin of her palms to keep her grounded…

Adrien finished with a sigh and a “I don’t regret it, she was in trouble and it’s our job to protect civilians.”

She didn’t know why those words made her anger worsen. There was some sense in them, and yet she had to strain to keep her voice level when she spoke: “Just once, could you actually just own up to a mistake you make?”

“I’ll own up to a mistake when I actually think it’s a mistake!”

“Whatever.” She thrummed her foot on the floor. “We can’t keep adopting random kids, Chat, there’s only so much we can do!”

“They need our help!”

“Bullshit! You need them more than they need you! Newsflash! Helping a bunch of kids isn’t going to make your own childhood any better!”

Adrien flinched and she felt a twinge of guilt finally poke through the anger, but before she could apologize he was jabbing his finger in her chest.

“At least my terrible coping mechanism helps people! You want to pull trauma into this? What about the fact that we still can’t say Lila’s name? What about the fact that you refuse to make friends with people our age because you fear them leaving you?”

She winced and her face reddened. “Okay, but does that inconvenience you? No! At least mine is only self-destructive! Yours is going to drag the entire family down with you! We’ve already fucked up these kids for sure, but you just keep making it worse and worse by spreading our limited time thinner!”

“Shut up! What do you know? You hardly ever talk to them anyways! You’re always at work or asleep!”

“Really? And whose fault is that? If you’d just stuck to the actual plan B instead of going out and attacking all the cops in the GCPD there wouldn’t have been as much attention on what had happened!”

He rolled his eyes. “I’VE ALREADY TOLD YOU THAT I HAD TO DO THAT! IT WAS TO KEEP EVERYONE AWAY FROM THE SECURITY ROOM TO KEEP PEGASUS SAFE!”

“PLEASE! NO ONE WAS GOING TOWARDS THE SECURITY ROOM! YOU’RE JUST AN IMPULSIVE DICK!”

“ARE YOU REALLY CALLING ME IMPULSIVE?!”

“YOU ADOPT KIDS LIKE THEY’RE POKEMON! OF COURSE I’M GOING TO CALL YOU IMPULSIVE!”

“YOU’RE THE ONE WHO ALWAYS GETS IN RANDOM FIGHTS BECAUSE YOU’RE NEVER CAREFUL!”

She groaned and fought to make herself relax enough to speak without yelling. They were in a relatively abandoned part of Gotham but that didn’t mean that there was no one around. The last thing they needed on top of everything going on was to have their fight end up in the papers.

Adrien was clearly doing the same, because he was quiet for a long time before he spoke in little more than a whisper:

“Do you not want to be a part of the family anymore?”

She opened her mouth to say ‘of course I want to be a part of the family’, but no sound came out. She wasn’t sure why she was even hesitating. She cared about them, obviously. She wouldn’t be working so hard if she didn’t…

But it was definitely a lot.

She could only handle so much at once. Beyond the powers she was just a human, and supporting that many other people is hard. Especially considering she essentially had two jobs to keep up with, as well…

The longer she went without answering the more tears spilled over his mask. Still, he was waiting for her answer. He was waiting for some kind of verbal confirmation that she couldn’t do it anymore.

She reached up and gently cupped his cheeks, wiping his tears away with her thumb.

“Chat, I…” She swallowed thickly. “I don’t know how much more we can do.”

He hesitantly brought his hands up to rest over hers. “I know. I just… I can’t just leave them. They always look so sad.”

She’d fallen in love with Adrien for his kindness and now it was the thing that was threatening to tear their marriage apart.

But he’d fallen for her because of her problem solving skills. And she was determined to not let this be the one problem she failed to solve.

The problem wasn’t exactly that he was getting more kids. Marinette loved kids.

The problem was that they didn’t know if they could raise kids without messing them up too badly.

Part of it was that everyone in the family had had one or more big events that had traumatized them, and it looked like it was finally time that they started getting past it.

Could they even get past it at this point? It had been over two decades since Marinette and Adrien had originally gotten their traumas, what if it was too late? What would happen if they somehow did get over it? It had been a part of them for such a long time, what would they be without it?

And then there was the kids. Could they even get them to go?

It was worth a shot, at least...

And the other change they needed to make was to make more time for their kids.

Neither of them were going to give up their day jobs (Adrien wouldn’t and Marinette, unfortunately, couldn’t just yet). That meant that they either needed to get caffeine in the house or give up vigilantism…

Well, cross of the giving up vigilantism thing automatically. On top of just not being able to give up on the city they were in when there was still so much to fix, they knew it would only be temporary. They’d already tried to give up vigilantism. They simply couldn’t bring themselves to.

So that left trying to get caffeine past Barbara. The kids (outside of Tim) were very much against caffeine and they worked very hard to make sure neither Marinette or Tim ever managed to get their hands on it. From purposefully making sure Marinette and Tim couldn’t go anywhere without one of them to monitoring the break room camera at her work to make sure she didn’t drink any, the kids were determined to make sure Marinette couldn’t get her hands on anything.

But Adrien could. No one would suspect him.

She bit her lip. This wasn’t going to go over well. Getting Adrien to therapy AND make him get caffeine? Man, this was going to suck.

“Chaton… I might have an idea… but you’re going to have to hear me out…”

He and Marinette were arguing again, though this was far more light-hearted.

“We are not opening another portal. We’re already lucky enough that this dimension hasn’t collapsed on us, we aren’t testing it.”

He rolled his eyes and stopped scratching runes into the wall to glare at her. “Would you rather we let a girl-woman-female-you-know-what-I-mean room with a guy?”

“What about we give her Jason’s room and let Jason sleep with us? He comes into our room to sleep either way.”

“Jason still uses his room to store things.”

“This is a bad idea, Chaton…”

He grinned. “Mhmm.”

“This is what I meant when you said you’re stupidly impulsive.”

“Would you rather do it?”

“Sure.”

He rolled his eyes. “And that’s what I meant when I said you don’t care about your own health. It’ll be fine.”

She clicked her tongue and motioned for him to go on.

He finished scratching the last rune and sighed when he saw some weird tentacle monster slowly unfurling itself on the other side. He got to his feet quickly and raised his staff to fight it, only to cringe when he heard Dick and Jason scream downstairs.

“I’ll deal with that, do you have this taken care of?”

She winced. “Sure. Where exactly is the portal, to be sure?”

He pointed it out and then ran downstairs.

Jason was currently not having a good time, it seemed. The bottom half of his body had been swallowed by a hole in the floor and he was struggling to get a hold on the slick floors.

Dick was also there, screaming incoherently from one of the ceiling lights.

Adrien ran over and grabbed one of Jason’s arms and started slowly pulling him out of the portal. After a bit Dick snapped out of it and scrambled to help.

The three were panting by the time they managed to get him all the way out.

“What the heck what the heck what the heck what the heck --,” Dick mumbled, holding his heart.

Jason, though just as shaken, seemed to be getting over it quickly. “How do we fix that?”

“Don’t remember, ask your mom,” mumbled Adrien as he crawled over to the portal on the floor and peered down.

It was a tiny group of people crowded around a computer.

Wait, what the heck were they wearing? Were they cosplaying as vigilantes? They definitely had the tacky outfits down if they were but Adrien didn’t know who they could be. Well, it had been a long time since they’d visited the Justice League, maybe he just didn’t know them…

He cleared his throat awkwardly and flashed them a blinding smile.

“Um… sorry about this, we’ll fix it as quickly as possible.”

“Was that… was that Dick Grayson?” Said the tallest of them.

Was he dressed as a bat? Why was he dressed as a bat? Dressing up like animals wasn’t technically their thing but on the other hand it was absolutely their thing. Adrien was almost offended.

Wait, he’d said something. He tried not to go pale when his brain finally processed it. This wasn’t exactly how he’d wanted the world to find out their identities…

“What kind of name is Dick Grayson? Ha! Lame!”

Dick sent him an affronted look from where he was on the floor. Adrien gave him an apologetic smile and a shrug.

Jason came back down with a baking pan. “Mom said to drop something through, so…”

“What’s that?”

“Brownies.”

“You’re dropping our brownies down there? Are you trying to kill them?” Asked Dick.

Adrien blinked once then sighed. “It could have worked for once. Be nice.”

Jason scoffed. “It didn’t. She forgot sugar. That’s why we’ll give it to them.”

“Sorry about this!” Said Adrien as Jason dropped the pan through the portal.

As promised, it closed now that something had been sacrificed.

The three looked at each other for a few seconds before Dick looked away and said, “So… pretend this never happened?”

“Yep.”

She cursed as she fell back on the couch, never mind the fact that Adrien was already laying there. Her husband made a quiet ‘oof’ sound as she dropped on top of him. She was hopped up on caffeine and ready to bond with her kids but the problem was that the kids, in fact, had lives.

The little time that Marinette and Adrien didn’t have work was taken up by patrols, by Jason’s homework, by Tim’s extracurriculars, by Dick’s job...

“There’s still not enough time.”

“We might have to stop being vigilantes for a bit…” He said, though he sounded reluctant. “Or rotate off by day…”

She didn’t like the idea either, but it didn’t seem like they had much choice in this if they wanted to be better for their kids. They’d already had to cut back on vigilantism because of their jobs and need for sleep, could they really cut it out of their lives entirely? Just like that?

No, there had to be something they could do. The city was still the most crime ridden city in the world. They couldn’t give up on it.

But then what to do…?

She watched Tim stumble in with a dislocated shoulder and squeaked, pushing herself off of her husband and rushing over.

“Shit! What happened?”

“I… might have messed up a boomerang-horseshoe-thingy catch and it might have hit me in the shoulder.”

She clicked her tongue. “Right. I’m going to reset it on three. One, two --.”

Tim gave a grunt of pain as she pushed his shoulder back into place.

“You should have told someone, how long were you fighting with a dislocated shoulder?”

“A little while…”

She shook her head and glanced at Adrien to give him the ‘kids, right?’ look, only to find him lost in thought.

He snapped out of it and flashed her a grin.

“I think I have an idea. How do you feel about going back on patrols with partners?”

He stretched across his family’s lap as they waited.

Adrien, Marinette, Dick, Jason, and Tim all sat in a therapist’s office for family counseling. They would have invited Cass but the whole ‘not speaking’ thing made therapy difficult. They actually had invited Barbara, only to get shut down because apparently she didn’t want to ‘deal with all that mess’.

So, it was just them.

Well, I say ‘just’ like five people isn’t a lot of people to have in a single therapy session. The poor therapist looked like she was going to have a heart attack when she saw all of them waiting for her.

Good thing they'd chosen the shortest session...

“Um… Agreste?”

“Yep!” Said Dick, far too brightly for a therapy session but whatever.

“Cool… right this way!”

His family glanced at each other before shrugging and pushing Adrien off of their laps in unison. He pouted up at them from his new place on the floor, but no one seemed all that guilty about it.

Marinette did reach out and pull him to his feet by the back of his shirt, though, so there was at least that.

They filed into the therapist’s room and took a seat on yet another couch.

Dr. Quinzel smiled at all of them. “Okay, does anyone have anything they’d like to start us off with?”

The family eyed each other warily. They were here as civilians, so they had to make sure not to slip up and talk too in depth about most things…

“Jason keeps calling me ‘Replacement’!” Said Tim, finally.

Marinette and Adrien frowned at Jason, who was attempting to sink into his hoodie.

“Well, we definitely didn’t know about that…” said Marinette.

“Of course you didn’t!” Said Jason. “You’re hardly ever around!”

Tim sighed. “They’re just busy.”

Adrien flinched. That was way too close to the excuse he used to make for his own father for his liking. Were they really that bad? Sure, he and Marinette were definitely not around as much as they’d like to be, but they were making an effort… did that really matter, though?

“No, Jay is right. We’ll try and do more. We’ve talked about how we’re going to free up time for you guys recently, actually. We’re hoping to include you more in our...” He glanced at Dr. Quinzel. “... hobby. Do more things with you in general, really.”

Marinette nodded her agreement.

She glanced at the boy’s faces and then clicked her tongue. “Anyone have problems they want to share?”

“No, our family is perfect how it is!” Said Dick brightly, his gaze fixed on the window.

Adrien followed his gaze to make sure nothing bad was going down on the streets and then sighed. “Dick, there has to be something. You’ve been just as tense as the rest of us recently.”

“Nope! Everything’s great!”

Everyone else exchanged skeptical looks but they couldn’t really feel comfortable pushing --.

Dr. Quinzel frowned a little bit. “Okay. We’ll come back to you when everyone else has had their say, then. Hopefully you’ll be more comfortable then.”

Dick gave a charming smile. Dr. Quinzel didn’t seem all that perturbed as she turned to look at Marinette.

His wife pursed her lips tightly as everyone else’s eyes went to her and she smoothed out the front of her dress. “We’ve already talked about this one-on-one, but… I think Adrien could maybe think a bit more before doing things. Or, at least, he should tell me when he makes major decisions like adopting kids.”

Dick’s smile dropped instantly. “Are you really complaining about not being told things? You guys tell me nothing! I have to figure everything out myself!”

Everyone startled a little at the sudden change of heart and gave each other wary glances before finding their way back to Dick.

The man in question had pushed himself to his feet (Adrien whined a little bit about losing the person to lean against) and started pacing. “You even ask Barbara things before me! It’s like you think I’m stupid!”

“Sweetie --.”

“Dont!” Dick sighed and came to a stop. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “It’s fine, it’s just… don’t you trust me?”

Marinette and Adrien looked at each other before nodding.

“Of course we do,” he said gently. “We’ll talk more about this at home, okay? When we’re not in the present company?” He looked at Tim and Jason, but he meant Dr. Quinzel. That was a hard subject to tiptoe around.

Dick took a seat on the armrest, likely so he could get up again without disturbing anyone.

Dr. Quinzel nodded. She looked at Adrien, and he fought the urge to try and hide behind Jason. She looked way too smart for his liking, it felt like she knew just by looking at him exactly what was wrong with him...

“I…” He struggled to find the words in French, let alone in English. “... think I try and get a lot of people in the house so I never have to be alone for long. I used to be alone all the time. I can’t do that again.”

Dr. Quinzel nodded thoughtfully. “It seems that all of you feel excluded or lonely in some way. Thankfully, that means all of you are the solution to each other’s problems. But, also, I suggest branching out some. Family is good, but so are friends. Everyone understand?”

They all gave each other wary looks, but they smiled all the same.

“Great, we can have a session again in a month or two to check your progress. That’ll be $7000 --.”

Marinette met her husband’s eyes and they exchanged nervous looks before walking into their room. As expected, Jason was already there. He was ready for bed, it seemed, with his pajamas on and his book out.

They took seats on either side of him and each took a hand.

“Jay…” Began Adrien. “We don’t love you any less because you’re not the newest kid anymore.”

“I know…”

Marinette bit her lip and pressed a tiny kiss to his forehead. “We’re not lying. And you don’t have to, either, just tell us why you think that.”

Jason looked at both of them warily before sinking into his shirt. It didn’t work as much as it did when he was wearing a hoodie or turtleneck, but it still worked surprisingly well.

She looked at Adrien nervously and he took the lead again:

“The reason we tend to focus on the newest the most is because they usually have the freshest problems. When we first got you we focused on you more than Dick because you were still struggling with old habits you picked up while homeless, and he was mostly over what had happened with his original parents.”

Marinette nodded. “And when Tim came in we focused on him because he was dealing with realizing his parents weren’t great and adjusting to a family who loved him. Now we have Cass, who… will definitely need some extra care…”

Jason sniffled a little and nodded his understanding. “I know you have to, I just… it feels like you don’t want me as much anymore...”

“No way!” Marinette said, squeezing his hand tighter. “We love you, sweetie, you’re just as much our kid as any of the others.”

Adrien smiled. “Exactly. You’re stuck with us, whether you want to be or not.”

Jason gave a wobbly laugh before slowly drawing them in for a hug.

“I love you, too, guys.”

They hugged him back.

“... and I’ll go easier on Tim.”

“Thank kwami, I didn’t want to ruin the moment by bringing it up, but… yeah, be nicer to Tim, please,” said Adrien half jokingly.

Marinette grinned. “Maybe give him a nicer nickname, at least?”

“How about Timbers?”

“Uh…”

“Timberly?”

She clicked her tongue. “How about just Timmy? Or Tim?”

“No, no, I think I’m on to something.”

Adrien stared in disbelief.

“You… you did what?”

Dick fiddled with a Rubix cube. Adrien wasn’t sure if that was just to help stay concentrated on the conversation or so he could more easily avoid eye contact.

“I joined the mob two years ago because I wanted to be more in the loop…”

Adrien and Marinette exchanged exhausted looks.

“Don’t be mad! I’ve been rising in the ranks for years now, eventually I’ll be close enough to Agoura to help you guys!”

Marinette sighed lightly and shook her head. “Sweetie, we aren’t mad.”

Adrien raised his eyebrows. “Yes we are.”

“You’re right. We’re mad. But we’re going to let this one slide.”

“No, we aren’t.”

“I can’t read minds!” She said, then she shook her head again. “Look, we just want you to be safe.”

Adrien nodded. “The reason we don’t tell you much isn’t because we don’t trust you, it’s because we don’t like involving you guys in dangerous things when we can avoid it.”

“But Barbara --!”

“We asked her about her opinion on one thing. She actually gave the same answer as you, and we turned her down, too. We’re sorry that you felt like we didn’t trust you, though, that wasn’t ever our intent.”

“And, besides,” added Marinette. “You have a tendency to snoop. We always figured you’d learn everything on your own.”

They took a seat on either side of Dick on the couch and wrapped him in a hug.

Dick beamed as he hugged back.

“... you’re still in trouble, though. That was stupid and dangerous and neither you nor your siblings can never do that again,” said Adrien.

Dick started whining.

Marinette bit her lip anxiously as she looked at her phone. All it would take was one click to call, but…

Adrien sighed beside her and reached over. He took the phone and pressed to call, then tossed it back at her.

She panicked, juggling the phone in her hands as it dialled. Nononononononono don’t pick up don’t pick up --

“Hello?” Said Nygma.

Fuck!

She looked at her husband anxiously.

“This or the Justice League,” mouthed Adrien.

She squeaked and brought the phone to her ear. “Nygma! Hi!”

“... Hello?”

“Hey! I’m a bit bored, so… I was just wondering if, um, you want to do something as…” she wheezed. “... as um… as…”

“I don’t really have anything prepared right now, I’m still waiting on that shipment of penguins...” The Riddler seemed confused, which was a first.

Was she a little concerned about whatever Riddler was doing with penguins? Sure. Then again, this is Riddler she was talking about. What was he going to do? Steal one of her ninja kids and then tell her exactly where they were? Whatever.

“No no! Like um…”

“Friends?”

“Yes! That!”

Adrien rested his head in his hands with a deep sigh. She flipped him off despite knowing he couldn't see it.

“I guess my schedule is free until the penguins come in... Sure! Want to go try an escape room?”

“No, I do an escape room every time I see you. I’m making you a new outfit.”

Adrien and Riddler both groaned.

She smiled.

He hesitated, messing with the strap of the bag over his shoulder.

“The city might need me --.”

“The city will be fine for a week,” said Marinette.

“The kids might need me --,” he tried, only to get silenced by a kiss.

She pulled back a little bit later. “It’s one week. Besides, we’re all doing what Dr. Quinzel said, and you’ve stalled long enough.”

He sighed. “For good reason! It’s a week alone! I’m going to go insane.”

“Chaton, we’re murderers. I think we crossed over that line a while ago.”

He cracked a grin, weak as it was, and pressed another kiss to her lips. “Are you sure --?”

“Yes! Oh my kwami! Now go!” She gave him a playful shove.

He raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms over his chest. “It almost feels like you’re trying to get rid of me.”

“And it almost feels like you’re stalling.”

