#it took me 3 days to write this

[oneriderratbug101]

Alright so, in part because I see my tempest post gaining some traction, I want to talk for a second about Wizard101's aoe meta.

Nono come back, I see you walking away already, this isn't just going to be a rah aoe bad aoe meta bad post. There are way too many pieces of content about this issue that don't actually make any points and just say the issue is there. We know the issue is there, we all feel it, that's why a shitpost where I spent 5 minutes manually typing out the word tempest (that's right, not a single word was copy pasted) is doing so well right now.

Part 1 - Why hasn't anything been done?

I'm going to say it right off the bat, I don't think a lot of us really tend to think about how much of a nightmare aoe must be to balance. In the current state of the game, aoe is basically necessary for quality of life. This raises what seems like one of the biggest dilemmas in balancing history though- there is no middle ground for these spells. The only point in which these spells would be nerfed enough for the community to not spam is if these spells were made practically unusable. Because of the unique amount of time battles take in a turn based mmo vs literally any other mmo, using single target spells can feel like it takes forever, and is wildly inefficient. Other games with more traditional gameplay loops can make up for aoe's effeciency by having it in a middle ground, but because we have long turn based instances rather than open world quick fights as our main battles, if the aoe is in a "middle ground" we will still spam it as if it's op. There isn't a pure balancing fix to the aoe problem. In order to fix the aoe spells from a game design perspective, a system is going have to be added, changed, or the entire gameplay loop get reworked. Needless to say, that's probably not happening, and I can't really blame KI on that one.

Part 2 - What's the problem?

Alright, so we've established that, for the forseeable future, an aoe dominated metagame is here to stay. However, aoe makes up an incredibly small portion of the vast array of spells we can obtain. Not even just wiping off single target spells from the table, for efficiency's sake, the main aoe spells used are ones we obtain relatively early on in the game. This branches into two very heavily interwoven problems I've seen a lot of people reblogging the original tempest spam bring up.

2a:

This aoe domination greatly thwarts gameplay diversity. That's the main appeal of the post that started this all, really. It becomes a chore to play the game after a while when all it boils down to is the same exact gameplay loop you have been using for years, with no change despite the addition of more and more spells into your repetoire. It becomes tiring, and it makes the obtainment of new spells lose a lot of excitement, getting not only in the way of fun gameplay but also in the way of core progession mechanics. Other games can avoid this issue becoming too large, as the traditional MMO combat style puts you in more control of your character and adds another layer of enjoyment to be had through that. In Wizard101 I have to take drawn out turns to do combat, where in traditional MMOs you have a chance at getting a bit of a rush from the more involved, faster paced button spams. Now, from here, you can bring up the fact that card games have been around for ages and have been able to avoid gameplay loop issues like this for a good chunk of that time, and I will meet you with a

????? Card games have had balancing issues for ages and many people struggle to get into and stay in the hobby, they've got their own thing going on

But yes, I will agree that despite having their own problems, card games can generally avoid the issue of gameplay loop growing too large through being PVP. That's right, all of you Wizard101 PVP mains out there, congratulations, you've managed to avoid this problem! I'm sure Wizard101 PVP has its own problems though. Regardless, let's get into what PVP brings to the gameplay loop table. As opposed to PVE where you face a semi-predictable AI, in PVP you will be put against another real person, formulating new strategies, using a deck you might not know about, and using spells in a more random/unpredictable pattern. PVP has the benefit of novelty, forcing you to strategize differently across your battles, and to think hard about your opponent's next move every time.

I'm not claiming PVE doesn't have anything like this! Just that in the core gameplay of an MMO, which typically consists of a lot of general mob battles, this battle novelty typically isn't all too present.

2b:

We're missing out on a lot of cool spells! Animations, art, sound design, game design, etc, all of that work poured into these spells and we're just tossing them on the ground like that scene from Toy Story! This sentiment was lost in reblogs as I put it in the tags of the tempest post, but I LOVE storm! The ocean themes, general water themes, and of course actual storm themes hit their mark incredibly well for me! And I feel the same about every other school, as well! Tempest was merely an easy vessel for this message, as it's the most stereotypically spammed aoe. As I said before though, when all you're using is the same spell, a certain excitement surrounding the game leaves. I feel we have gone from seeing new spells and going "That's so cool, I can't wait to use it!" to seeing them and going "That's so cool, I wish I had a chance to use it!".

Part 3 - Why is this a problem? (E.g. why not just use whatever spell you want?)

You, balance wizard reading this: when's the last time you've heard something to the tune of "just blade me"? How did that make you feel? Did that extend to other parts of your gameplay? To expand on this, anyone who isn't fire or storm, has Wolf Stormblade ever told you that you can't hit? That you deal no damage? Told to just support or pass? Even fire wizards are sometimes subject to this!

The chances are, a lot of people don't realize how much of an effect the community has on their gameplay. I've even encountered this as early as Unicorn Way, but people care about the meta. You're going to play with people, and a lot of this playerbase can tend to treat their own word as law, and so you will have the meta drilled into you. Hell, sometimes their "meta" is less efficient or just straight up worse than your plan. Putting that aside though, opinions turn into "facts", they then circulate, and then you have been pressured to play a specific way. Before I continue, I'd like us to remind ourselves that this is NOT League of Legends, and that at its core this is an all-ages game in a humorous fantasy setting, and that some of us might be taking PVE gameplay a little too seriously. That being said, I get it though! Circling back to an earlier point, this gameplay loop can be absolutely numbing! Of course after 80 battles against Malistaire just trying to get that one drop you want everyone around you to play with maximum efficiency! It's impossible to always keep in mind that some people might be trying to experience these parts of the game you might have already experienced as much as you can! And in a way, it makes sense, why would we roughly double our already extended battle times through not playing aoe? Metas get popular because they work. They work extremely well. Under Wizard101's current combat system, which is a large part of why I love Wizard101, single target spells are rarely a better option, and instead cost me multiple more minutes in my day.

The next suggestion would usually be to solo, however:

A: Not all content can be soloed, you WILL have to encounter another player at some point, and it will usually be in a setting where these types of players congregate most.

B: Even if more challenging content CAN be soloed, you have to play extremely to the meta, defeating the point of soloing here.

C: This is an MMO. A core part of it is inherently community and other players. Why am I only allowed to have fun while lonely?

Unless you come upon a rare chance and find the perfect group of people, you can't consistently play Wizard101 the way you want. And the problem is much larger than the aoe spells.

So, we have acknowledged we all understand the problem and have feelings one way or another about it. We have described why nothing has been done about it, and what the problem really is. We've gone into the community pressures, incentive to self, and damage to gameplay options regarding aoe and a greater meta. I've also done my best to show that this problem runs deeper and is harder to avoid than yoh may think. So, what's my big suggested change for Wizard101 and KI to fix this problem?

Nothing. That's right, all this for me to suggest nothing. Unless a lot of random reworks somehow magically make things better, this isn't changing. I don't even necessarily want the reworks, either. This problem is just here. I guess the only actually meaningful call to action would be please, regardless of whether it's Wizard101, some other game, or even just life in general, be mindful of the experiences of others. You may be beating that boss for the 80th time today, but this might be a teammate's first encounter with it. You may be jaded and want to do things as fast as possible, but try your best to remind yourself not to take the sparkle out of the eyes of someone enjoying themselves. Remember- you always matter, and whether or not that's going to be positive or negative is in your hands.

Maybe our game gets better, maybe we get better, or maybe some secret third option happens. It doesn't even matter too much to me, despite this lengthy post. I just wanted to get my thoughts on this issue out there.

#wizard101 #it took me 3 days to write this #motivation faded in and out #really though I saw the reaction to the tempest post and immediately wanted to get this out there #i think no matter what happens opening this dialogue is important #Wizard101 #morganthe #malistaire #cyrus drake #halston balestrom #heehee that's a frog :) #i love his dapper suit #he's so swag !!! #w101 #kingsisle #KI

[appalachianapologies]

There are many new friends on the archive, and many are young and have only known social media, which is why I wanted to say something!