She waved down a taxi for him and he couldn’t help but cringe as they took the bags from him. It made it feel much more real…

“I love you, Chaton, I’ll see you in a week.”

“I love you, too, M’lady.”

He waved at the kids long after they had disappeared over the horizon and he sighed as he sunk back in his seat. He knew it was for the best, he needed to learn how to function as a person on his own, but…

It was only a week. Only a week.

Besides…

He looked down at the coordinates of the last known location of David Cain (it was amazing what Tim, Barbrara, and Marinette could do when angry enough).

He wasn’t going to be bored, at least.

She turned away from the cake she’d been decorating and nearly screamed when her eyes landed on Cass. She hadn’t even noticed her walk in.

Marinette forced herself to relax.

She glanced over the tiny girl in front of her and bit her lip. She was wearing a mix of different shades of black which…

She suppressed a shudder. The outfit was okay, if she was being honest, but it definitely needed a splash of color.

“Right, that’s it, we’re finding you some new clothes.”

Cass looked at her blankly.

Right. She didn’t speak language. Marinette pursed her lips as she tried to think of some sort of movement that would convey what was going on, then settled for reaching out a hand for Cass.

She couldn’t help the smile that broke across her face when the girl took her hand. She trusted her! Score!

She hesitated for a minute before yelling: “SWEETIE! I mean… JASON! COME ON WE’RE GOING SHOPPING YOUR CLOTHES ARE GETTING SMALL FOR YOU!”

There was a few seconds’ pause before Jason poked his head in. He glanced at the two of them and frowned, sinking a little bit into his hoodie. “You noticed?”

“I… don’t even know how to respond to that. I’m a designer, of course I noticed. If you want to keep going for the grunge look that’s fine but you need to up your size.”

Jason nodded.

She rested her arm around his shoulders (something that was very hard for her to do now that he was both taller and wider than she was) and pulled the two kids out to the mall.

Jason was getting used to buying things for himself. He still resisted a little bit when people spent money on him or asked what he wanted, but he was making progress.

She pressed a kiss to his cheek and handed him a credit card. “Buy what you want. Remember the PIN?”

“Mhmm…” said Jason. He sent a wave over his shoulder as he made his way over to the men’s section.

She hummed lightly as she walked through the girl’s section to look for things for Cass. The girl was short and skinny for her age -- she was determined not to think about it for too long -- and she could easily fit in kid’s clothes…

But no kid of Marinette’s would have a shirt with the words ‘Girl Power!’ or ‘I love tacos!’ on it.

She helped pick out different shades of black shirts and jeans for the girl, mulling over the different colors she should give her. Yellow and red matched her skin tone but she doubted the kid wanted anything bright…

Marinette settled for giving Cass a blue scarf and some gold accessories.

She smiled and offered them to Cass, only to pale when the girl burst into tears. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck --

Cass hugged Marinette around the middle and buried her face in her chest and Marinette was just very confused.

Jason came back with two bags of new clothes and he blinked a few times as he took in the new situation.

“What the fuck happened?”

“I don’t know!” She hissed back, waving her hands vaguely. “She’s crying and I can’t even ask what’s wrong!”

“We need to teach her a language,” mumbled Jason.

“No shit, Sherlock!”

“Fuck off, Watson!”

She was getting judgemental looks from fellow shoppers now. Great. Amazing, even. She rested an arm around Cass and then used the other hand to flip them off. How dare they judge how she parented her kid she just met.

She waited until Cass was done to pull away and lean down to check her face. Even if she couldn’t really speak, her expression should be a good gauge of what was wrong --.

Cass gently took the items from Marinette and flashed her a blinding smile.

Damn it. Now Marinette was going to cry. This kid was so cute.

She leaned over and gently pressed a kiss to Cass’s forehead.

HER kid was so cute, she reminded herself as she led her along to .

She helped her wrap the scarf around her neck. Was it kind of hot out? Yes. Was Cass super cute with her mouth hidden behind the fabric? Also yes.

She glanced at Jason, who was also smiling a little bit despite not having all the attention.

His smile dropped at her next words, though:

“I know you still have my card. Hand it over.”

“Fuck.”

It turns out ASL is hard.

It also turns out that teaching ASL, while you’re still learning it yourself, to a person who doesn’t even comprehend language is even harder.

Weird how that works out.

They started with simpler things. Everyday objects, basic emotions, the first letters of their names so she could say who she was talking about. It was a slow process, especially because they often would take two days per lesson because of everyone’s conflicting schedules.

But it was a process.

And he thought the family was doing pretty well, too. It probably helped that Cass was, at least so far, the nicest person in the house and none of them wanted her to be sad or lonely.

Look at that. They were working on making her not feel excluded. Progress! Dr. Quinzel would be proud.

Marinette paused her walk to the kitchen when she saw blonde hair. Adrien had blond hair, but he was still out on patrols with Dick so…

She turned and looked at the person on the couch with Tim. “Please, kwami, tell me he didn’t get another one when we just started making progress.”

Tim barely even looked up from his computer. “No, just my friend, Steph. She’s here because she thinks I’m sad my parents died.”

“Oh, oka --.” Marinette took a step back. “Hold up, what?”

“Yeah, they were killed by this guy in Haiti. I was sad about it for a while but then I was like ‘wait a minute! I can just kill him back!’ Anyways, it’s all good now.”

Steph didn’t seem all that perturbed about the murder thing, so she brushed past worrying about their identities or, y’know, her kid getting prosecuted...

Marinette pulled out her phone. “Yeah, Dr. Quinzel? I’m going to need to schedule another appointment…”

Tim frowned. “I’m fine, Mari.”

“Oh! Yeah! This isn’t for you… but, Steph, he doesn’t have anything going on Friday night, right?”

“I’ll make sure he’s free.”

She nodded. “Thanks, sweetie. Want anything to eat?”

“Guys! I’m fine! I got my revenge! I feel great!”

“Of course, you do, Timmy. And… waffles?”

She continued her walk to the kitchen to finish up scheduling and make Steph waffles.

Listen, at this point Cass having a miraculous was a given.

He might as well make sure it was a good one that would come in useful. And, it kind of matched her fighting style of predicting people’s moves to have one that allowed her to go five minutes into the past. She’d be even better at predicting people’s movements if she’d seen them before!

Besides, she liked the color blue. Perfect fit.

Marinette had agreed to train her, but Adrien was the one to take her out on patrols with him.

It was good to have people with different fight styles together, it made solving problems easier. Adrien paired with Dick and Cass, Marinette tended to pair with Jason, and Tim would tag in on either side since he had no real consistent fight style (he liked to change based on his opponent).

Besides, with group patrols they got to spend more time with their kids! They were nothing if not efficient people.

He and Cass sat on the rooftop across from the building Agoura had asked to meet Dick in. There was a low chance it was going to get violent, there should be no way that he’d know anything was off (Marinette and Dick had been publicly fighting for the past year to make it seem like they were on opposite sides), but it was better safe than sorry.

He watched Dick wave to Agoura and head off. Adrien and Cass watched carefully for any sign that they were suspicious, that they were going to do something underhanded, but Agoura just turned and started heading off into the night.

When his oldest son came up to sit with them, he had a thought. He glanced at Cass and made a swiping motion on his wrist.

She nodded her understanding.

They waited for Dick to transform before following Agoura and his goons. Five people were with him, but that wasn’t actually that bad by Agoura standards, so...

“Y’know, if he gets suspicious of me because of this, I’m never going to forgive you,” said Dick.

He shrugged absently, then broke into a wide grin when Agoura turned down an alley. “Living hotel to hotel wasn’t that bad back in the day.”

“Hm. I disagree, but…” The three of them exchanged grins as Cass activated her power. “Let’s do this.”

Dick brought his flute to his lips and played a high-pitched note that made Agoura and his goons stop in their tracks. Duplicates of each vigilante slowly spread out over the rooftops, as well as a replica of Dick.

The vigilantes and their fakes dropped down to surround the group and Cass suddenly reached out and jerked Adrien’s hand. He almost complained but then a bullet soared past where his head had just been and he went pale.

He squeezed her hand once as thanks and then pulled away so he could activate his Cataclysm.

Doubles went after the goons while Cass went to work disarming people. It was kind of creepy how she disappeared into the shadows without any help from Dick, but no one said anything because it was useful. She would pop out of shadows and break arms and legs to put goons out of commission.

Dick was giving himself an alibi. The fake lawyer ran into the action, only to get taken out by a fake Cass.

Agoura was making a run for it. Too bad, really, that he couldn’t exactly see anything that was going on. The world in front of Agoura was a mess of dumpsters and trash bags that he was struggling to run around. Adrien, who knew for a fact that everything was either fake or light enough to brush away with his staff, followed after him at a calm pace.

He grabbed Agoura by the back of his tailored suit and smiled at him.

“Agoura! Buddy! Where are you going? I just want to chat!”

“Nice one!” Yelled Dick from somewhere in the chaos.

“Thanks, Robin!”

He tipped his head to the side and regarded the man in his grip. It was clear he didn’t really know that much self-defense, but he must have some kind of weapon hidden on him…

Cass seemingly materialized out of the wall nearby and threw herself at Agoura, a blur of blue and black, and the man was nearly knocked out of Adrien’s grip by the force. Then she pulled away with a gun and a few knives.

Adrien raised his eyebrows a little bit before sending her a smile. Yeah. It was definitely a good thing that he’d given her that specific miraculous...

He turned his attention back on the mobster, who was beginning to look a little pale.

“Don’t worry about it, I’m not here to kill you. You deserve way worse,” he said brightly.

He pressed his hand to the man’s wrist. He closed his eyes and forced himself to concentrate on just dissolving the wrist. It was kind of hard to do with the mobster screaming his head off. Kwami, you’d think he’d be quiet so Adrien wouldn’t dissolve him into nothing but apparently not…

The hand popped off and he let go instantly. He looked down and winced at the black webbing its way under the glove.

He glanced at the mobster nearby, who was still screaming, and rolled his eyes. He punched him as hard as he could and smiled when he fell to the ground in a heap by the hand. Good, now that that was dealt with...

He scrunched up his nose a little bit as he slowly peeled the glove off of the hand and then his face split into a wide smile. Thank kwami, he hadn’t ruined the prints.

He turned to his kids and found them waiting for him amidst a pile of bodies. He didn’t know if the henchmen were alive or not, but when he saw the tiny scrape on Cass’s cheek he decided he didn’t care.

He waved the hand at them.

“We got him!”

Listen, Marinette had considered staying commissioner…

For approximately two seconds.

The vigilantes had made their point in getting Agoura arrested (they gave him about four days before he ‘mysteriously committed suicide’ in jail thanks to either underpaid henchmen or old victims). They were done. It had been way too hard to even think about doing it consistently. No, murder was definitely the way to go.

She glanced over at Nygma. “Thanks for helping me pack up.”

“Well, I figured it would be nice to visit again.”

She nodded slowly and looked around her old office. Tomorrow there would be someone else in that chair, someone likely far more corrupt…

“Got a knife on you?”

“Obviously, but why?”

She shrugged and took it from his outstretched hand. She knelt down by the chair and sawed on one of the legs until she had taken off a tiny piece of it. She pushed on the chair and giggled a little when it wobbled. Yes. Perfect. That would be so annoying.

She tossed the piece of chair leg in the air and then caught it, sending Nygma a wink. “The budget here is terrible, it’ll take at least a few months to get a new chair.”

Nygma rolled his eyes and took his knife back from her. “Hm. And they say I’m the evil one.”

They each grabbed a box. His was full of personal items, hers was full of files on every person currently in the GCPD and every mobster and goon she could think of the name of.

“You owe me one escape room.”

She groaned as they slipped out into the halls. “Why? Wasn’t it enough to spit on the floor?”

“Nope! Spitting on the floor was payment for me showing up, you’re making me do manual labor so I get one hour of escape rooms with you.”

“Don’t you know every solution already?”

“A new one opened up across town!”

She clicked her tongue irritably but shrugged. “Fine. But only because I owe you, not because we’re friends.”

He rolled his eyes and then looked down at the box he was carrying. “Wow, it sure would suck if all these pictures of your kids just… fell.”

Her eyes widened. “You ARE the evil one!”

He raised his eyebrows.

“And… you’re also my friend.” She made a retching noise. “Kwami, I’m going to die.”

“What?! No! Only one of my traps is allowed to kill you!”

“Too late! I’m dying. I’ll never recover…”

“Nooooo…!”

He raised an eyebrow at the girl on his couch. He was pretty sure she was Tim’s friend but… she was definitely around a lot…

Whatever, he might as well at this point.

“Hey, how many parents you got?”

Steph didn’t even glance up. “Zero, thanks to you.”

He went still. Wait, was she saying this in the ‘my parent(s) was evil and you killed them’ way or the ‘they were civilians and they got caught in the crossfire and I blame you’ way?

“Um… did you like them?”

“No, he was a dick.”

He allowed himself to breathe. Cool. Great. That would have made everything difficult…

“Want to be adopted?”