Ao3 does not have an algorithm! It isn't a social media site, it's an archive.

Posting fics on Tumblr isn't the same as posting fics on Ao3

Ao3 is like a giant virtual bookshelf, and everyone is able to add their own stories to the bookshelf, all stored with different tags and different fandoms. Works are automatically sorted by newest to oldest, but filters, looking at bookmarks, and using the search function can change that.

Certain works are not pushed to the top like social media posts. More kudos and reads don't push a single work to more viewers by some algorithm. Unless otherwise filtered, works will be at the top of the page based on how recent it was posted.

Smaller fandoms get less views, less kudos, less bookmarks, and larger fandoms get more simply because of the number of people inside the fandom.

Ao3 is a giant virtual bookshelf- there is no algorithm, and there is no man behind the shelf pushing certain books forward.

Happy reading, and if you'd like to have more people notice a fic, why not share it with them! Send a dm to a fandom friend and it might turn into one of their favorite fics!

#ao3 #archive of our own #organization for transformative works #i have admittedly only been a member of the committee for a couple of years BUT ive been a member on ao3 since i was much younger #and it took me a hot second to understand how ao3 works; so i wanted to write a lil post about it after seeing this comment #no shade or blame to the person who wrote this by the way! #after being on social media so much it's a completely understandable mistake and i totally get it #and in fandoms populated by younger ppl typically it's even more understandable! #so absolutely no hate no shade no passive aggressiveness #but i do think it is important to learn how the archive works #so if you'd like to share this it would be greatly appreciated! <3 #okay have a good day sorry this post/tags became so long haha

[mipexch]

comic about v2 and the goal they'll never fully reach alongside a dissatisfying conclusion. intimate rivalry and all (alternative ending comic. V1 dies instead of V2 during 4-4. V2 is narrating. V1 is dead.)

#high of victory drops to an overwhelming crushing feeling of what comes next now that youre done #if it wasnt clear v2 is trying very hard to put v1 back together after it kills them. very very poorly. weight of your actions hits #v2 #v1 #ultrakill #v4v #heavy implied at the very least. see as you will #i realize now that the writing is very disconnected and so are the drawings but bear with me here. do you see my vision #theres something going on between these two that is beautiful but also extremely codependent #at least on v2s end #tried to do those two descriptive pages in a way where it went like. 2 - 3 small details about v1. and then something very specific. some- #-thing theyd only know if they paid close attention to how the other acted or looked #took me a few days to put together and im pretty happy with it i think #feel free to dub or do whatever as long as you gimme credit where credits due #there are many ways to interpret v2 and this is one of them #gen art

[harrowharkwife]

i'm so used to there just being random unidentified bones laying around everywhere in these damn books that it finally occurred to me, just now, to wonder where the bones on new rho came from. y'know, the bones palamedes always tried to teach nona necromancy on.

they're his.

palamedes, who always loved teaching, living on borrowed time in a body that's not his own. palamedes, mentoring, teaching- parenting, by sixth standards, mind you. and that boy is sixth, through and through.

and the entire point of teaching nona necromancy in the first place was to try and determine if nona is, well, nonagesimus, right? so it has to be bones, it can't not be bones. bones are, like, her whole thing.

but they're not in the nine houses, anymore. things are different, on new rho.

they burn bones here. dig up the cemeteries. a society terrified of zombies will evolve to dispose of its dead differently.

the only bones he has access to now are his own. (camilla wouldn't let anyone take them- skull or hand, doesn't matter. they're still him, and she doesn't let go, remember? it's her one thing.)

palamedes woke up every morning wearing someone else's body to then gently place the shrapnel of his own in the cupped palms of a girl who's the closest thing he'll ever have to a daughter and try to teach her- how did the angel put it, again? normal school, as much as possible, for as long as possible.