Steph laughed a little and shrugged. “Do I get to be a vigilante, too?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Then... yeah, whatever.”

~~~

Taglist

@i-am-ironic @nathleigh @mialuvscats @golden-promises @sassakitty @deathwishy @toodaloo-kangaroo @ladythugs @moonlightstar64 @dahjokester @jjmjjktth

#another one?!#maribat #adrienette #marinette dupain cheng #ladybug #adrien agreste #chat noir #dick grayson #nightwing #jason todd #red hood #tim drake #red robin #cassandra cain #orphan #damian wayne #robin

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greytoiletpaper · 4 years

Text

Out on Allen Street, it’s 7 in the Morning

Set in the same-ish Street Siblings universe as First Contact by @cryptids-and-muses and @a-sketchy-character @streetsiblings (they’re awesome), I present my own built-on concept. It’s a bit angstier but sue me I’m an angst ball

AO3 | Deluge

Chapter 1: Drizzle

Jason Todd loved the rain. He remembered it pattering on the roof as he dozed off into the night, curled up with Sparky. Times spent splashing in puddles. Drawing a rare smile from Catherine as bright as the morning sun. Days without Willis, his head stuck in a worn copy of Huckleberry Finn and the ambience set only by the rain as it tracked ran down the window he leant on.

It was raining when Jason woke to his mother’s lax corpse, ears drowning out every sound except the rain’s as it plinked in time with the droplets that dripped down her arm.

In front of her, Faizul’s corpse is still. So still that Cassandra Cain can almost block out how the man’s body only radiated pain and fear and agony so strong-and-she-did-that-with-her-hands-her-hands-so-red-and-.

But she can’t, her head is still drowning in the memory, and all she can think about is the fear emptiness that settles in her body. Her gift to understand movement as if it were a language, she learns, is nothing more than a curse when Death comes by her hand. She wrings her red fist, as tainted as her soul because of what she had done. She looks away.

Father David has his arms outstretched, a smile so sharp and so bright that if he were any other man, she would have thought he was proud. He is, but underneath, Cassandra can see nothing but sick and profound glee at what she can do. The decision is easy.

As Cassandra springs out the window, its hinges blew wide open, her father David keeled over, the sky crackles and runs with the long red rivulets off her arms.

Now, five months later, Jason ducks his head under the fire escape in an empty alley, the rain in a duet with the nightlife of Gotham. He allows himself some respite as it steadily washes the grime off his surroundings, a pleasant ratatatata above the ambient din that is the dark of Gotham. He is so tired, but he’ll have to move soon if he wants to stay out of sight of kidnappers and killers and whatever else haunts the shadows of Gotham.

A howl slices through the Gotham night as some mug gets his face slammed into a wall. Jason knows this because he can see it right now as the same mook gets decked by a – a girl. Anyone on the streets knows that girls can hold their own but seeing some thirty-something-year-old man get his ass handed to him by a pixie of a girl – he thinks she’s his age, somehow – is something else. Seriously, the guy looks terrified out of his mind as he runs with his tail between his legs after a particularly nasty hit to his crotch.

As if sensing his gaze, the girl snaps her head to him, locking him in place.

“Uh… Hi?” Jason raises his hand in an awkward wave which the girl mimics, albeit a bit stilted, her head on a tilt. The silence between the two of them stretches until the girl seems to see something in him and nods. Out of ideas, Jason digs around his bag and produces a fresh enough apple.

“I’m Jason.” He points to himself.

A beat, and then the girl repeats the gesture.

“Cuh, cuh, cuh,” She struggles with the words, her forehead pinched. “Cuh, ah, ssss.”

“Cass?” The girl nods again, this time rigorously. Unsure of himself, Jason raises the apple to her. “Well, nice to meet you, Cass. You hungry?”

Cass grins, her eyes twinkling as she bites into the apple. Around them, the rain lessens. Just a little.

She watches two of her most precious children draw closer, children who will laugh and cry and burn for her love. Gotham watches them come, raises her arms, and weeps with her joy.

“Jason and Cassandra against the world,” Is what Gotham would have said if she had a voice. For years, the city is content to watch her children. She observes Jason and Cassandra as they starve, as they fight, as they grow. On one night, the weather nothing but pluvial, she witnesses them come across the strange car in the alleyway owned by her first child. On that night, she watches as the Dark Knight comes across her most perfect pair of children.

“Cassandra,” She looks up at the man they had been living under for the past two months, Bruce. She makes no answer, only staring blankly at him–they were betting on seeing how long it took for the man to get uncomfortable when she does that–who stares back. He continues as if they had not been staring for a full minute, which is not to Cass’ benefit. “Do you know where Jason is?”

Cass, willing to keep trying, keeps her gaze unrepentant. Under her scrutiny, the Dark Knight’s demeanour finally cracks a little. Internally, Cass is ecstatic, but she still really wants to milk it as she keeps up the act.

“Someone call for me?” Jay comes down the stairs. Finally, Cass can break her façade.

“Good morning, slob.” The slob, honest to god, freezes.

“No,” He grinds out of his teeth.

“Yes,” Cass gives him a crooked smile. “slob.”

“Am I missing something here?” Bruce is frowning. Oh right, he was ignorant to their scheme.

“Slob,” Cass repeats with feeling and delights at Jay’s fuming. “S-L-O-B. It means Stupid-Loser-Of-Bets,” She looks Jay dead in the eye again and calls him by the name.

Bruce frowned even further (his body projects such honest confusion that Cass almost laughs). “I was not aware you two had made a bet.”

“A bet I lost because of you, old man!” Jay pipes up, suddenly fuming at Bruce. “You’re Batman, and you can’t even keep from cracking when some girl stares at you for longer than a minute?”

Cass does not hold in her laughter anymore, something she broadcasts to all gathered. Bruce sighs, but at least he waits for her to calm down before he gets to his point.

“Regardless… I need you two to come with me to my office,” As the man leaves, the two share a glance.

“You gonna go after him?”

“You first, slob,” Jay grumbles the entire way to the office, where Bruce waves them in.

For a few seconds, the man awkwardly shifts before he pulls a sheaf of papers from behind his desk.

“I… I quite enjoy having the two of you here. With me,” Bruce admits, looking both of them in the eyes. He takes a deep breath. “I do not want to force this on either of you, but I would love to have you here with me for longer.”

“Permanently, even.”

Bruce lays out the papers on the desk, ‘Adoption Applications’ printed at the top. The letters draw a sharp breath from Jay, and Cass is confident enough with reading to understand what it means.

“Yes,” They both say immediately, and Bruce’s face goes softer than either have ever seen it.

When he asks for their surnames, Cass thinks about saying Cain. Instead, she says Todd.

Shyly, her russet orbs meet his azure ones expecting anger, but everything about Jason only projects love and acceptance. Her grin, something she had not got right yet, is almost identical to the one her brother wears.

“Always wanted a sister. Can’t do much better than you, eh, Cass?”

“Yes Jay,” she pauses. “slob.”

Outside, the sky is open in a light drizzle.

If there is anyone in the Waynes that Jason thinks is his favourite, it would be Alfred. An opinion he thinks Cass would be hard-pressed to disagree with. Of course, Cass is still in awe about the fact that Bruce Wayne is Batman (and isn’t that just fucking crazy), so it’s understandable. Conversely, Jason still remembers his first memory of the butler, a kind smile and welcoming arms that promised care for both of them.

“Master Jason,” The boy had looked up to see a crinkle in Alfred’s eyes that he had only ever seen from Catherine. The butler continued, somehow even softer than his usual. “Would you like me to fix that for you?”

Alfred gestured to Jason’s battered copy of Huckleberry Finn that he had cradled self-consciously to his chest. He refused, unsure why the butler seemed to be delighted to see Jason in the way only Cass and his Mom did. But there is something so trustworthy about the man that part of Jason is sure Alfred would do things like that no matter what he asked. So, automatic favourite.

Their older brother, Dick (“Aptly nicknamed,” Jay mutters under his breath.), yells whenever he comes to the manor. Most of his visits tend to cycle between him screaming at Bruce or yelling about them. He does make an effort to be a little quieter when he’s talking about the latter. Although, he still looks at Jay with an indecipherable mixture of emotions in his eyes. A pool caught between anger and something unknown to them. It’s not something that upsets Cass, but it puts both of them off, nonetheless.

On the other hand, Barbara is a little more forward in her dislike of the new kids. More often than not, her ire seems aimed at Cass specifically. Privately, Cass thinks Barbara was still angry about Bruce taking her role as Batgirl and giving it to Cass. But, she can see how every time the older girl gets less hostile, another part of her body was long past the role anyway. So, she doesn’t hold it against Oracle.

“C’mon Cass, repeat after me,” Jason waves the pages in Cass’ face, which elicits a giggle from his sister. Her giggling unbalances the both of them, so they have to waste another couple of minutes to make themselves comfortable again.

“What’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”

Cass repeats the words, but she struggles at ‘troublesome’, so Jason repeats it for her. Silence, and then.

“What mean?” He thinks she isn’t asking about the word.

“Well, Mom used to say that it was just that. It might be harder to do the right thing, but it’d be better since you at least did it properly,” Satisfied, his sister merely nods and tries the words again. This time, she only takes three tries until she gets ‘troublesome’ right.

“I think she would have liked you,” He murmurs between phrases and instantly regrets it when Cass’ head turns to him so sharply she jostles him. He is about to brush it off when she nods her head shyly, snuggling closer to Jason.

He thinks, as they keep reading, that things are going to turn out alright. He has Robin now, and Robin gives him magic. Not only that but he’s also got Cass as Batgirl. Sure, she has that weird stitch mask covering her face, but it’s so fitting that he cannot imagine Cass with any other kind of costume. He knows her, and she knows him. For years she has been the sister he never knew he needed.

Together, Jason muses, they’re going to shake the whole damn world.

Whether they're from the Justice League or otherwise, everyone is always ready with a snide comment directed towards them. Or, more specifically, Jason. They use words and insults that don’t make sense to her, but she can see them affect her brother. When she asks, all he does is brush her off with lies and platitudes that they both know are fake. It isn’t until Troia huffs and says something that has waves of hurt rolling off Jason’s body that Cass decides she’s had enough.

“Honestly, I can’t believe you’d think you’d ever be like – ow!” Troia, poise flooded with nothing but condescension (she’s too angry to be elated at remembering a word Jason taught her) that Cass quickly corrects with a sharp jab. Like a deer in headlights, she turns and somehow has the gall to look indignant (another word). “Who did – Batgirl?”

“What, are you doing?” Troia fucking blinks. “Why are you treating my brother like this?”

She doesn’t even look guilty.

“Oh, don’t worry about all that. I don’t think it’s anything you’d understand anyway,”

She bends down towards her, apparently not noticing how still she is. Anyone who knows anything about Cassandra Todd knows her stillness means Death. Evidently, Troia is an exception. She's the only one in the room that's relaxed.

“Some people are simply born for this role. No street rat can ever hope to achieve that.”

Cassandra moves before anyone even blinks, her arms a flurry of jabs and punches and vicious kicks as she catches Troia off guard. Even when she finally regains her footing, the Amazon doesn't stand a sliver of a chance as Cassandra lays into her.

A block from Troia awards a savage stomp on her shin. A punch ducked under and followed through into a sequence of blows to the Amazon’s chest. When Troia grips her lasso and tries to restrain Cassandra, the girl only slinks her way past and wrestles it from her hands. Quickly and efficiently, she wraps it around the Amazon’s waist and pulls. For someone so small, Cassandra manages to lift Troia with the lasso with enough strength that when she releases it, the Amazon goes flying into a pillar in the Watchtower with a sharp crack.

Cass picks up her brother and shields him from the Leaguers, indifferent to their shocked and judgemental eyes.

The message is clear.

Even though they’re lost in a veritable sea of people, it still ends up being just the two of them, and Cass is more than okay with that.

Next chapter

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sabraeal · 3 years

Text

Minimum Distance

If there’s one thing Obi’s sure of, it’s that this is Hisame’s fault.

Not the lockdown-- though honestly, he wouldn’t put it past the bastard if it meant having things go his way-- but everything else. This fucking party. That stupid fake dating plan. The kiss.

He scrapes a hand down his face. This whole ‘day trip’ is turning right into a disaster weekend and god, if he had the ability to fly right back to DC right now, he would. But instead he’s trapped here, in the middle of the New Mexican desert, in the Smart House of some elusive and shady billionaire. He must have kicked a puppy in the last life-- no, bags of puppies-- if the universe is exerting this level of karmic violence on him.

His back hits the door. He needs like, five minutes. Just until he learns how to breathe again.

Which he’s not going to do, if he keeps replaying that kiss in his head. You know, the only thing he’s been doing for the past twenty-four hours, including breakfast, where Rougis just stared at him with that grin on his face. Like he knew. Like he could somehow see every last mortifying second of his dreams last night, and thought it was funny.

Doc’s informed him this whole pandemic thing is serious, that there’s stuff with r’s and knots and things being close to two. He is tangentially aware aware of how a logarithmic scale works, and he’d never wish anyone actually sick, but-- if Hisame could just shuffle off this mortal coil in the next few hours, that would really pluck one of the bigger monkeys off his back.

He takes a deep breath-- more like a deep hiccup, honestly-- and lets the tension fall out of him. It’s fine. He doesn’t have time to stand here and freestyle mental scream. He has to work on getting them back home. Which means getting this Rugilia guy to sign off on funding.

And then he can hop on a plane, pandemic permitting, and get instantly fired for kissing his boss’s girlfriend. Bingo bango bongo. Job well done.

God, it would be just great if he could resist fucking up just one good thing in his life. At least Ryuu will still write.

Right, no time for catastrophizing. They’ve got a billionaire to woo. Or something.

He swings open his door-- no, it’s her door, but also his, because switching rooms seemed prudent when the guy holding all the keys spent a night trying to get Doc alone in a garden-- only to run into Doc. Literally. Right there. In her borrowed pajamas.

Whatever intel Rugilia had on her was clearly not as good as his, since Doc is really a matching pajama sets kind of girl, and not--

Well, after living with her for three years, Obi can firmly say he’s never seen a cotton teddy. At least, not on Doc herself.

He could get used to it, though.

“Oh, Obi!” She blinks, taking a step back. Adjusts her glasses, too. Tugs at a hem that is not going to get any lower, no matter how much she tries. “I was just coming to see you.”

“Ah.” He scrubs at the back of his head; it gives him as good an excuse as any for looking anywhere else. If he gives her more than a glance he’ll start counting freckles, and well-- they have separate rooms for a reason “Me, too. I was thinking--”

“The room thing isn’t going to work.”

He blinks. Blinks again.

“I mean...” Her cheeks bloom to a pale pink, the start of what’s sure to be a painful blush. “We should be sharing a room.”

He hopes there’s an actual, medical doctor in this group of useless socialites, because he’s about to have a cardiac event, and Doc’s doesn’t have the right alphabet soup to handle that kind of thing. “UH.”

“No, no!” She waves her hands, and god, they’re so close her fingertips practically brush his chest. Which wouldn’t be a problem if she didn’t follow up with, “I just mean, we should be sleeping together.”

Oh, it’s too late for medical intervention now; he’s already dead. “Ah, Doc--?”

“I just mean,” she yelps, fingers fluttering nervously between them, making it real hard to not look down and get some solid ideas about her cup size. “I know we switched rooms. For safety.”

“For safety,” he echoes dumbly, because that’s the level of thought he’s at right now. Or at least, the level he can safely be at without risking a real containment breach on all the things he’s not allowed to think when Doc’s around, wearing almost nothing, and telling him they need to put their bodies in close, horizontal proximity.

“But if we’re trying to be a couple, I don’t think...” Her tongue pokes out, pink and spongy, and draws his eyes right to the lips he definitely shouldn’t be staring at. “Well, I just don’t think that we-- that you-- that it looks--?”

“You mean,” he says, so slow, like she’s a rogue possum and he’s animal control, “I don’t look like the kind of guy who wouldn’t be taking advantage of a king bed and silk sheets?”

“Ah...” She’s the one that blinks now, eyelashes fluttering against red cheeks that are begging him to take their temperature. “Not-- not the way you were, um...”

She lets the implication hand in the air, and god, fuck Rougis for putting that fucking idea in his head, for even allowing the memory of her against him like that, sighing into his mouth--

“I thought we were supposed to be keeping it on the down low,” he says, leaning in with a grin. “Since you’re slumming it with the help.”

Her mouth goes from sexy to scowl. “I’m not slumming it with anyone.”

“Right, right, I know that,” he assure her, “but Rugilia--”

“No.” It’s loud enough that he flinches, because fuck, he can pretend to be normal all the live long day, but the second a voice raises-- “Oh, Obi, sorry, I didn’t--” her palm wraps warmly around his arm, thumb rubbing over the cotton of his sleeve-- “I just meant that I’m not-- it’s not-- being with you isn’t slumming.”

It’s all a little much having her so close, having so little of her be clothed, and smell so good as she does. She must have taken a shower or something before rushing out here to make herself his own personal problem. In any case, all he manages is a half-dubious, half-distracted hum.

“Besides,” she adds, one of her eyebrows rounding in a teasing arch, “as far as I was aware, doctors and lawyers were considered the same pay grade.”

Obi coughs on his own spit. “I’m not a lawyer.”

“And I’m not that kind of doctor.” Her arms fold neatly-- distractingly-- beneath her breasts, A cups giving off a distinctly B-cup vibe. “But Eisetsu doesn’t know that. I told him I was here about a vaccine, and you said you were here to keep me out of trouble.”

And with a man used to dealing with pharma rather than the academic side, the legal representation would be implied. Obi scrubs a hand through his hair, staring down at his silk pajama set, and tries to discern what about him says ‘went to a four-year college,’ let alone law school. “Me?”

“Well...” She really shouldn’t look at him like that, all coy from the corner of those big eyes, if he can’t give her a repeat performance of last night. “It only makes sense. I mean, who else does Zen hang out with.”

Now, that-- that gives him pause. Mitsuhide, lawyer. Kiki, lawyer. Doc, doctor, but Not That Kind. Him--

“Fuck me,” he breathes, “that actually makes sense.”

“It does,” she agrees primly. “I’d thought the keeping it quiet angle was more along the line of, uh, conflict of interest, rather than, um, other reasons.”

Other reasons, like that half of his other aliases were on No Fly lists. “Conflict of Interest?”

“Well, um...” Her flush is brighter this time, spilling over her cheeks and down her neck, flirting with the lace edging her neckline, and he certainly is feeling both conflicted and interested about how far it might go-- “There’s probably fraternization rules.”

He blinks. “Fraternization?”

“You know,” she says slowly, taking a step back, right into the doorway of her-- his room. “That employees can’t date or, um--” her skin’s barely a shade lighter than her hair-- “do other stuff. At least without clearing with HR first.”

It shouldn’t be so cute that a woman with a doctorate can’t say sex, but this is it, this is his type now.

“Other stuff, hm?” He steps close, their toes sharing the jamb. So close that when she sucks in a breath, shallow and quick, her chest brushes against his. “If we’re supposed to be fraternizing in this room tonight, a few things are going to have to change.”

She shuffles back, an arm’s length--one of hers, at least-- toes curling on the carpet. “O-oh?”

The thing is: Obi can’t resist a good joke. It’s why he works so good with the boss-man; no matter how transparent, how dumb it is, all his teasing crawls right under that lily-white thin skin of his and sends Wisteria climbing right up the wall. It’s satisfying.

So when he closes the gap between them with a single long stride, he expects Doc to just-- tell him to quit it. Yelp maybe. Slap his chest. Scold him, if he’s lucky.

But instead she just peers up at him, chest quivering, and doesn’t get the joke. By the way she’s looking at him, she--

Ah, well, it doesn’t look like she minds overly much either. Which is going to make this Not Funny real quick in a southerly direction.

Strange, he doesn’t feel much like laughing either.

“The bed.” His hips guide her back a step, then two. “For one.”

She really needs to stop him, to put her foot down, to really get it through to the parts of him below the belt that she’s not interested in bringing some realism to this little show they’re putting on.

Instead, she lets him herd her four more steps back, body following every slow, rolling suggestion of his. “Bed?”

“Yeah.” Her knees hit the edge of the mattress-- well, considering how tall these beds are, her waist. She wobbles, hands bracing on his chest. “We need to get this bed messy.”

Her breath sighs into the air between them, eyes so round, so dark, and--

She realizes what he’s about to do five seconds too late. “Obi, n--!”

Feathers fly everywhere. Damn, this Rugilia guy really did spare no expense.

There’s a long, quiet moment, Shirayuki staring up at him with confusion and betrayal warring in her eyes, and she-- she laughs. It’s all the warning he gets before he’s blind-sided, pillow knocking him to his knees, and god, she’s going to regret starting a fight with--

Tap tap. Tap tap.

They both freeze, staring at one another. That was on the door. Her door. No, his door.

“It’s Eisetsu,” comes the soft voice through it. “Can we talk?”

#obiyukichopped #obiyuki #akagami no shirayukihime #snow white with the red hair #my fic #modern au #quarantine au #ans #this is another one of those fics where I really just gotta...write out the whole thing #and i will!#hopefully in Feb/March you'll see the first chapter of this particular fic #i have got some IDEAS for how this is going to go down #and oh boy is it gonna be fun

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possiamo-andare · 4 years

Text

Midsummer pt.5: JJ Maybank (Finale)

JJ x Reader

MASTERLIST

word count: 9k