(but hey, in a roundabout way, at least it's a chance for him to touch camilla again, right? nevermind that she's not there to feel any of it because he's in the driver's seat, that he can only stay for fifteen minutes at a time. it's atoms that belong to camilla touching atoms that used to belong to him, and that's close enough. he'll take what he can get, these days- if she can be their flesh, he can be the end. so what if holding his own bones is a mindfuck? so what if looking at them makes him nauseous? surely he can suck it up and deal with it for fifteen minutes. it's the least he can do— his poor camilla was the one who had to scrape the bloody pulp of them off the floors of canaan house.)

(speaking of, here's a fun fact: we actually only see nona practicing with the bones one time, on-page. camilla's final line in that scene, before palamedes takes over, is none other than: 'keep going. there are some bones left.' ow!)

remember, too, that the only part of dulcinea, the real dulcinea, that palamedes ever physically touched, was her tooth- the one that ianthe gave him, pulled from the ashes cytherea burnt her down to. he only ever touched dulcie once, and it wasn't until after she was already gone, but that doesn't matter- it still happened, and you can't take loved away.

in this same roundabout, bittersweet, by-proxy sort of way, palamedes has been physically touched by nona, too: the atoms she currently occupies, touching atoms that he used to occupy, and never will again.

the main interaction we've seen between palamedes and his mother took place back on the sixth, with her acting as mentor and him as pupil: the two of them studying a set of hand bones, juno encouraging him every step of the way.

we know that harrowhark's "most vivid memory of her mother was of her hands guiding harrow's over an inexpertly rendered portion of skull, her fingers encircling the fat baby bracelets of harrow's wrists, tightening this cuff to indicate correct technique."

they're still small for a nineteen year old, but the wrists are bigger, in this new set of memories nona's making. and it's not an inexpertly rendered portion of skull anymore- it's a hand, now, albeit one crafted from [a piece of skull reassembled (painstakingly—passionately—laboriously reassembled) from fragments, manually, and not by a bone magician, from the skull of someone who, soon after death or symptomatically during, had exploded.] and the identity and origin of these bones is no mystery at all. they belong to palamedes, and he's consented to their use for this purpose, and that matters.

but the details are just set dressing, really. the foundation of the memory is the same.

palamedes and his mother, juno and her son.

harrow and her mother; pelleamena and her daughter.

nona and her father-mother-teacher; palamedes and his daughter.

#these fucking books. every 2-3 business days i'll find some new detail to be insane about #this post took me like three hours to write. what the fuck #palamedes sextus #nona the ninth #the locked tomb #nona #palamedes the sixth #tlt #ntn #camilla hect #tlt spoilers #pal honey. im :( :( :( #spiritually that man is a MOM okay! there's a reason tamsyn specifically assigned him the same imagery in this scene #that she's been using to represent crucial bonding moments between mother/mother figure and child/child figure #that and the 'sextus you'll make a very irritating wife someday' joke and cam's 'i'll talk to your mother later' face #ie: talk to palamedes about nona #that boy is momcoded i don't make the rules!

[becca-e-barnes]

Sub Bucky and a breeding kink 💀 dead unlived it's one of my favourite things 😌

This is pretty high up there on my list of dream fantasies 🥵 these are two of my biggest weaknesses, don't even look at me rn

One of life's greatest joys is cuddling with the other person's head resting on your chest so you can play with their hair and rub their shoulders. I love that shit, having someone else's body weight on you is so comforting.

I imagine that's something Bucky would really enjoy too. It's so soft and sweet and tender and getting to feel cared for would really appeal to him.

But that's up until his hands work their way under your top, up over your bare skin so he's able to cup your breasts and bury his face between them while he's getting his hair played with. Life's pleasures don't get much simpler than that.

After a few moments he shifts slightly, tugging the neckline of your shirt out of the way to give himself space to kiss and nip your skin. All of a sudden he's desperate and it's beautiful to watch.

"Please." He whispers between frantic kisses, flicking his tongue over the stiff peak of your nipple before engulfing it with his warm, eager mouth.

"Please, what?" You tease, tugging on his hair just a little for emphasis.

He groans, frustrated by his own lack of coherence, pulling his mouth from your nipple. "Please let me put a baby in you."