a/n: this final chapter of Midsummer is dedicated to @shawnssongs for being the kindest soul when I was writing this series.They always had something nice to say and uplifted my spirits when I thought I had nothing good to write. You were my inspiration so thanks buddy!! I’m so sad to see this series come to an end but it has been so much fun. the first part of Midsummer has over 1,000 notes and I am so happy with all the feedback I received. Thanks to everyone who commented, liked and reblogged. You are angels!

JJ rarely slept in his bed. He had these fleeting, but clear, memories of his mother with her caramel hair and blue eyes, reading the Giving Tree to him. She sat on the edge of the bed, petting his head and she read to him, changing her voice when the tree spoke. As a child, it amused JJ but now, he couldn't think of that book or his bedroom without getting emotional. It didn't help that his father erased any memories of his mother around their house. The books she read to him were burned. The family pictures of a once lovely but poor family were discarded in the trash. JJ's father forbade the mention of his mother's name to the point where JJ started to forget what she looked like or what her name was.

The only time he ever slept in his own bed was when John B. couldn't have him over and that rarely happened. John B. knew his situation and always made his home available. When his father went missing at sea, he needed JJ even more than before and welcomed him into his home twofold. Loneliness was contagious in that household and as much as JJ appreciated John B.'s hospitality, he was suffocating.

Then she came along. You walked through those double doors with your arm through Rafe's in that beautiful dress and JJ knew he was done for. You had made him feel something in Peterkin's office but he suppressed those feelings and soon enough, he thought they disappeared. He had chalked it up to just a crush and when it disappeared he thought he was right. Then, that night, he knew it was more than that. Then, you kissed him. He had kissed you first because he had that 'screw it' mentality but he never thought you would reciprocate those feelings. He had no idea why you kissed him but you did and you wanted to be around him. Most girls never saw JJ as anything more than a Pogue and he thought he was okay with that. Now, he knew he would never be the same.

You stirred beside him as he reminisced over the last weeks. He had never slept so soundly in his own bed before. Slowly, as to not wake you, he tightened his grip and your body and pulled you close. He usually hated sleeping on his back but he never thought of how uncomfortable he was when you were so peaceful beside him.

"Hm?" You grumble, completely unaware of what JJ was thinking beside you. You rubbed your eyes and looked up from the crook in JJ's neck. "Morning."

JJ smirked, feeling terrible he had woken you up. "Sorry."

You smiled, shrugging. "I had to wake up eventually." You glanced at the clock on JJ's cabinet and squinted. It was 9am. "We were supposed to get up one hour ago!" You move away from JJ, pushing the covers off your partially naked body.

You hurriedly bend over, looking for your shorts and tshirt. Some time in the middle of the night you had put your undergarments back on but for your tshirt and shorts, they were still on the floor. As you pull your shirt over your head, you feel JJ move from behind you. You know what he's about to do before he even gets a chance to do it but decide not to pull away. Instead, you wait as he wraps his arms around your waist. You feel his lips against the nape of your neck and you smile, the gesture tickling you a little.

"Harry Styles?" He laughs as he points to the flip flops on the floor beside his bed.

You gasp, quickly flipping over the sole of your shoes so he can't see the embarrassing drawings on your old white flip flops. "I was ten!" It was a stupid drawing of a heart with an inscription of your favourite One Direction member's name. You had meant to get new shoes but you had never grew out of your old shoes and thought no one would see it, much less your boyfriend.

"Is that who I need to be for you to stay in bed?" He teased, poking your side. You jumped from your seat in his bed and squealed, his teasing embarrassing you. You pull your shorts up and zip them closed as JJ watches your flushed cheeks turn a brighter red.

"You could never be Harry. Sorry." You joked right back, finally slipping into your shoes.

JJ finally sits up, his shorts him yesterday now on the bottom half of his body. "Rude!" His eyes go to his feet for a moment and you can hear him whisper "How does it go..."

"JJ!" You giggle, knowing exactly what he was going to do before he even had to do it.

"Straight off the plane to a new hotel!" JJ screams, playing an air guitar. You cover your face, embarrassed for him. "Just touched down, you could never tell. Big house party with a crowded kitchen -"

"Okay!" You finally jump over the bed and reach for JJ's mouth so he can stop teasing you.

He pulls away but stops singing. Instead, he reaches for your neck and pulls you close. You can see it in his eyes and you indulge him, letting him kiss you. Surprisingly, his breath does not smell and you feel a little self conscious since you know yours does.

You are the first to pull away. "I have to brush my teeth."

JJ nods, smirking. "That bad?"

You gasp, slapping his shoulder. "Rude."

He chuckles but nods, guiding you out of his room and to the bathroom that is closest to the front door. JJ opens the door to a very small bathroom with not even a shower. He goes in first, looking under the sink for a clean toothbrush. Once he finds one, he hands it to you and exits the bathroom. It's so small that there can only be one person inside at one time. JJ gives you a chaste kiss one more time before you step inside the bathroom and close the door behind you. You turn on the facet and slowly your mind wanders as you brush your teeth. As much as you know you shouldn't be smiling just because you're brushing your teeth, you can't help it. You can't seem to believe you're in JJ's house, brushing your teeth and actually acting like a couple. Nothing about your relationship so far has been normal. From buried treasure to murder, your relationship was never as peaceful as it was now. You sang a little song as you rinse your mouth, the smile still on your lips. However, once you shut the faucet off, your little happy bubble popped. Just a few feet away, you heard yelling. In seconds, you peered out the door and looked for where it was coming from. You saw that the front door was open and, as quietly as you could, you tiptoed closer to the front of the house. The door was wide open and the closer you got, the more you heard.

"What are you doing?" JJ raised his voice, finally walking in front of the door. At first, you thought he was speaking to you but he wasn't facing you. Finally, you saw as his father walked past him, a wad of cash in his hands.

JJ had been getting dressed in his room when his father arrived home after a night of gambling and liquor. He had not entered his house, only sitting on the singular chair on the porch. JJ’s father rarely was inside his own home. It reminded him of his wife and he had suppressed all his feelings over her. The less time he spent inside, the less he would think about her. JJ had initially approached his father with a coy smile on his face, handing the man the money he stole from the drug dealer. His father seemed happy and, for the first time in years, actually praised his son. Now, his smile faded as he watched his father stuff the money into a canister.

"I'm gonna take this south and triple it..." He trailed off, his mind in all different sorts of places. It was clear he was still drunk.

"Dad, that's my bail money I owe you." JJ pleaded, his eyes filled with worry. Your heart broke as JJ's father walked straight to JJ, gripping onto his collar.

"What'd you say boy?" He yelled, pushing JJ away from him. "You are nothing! Always getting in trouble. Wish you were never born."

JJ had heard these phrases before. His father was a predictable man and used the same insults. Before, they rarely affected JJ, mostly because his father was drunk. Now, however, it was different. The words were the same but the feeling they gave JJ was different. It had been so long since any parental figure had shown him even a small amount of love and he was getting tired of hearing the same thing over and over again. This time, when his father called him nothing, it stirred a type of rage JJ had never felt before.

By the time JJ realized he was fed up, you had enough as well. You had only heard this come out of his father’s mouth once and yet it already affected you. You couldn’t imagine how JJ could handle all these years. He had more self control than you thought. You were about to step in and take the pressure away from JJ but before you could do so, JJ lunges at his father, pushing him through the screen barrier around the door. The sound of both of their bodies ripping through the material makes a loud noise and you gasp. Although that sound scared you, the sound of JJ's body hitting the grass makes you scream. You push the screen door open and run to JJ who is on top of his dad, punching him viciously.

"JJ!" You scream, trying to pull your boyfriend off his father.

All JJ sees is red and he doesn't even hear your screaming. Tears stream down his face and he continues to punch his father. "I'm not a failure! You did this to me!"

He continues his assault on his father, only once allowing him to get the upper hand and giving him a few good punches to the mouth and sides. JJ had learned how to take the pain. For years, his father beat him and after a while he built up a resistance to the abuse. Now, he barely felt the punches his dad lay into him, only concentrating on punching his dad as hard as he could.

Only when you grab onto his fist, blocking him from punching his father again, does his mind clear and he realizes what he's done. He falls back, watching as his father crawl away from him. You wrap your arms around his body, asking him if he's hurt but he doesn't answer. He looks down at his hands and looks in horror as he sees his father's blood all over his knuckles.

"JJ, are you hurt?" You ask again, cupping his face. He only shakes his head, his eyes still on his father. His father has gotten up from his place on the ground and now moves in front of you and JJ.

"Get rid of her before anything happens." JJ's father taunts, a beer bottle in his hands. You gasp in horror and wonder if JJ’s dad tried to hit him with a beer bottle. He walks past the both of you, not bothering to make eye contact with you. "Us Maybank men only hurt our women."

You don't know what to do. You heard the horror stories. You knew, to some extent, how terrible of a father JJ's dad was but never this. You try to ignore the man and look back to JJ, who seems to be zoned out. He's grasping his hands together and whispering to himself. You're scared. JJ's never like this and now that he seems to have broken entirely.

"JJ..." You call, trying to wake up from this nightmare.

JJ shakes his head, pushing you off him. This action hurts you and knowing the words his father has said really has cut him deeply. JJ shakes his head, getting up from the floor without your help. He winces as he does so, his father getting in some good punches before JJ got the upper hand. You follow behind him and call out to him but he ignores you. He can't seem to shake the words his dad said to him about all the Maybank men hurting the women they love. That was more true the more JJ thought about it. His grandfather drove his grandmother to drink which ended up killing her. They were never perfect and constantly arguing. When JJ's parents gave him to his grandparents for the weekend so they could party, JJ thought it would be a break from all the fighting his parents did but he was wrong. And his mother... She was gone because of his father. All the women in the Maybank family had bad endings and JJ couldn't do that to Y/N. She deserved better. She was better.

"Where are you going?" You asked as you watched slip on his sneakers.

"Don't follow me." JJ grumbled, tears threatening to spill. Although he didn't want to leave Y/N, he knew it was for the best. He couldn't ruin her life. He never wanted his dad’s words to affect him so much but his father’s words had planted a seed in JJ’s mind and it was growing in seconds.

"Is this because of what your dad said?" You follow after JJ, watching as he clutches his stomach. Before he can walk farther away, you run in front of him and place your hand on his chest, stopping him from walking too far away. "JJ?"

JJ can't bring himself to look at you. "You shouldn't have seen that."

You shrug. "It's okay. I did and I love you."

JJ's head snaps up, glaring at you. "Stop." He hates that you’re being so supportive right now. All he wants for you to do is to leave.

Your face contorts in confusion. "JJ -"

JJ pushes you away and walks past you. "No, leave me alone."

You stand in awe, watching as he walks farther and farther away from you. Finally, you feel the tears bead down your face and you realize that JJ has just broken up with you. A hand goes to your temple, the confusion giving you a headache. JJ just broke up with you and you don't even know why.

Kie was the only person you could talk to. Sarah was with John B. and you knew the second you vented to Sarah with John B. around, it would get back to JJ. The last thing you wanted JJ to know was that you were getting advice about him to someone else. Kie was friends with him but you trusted her more with keeping secrets. You found her at the Wreck with Pope. The second they saw you enter, they knew something was wrong. You didn’t have to say much. The second you sat down beside Kie, Pope excused himself so the two of you could be alone. You had kept most of your tears from falling. Your entire walk from JJ’s house to the Wreck consisted of you trying your best not to look like a crying mess. The second Kie asked you what was wrong, however, you began to cry. You barely got two words out before you began to weep. Kie let you cry and only held you as you did so. When you calmed down, you finally spoke and told her what was going on. You told her about the fight and JJ’s reaction afterwards and she said nothing, not interrupting you once. When you finally finished, she took a few moments to think of the right response before speaking.

“I hate JJ’s dad.” Kie scoffed, making you smile.

“Yeah, he sucks.” You agreed.

“JJ loves you,” Kie begins, holding onto your hand. “I know. He’s never been like this with any girl. If he’s got any sense, he’ll realize how stupid he’s been.”

You nod. “What about his dad?”

Kie shakes her head. “He’ll never change, but he should not be ruining his son’s life. He’s already ruined it enough.”

You place your head in your hands. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Be there for him. Even if he doesn’t think he needs you, he does. Wait it out for today. By tonight, you should talk to him.” Kie explains, patting your shoulder in an attempt to comfort you.

You stand up, looking to the kitchen where Pope is acting as if he heard nothing. You almost want to smile because of how adorable Pope is acting. You finally look back to Kie, nodding to her. “So, can I help you guys with anything before we meet with Sarh and John B. tonight?”

Kie stands up beside you, smiling. “Of course you can.”

All things considered, the tasks Kie and Pope had to do were not complicated. Kie would go to the nearest Home Reno store and buy all of the equipment she could afford, while Pipe would go to his father’s dock and get the more expensive equipment for free. You decided to tag along with Kie instead of Pope, the sole reason being that Pope would have to sweet talk his dad into giving him the equipment and you being there would raise a lot of suspicion. You and Kie drove to the Reno store in her parent’s car, listening to music and talking intermittently. After she had consoled you, things between the two of you seemed way more mellow. It seemed like you were closer and without Sarah around as often, you couldn’t be more happy you had another girl to talk to.

When you pulled into the parking lot, you and Kie were happy to see that the lot was virtually empty. It was still mid morning so you both expected it to slow, but you were still pleased it was so deserted. It would look very suspicious to see two teenage girls buying rope, pulleys, and hammers so the less people saw, the better. Too many people gossiped in Figure 8.

“Let’s get to it,” Kie smirked at you, walking into the first aisle. You followed after her, unsure of where to go since you had never stepped foot into this store before. You had been to the Home Depot only a few blocks away but that place was way smaller and the signs were easier to read. Now, you blindly followed Kie as she guided through each aisle, looking for the items you needed.

“How long do you think it needs to be?” You asked, extending your hands as Kie made you hold one side of the rope as she measured it.

Kie shrugged, grabbing a pair of pliers and cutting it abruptly. “Hopefully this is enough.”

Slowly but surely you both made your way around the store, now pushing a cart that held the long rope and hammers. It had been easy to find the large hammers; they had their own section. Unfortunately, the pulleys were not as easy. Soon, five minutes turned into ten and you realized that neither Kie or you knew where they were kept.

“Do we need them?” You asked, pushing the cart beside Kie as she glanced through the next aisle.

She shrugged. “Last time, we pulled John B. down but our hands were burning. It would be easier if we had a pulley.”

You nodded, imagining a tired Kie pulling John B., who was definitely yelling at her to hurry up. The scene you conjured in your mind was hilarious to you and when you giggled, Kie looked at you with a puzzled look on her face. You could tell she was about to question what you were laughing at but before she could, someone spoke from behind the both of you.

“Y/N?”

Your blood turned cold, the hair on the nape of your neck standing up. With a defiant look on your face (scared to show that you were surprised), you turned around and came face to face with Topper and Rafe. Both were dressed like asshole frat boys, black helmets in their hands. You knew they both rode motorcycles, only adding to their ego. Last time you had seen Rafe, he had broken into your home and now, although you were scared, you were more angry. Although, in that moment when you were hiding with JJ, you never thought of punching him but now you did. The blood rushed to your face, thinking of grabbing the nearest hammer in your cart and using it.

“Hi.” You glumly said, watching as Kie stood beside you, defiant just like you.

“Where’s my sister?” Rafe asked, stepping closer to you and Kie.

You shrugged. “Off with her boyfriend.”

You could hear Topper scoff from beside Rafe. “That thing is still going on?”

You felt a surge of confidence, wanting to defend Sarah. “Hi Topper. Still jealous?” Topper glared at you, saying nothing. You both knew he was but he wasn’t about to admit that to you. You looked back to Rafe, your eyes narrowed. “What do you want from her?”

Rafe chuckled, glancing at Kie and rolling his eyes. “We know you idiots stole money from Barry.”

You frowned, pretending to be oblivious. You were not about to rat out JJ, even if you were on a break. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Topper scoffed again, this time speaking. “What are you guys doing with these Pogues anyways?”

You glared at Topper. “Maybe because they don’t dress as if they’re frat boys from the early 2000s.”

Kie chuckled from beside you, mumbling a thank you. Topper only rolled his eyes, crossing his arms over his chest. Topper was not quick witted enough to have a good comeback so he stayed quiet, looking to Rafe.

“What’s this I hear about you and Maybank?” Rafe asks, stepping closer to you. Topper stayed put, knowing the both of you were about to have an uncomfortable conversation.

You shrugged, trying not to show how the mention of JJ hurt you. “Why do you care?”

Rafe scoffed, shaking his head in disbelief. “Because a few weeks ago you were my girlfriend and now you’re with some nobody.”

This time you scoffed. “For a nobody, you sure are interested.” You pause for a moment and, without allowing Raf to rebuttal, you spoke again. “I’d like my key back.”

Rafe’s brows contorted in confusion but then shot up in surprise. You could see he was trying to control how he reacted but your comment had surprised him so much that he seemed flabbergasted. “How -”

“How did I know you were sneaking into my house like a stalker?” You cut him off, watching as his face turned bright red. Topper seemed just as shocked as him, clearly not knowing that Rafe was sneaking into your house. “I just do. Leave the key on my porch.”

You heard Kie giggle from beside you. You looked at her and smiled. She was the first to turn around and you followed after her, not bothering to look back at Rafe and Topper, both of whom remained quiet since you spoke. When you both were far enough away, Kie was the first to speak.

“What the hell Y/N?” Kie chuckled, pushing the cart into the next aisle.

You pointed forward, finally spotting the pulleys laying on the shelf in all their glory. “I didn’t know I had that in me.”

You were right; you had no idea. But you were slowly realizing, with the help of your new friends, that you were capable of more than you thought.

Once all of your items were paid for, you took the liberty of driving back to the Wreck. Pope had said by the time you and Kiara drove back, he would probably already be there. He didn’t think it would take long to convince his dad to use his equipment, even if it was for one night. Pope had promised the two of you that it would be, in his words, ‘easy as pie.’ All Pope had to do was tell a small lie; a seemingly easy thing for a teenager to do. Yet, as you parked beside the Wreck, Kie pointed out what you already suspected.

“He’s not here.”

You nodded, not bothering to unbuckle your seatbelt. There was no point to exit Kie’s car if Pope wasn’t here yet. Kie followed you, not moving to unbuckle her seatbelt either. “Should we go see if he’s still with his dad?”

Kie shrugged, watching the Wreck through her window. “Probably.”

You smiled, putting her car in reverse. “So much for ‘easy as pie.’” You chided, glancing at Kie and watching her smirk.

As you drive to Mr. Heyward’s dock, a place Kie said he usually was at, Kie and you stayed silent. It wasn’t an awkward silence like the ones you shared with her before. Now that she was friends with Sarah again, you both felt at ease with each other. As you drove, your mind wandered to JJ. You really tried not to think about him but every time you tried to divert your mind somewhere else, it went straight back to him. It was almost as if your brain was trying to tell you to confront your feelings head on. That was the last thing you wanted to do.

As much as you hated it, your mind went to a certain memory. The midsummer festival where you finally got to know JJ. You remembered how you felt that night. That night, you weren’t sure what it was let alone describe it but now you knew. Enchantment. You were completely enchanted to meet him. He was never your first choice for a boyfriend but the more you got to know him, the more you realized he was the only choice that mattered. He was more than anyone gave him credit for. So many people in Figure 8 saw him as a womanizing blonde with an ego the size of Russia, but he was more than that. He was caring. He cared so deeply about his friends, taking the fall so that Pope’s future wouldn’t be threatened. He was patient. He understood my caution and didn’t rush me. He seemed to care too much about what people thought of him, even if he would never admit it. He cared if Kie or Pope were upset with him. He cared that people saw you both as a weird couple since he was a Pogue and you were a Kook. JJ Maybank had more heart than anyone on OBX and you were so glad you gave him a chance. But now, it might be all gone because of JJ’s father. He had put that doubt in JJ’s mind and you could only hope JJ would soon realize he didn’t need to protect you from himself.

“You okay?” Kie asked, breaking you away from your thoughts.

You pulled the car over, making sure the car was properly parked before you answered. “Yeah. Just distracted.”

Kie nodded. “I know you have a lot in your mind.” She started, waiting until you were both out of the car before she continued. When you met back up in front of her car, she spoke. “We’ll see JJ in a few hours.”

You don’t say anything, only looking across the boardwalk. You knew what Mr. Heyward’s boat looked like, seeing JJ and Pope drive it on the ocean a few times. Although you had trouble spotting Pope and his dad, Kie spotted them right away. In moments, she pointed to the left side of the dock. You followed her finger, your eyes finally landing on Pope and his dad who seemed to be in an awkward conversation.

“Should we wait?” You cautiously asked, watching as she didn’t even answer your question and instead walked past you and towards Pope and his dad. You shrugged, following Kie even though you were sure intervening in Pope’s conversation with his father would only bring agony.

The closer you got to Pope and his father, the more you were able to listen to their conversation. At first, it was all mumbles but when you were six feet away from them, you could hear the confusion in Mr. Heyward’s voice.

“No way Pope.” He grumbled, loading bags onto his boat.

“Hi Mr. Heyward.” Kie spoke politely as she approached the two men.

Mr. Heyward glanced towards Kie and smiled. At first, he did not see you but the second you did you wish he hadn’t. His face instantly fell and he scrambled to wipe his hands on his pants. He seemed a little flustered and you were embarrassed because you knew why. Your father regularly picked up groceries from the trips Mr. Heyward went on all over OBX. Your dad spent a lot of money on Mr. Heyward’s groceries so you knew Mr. Heyward was confused as to why you were with Kie. You were even more embarrassed when he extended his hand, a polite smile on his face. To be kind, you shook it briefly.

“Hello Mr. Heyward.” You finally said, watching as a confused look crossed over both Pope and Kie’s face.

“Hello Y/N. What can I do for you?” He smiles, looking at Pope.

Pope shrugged, glancing at you. “She’s hanging out with us dad.”

Mr. Heyward frowned, scratching his head. “I see. I didn’t know you were friends.”

Pope frowned. “She’s dating JJ.”

Mr. Heyward looked even more confused, almost startled. You got this a lot. In the weeks since you started dating JJ, you had told a total of two people including your mom and dad. They had the exact same reaction as Mr. Heyward. Although they were confused as to why you would date a Pogue, they dare not say anything to you. As long you were happy, they didn’t dare to voice their opinion. It didn’t help that their faces scrunched up like they just bit into a lemon every time you mentioned JJ though.

“I see.” Mr. Heyward said cautiously, trying not to show his surprise but failing. “Now, Pope has told me that you plan to help him with his project for his scholarship and you need some materials. Is that true?”

You nod sweetly, glancing at Pope who was biting his nails. You wanted to roll your eyes. If he was acting that anxious as he lied to his dad, no wonder Mr. Heyward was so suspicious. “Yes sir.”

Mr. Heyward nodded at you and then looked at Kie who had the same fake smile on her face. “That true Kiara?”

Kie nodded nonchalantly, clearly better at lying than Pope. You figured anyone else was better at lying than Pope. “Yep.”

Mr. Heyward’s eyes narrowed, not entirely believing you all but deciding to do so anyway. “Fine, get it and go.”

Pope laughed, clapping his hands together. “Ah, thanks dad.”

You bid Mr. Heyward a polite farewell; you and Kie sweetly smiled until you both turned around. Pope followed slowly behind you, dragging the harnesses and helmets in a brown sack. As you all walked, he tried to call after you and Kie but you both ignored him. When you guys finally approached Kie's car, you were the first to turn around and watch as Pope continued to drag the sack behind you. After minutes of watching him struggle, he approached the both of you, his breath heaving.

“Thanks for the help.” He grumbled, throwing the sack onto the floor in front of Kie who was now slowly turning around. You could tell she desperately wanted to laugh at Pope and she was trying so hard to control herself.

“If you knew how to lie, we wouldn’t be here.” You teased, a smirk adorned across your lips.

Finally, Kie let out a breathy laugh and soon you joined in. Both you and Kie could no longer control yourself and soon you were both laughing hysterically at Pope. At first, he was not smiling but the longer you both laughed, the bigger his smile became. Soon enough, all three of you began to laugh together as if you hadn’t been lying two minutes ago.

In that moment, you never felt closer to Kie and Pope.

After the eventful afternoon you, Kie and Pope had, you all decided to head back to the Wreck for some food. You had promised each other that it would only be for an hour at the most. You had wanted to go back to John B.’s house where you knew JJ would be and you wanted to try and talk to him one last time. Unfortunately, you lost track of time and before you knew it, Kie was on her fifth story and this time it was about how she was almost bitten by a shark. The sun was setting and you had been there for hours, laughing and talking as your new friends entertained you.

“I swear!” Kie yelled, placing her hand over her heart.

You shook your head, indignant. “No way.”

Pope nodded along with you. “You might think you can fool Y/N, but I know that never happened.”

Kie chuckled, taking a sip from her glass that was half full of her third glass of lemonade. “I swear to you guys. That shark almost bit me. Got away within an inch of my life.”

You and Pope looked at each other and dramatically rolled your eyes. You spoke first, teasing Kie. “Are there even sharks in Figure 8?”

Pope nodded, pointing at you. “Y/N’s right. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shark in Figure 8.”

Kie shrugged, taking a bite out of a french fry before speaking. “Well, it might’ve not been a shark -”

“I knew it!” Pope interrupted. Kie gasped at his interruption and threw the half eaten french fry at him.

“Well it definitely looked like a shark!” Kie defended herself, reaching for another french fry.

You shook your head, laughing under your breath. As Pope and Kie lightly argued about Kie’s fabrication, you looked over your shoulder and watched as the sun set. The sky was a huey purple tonight with a hint of orange. You loved the sunsets in Figure 8.They seemed so peaceful and serene, something the other side of OBX rarely displayed. Although technically the other side of OBX was supposed to show people the lap of luxury, the atmosphere showed a different side. Yes, everyone was rich but they were also very unhappy. You envied Kie and Pope, although you would never tell them. You knew that they would laugh and ask you what there was to be jealous of when you lived in such a beautiful house. Although that may be true, your home never felt as cozy and warm as the places here. Here, there seemed to be a true sense of family. Neighbours seemed to look out for one another while in your neighbourhood, you weren’t sure if you ever met your neighbours.

“Hey,” Kie called out to you softly, touching your shoulder.

You shook your head slightly, trying to break away from your thoughts to listen to what she had to say. “Yeah?”

“Let’s go see JJ.” Kie gave you a polite smile, almost trying to comfort you. You knew it was because JJ was still a sensitive subject.

Surprisingly, you didn’t protest. As much as you wanted to stay here for a little longer, you knew that you would have to talk to JJ eventually. Besides, when you all met up to get the gold tomorrow, you knew you had to talk to him then. He was unavoidable so you decided might as well get it over with. Kie decided it was best for her to drive to John B.’s house. Pope was a terrible driver and she could tell you were way too nervous to stay focused right now. You wished that it wasn’t true but you knew Kie was right. Even as Kie drove, your mind was in a million different places and you realized Kie was right in not allowing you to drive. Another thing you had to thank her for.

The sun had fully set and now was dark, making the drive to John B.’s house a little more risky. Thankfully Kie had made it there in one piece. You thought your heart would beat out of your chest as Kie parked in John B.’s driveway. With a deep breath, you opened the passenger side door and climbed out. Pope, Kie and you all congregated near the trunk of Kie’s car and started to whisper to each other. You weren’t exactly sure why you all were whispering but you didn’t bother to question it.

“Where are we putting everything?” Kie asked, peering over the trunk and looking at all of the equipment they had successfully retrieved.

“Sh.” Pope shushed Kie, only upsetting her.

“Excuse me?” She whipped her head around to Pope, glaring at him.

At first, you were going to give Pope an earful but then you heard it too and you found yourself shushing Kie as well. “Shh.”

Kie looked puzzled as you shushed her but when everything went quiet, she heard it as well. It was bubbles. The noise a machine would make when it was producing bubbles. You peered over the side of John B.’s house and found a trail of lights leading to the backyard. You didn’t know who was there but whoever was there, but it sounded as if they were in a hot tub.You didn’t know if John B. had money but you were sure he couldn’t afford a hot tub.

“What’s that?” Pope whispered, looking in the direction you were looking in only moments before.

Before anyone could give him an answer, Kie ran forward and towards the sound. Apprehensive, you ran alongside her while Pope was the last one to run. As he trailed behind, both you and Kie got closer to John B.’s backyard and, soon enough, entered his backyard. What you saw stunned you.

“What did you do JJ?” Pope asked first, standing in front of his friend.

JJ was, in all his glory, sitting inside a hot tub. With small lights dangling above his head, he relaxed in a newly bought hot tub. It was the largest hot tub you had ever seen, bigger than the ones at pools. JJ had placed floaties shaped as swans and flamingos inside the hot tub along with floating glasses filled to the brim with champagne. He had a shit eating grin on his face but hid his eyes behind glasses. When you all stood in front of him, he finally slid his glasses down the bridge of his nose and smirked as he observed each and every one of you. When his eyes gotto you, you could instantly see how drunk he was.

He chuckled, looking at Pope. “I got a jet going straight to my butt right now.” Pope sighed, JJ’s response not really answering his original question. Just as he was about to speak again, JJ did instead. “Y’all should get in immediately. Ya hear?” JJ slurred his words, pouring himself another glass of champagne. He thought out a pathetic ‘salut’ before gulping down the glass of champagne.

You stood there dumbfounded.You had been to parties where JJ was shit faced but he never was like this. He was aggressive all the other times you had seen him drunk but now he just seemed pitiful.

Pope looked like he was about to have an aneurysm. “How much did this cost?”

JJ grabbed the entire bottle and chugged it before responding. “Uh, well, with the generator, the petrol and, oh hey, express delivery,” he started, pretending to calculate the amount in his mind. You watched as Kie’s shoulders dropped and her head tilted back in despair. He had used so much of that money. Your hands went to your mouth, hanging off every word and hoping that he hadn’t spent all of it. “Pretty much all of it. Yeah.”

Pope’s mouth hung open as did Kie’s. You refused to react, still in total shock. “All of it?” Pope angrily said back to JJ, confirming his worst fears.

JJ smirked, avoiding eye contact with you. “Yeah, all of it.” He almost seemed proud.

“You spent all the money in one day?” Pope said in disbelief, clasping his hands together.

JJ nodded, his head bouncing back and forth. He was hammered and everyone knew it. “Yeah. Burned a hole right through my pocket. But I mean, like, c’mon guys, like, look at this? Finest in jet based massage therapy. That’s what they told me.”

You looked to Kie but she was staring at JJ, her mouth still hung wide open. JJ seemed to notice her facial expression the same time you did because he turned his attention to her. “Kie what? Can’t a man have a little luxury in life? C’mon,” JJ asked, his tone shifting to anger. He took off his glasses before he continued. “All this scrimping and scraping, I mean guys, you only live once. Right?”

“JJ -” You said, the emotion evident in your tone. His cheek was black and blue along with his right eye. The beating he received in the morning was now turning to nasty bruises.

“Stop!” JJ looked at you and yelled. “You always get what you want. Am I not allowed to get the one thing I want? Enough of this emotional shit, get in the cat’s ass.”

Kie finally spoke, her voice just above a whisper. “The what?”

JJ smiled at his joke, which made no sense to any of you. “The cat’s ass. That’s what I named her.” He stopped for a minute but then his eyes lit up again and he reached over the hot tub and grabbed something. “Oh, hey yo, I almost forgot.” He pushed a button and suddenly, a disco ball that hung from a strung above him turned on and water started sputtering out from all sides of the hot tub. “Huh? Yeah, that’s right, disco mode.”

“Are you kidding me?” Pope began to lecture, the most angry you had ever seen him. “You could’ve paid for restitution.”

“Or literally given it to any charity!” Kie butted in, just as angry as Pope was.

“Or better yet, you could’ve helped us buy some of the supplies to get the rest of the gold out of the well!” Pope added, pointing to the truck that had all of your supplies.

JJ rubbed the bridge of his nose, clearly distraught over Kie and Pope’s anger. “Ok! Well you know what?” JJ yelled over the sound of the jets, finally standing up. You gasped as you saw his abdomen but he continued to speak. “I didn’t do that! I got a hot tub!”

“Oh my god, JJ.” You whimpered, stepping forward to get a better look. If you had thought his face was badly bruised, his abdomen was a thousand times worse. There were nasty black and blue splotches all of his stomach where his father had punched him. You knew his father had gotten some good punches in but you never thought they would be this bad.

“For my friends. A hot tub for my friends. You know what? Screw friends. I got it for my family.” JJ softly said the last part, almost as if he felt weak. He looked to you finally and you saw the emotion in his eyes. “I got it for my girl.”

“JJ, I -” Kie started to say, all of the anger suddenly gone from her face and was replaced with worry.

“Look what I did.” JJ said, turning around in one spot and looking at the entirety of the hot tub. “Look what I did for you. Alright? Look at this.”

You looked to Kie as JJ’s back was turned to you and you saw her eyes brim with tears. As if she could read your mind, she looked at you and you both started to cry together. As the tears rolled down your face, JJ turned back around.

“JJ…” Kie started again, a tear sliding down her face.

“No, stop.” JJ held his hand out, pleading with her to stop crying. “Stop being emotional, it’s fine.” But it wasn’t. The second he reassured Kie it was fine, he looked down to the water and you watched as JJ himself started to cry.

You couldn’t watch this anymore. Without allowing JJ to have time to push you away, you climbed into the hot tub and lunged at him, hugging him as tightly as you could. He instantly hugged you back, forgetting about the last day and weeping into your shoulder. Kie was right behind you and hugged him on the other side. Pope was after Kie and before long, you were all hugging each other.

“I can’t take him anymore!” JJ cried into your shoulder, leaning against you.

You stroked his hair and tried to comfort him the best you could. Kie and Pope helped you, patting him on the back and hugging him tight. No one spoke as JJ cried, not exactly knowing what to say. You stayed there for what seemed like hours. It was enough time for the jets to turn off automatically and then the only noise was JJ’s weeping. He weeped for a long time but no one stopped hugging him. You wouldn’t let yourself let go. You couldn’t let go. He was in so much pain and he had always tried to cover it up the best he could but now all his walls are crumbling. Finally, he seemed to calm down and stop crying. When you were sure he was calm enough, you all let go of him. Pope was the first one to exit the hot tub and Kie was the second. Finally, you and JJ exited together. Kie ran to her car to grab a towel to dry JJ off as you and Pope guided him to the hammock near the water. When Kie returned with the towel, you silently thanked her and wrapped it around JJ. It seemed like ages before anyone spoke. You, along with Pope and Kie, had I idea what to say to JJ. There seemed to be nothing good enough to say so, for a very long time, you all said nothing.

Finally, JJ spoke. “I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for.” Kie said, looking at you.

You, Kie and Pope looked at him, almost surprised JJ was apologizing. Kie sat on the ground in front of JJ as you sat beside him and Pope stood beside Kie.

“I do.” JJ mumbled, his voice hoarse. “I spent that money when I should’ve never stolen it in the first place.”

You rubbed JJ's arm, consoling him gently. “It’s okay. Besides, I like the hot tub better.”

Everyone seemed to smile as you joked. Even JJ gave you a small smile. As the giggled died down, it became quiet between all of you again. This type of quiet, you had never experienced. It was almost as if there was so much to discuss, everyone just decided it was better not to say anything.

Finally, JJ spoke. “I’m kinda tired. Can we all just go to sleep and start all over again tomorrow?”

You looked to Kie and Pope who were already nodding. When you looked back to JJ, he was only looking at you. You nodded along with Kie and Pope. Although you still wanted to talk toJJ about what happened, you knew he deserved to rest.

As you all got situated for the night; Kie bringing blankets from John B.’s house to his backyard and Pope draining the hot tub, you couldn’t shake the feeling that this was not over.

You had not lay your head down for more than five minutes before you were woken by the sound of someone rustling around. Your eyes flew open, not at all tired. Although your day was tiring, you couldn’t sleep. There was too much on your mind. You sat up from your place laying on the blanket and looked around to see where JJ was. He was no longer beside you. Your heart dropped.Your mind instantly went to the worst case scenario as you imagined where JJ could be.

You got up from your place on the floor and made your way inside John B.’s house, where you hoped JJ would be. The second you entered his home, you saw a light in his kitchen on and smiled. Your heart relaxed a little. You knew you couldn’t completely relax until you knew where JJ was. As you made your way down the hall, you kept your eyes out for any noise signalling where JJ could be. Finally, you heard a sigh coming from the last room on the right hand side of the hallway. Slowly, you opened the door to see a quiet JJ sitting on the edge of John B.’s bed with a book in his hands.

“JJ?” You whispered, trying not to startle him.

JJ looks to you and weakly smiles, closing the book in front of him and placing it on John B.’s nightstand. “Hey.”

You move across the room slowly and sit beside him, reaching out to hold his hand. “How are you?”

JJ shrugged. “I’m tired but I can’t seem to sleep. Does that even make sense?”

You smile, nodding at him. “Yes.” You both stay quiet for a moment but soon your curiosity has peaked and you need to know the answer to a question you have. “What’s that?” You ask, pointing to the book JJ had put on the nightstand.

JJ smiles when he sees what you’re pointing at. It’s almost as if there is a memory tied to that book and you start to think there is. “JB’s journal.” JJ answers, watching as you smirk, surprised at the answer.

“Didn’t know John B. journaled.” You admitted, glancing at the book again before looking back at JJ.

JJ nodded, grabbing your legs and letting them drape across his. “Not anymore. Kid gave up after two weeks.There’s only a couple entries before he dad went missing and they talk about our stupid antics.”

You raise your brows, nodding happily. “I’m very familiar with those.”

JJ smirked, reaching up to cup your face. “Speaking of stupid,” he started, sighing a little before continuing. “I’m sorry for what happened this morning. I let my dad -”

“JJ,” You cut him off, not allowing him to apologize. “You don’t need to.”

“No,” JJ argued, now both of his hands cupping your face. “I do. I let my dad get into my head and ruin things for me.”

“But JJ, what you put up with is far too much.” You argue right back, making JJ smile at your stubbornness. “I want you to know you can come to me.”

JJ nodded, letting go of your face and standing up, your legs falling back beside the bed. JJ extended his hand out to help you up and you gladly reached out even though you didn’t need his help getting up. When you were standing, JJ did not let go of your hand and instead guided you out of John B.’s room and down the hall.

“JJ,” You whispered, letting him lead the way because you truly had no idea where you were going. “Where are we going?”

Suddenly JJ stopped and opened another door to another room. With only a smile on his face, he nudged you inside and followed behind you. When you realized what room you were in,you couldn’t help the smile on your face. You were in a closet. The deja vu hit you like a ton of bricks.

“Y/N…” JJ whispered, getting your attention.

When you looked at him, he leaned forward and captured your lips in his. At first, you were taken aback and didn’t react but you quickly recovered and kissed him back. You thought back to the word you used to describe how JJ made you feel; enchanted. It was like the first time all over again. It was always like the first time with JJ. You wondered, years from now, if the kisses would feel the same. You knew they would because it was different with JJ.

Finally, when you pulled apart, JJ spoke. “I love you so much it hurts.”

You smile wide, your arms wrapping around his neck. “I can’t explain how much I love you.”

JJ smiled just as wide and you and pulled you close.He smelled wonderful. He smelled like home. “Promise me, no matter what, we’re gonna be together.”

You nodded confidently. “No matter what.”

You both were not aware of the future and what it would bring. You didn’t know of the things John B. would find out in the morning on his boat ride with Ward. You didn’t know about what you all would have to do for John B. tomorrow, including evading the police. But even if you did know, your promise would have never changed. Because in the end, it was always going to be you and JJ.

The End.

taglist; @teamnick @dolanfivsosxox @obxrush @bellakellyrose03 @belledutchess @sexualparkour @lueurglow @itsriasblog @maries110911 @ebonyyyy-e @tangledinsparkles @sarahsmaybank @91912512 @ssjiara @amarachoren @haute-shawn @blog-hannahnicole @xlittlemissydjx

#jj maybank #jj x reader #jj x y/n #obx #obx rp #jj obx #john b routledge #outer banks #kiara outer banks #kiara carrera #pope outer banks #pope heyward #jj outer banks

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chogiwrites · 3 years

Text

Haunted|| BBH

CW: Gonna keep it 100, if zombie dick isn’t your thing then don’t read. Happy Halloween.

Word count: 1.6k

Fluff/Angst/Smut/Horror. Sort of.

Accompanying song: Love Song by The Cure.

I’m not going to lie, I proofread by using Microsoft’s ‘Read Aloud’ option and now every time I read ‘Baekhyun’ I hear it as ‘Bake-Hi-Yun’. It’s really sad. ~

“I’ve missed you.” Baekhyun pouts as he stands by the foot of your bed. “Did you know this?”

He tilts his head and undoes the last button on his blouse with an “Ahhh,”

Baekhyun smiles suggestively as it falls to the ground with a slight thump. Stalking closer, he works to undo the tie. “Have you been faithful to me, babe?”

You’ve learned to pretend the smell of rotting flesh does not bother you. You shift beneath perfect, white sheets.

“You better have been. I might be mince meat, but my dick’s still fully functional.” He scoffs, before kicking out of his slacks. “Anyhow...”

He leans over and rests his cheek against the valley of your breasts with a delighted hum, especially as you reach out to tousle his hair. Baekhyun’s smile is so bright, you’d never guess he died five years ago.

“How’s your year been? I missed you. Did I say that yet?”

“You did.” You nod before sitting up on your elbows. “It’s every other thing that you say, actually.”

Baekhyun nods pensively with a jut out lip. “Ah, well. I’ve missed you~” He sings.

You nearly smile at his cuteness. Nearly. You shift and his forehead lands on the swell of your belly.

Baekhyun nuzzles you with a giggle.

“And you wore the nightdress I like! I knew you wanted me.”

“Of course I want you, Baekhyun.” You reply, hoarse and emotional, touching his cold cheek with the pad of your thumb.

Baekhyun’s tongue darts out to give your fingertip a lick. His spit is cold and slimy. You shiver. He pouts. You push your thumb further past his lips so that he doesn’t feel unwanted. Baekhyun’s dead, not emotionless.

Baekhyun smiles and moves up on his knees. “I’ve missed you too.” Though you’re hesitant, you’re sincere. Baekhyun knows this so he closes his eyes and smiles wider.

He begins to roll the sheets down your thighs, letting the cold and his skin bite you as your undressed bits hit the air.

“I probably miss you more than you miss me. I’m awake all year, you’re asleep for most of it. Do you know what that’s like, Baek?”

“Nope!” He replies simply, before pushing his head up the hem of your nightdress and popping back out the neck hole. “Hiii...” His grin is goofy.

“Hi.” You reply with your own, more conservative, smile.

You shiver, teeth clattering as Baekhyun wraps himself around you. “Baby, you’re so warm.” He breathes, knees hitting against your sides as he straddles your lap. Your body works overtime to warm you both back up to the standard 36.6.

With trembling arms, you hold Baekhyun like a vice.

“It’s kinda turning me on, actually.” He giggles, voice going husky as he gracelessly peels the thin fabric away from you both, leaving it discarded somewhere only the rats know to look. Fuck it. It doesn’t matter anyway. Baekhyun slides his boxers off with all the primness of a virginal school girl before licking his top lip. You laugh again.

You hold him until his body is purring and red. He squirms between your legs, something like a newborn, or maybe an earthworm. “My lips too, baby.” He breathes, displaying his perfect mouth, marred only by its blueish tint.

“Of course, how could I forget that?” Your muse with a small murmur before leaning in to rectify this too. The warmth against his cold lips make him sigh, shoulders relaxing in your touch.

It was only two Octobers ago that you worked up the courage to place your mouth on his. You know you’re going to have an upset stomach the next morning but for now, it’s well worth it. Baekhyun tastes like nothing, maybe a little sour. If he finds out that every time he kisses you, you get sick, he’d probably cry and forbid you from ever kissing him again. The thought makes you smile grimly.

It’s not just Baekhyun’s mouth though, having sex with him will undoubtedly lead to disgusting, putrid infections. Boils, abscesses. Rank, agonizing and painful. You are not equipped to handle your dead lover.

So, you lie. You lie to Baekhyun, who can’t stay for November first even if that’s what he wants. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him and you welcome the way he rots you as proof this encounter isn’t just grief-fuelled mania.

His delicate fingers reach out to cup your jaw as he slides his tongue past your lips. It curls, like a snake, against yours as your fingers reach out to grope his chest. Baekhyun pushes himself into your hands with a coo. He’s weak against you, keening when you lean down to wrap your tongue around a taut nipple.

He was a lot brattier in life. Now, he’s so hypothermic that every touch is a blessing. You miss his demanding nature but you’d be lying if you said the way he’s become so docile isn’t charming in its own right. Your lips trail up his pec, to his prominent collarbones, then, you nestle into the curve of his long, slim neck and attack the skin there. “You know what else is cold?”

With an exasperated laugh, you grapple his shaft and warm it up in your soft hands. He bucks into your palms with a moan and leans back on the pillows.

“I’m sorry I’m gross.” He breathes. “You’re right. Seduction isn’t your strong suit, Baek.”

He rolls his eyes at you but takes the flattery. “So I’m not a nasty fuck?”

“No, you are. You get pretty perverted quick.” You respond with the same stupid voice. Baekhyun huffs before slapping your fingers away from his flesh.

“Fine then!” He raises his chin indignantly. “Ride me.”

You raise an eyebrow at him. “Come on. Giddy up.”

You brace a hand against his thigh before mounting him. Baekhyun winces at the heat radiating between your legs. “Baby, I don’t think you can take it.” You coo, touching his cheek. With a growl, he grabs you by the hips and slams you down on him.

And then Baekhyun screams.

He screams so loudly that you scramble off of him. Baekhyun doesn’t allow you, he wraps his arms around your lower half and pushes his face deep into your chest.

His shoulders tremble as if he’s crying. “Baekhyun!” You shout, your teasing turning into panic. “Baekhyun, if it hurts then pull out!”

He shakes his head and ruts against you. You bite your lip as you feel him move. Beneath your palm, his stomach is a concave plane. With his body wracked by tremors, he finally speaks. “So. Fucking. Hot.”

“B—”

“What are you waiting for? Next year?” He snaps. Hesitantly, you lift up before sinking back down.

Baekhyun falls back with a groan, teeth digging so deep into his bottom lip that it splits around him, drawing thick, black blood. You stop again.

“No. Keep going.” He begs, taking a sharp inhale, his thumb pressing into your hipbone. So, you do, and his mouth falls open, eyes rolling back as he takes it. “Fuck!” Baekhyun’s voice raises an octave. “That’s it!”

He claws at your skin in desperation. “Baby, I need more. Faster! Fuck me faster!” His hips rise to meet with your movements.

The sounds that slip through his ruined lips are guttural and dirty. You reach down to wipe the coagulated mess and, deciding that you can’t give him the intensity he needs, Baekhyun flips you over so that you’re between him and the mattress.

His pace is harsh and unrelenting, skin against skin as he somehow finds a way to push places he’s never been before. It ruins you, rots you, destroys you. His kiss tastes of old blood and he cums inside of you with a bruising thrust, before pushing his fingers inside of you when you don’t reach the same end.

It squelches— the sounds of his nails pushing his seed further and further into your body. You tremble, cry and then collapse in finality. Afterwards, Baekhyun doesn’t whisper how good you are, he doesn’t tell you you’re a good girl for taking it as rough and dirty as he needed. He lies there spent with a set jaw because any sex, even bad sex, is still sex.

You take it upon yourself to place the blanket over your bodies. “Post coital tristesse?” You offer and he nods with a faraway look to his eyes. “‘Course.” He shrugs.

His fingers touch yours. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For being me. For not letting you move on. For a lot of things. I’m dead. We need to stop pretending that I’m not.” You shake your head.

“Maybe I don’t want to move on. Maybe I don’t want anybody else.” Baekhyun sighs and laughs, a hollow, dry sound. “I’m just sayi—”

“Who was it who asked if I was faithful and told me that I better be? Where is this energy, Baekhyun? I’m in this for life. I will always love you. I will always be faithful to you. Stop telling me how I should feel.” You flip onto your back and stare at the ceiling, your throat pregnant with emotion.

His lips touch your shoulder. “Of course...” He mumbles in resignation. You are too stubborn to argue, and Baekhyun is too weak to go back to sleep when he wakes up in his coffin once a year.

“Thank you.” “For what?” You scoff.

“For loving me.” He replies, voice small. You turn around and see that there are tears in his eyes.

“Even though I left you here all by yourself. You still love me and I don’t deserve it.” His gaze avoids yours.

“It was an accident.” You comfort, hand on his wrist. “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know it would happen. No one could’ve known.” Baekhyun shakes his head with another defeated laugh. “Just tell me about your year.”

“Baek—” “Do it. In as much detail as possible. I want to feel like I’ve lived it with you.”

You want to espouse a line about how he did, just in his heart and-or in his own way, but you think it would just make Baekhyun feel worse.

Taking a deep breath, you begin from November first of last year.

Baekhyun finally smiles again whilst listening to your antics. He relives it with you well into the night.

When you fall asleep, it’s because he sings to you and the next morning, you wake up with a stinging fever and swelling.

Despite yourself, you wrap your arms around your burning wounds, and crawl into the empty space Baekhyun once lay. You savour the pain as proof of his visit, praying the hurt lasts until the next year, if not kill you altogether.

#baekhyun #Exo #exo beakhyun #exo x reader #baekhyun x you #baekhyun x reader #exo imagines

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yan-purgatory · 4 years

Text

Ensnared

Request: Yandere! Jungkook: his S/O trying to break up with him and him going psycho mode lmao 😔

Admin: ღ

Pairing: Jungkook x reader

Word Count: 1.4k

Why don’t you go and show Mommy what you got?” Hearing the scurrying of feet and her husband’s voice softened (Y/N)’s heart. Jungkook had said he’d take their child out for the day, and by the excited babble of the infant it had been a pleasant trip.

“Mommy, mommy look at this!” (Y/N) turned around to see her family at the entrance to the kitchen. Her son was clutching something in his fists, which upon further inspection (Y/N) realised with horror that it was dead hare.

“We got it for you!” Daehyun thrust the dead mammal towards his mother with a toothy grin, only pausing when he saw the ghostly look on her face.

“Go to your room, Daehyun.” (Y/N) said, with a low voice.

“B-but…!” The infant looked to his father, who gently took the animal from his sons hands and pushed him in the direction of the doorframe.

“Wait for Daddy upstairs, Daehyun.” Jungkook said firmly, smiling unfazed.

As soon as their son was out of earshot, (Y/N) snapped.

“What the hell did you do?”

“I took him hunting.” Jungkook replied nonchalantly.

“You gave our five-year old son a shotgun? What on earth is wrong with you?” (Y/N) was aghast.

“I didn’t give him the gun, he just watched.” Her husband scoffed. “But he has to learn the ways of a man at some point.”

“You can’t turn our son into a murderer.” (Y/N) had hoped when she found out that she was pregnant that Jungkook would settle. That his violent ways would end to be a better role model for his son. But his intentions were clearly the opposite.

“I’m proud of him. I just want the best for our family. You want that too, right?” He pressed a kiss to her lips, smiling softly as if nothing was wrong.

~ ღ ~

(Y/N) resolved that getting away was of the utmost importance. Staying around would only corrupt her son’s mind, and whilst she could bear her husband’s love and company, she didn’t want Daehyun to fall under Jungkook’s spell.

Thus she made discreet plans with an old friend of the family, someone who could be trusted, to take them in for a few weeks until they sorted a way out. It did hurt (Y/N) to give up on the marriage she’d committed to for so long, but thinking about her son covered in blood, just like his father, was enough to ease any disbelief.

The date had been set. That day, Jungkook left early in the morning, barely having time to kiss his wife before rushing out the door. But (Y/N) knew that her husband was a smart man, and surely she’d be caught if she was too hasty. Rather, she spent the morning with Daehyun, packing his books into his backpack and putting some of his clothes into a duffel bag she also filled with a small amount of her own. She couldn’t bear to take anything else, not with the sentimentality attached to all of Jungkook’s gifts; if she so much as touched them, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to leave.

When the clock hit quarter past two, she tugged Daehyun’s coat onto his arms and gave him his backpack, explaining that they were going to go on a special trip to see their uncle. With her son content, she started to lead him out of the side exit, knowing that the front exit had a security feed going to Jungkook’s laptop, whereas sneaking out through the garden would be less detectable.

But she made a crucial mistake when she stepped out of that door.

The sharp pain that shot through (Y/N)’s leg was almost as agonising as the birth that had sparked her desire for help. She looked down, wincing at the grisly sight of her ankle ensnared in the teeth of a bear trap sat menacingly by the gate, just waiting to catch someone. She cursed herself for not checking the premises before making her move, but it was not the right time for regrets. Protecting Daehyun from Jungkook’s influence was her priority.

“Listen, Daehyun, y-you need to find u-uncle Jin. H-he’s waiting b-by the back of the garden and you can leave with him in the car, go to him o-okay?” (Y/N) spoke rapidly, pushing her son towards the

“Mommy, are you okay?” Her heart broke seeing the worried look in his chubby face and knowing it was the last time she would see it, but her resolve to protect him had been made and she would carry it to the bitter end.

“I-I’m fine, go find uncle Jin and I’ll see you soon.” It hurt to lie, and it hurt even more to see her son leave but it was for the greater good. (Y/N) would endure this pain forever to protect him, that much she knew.

For the long hours of the night, (Y/N) could do nothing but wait for her fate. She couldn’t move, not wanting the trap to get any tighter. All that there was to do was to wait for Jungkook to let her out so she could face the consequences of her actions.

However, she quickly realised that leaving her to wait was Jungkook’s sadistic intent. Because as she shivered the bitter winter air, she started to resent her son for dooming her to this torture. If he’d never existed then maybe leaving wouldn’t have required so much preparation, if he’d never existed then Jungkook’s power over her would dramatically decline. But her love kept her heart warm, all the way up until she heard the distant sound of a motor, and saw the headlights through the light evening fog, drawing into the drive.

(Y/N) couldn’t bear to look up, only knowing how her husband was approaching by the crunching of gravel, until his shoes came into her blurry field of vision.

“Quite the predicament you’re in, my love.” Jungkook crouched, reaching out to rub his thumb over her cold cheek, before picking up the duffel bag next to her in a taunting move. “I’ll go find the tools.”

(Y/N) couldn’t help but let out a small whimper, not just out pain but fear. Fear that whatever punishment awaited her outside of the trap was much worse.

Jungkook took his time searching for the clamps. He wished that he could have stayed there to listen to his wife’s sweet noises, even take advantage of her compromised situation but he wanted to give her a glimmer of hope, just so he would be able to snatch it away.

“I didn’t think I would have to do this.” (Y/N) jumped at his voice, having zoned out the keep her mind off the numbing cold.

“I thought that I would come home from a grueling day at work to find my adoring family waiting for me at home. And what do I find?”

Jungkook’s fingers found their way to (Y/N)’s ankle wound and his nails started to dig into the flesh, causing her to cry out in pain.

“My son is gone and my wife is bleeding alone in the cold. I guess I was right to think so lowly of my family. I should have known you’d be stupid enough to try and leave me.” He spat, his grip tightening. “I saw those texts on your phone but I didn’t think you’d follow through on it. Silly girl.”

“You’re a monster. Daehyun doesn’t deserve a father like you.” (Y/N) whimpered at the pain.

“You think Jin would be better?” Jungkook growled in jealousy. “The bastard will be dead by the morning, mark my words. Then our son will be back where he belongs, and hopefully you will have learnt your lesson.”

He stood up and turned on his heel, walking away from the hopelessly injured animal begging for his mercy.

“Wait! Jungkook! Please don’t leave me here!” (Y/N) wailed after him. She wanted to leave him, but she certainly didn’t want to die from exposure at his hands.

He returned a few minutes later, a soft blanket in his arms. With a delicacy foreign to the barbaric situation, he draped the warm material around his wife’s shoulders, before pressing a kiss to her forehead.

“You can wait outside until Daehyun comes home. Don’t worry, you won’t die from this.”

Jungkook withdrew his car keys from his pocket, smirking.

“You can just sit here and think about how hopeless it is to try leaving until I return with our son.”

#yandere kpop #kpop yandere #yandere au #yandere #yandere requests #yandere jungkook #yandere bts #bts yandere #yandere x reader #yandere jungkook x reader #bts jungkook #yandere bts au

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crossedwithblue · 3 years

Note

tbh i had forgot the katara as jane i just remembered the zuko being stupid haha the post being ss well makes it great (i suppose they mean the narrative function of being the support and a contrast with lizzy. but yeah comparing her to katara who has such strong independence and standing up values sounds '???')

I read a lot zutara mainly because katara and aang getting together was always super uncomfortable to me

i am always here for Dumbass Zuko headcanons lmao. however I did unfollow that blog just the other day because while I love their art (give me allllllllll the accurately drawn PoC. if you draw PoC (or white people for that matter) as button-nosed instagram girls with dark skin and make no effort to learn how to actually draw different types of facial features i will come to your house and make you eat your wacom tablet and draw my giant nose and square jaw with pen and paper until you get it Right, there are enough resources about this and i am tired) I didn’t love their hot takes which I obviously did not want to say in the tags on their post but idk,,, I was getting this really bitter vibe from their meta, idk how else to explain it. I can understand being bitter about aspects of media you like and of course people are perfectly entitled to their opinions and headcanons, but I just don’t want that bitterness on my dash lol, I come to tumblr to shitpost and look at pretty pictures. and their opinions on zuko were definitely part of it bc they felt really unfair to me and the Pride and Prejudice post is def an example of something where I was just like ??? this makes perfect sense until I actually think about it at all?? why are you being mean to zuko for no apparent reason????? is it.... because he’s the only major character from the nation that is most similar to white colonising cultures, even though he’s doing the work to a) be aware of the colonising mentality he’s internalised and work on it and b) as the ruler of said nation, flag up and eradicate this mentality from his own country, which is evidenced by the FN’s policy of non-intervention in Korra (I think the almost-going-to-war plot in the comics was absolute bullshit by the way, like not its existence but just it not really being examined in that sense)? I am 100% here to examine those aspects of ATLA and again, I totally understand being bitter about them, but it just tires me out in a website I consider a leisure space

I do need to find more atla blogs to follow now, recs would be fab if you have any :)

oh yeah i basically dont ship any of the endgame ships (in ATLA, as you may guess from my header being Korrasami lol) because as i have said before, nobody needs to find their One True Love at the age of 13 lmao (i do kinda ship Suki/Sokka because they are a little older (still kids by our standards but most probably near adulthood by their own, if not actually adults in the full sense, and yes I do think cultural context matters when ascribing adulthood to people outside the modern West no matter what ‘you’re a baby until you turn 18 and then why don’t you instatnly have a job and a mortgage’ internet culture says) and their relationship is just so cute and feels really healthy to me idk we were Robbed of enough Suki screentime, we should have got more Suki and also she should have had her character explored a Lot more than Cool Ninja Feminist Gal) (also, witness the nested brackets, they are here)

I think a lot of people have issues with Zutara (and presumably by extension Zukka? though I haven’t seen this discussed as much or like. at all) because of the issues associated with essentially the heir to a colonizing empire which has decimated the culture of the indigenous-coded woman he’s being shipped with (im sure you’ve also seen those discussions if you’ve spent like. any time at all in ATLA fandom lol) which I... kinda have mixed feelings about, I’ve seen fics where it is definintely completely ignored and done really really badly but I have also seen fics where that conflict is a really essential theme and that’s been quite interesting (would recommend Southern Lights on AO3 if ou haven’t come across it before as a good example of that though it is very long and currently being updated (pretty regularly)). I feel like I’m too removed from that part of intercultural conflict that I have the right to comment on it, though I’ve definitely faced shades of those issues in the past, but I also feel like it’s potentially an example fo knee-jerk Tumblr purity culture to just say its Bad And Wrong so idk I’m conflicted.

In the politics of the world, I just don’t see how Katara being Fire Lady (ugh that’s a phrase that always makes me laugh, and not in a kind way), which is probs the most comon Zutara fic plot, would have Worked in any sense at all, and I definitely think she would have wanted to stay at he South Pole and rebuild her culture and bring bending back to them (as we see in the comics and obvs with her being Korra’s waterbending master iirc) and I can see Zuko wanting to help with that in whatever way possible because he rightly sees that as a really important part of the reparations owed by the Fire Nation. and obviously by the end of the series they were very good friends and definitely had better chemistry than fricking Kataang but yeah those reasons are basically why I don’t love Zutara but don’t necessarily hate it either

this was another ramble, not apologising for it this time because this is just what talking to me is like. I am very here for bringing back letter-writing because it lets me ramble to my heart’s content but also it would take up All My Time

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taetaesbaebaepsae · 4 years

Text

The Other Shore

A/n: This is a sequel to Hellfire, which is a sequel to Pomegranate Seeds, and this all takes place in the Brimstone Universe

Summary: Things have been different since Taemin left, and Jungkook just wants to help.

Warnings: WOW listen this is pure filth you have been warned, some angst, poly relationships, Bisexual Jungkook, Bisexual Taemin, Succubus!reader, threesomes (mmf), cum eating, oral sex (f. receiving, m. receiving), choking, dom/sub undertones, sub!JK, dom!Taemin

Word Count: 3299

Things are different, after Taemin.

It isn't as if the sex is different, Jungkook is more than happy to learn everything about your body, could spend days with his mouth on your heated skin, but you're different.

You're sad.

You don't say it, but sometimes he catches you humming to yourself, a melody he's never heard, and when he asks you about it you just give him this smile that doesn't quite reach your eyes.

"It's something someone used to sing to me. A long time ago."

He doesn't push you, but he can't help thinking about it, remembering how your eyes had rolled back in your head when Taemin fucked you and it makes his stomach hurt, some weird combination of jealousy and lust.

Jungkook thinks about it so much he starts dreaming about it, about how happy you could be with Taemin, about how your smile would reach your eyes again and he wakes up with tears drying on his cheeks.

"Do you miss him?" He asks you one night, hiding his face in your neck while he spoons you, taking comfort in all your soft curves but he clamps his forearm across your waist so you can't turn to look at him.

"Kook-"

"It's okay if you do," he says quietly, and you don't answer, just wrestle around to bury your face in his chest.

"I love you," you say, fierce although broken with tears and muffled by his shirt, and he knows you mean it.

It doesn't mean you're happy, though, and he knows that too.

It doesn't help that you won't talk about it, you just shut down when he asks you, go stiff anytime he mentions Taemin's name.

When you get a summer job and leave for a few hours each day, Jungkook starts doing research.

He reads a lot about demon lore, or at least he tries, but the books he really needs, about summoning, are all in Latin and it isn't exactly like he can ask you.

Luckily, he has a friend who married a witch, so he's able to get some good translations.

Jungkook's not at all sure it will work, worried that all he'll end up doing is burning the house down, but fuck it there's burned circles in the carpet already from you popping up from hell.

He takes a deep breath, sitting cross-legged in his living room, bare-chested with a goat's blood pentagram painted on his skin, white candles lit on the floor, and starts the spell.

It's a lot quicker than he expected, a moment after he completes the spell in halting Latin, Taemin appears in a burning circle, and promptly falls over, knocking over the candles and making Jungkook squeal and jump up to put out the flames.

"Shit, shit, I'm sorry, are you-" he crouches down to look at Taemin, lying facedown on the carpet. "Are you drunk?"

"No more than usual," Taemin mutters, voice muffled by the carpet.

Jungkook heaves him up and Taemin was slight before, but it seems like he's too light when Jungkook helps him to the couch, as if he's lost weight in the month since he'd disappeared.

Taemin blinks at him when he's finally (mostly) upright as if he's just now recognizing him.

He groans. "Not you."

Jungkook flushes a little. "Needed to talk to you. It's about Y/n."

Taemin's eyes flash and he stiffens. "What's happened? Is she all right?"

"No, no, she's…. she's fine. Physically. But I...I think she's sad, hyung."

Taemin scoffs, running a hand over his face. "If you can't satisfy her, it isn't my job to help you, human."

Jungkook huffs out a frustrated breath. "No, not that, hyung. She...she misses you."

Taemin blinks at him again, and he picks at his wrinkled shirt, looking away from Jungkook. "She...she does?"

His voice goes all soft, devoid of bravado and disdain, and Jungkook feels suddenly miserable.

"You love her, yeah?"

Taemin looks up at him again, dark eyes bright with something Jungkook can't name. Taemin clears his throat. "Doesn't matter."

"It does matter!" Jungkook cries, sitting on the coffee table in front of him, but withering s bit when Taemin gives him a sharp look. "It does matter. I want her to be happy. She'd be happier with you, you gotta...you gotta convince her to go back with you, to marry you-" Jungkook's voice cracks a little, and he's fighting back tears.

Taemin's mouth twists in a bitter smile. "Don't you think if I thought that would work, I'd have done it years ago? I'd get down on my knees and beg if I thought-" He stops, draws a shaky breath.

"What do I do then, hyung? She loves you. She loves you and she loves me too and she's just so sad all the time." Jungkook feels his lip trembling and he hangs his head.

Taemin is quiet for a moment, and then he stands, steadying himself on the arm of the couch. "She doesn't love me, human. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a 1000 year bottle of Scotch calling my name."

"So what, you're just gonna go back to hell and drink yourself to death? Leave her here to mourn you? She's sad and you're obviously a mess-"

Taemin turns, eyes flashing at Jungkook's impertinence. "Watch your mouth, human."

Jungkook stands, taller than the demon, clenching his fists. "She does love you. I know it."

"She gave up an eternity as a demon princess for you, you stupid human. I didn't give her up so that you can let her be upset-"

"Then help me!" Jungkook lowers his voice. "Help me make her happy. If she loves us both…" Jungkook swallows. "Why can't she have us both?"

Taemin raises a groomed eyebrow. "What are you suggesting, mortal?"

Jungkook feels the blood rush to his face. How did he do that? How did he switch on a dime from being scary and intimidating to...to...sexy?

"I-I...we can...we can share."

"You and I? Or me and Persephone?" Taemin croons, voice like velvet, and Jungkook chokes on air.

"E-either. B-both," he stutters.

Jungkook can't look at him, he's half-hard in his sweats just thinking about it and why does Taemin's burnt cinnamon smell go right to his cock anyway, it's clearly some kind of demon aphrodisiac…

Taemin puts a slender finger under Jungkook's chin and lifts his head.

"That what you want, mortal? To be our little pet?"

Jungkook wonders if it's possible to die from all the blood leaving your brain to your genitals.

He swallows, throat dry. "Y-yes."

"Just to make her happy?"

"I'd do anything to make her happy," he says, earnestly, but then he swallows. "But...but not just because of that. Before, when we-when all three of us-" he can't say it, just thinking about that night makes his brain short circuit.

Taemin laughs, a real one, and it's like honey.

"Oh, baby. Don't hurt yourself."

Jungkook's knees go a little weak when Taemin calls him "baby," and he sits down on the couch.

"We'll talk to Persephone," Taemin promises, and Jungkook nods dumbly.

"She'll be home in an hour."

Taemin looks down at himself. "In that case, can I use your shower?"

Jungkook almost stumbles over the coffee table to go and get Taemin a towel, and he realizes too late, half an hour later, that he needs a shower too, stinks of animal blood.

Taemin has the door open and that burnt cinnamon smell just gets stronger as he washes the alcohol away and Jungkook disappears into the guest bathroom to wash up, fighting the urge to reach down his sweats and palm his aching cock.

Jungkook is on the couch, trying to think about anything unsexy, when Taemin comes through the living room with a towel slung low on his hips.

Jungkook tries to look everywhere but at the lithe lines of his body.

He's already sat out a pair of his smaller sweats and a t-shirt, hoping it wouldn't completely swallow the leaner man.

When Taemin drops the towel and dresses right in front of him, Jungkook can't help squeaking a bit in the back of his throat.

Taemin laughs, that honey sound melting over him, and Jungkook feels the tips of his ears going red.

"You know, I might actually be looking forward to this. Such a sensitive little pet."

Jungkook's dick twitches in his sweats and he wants to yell.

"D-don't say things like that."

Jungkook doesn't notice Taemin sliding up next to him until he feels his long fingers in his hair, and a sharp tug, making Jungkook grunt.

Taemin looks down at his exposed throat, almost hungry, and Jungkook's mouth goes dry.

"Don't tell me what to do, boy." Taemin spits out, and what weird kink had Jungkook developed that Taemin's disgusted tone only makes him harder?

Jungkook hears your key in the lock and he whimpers quietly when Taemin releases his hair.

Your feet stutter when you see Taemin, and Jungkook feels like he shouldn't watch, like this reunion is something sacred and private, but he's fascinated by the raw look on Taemin's face, how your eyes fill instantly with tears.

It isn't like he expects, you don't run to him, he doesn't sweep you up into his arms, but Jungkook thinks maybe this hurts more, your hand tucking a strand of damp hair behind Taemin's ears.

"You smell like firewhiskey," you say, softly.

"I've spent a month drinking it, it's probably seeping out of my pores," Taemin admits, but the smile that ghosts across his full lips is so much softer than the twisted smirk he'd had earlier.

"You idiot," you mutter, just as softly, and put your head on his chest.

Taemin lets out a shaky breath, one hand trembling as it strokes your hair. "I missed you, Persephone."

Jungkook feels adrift, as if he should leave, as if he's watching something forbidden, and his chest aches and of course it'd be like this, of course he'd be obsolete, he doesn't know how he ever thought-

But then you lift your head, give him a withering stare, and his breath stops in his throat.

"Jeon Jungkook, what did you do?"

He doesn't know what to say, and he's grateful when Taemin answers for him.

"He summoned me."

"Wh-why?" Your eyes dart between Jungkook and Taemin, catching your bottom lip between your teeth.

"You've been so sad, Y/n. I thought...I thought he could make you happy."

You're shaking your head, slipping out of Taemin's arms to stalk over to Jungkook, poking a finger into his chest.

"I told you, you make me happy."

"He thought we could make you happy together," Taemin offers, and Jungkook nods gratefully.

"Together? You don't mean-"

You glance at Taemin and his smirk turns wicked again. "He wants to be our pet, Persephone. Isn't that sweet?"

You look torn for a moment, but then your lips twitch up at the corners, almost a replica of Taemin's smirk.

"He is sweet," you croon, trailing your fingers along Jungkook's bare collarbone.

Jungkook feels his skin heat under your touch, it's been hours and he's been so worked up and anxious that his hips twitch involuntarily.

Taemin strides over to stand at your side and you look for all the world like the demon royalty you were meant to be, a king and queen looking down fondly at their subject and Jungkook wants it, wants it so bad saliva fills his mouth. He doesn't know what he's going to say until he says it.

"I'll be good," he whispers. "I'll be so good."

"Aw, baby. You're always good," you coo, and your hands in his hair make him whine.

"Please touch me," he pleads, but it's Taemin's long fingers sliding down his spine and Jungkook shivers.

You place both hands on his chest and then Taemin's wicked mouth is sucking marks onto his neck and it's all too much, Jungkook feels like just the feeling of your hands at his waistband is enough to make him come apart.

It's you who tugs down his sweats and underwear but the fingers curling around his aching cock are longer, nimbler, and Jungkook's hips buck forward.

He feels unsteady, heady and lightheaded with the mix of your cherry scent and Taemin's scorched cinnamon, and he whines again.

"Fuck. Fuck." Taemin's fingers are dancing along the underside of his cock and it's surely illegal to feel this good.

When you go down on your knees in front of him, smiling up at him, he surely would've fallen if not for Taemin bracing him against his chest. He's surprisingly firm and strong, for all his slight frame and your mouth and Taemin's handwork together as if they were meant to and Jungkook is babbling and pleading, head thrown back against Taemin's shoulder.

"Feels so good, please, I'm gonna cum, gonna fill up that pretty mouth-"

Taemin's fingers are suddenly a vice around the base of his cock and the orgasm that had been building in his belly halts.

"No," he whispers, almost mournfully, and he hears you giggle around him.

"Thought you were gonna be our good pet, human. You didn't ask permission." Taemin's honeyed voice sends a chill of pleasure down his spine and his hips jerk.

"Please, please, oh, fuck, I'll be good, I'll be so good if you just let me-"

Taemin's other hand moves around his throat, squeezing gently, and Jungkook gasps.

"Tell him the safeword, Persephone." Taemin says, almost a growl.

You pop off of him, a string of saliva spreading from your bottom lip to the tip of his cock that makes Jungkook groan.

"Brimstone," you chirp, and Jungkook can feel Taemin smiling against his throat.

"Good girl."

Jungkook doesn't remember getting into the bedroom, he can't think, everything in him just straining and begging for release, but then Taemin is sitting up, back against the headboard and you look almost giddy, climbing up on top of him like a throne.

You face Jungkook and Taemin spears into you like it's a perfect fit and all Jungkook can do is stare dumbly as Taemin spreads your thighs wide, displaying your glistening, swollen cunt.

Taemin's eyes are on him, that sinful mouth of his twisted in a smirk. He crooks two long fingers.

"Come on, baby. What are you waiting for?"

"In-Instruction," Jungkook stutters out, and the low chuckle that comes out of Taemin's throat makes his belly flood with heat.

"Good boy."

The praise sends an ache through his cock but Jungkook ignores it, climbs up on the bed and Taemin has one hand around your throat, long fingers on your pulse and when Jungkook slides up between your thighs Taemin lifts his knees on either side of you to give him space.

The movement causes you to bounce on Taemin's cock and you moan, long and low.

"You like that, my princess? Want our pet to lick that pretty cunt of yours while I fuck you?"

You let out another moan and Jungkook notices that Taemin's fingers are looser around your throat, almost caressing.

He fills his heart swell, he thought he'd be jealous but instead he just wants it all for you, wants you to have Taemin's love and his both because you're so good and perfect and beautiful.

"I love you," Jungkook whispers, and your fingers thread softly in his hair.

"I love you, too, Persephone. Missed you so much," Taemin murmurs against your skin, and Jungkook flattens his tongue to press it against your clit, the taste of cherries and cinnamon and sex blooming on his tongue.

Jungkook ruts against the sheets and he knows he's leaving stains of his precum but he can't bring himself to care, moaning against you, and you're nearly keening, bouncing on Taemin's cock while rocking your hips forward to meet Jungkook's tongue.

Taemin is rocking up beneath you and there's not much precision to be had, you're riding Jungkook's face, and fuck, it feels good to be used, make him wonder if he can cum just from rolling his hips into the mattress.

"Gonna cum for us, baby? We like to spoil our princess, right Jungkookie?" Taemin's voice brings him back, and he breathes out of his nose, trying to focus.

"Hold her for me, human," Taemin barks, but his voice is hoarse with need and Jungkook grabs hold of your hips, tight, as Taemin jerks up beneath you with a fluidity that doesn't seem human.

You're crying out, pleading, "Taemin, Jungkook, please, please," and Jungkook swears he can smell it, like burst cherries under his nose, when you cum.

"Ah, ah, Persephone, my princess…" Taemin's groans are almost musical.

"Roll over, baby," you gasp, and Jungkook obeys immediately, feeling drunk and heady with all the demon pheromones in the air.

Then you lower yourself down on his face, trembling, and you taste unbelievable, cherries and cinnamon scorched together like the sweetest wine and Jungkook puts both hands on your ass to spread you, lick your still pulsing cunt clean.

"Do you want to cum, pet?" Taemin's fingers are tapping along his inner thighs and Jungkook has to take a breath against your thigh before he answers, his hips nearly bucking off the bed.

"Please, please, hyung, I've been good."

"So good, baby," you murmur, and your fingers tease at his nipples and Jungkook wants to be good, he really does, but his balls have drawn tight and his hips are rolling in the air.

This is so much worse than those seeds, he can't fucking think, he just needs to cum so badly he might explode.

Taemin's forearm clamps down over Jungkook's abdomen, he's so strong to be so slight, and Jungkook moans against your clit.

He cries out when he feels your small thumb collecting precum from the tip of his cock, sliding it down his length and Taemin's nimble fingers caressing his balls, which have drawn uptight.

"C-can I?" He stutters, whimpering when you move off him and he blinks when he sees Taemin's wicked smile between his legs. When Taemin kitten licks just the tip of Jungkook's swollen cock, his orgasm hits him like a freight train, and you kiss him hard, biting at his lip, and all the world is made of pleasure and relief.

He doesn't know if he blacks out or if everything just moves fast after that but before he knows it you're dragging a cool cloth against his belly to clean him.

"Sorry," he mumbles, so tired he can barely hold his eyelids open. "I tried not to, baby, I tried to be good…"

You coo at him, planting kisses all along his jawline, the bridge of his nose.

"You did so good, baby."

"We've had demon pets who didn't do half as well," Taemin remarks, and Jungkook flushes a deep pink when Taemin kisses him almost chastely on the lips.

Jungkook starts a bit, half asleep. "You... you've had other pets?" He knows his words are slurred, eyes keep drifting shut.

"Not like you, baby," you assure him, brushing his sweaty hair back from his face, and Jungkook falls into a dreamless sleep.

🔥🔥🔥

It goes as smoothly as one could have expected, becoming a pet to two demons.

Jungkook struggles a bit at first with the extra pheromones when you and Taemin are away, down in hell, dealing with your father, and the first time you're gone more than a few hours he feels like he might burn alive with lust, but he's able to handle it after a few weeks.

There's lots of new positions to try and things to discover, but his favorite part is having you wrapped in both their arms, your bright smile in the mornings when you wake up cuddled between them.

#jungkook x reader #taemin x reader #jungkook x reader x taemin #brimstone universe #ksmut club #3k words #jungkook smut #taemin smut #bts smut #shinee smut

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agrestenoir · 5 years

Text

what’s written in the stars

Fandom: Miraculous Ladybug Pairing: Adrien/Marinette Rating: M Summary: Marinette doesn’t know what deity she pissed off to be cursed to love a time traveler.

“I think we are one of those couples with a long story to tell when people ask how we found each other. Because I will see her every now and then, and maybe one year, she’ll be with a different me, and the next year, I’ll be with a different her. And it’s gonna take a long time, but then it’ll be perfect. I’m in no rush.”

When Marinette is twenty-years-old, she meets Adrien for the first time.

He’s behind the counter at the coffee shop, an apron wrapped around his waist as he takes an order from the customer at the register, and looking younger than she’s ever seen him. Her mind draws a blank as she rushes forward, pushes to the front of the line, and grabs ahold of his wrist before he can pull away.

“Hello,” she says with a bright smile.

He stares at her in confusion, quirking an eyebrow high. “Hi?”

There’s a moment of silence between them, the span of a handful of heartbeats, and then she’s leaning closer. “Do you… Do you know who I am?”

“I’m sorry?” Adrien shakes his head and starts to pull away. “You have the wrong person.”

“I love you,” she tells him suddenly, expression imploring. “Please don’t go.”

“Oh?” A smile stretches across his face, and heavy-lidded eyes turn her inside out. “Tell me more.”

It’s nothing new, but it’s a face she recognizes from those years he was tentative and unsure, when Early Adrien had no idea how to talk to women. Even though it has the power to make her heart throb, bruised and bleeding in her chest, she knows there’s no truth behind it. Not here, not in this time.

Adrien is eighteen and full of the charm and charisma that tears her apart, something that squirms under her skin like a live wire, and something she doesn’t miss. But it’s still Adrien, the person she loves with her whole being, and she’ll take him no matter what age. (Even if he’s still that rascal sort who thinks flirty eyes and sharp smirks are all girls want, and then they’ll leave him alone.)

“Over coffee,” she says. “Preferably when you’re not working.” She thinks back to what he told her way back when, tries to remember what time he gets off again. “Tonight, maybe seven?”

He smiles, and Marinette’s heart picks up its pace.

This is how it all starts.

It actually starts when Marinette is six and picking flowers in the park across the street, when an older man steps out from behind the old willow tree with an easy smile and kind eyes. He’s holding a pink lily, petals wet with morning dew, and offers it to her.

“Someone told me this is your favorite flower,” he says when her little hand brushes his. “But I think blue poppies are better.”

Marinette manages an indignant huff. “Blue flowers are stupid.”

The man merely chuckles, shaking his head. “Maybe, maybe.” He stretches out his hand for her to shake. “My name’s Adrien. Do you mind if I stay here for a little bit and look at flowers with you?”

Little Marinette hesitates for a moment, her parents’ voices echoing through her head about strangers and caution, but this man looks at her with that smile, and it’s like she’s known him for her entire life. A part of her recognizing him instantly.

“Sure. I’m Marinette,” she murmurs in response, and the rest, they say, is history.

“So you’re my girlfriend, and you know I time travel,” Adrien says incredulously over the rim of his coffee cup, like he doesn’t know which concept is more unbelievable. “How long has this been going on exactly?”

“You’ve been with me my whole life,” she tells him with a smile. Marinette reaches out and grabs his free hand in the center of the table, intertwining their fingers together. “You’ve come more frequently in the last five years though. I think it’s because it’s closer to when you first met me.”

“This is still a lot to take in.” Adrien shakes his head, still dumbfounded. “It’s not every day that some pretty stranger comes up to me at work and tells me that she knows my deepest secret, that we’re apparently dating, and that she knows all about my future.”

“Our future,” she corrects. “You’ve known mine my whole life, so I kind of like being on the other side of things.”

Adrien leans back in his chair and crosses his arms against his chest. “So you’re telling me that someday soon, I’m going to start traveling back in some random girl’s timeline?”

“It’s not random,” Marinette presses and nudges his ankle with her toe. “It’s never been random.”

“Trust me, it is, bugaboo, because I’d remember if I ever saw a pretty girl like you—” he begins, eyes lingering on the ladybug earrings she’s currently wearing, the nickname slipping out as easy as breathing.

She kicks him hard enough to make him choke. “It isn’t.” Anger burns low and hot in the pit of her stomach, and she remembers how stupid Early Adrien was, still learning how to function without the mask he portrays to random girls who accost him in coffee shops.

“I just don’t understand how this is supposed to work,” he tells her honestly.

“You once told me it’s like gravity: that big events pull you in.” She shrugs helplessly. “That’s how it is for me too. The more important something or someone is, the more I travel to them.”

“Wait.” Adrien’s eyes flash wildly. “You time travel too?”

A laugh falls from her lips and into the space between them. “You think I’m from this time?” Adrien tightens his grip on her hand as the truth crashes over him. “I travel too, but only to you.”

“Why?”

“What can I say?” Marinette smiles, eyes glimmering. “Big events pull me in, and you were mine.”

“I don’t think we’ve ever been the same age,” Marinette tells him, when she is eighteen and he is eighteen. “It’s different.”

“What’s the oldest you’ve seen me?” he asks as they amble down the snow-slick sidewalks towards the Italian café near Marinette’s university. Adrien is fresh from his spring semester while Marinette is in the middle of her fall, her workload already increasing as she prepares for her finals. He carries her bag over his shoulder while she buttons up her jacket.

Marinette bites her bottom lip in thought. “I think… twenty-eight maybe?”

“That’s… a long time,” he muses. “I do this for over a decade?”

“I’ve been doing it for longer,” she tells him with a sharp smirk. “Better catch up, darling.”

Adrien laughs, shoulders shaking. “And how long have you been traveling?”

“I started when I was ten.”

“And you only go to my future?”

“Your future, a different reality, a parallel universe.” She sighs and buries her face in the worn knit scarf. “We’ve never really figured out what it is. Time travel or universe hopping or something else. Nothing really needed a label. We don’t even know if we’re in the same timeline.”

Adrien thinks about that for a long while. “So I could be in my sixties when you’re born. Or you could be long dead right now.”

“Or I could be in a completely different reality,” she says softly. “There’s an infinite number of them you know: ones that are completely different, others only slightly. One where we took a left instead of a right, where I studied forensics instead of fashion. You just never know.”

Adrien whistles low. “Wow. You’ve thought a lot about this.”

Marinette presses her lips into a thin line. “I’ve spent most of my life waiting for you. I’ve had time.”

Marinette is twenty-one and sitting with a twenty-three-year-old Adrien on a rooftop in the grassy hills of England somewhere. There’s a B&B belonging to a friend of his from London that he likes to visit a few times during the summer when he’s on break from school.

“So you ever been here before?” he asks her as he takes a sip of the cinnamon whiskey he’s taken up to the roof with them. “Little bit different than New York, I presume.”

She leans back on her hands, crosses her legs, and tosses her head back to stare up at the night sky. In the distance, the moon bobs above the waves. It’s definitely not like the city.

“Once,” she tells him and thinks back to when she was twelve and walking down the hallway of her home, only to suddenly find herself in a meadow in England with Adrien laying on a picnic blanket. It’d only been for a moment, where she managed a short wave, and was thrust back into her own timeline. “But it was nothing like this.”

“It’s really something, isn’t it?” He hands her the bottle of whiskey, and she takes a quick sip, wincing as the bitter taste burns her throat. “Don’t get a view like this back home.”

Marinette’s eyes rest on him, trim and toned body laid out across the roof, all long legs and pale skin. “You definitely don’t,” she tells him, probably a little tipsy but far past caring.

Adrien can feel her gaze on him and takes the bottle from her hands, tossing back a shot and choking it down to give himself an excuse for his burning cheeks. Shoulders shaking, Marinette laughs and leans forward to press a kiss to his cheek, to the tip of his nose, and then to his lips.

He smiles into the kiss. “You’re the best view I’ve ever seen.” He pulls away and rests his forehead against hers, breathing heavily. “I wish I could see you every minute of every day.”

Marinette sucks on her bottom lip and pushes Adrien backwards until she can lay across his chest. She can hear his heartbeat through the thin fabric of his shirt, the steady pitter-patter that reminds her that he’s real and he’s here. Sometimes she thinks she’ll wake up one day and this will all be a dream—time travel, Adrien, and their love—but then she jumps again, and he’s there, right where he should be.

“I wish I could wake up next to you every day,” she tells him softly. He cards his fingers through her tangled-curls, and tears prickle in the corner of her eyes. “I love you so much.”

She tries to quell the fears bubbling up inside her, her heart beating against her ribcage like a wild animal wanting to get out. What if this is all their life is—waking up alone with the ghost of the other in their bed—and they never get the chance to make something real out of it? What if the time traveling stops, and she never sees Adrien again after this moment? What if this is all they have?”

“I graduate next week,” she says. “Can you come?”

He looks at her sadly. “I’ll try,” he tells her and presses a kiss to the top of her head. “I always do.”

Sometimes that’s all they can do.

Marinette can’t remember when she first fell in love with Adrien.

He’s always been a part of her life—since the moment in the park to the last night they spent together in her apartment in the middle of New York. All she knows is that she’s loved him for as long as she’s known him, which is basically forever at this point. At twenty-four, you’d think she’d know better than to love a person she can never keep.

But that’s a lesson Marinette’s been trying to learn for nearly twenty years to no avail.

“Do you ever wonder if this is the last time we’ll see each other?” Marinette asks him on the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday in a mess of sheets and skin, wrapped in his arms as a storm brews outside.

Adrien at twenty-seven simply shrugs like he has no care in the world and holds her tighter. “I don’t have time to worry. I’ve been traveling my whole life, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that I have to value my time in the present.”

“But is this my present or yours?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says and presses a kiss to her crown. “All that matters is that you’re here, and so am I, and that we’re together.”

One time, when she’s twenty-two and visiting home, she goes to London and tries to look for Adrien.

She doesn’t find anything and heads back to Paris, too broken-hearted to think.

“Can I kiss you?” Adrien asks while they stand in the pouring rain, when she’s seventeen and he’s nineteen. “Or is that too weird?”

There’s no proper response as Marinette throws her arms around his neck and pulls him close. She kisses him then, and it’s wet and messy, maybe from the rain, who really knows, but it’s wonderful and beautiful because it’s something they’ve both been waiting for. When they pull away, both are gasping for breath.

Marinette laughs, giggles spilling into the space between them, as she rests her damp head against his soaked shirt. “God… I’ve been wanting to do that since I was fourteen.”

A shiver goes down his spine. “You’ve loved me for a long time.”

“You’ve just…” Her voice trails off as she struggles to find the words. “You’ve always been there. I don’t think… I ever had choice not to.”

“Do you ever regret that?” he asks.

Marinette shakes her head. “Never.”

Marinette doesn’t love Adrien just because the universe told her too, but rather because he’s ingrained himself in every part of her life. While the concept of him has always seemed impossible, he makes himself known in little ways that matter, sometimes just to prove he exists, and others just to make her happy. It’s these things that make her fall for him.

When she has her first fashion show, he’s standing in the crowd with a noise maker he’d snagged from the convenience store down the way, getting chased out by security when he uses the damn thing. When she’s drowning in finals during her freshman year at a university in New York, away from home for the first time, he comes with an energy drink and study guide to keep her company. During her graduation, he’s seated front row away from the rest of her family, blowing her a kiss and mouthing “I love you!” for her eyes alone.

It’s every afternoon in the park pressing flowers between the pages of one of her father’s old dictionaries. It’s poking each other with foils between Adrien’s fencing matches when he’s sweaty and anxious and she’s there to calm him down. It’s hours spent over designs as she finalizes the pieces before the presentation for the spring collection. It’s her at fifteen teaching him at twenty to skip rocks on the Seine only for him to turn around at twenty-four and teach seven-year-old Marinette the same thing.

It’s all these things and more—the way he comes to the big moments in her life, the way she makes things big moments in his.

Marinette wonders sometimes how she got so lucky to have someone who’s always there, and even when he disappears, there’s the burning hope he’ll come back. How he always keeps his promises. How he’s her constant support. How he never fails to make her smile. How his kindness shines through in everything he does. How soft and tender he is when she’s a little girl. How much he loves her and fights for her in the present.

Marinette may not know when she fell in love with Adrien, but she definitely knows why.

The first time Marinette time travels, she’s ten and afraid.

She’s skipping down the street to head home from the park as the sun burns low on the horizon, and suddenly it’s daybreak and she’s in the middle of an auditorium full of loud voices, flashing lights, and lots of people. She doesn’t know when she is—let alone where—but before she can panic, there’s hands on her shoulders and a man kneeling in front of her.

“Marinette?” Adrien whispers, green eyes like the trees, soft and kind.

“W-Where am I?” she presses as tears trek down her cheeks. “I was going home, a-and then I—” She snaps her eyes shut as a sob bubbles up from her chest. “I w-want to go home.”

Her gaze skitters to the people around her, wearing weird clothing and weird hair and weird shoes with weird voices and weird phones, and she doesn’t know if she’s thirty years in the past or thirty years in the future. It only makes her press closet to Adrien and wrap her arms around his neck, holding on tightly as her whole body shakes, because he has a habit of disappearing when she doesn’t want him to, and she won’t let him go now.

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” He rubs a hand down her back to comfort her. “You’re fine, you’re safe, I promise.”

“What happened?” she whimpers.

Adrien looks at her, twenty-one and quiet, and simply smiles. “You time traveled.”

Marinette is twenty-six when she travels onto a balcony in the middle of the city in Paris, attached to an unknown apartment in the uptown district. It’s a quaint complex with a sloping roof and white brick, maple trees bending gracefully over the street below. The late morning sunlight filters through the leaves and a spring breeze filters past.

Cocking her head to the side, she ambles towards the window of the apartment, trying to make sense of where she is. In all her travels, she’s never been here before and Adrien has never told her about it.

She peers through a window with white-trim and catches sight of movement inside. Hesitation has never been her strong suite, especially when she’s traveling, as she never knows how much time she has to do what she needs to do. Usually Adrien is somewhere close, but something about this time feels different.

The window shows a dining table where two people sit—a man with a red hat and thick-rimmed glasses and another woman with dark hair pulled into a high bun. They’re both sipping from coffee mugs and pondering over open catalogs strewn across the table in front of them. The man says something that causes the woman to shake with laughter as she scoots her chair back and makes a move to stand.

As she turns to the side, Marinette lets a gasp fall from her lips.

She recognizes the woman as herself—laugh lines etched into her face, hair piled into messy curls, and belly swollen with child.

A single tear trails down her cheek as she continues to stare, speechless and shocked, at the older Marinette who’s happy and with a man other than Adrien. Her hands are shaking as they clench the fabric of her shirt in tight fists, heart thundering like it’s going to break through her ribs, the world tilting on its axis as reality crashes over her.

She’s pregnant. He’s not Adrien.

She doesn’t want this. She’s never wanted this. Her whole life—it’s only ever been Adrien.

There’s a pull within her, the universe trying to take her back, but she fights it even as her world falls apart. She needs to see more, get her answers to questions she hasn’t even formed yet, has to learn how to change this future because she doesn’t want it.

As everything begins to fade and she finds herself between one time and the next, the older Marinette turns around and stares out the window, catching her gaze before she can fully disappear. The Marinette inside only presses her lips into a thin smile and raises her hand in goodbye, the silver ring on her finger glinting under the kitchen light.

“It’s okay,” she mouths to her. “It’s gonna be okay.”

Marinette doesn’t like to think about all this ending.

If she has her way, they’ll keep jumping in and out of each other’s lives forever. It’s not much of a life together, but it’s theirs, and damn it, that matters to her. She’d spend the rest of her life being a ghost in his, the figure found in all his photographs, the voice on his answering machine when he’s out and she can’t bother him, the memory that he goes back for when he needs to.

Marinette would do it all if it means she gets to keep him.

She wonders what Adrien thinks. She knows he loves her, but the question is… is it enough?

For her, it always has been.

“What’re you doing?” Adrien asks her at twenty-seven, breathless and smiling between her kisses.

She’s twenty-six and desperate, convinced she’s just seen the end, where she’s thirty-something with a family of her own and no Adrien in sight. It makes her hungry for what she has now, and she wants to lose herself in it just to hide from the bubble future and what it has in store for them.

It’s funny, she thinks to herself. I’ve never been scared of the future before.

Inside her bedroom, she pulls him down by the collar of his shirt and crushes her lips to his, wet and hard with teeth and spit. He tastes like vanilla chap stick and coffee as he’d travelled in the middle of his breakfast, and God… she just wants to savor this. He hefts her against the bedroom door, her legs wrapping around his waist as she pulls her blouse overhead, and he buries his face against her neck.

“I missed you,” she tells him between harsh gasps, shoulders shaking. He only smiles and spins around, throwing her onto the bed before crawling atop her.

More clothes start coming off, exposing miles of warm skin she’s never once taken for granted. He sighs as he pushes into her, breathes turning shaky, but his kisses turn more ferocious. Hips pumping, toes curling, bed rocking—her nails dig into his shoulder blades as she holds onto him for dear life. It makes tears prickle in the corners of her eyes at the thought that she could someday lose all of this.

“I love you, you know that, right?” he says as he pulls away, staring down at her in awe.

Marinette can’t even muster a response, only nudging him closer until she can capture his lips with hers, opening her mouth and licking inside. Adrien smiles into it and reaches between them with one hand, cupping her sex and pressing until the world turns white. They lose themselves in the ebb of the tide, the sheets turning sticky with sweat, until her thighs clench around his hips, back arching off the bed, and she comes hard.

When Marinette comes back to herself, and the world seems to right itself, she curls up in Adrien’s arms and buries her face in the crook of his neck. “I want you,” she murmurs against his skin. “I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

Adrien is silent for a moment before he laughs. “Did… Did you just propose?”

“Yes,” she says because she can’t imagine what else she’d rather do.

“Isn’t that my line?” he teases in jest.

Marinette snorts.

(God, she loves him.)

The first morning after, when she’s twenty and full of hope, she stares at the twenty-two-year-old Adrien sleeping beside her, who’s hogging the blankets and drooling on the pillow, and can’t help but laugh. “I swear, I’m gonna love you forever,” she tells him, and it’s more than a promise or a far-fetched dream.

It’s always been a fact.

Adrien is twenty-eight and tosses her a small black box when she collapses on the couch in her new apartment. Moving back to Paris was harder than she imagined, but at least her boyfriend knows how to time things perfectly. They’ve spent the past few hours moving the last of her things in, and the adventure of unpacking still awaits, but it’s been a long day and she doesn’t know how long Adrien has left.

“What’s this?” She takes the box and turns it over, gears in her head turning slowly, because she’s twenty-seven and tired. “Was this packed somewhere?”

“No,” he says with a soft smile and plucks it out of her fingers. Marinette lets out an indignant squawk, trying to yank it back, but he presses her back against the couch with a single finger to her forehead. “Just hold on a second.”

“Is it mine?” Marinette bites her bottom lip, trying to picture where he’s swiped it from. She doesn’t recall the box among her jewelry when she packed it all up.

“Well, it ought to be,” he tells her. “Just depends what your answer is.”

The world shudders to a halt. Her hands fly up to cover her mouth, and she draws a blank, unable to think of any words.

Adrien slips off the couch and rocks back on his haunches, propping up on one knee in front of her. “Marinette, I feel like I’ve loved you since before I knew you.” He swallows, voice breaking. “Last year, you asked me a question, and I… I didn’t have an answer, and you didn’t do it correctly. I went to my father and asked for my mother’s rings because…”

A half-formed sob falls from his lips before he can choke it down. She’s still frozen.

“You didn’t—” Marinette starts to say, voice full of tears.

“You asked last time, so I think now it’s my turn, so Marinette Dupain-Cheng, will you—” A smile stretches across his face, and there’s tears dripping down his cheeks, and there’s tears against her lips as she kisses him breathless.

“Yes,” she tells him and can’t stop laughing or crying. “It’s always been yes.”

They can’t get married—both lost in time, neither sure where the other is.

It doesn’t stop them from pretending though. Rings adjourn fingers, twenty-eight-year-old Adrien pressing kisses to twenty-eight-year-old Marinette’s lips, the “I do” and always” somewhere in the spaces between them.

It’s been a decade since they were the same age.

Marinette often wonders if there’s a limit to how much you can love someone. She wonders if there’s a limit to how long you can love someone.

At thirty, Adrien’s mother’s wedding ring burns like silver fire on her finger wherever she goes, a constant reminder of who put it there. She thinks about Adrien, tries to picture her future where they don’t exist, but it’s impossible.

Every time she thinks about the future, where she’s thirty-something and with another man, she can’t imagine what life without Adrien will be like. It’s like trying to imagine a world where the sun doesn’t shine and the sky isn’t blue, where the road to her parents’ bakery isn’t cracked with age, where the pink lilies on her porch don’t grow after the rain falls.

It’s impossible, so she tries not to think about it.

She also tries not to think about the fact that it’s been six months since Adrien last traveled.

(She tries but fails every time.)

She’s thirty-one and married to a ghost.

It’s been five months since she last traveled.

The last time she sees Adrien is when he’s twenty-two and in love with a girl who burst into his coffee shop one day just to tell him that she loved him.

They go to brunch and then kiss goodbye on the sidewalk, and Adrien fingers her ring and promises to catch up. “I think this is the oldest I’ve ever seen you,” he notes, and she tries not to cry, tries to pretend that there’s so much more future between them, tries not to think about how she’s going to lose him.

“You’ll see me older someday,” she says, and this time is a far-fetched dream because if there’s one thing she can’t promise him, it’s time.

Adrien stares at her with those green eyes that glitter like stars. “You know,” he tells her. “I think this is the happiest I’ve ever seen you.”

Marinette can’t even form a proper response, only huffs a soft laugh and presses her lips to her wedding ring.

Marinette is thirty-three and has started a new job as a fashion designer at a renowned business in Paris. Adrien’s mother’s wedding ring still sits on her finger because she made a promise when she was twenty and refuses to break it. She’s unpacking her desk supplies from a box and adjusts her new nameplate with a soft sigh, the golden metal glinting in the sunlight streaming from the window.

There’s a knock against her door, pulling her from her morning musings. “Hey, I found this box outside your office, and I think you dropped… Marinette?”

The voice strikes her deep inside, bringing her heart stammering to a stop. She twists around on her heel and a bright smile overtakes her face. “Adrien!” she cries and wraps her arms around his neck, his own holding her tight against his chest. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again!”

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he gushes to her, eyes wide and brimming with questions. “I haven’t traveled in three years, and the last time I saw you, you were seven at that park, and… and I thought I’d lost you!”

“Wait, wait,” she says, pressing her hands to his shoulders to keep him still. “What do you mean you haven’t traveled?”

“I don’t know,” Adrien tells her, running a hand through his hair, already messy to begin with. “It just stopped. Master Fu thinks it’s because the clock genes got shocked back into place or something, or maybe it just… I don’t know, but I am so happy you’re here, I was worried you weren’t traveling anymore—”

“I haven’t traveled in two years,” she says.

Just to check, she glances around her office. It’s still her nameplate, still her box, still the picture of her parents in the corner, still the pink lilies and blue poppies on the windowsill.

“Then how are you here?” he asks her.

“I don’t know,” she tells him. “But this is my timeline and my reality. I woke up and came to work. I’m here because I got a new job with Gabriel Fashions, and this is where I’m supposed to be.”

Adrien bites his bottom lip and shakes his head. “Then if you didn’t travel, and I didn’t travel…”

Then…

Marinette doesn’t waste her time thinking. She grabs him by the collar and pulls him forward, kissing him and kissing him, until he’s laughing and so is she, tears streaming down both of their faces.

“H-How are you here?” she asks him, flabbergasted. “I looked, but I could never find you.”

“Gabriel’s my father. He owns this whole building, and I help with the business… But God, Mari, you’re here, you’re here,” he whispers against her forehead. “You’re really here.”

“I’ve always been here,” she tells him and intertwines their fingers together, the silver of their matching wedding bands glinting in the sunlight.

Same timeline, same universe, same Adrien.

She’s thirty-five and sitting at the kitchen table of her and Adrien’s home a mile from the office. Her wedding ring sits on her finger, but soon she’ll have to switch to a necklace as her fingers swell from her pregnancy. Across from her, Nino, her husband’s best friend, smiles around the rim of his coffee mug and points to a picture in the catalog.

“I think you should get this crib,” he tells her. “That’s what Alya and I got for the twins. It’s sturdy and does its job.”

She pushes herself to her feet, eager for some more tea, still laughing. “It’s fire engine red, Nino.”

“There’s nothing wrong with red,” he grumbles under his breath.

Her giggles spill into the space between them as Adrien comments from the other side of the room, “How about blue? Or green?”

“You already got the room painted blue,” she snipes back. “We don’t need it looking like the Cookie Monster threw up in there.”

“Hey,” he says and peers around the cabinet, a wrench in hand. “There’s nothing wrong with blue. I—oh.” Adrien pauses, blue eyes softening as he stares out the window onto their balcony.

Marinette simply sighs and turns on her heel, already knowing well enough what she’ll find. Her own wet eyes stare back as the younger Marinette begins to fade away, hands clenched to her chest in despair.

She smiles and waves goodbye, quietly telling her that it’s okay, because it is, it does work out.

It’s not much, but the younger her has a lifetime to figure out what she means.

Warm arms loop around her waist, lips pressing against the nape of her neck. “You weren’t kidding.”

“I told you,” she says and leans back against Adrien’s shoulder. “She’s going to be very worried for a while.”

“I’m sorry I worried you.”

She turns around in his arms and kisses him—slow and soft. “It’s worth it,” she whispers. “You’ve always been worth it.”

And the rest, they say, is history.

#miraculous ladybug #ml fic #adrienette #adrinette #ml #my fic #my writing

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