That's not what you were expecting but fuck, he makes it sound pretty appealing.

"Bucky-" You begin but he cuts you off, giving your other nipple the same attention as he gave the first. God, that's distracting.

"You'd make. Such. A pretty. Mommy." He whispers, kissing his way down your body until he reaches the bottom seam of your top. From there, he pulls it off, letting it fall to the floor before removing the rest of your clothes.

"You'd look so pretty with a little baby bump." His huge hand rests on your bare tummy, imaging how your body would change.

"I want it, Buck." You mean it too. It doesn't sound like such a bad idea when he's taking his clothes off.

"I know you want it." He groans, rubbing the tip of his dick against your soaked core. "Y-you're so wet."

He presses his hips forward, sliding inside you and you can't explain it but you swear it feels different this time.

"Don't even think about pulling out." You cup his face in your hands, keeping his eyes on you and you almost worry he's going to fuck himself senseless into you. "I want you to make me a mommy. You're going to give me every single drop of cum and when it starts to drip out of me, you're going to fuck it back in."

His head falls onto your shoulder, sobbing a pathetic moan against your already hot skin. The pace of his thrusts matches his need, his hips slamming into yours and when he finally gives in, he cums inside you with your legs clamped around his waist, making sure he couldn't pull out even if he wanted to.

#asks answered <3 #becca writes spice #anon #sub!bucky #subby bucky #this is one of those fantasies that's nice in my head #I think I'd like to be at that point in my life but it's absolutely not where I'm at rn #maybe some day tho #I started writing a new series yesterday #making a lil moodboard #excited to post the concept #can't decide if I want each chapter to feel like a continuation of the one before #or if I want the chapters to be more detached from each other with time passing in between #might actually space it out over a weekend? #I took my lil granny out for lunch today and she's just the cutest #she usually comes up to ours for Sunday lunch but my parents were out this weekend #so I made her dinner last night and took it down to her and I asked if she wanted to go out for Sunday lunch for a change #she made me book the table right there in front of her so she'd be able to look forward to it 🥺 #I sat with her for over an hour yesterday evening and she smiled nearly the whole time #she's too cute I swear

[greythemed]

𓂃 ♥︎ⴰ bloodhounds . kim gun-woo

˚ TITLE 𓂃 ♥︎ⴰ polymyxin b. ˚ WORD COUNT 𓂃 ♥︎ⴰ 9005 (i am so sorry).

“stop pressing it, you dumbass!”. you exclaim in discomfort, but shamefully not because of you.

“it’s just a bruise, some nebacetin will do it”. your boyfriend’s reaction was pissing you off more than his colleague’s grunting behind you.

“it’s not just a bruise, that was metal they were hitting you with”. your angry tone left space for your saddened one and gun-woo did not like it at all. “why did you guys agree on that anyway?!”.

“it was his idea”, they both said it simultaneously, pointing fingers at each other that made you roll your eyes.

“ya, y/n”. woo-jin called you. “don’t be so mean to him, he dodged almost every punch wonsuk-subaenim threw at him”.

was that supposed to calm you down? a middle finger was pointed at the older man next to your boyfriend, gun-woo laughing and woo-jin reaction was to scold you.

"aish-", he gets up to grab a towel and you laugh a little seeing woo-jin's response. "i miss when your girlfriend wasn't a professional doctor, gunwoo-ya". gun-woo smiles shyly and you return to your job on your boyfriend's abs.

"shut up, old man". you ignored him.

"see?! she doesn't respect me!". it was your turn to laugh, ignoring him completely once again.

“i can’t work properly without some soothing paste, gun-woo, look at this mess”, the frustration was evident in your voice, manicured hand tracing his right side carefully which made the boy a little sad and impatient.

“it’s okay jagiya, don’t worry too much”. he turned to you after throwing a nasty looking at his best friend for not helping and held your face in his hands. he hated to admit that he could see tears forming in your eyes. “we can take a look after napping today, what do you think? you must be exhausted”.

the brutal difference between your little hand and his almost pierced skin shamefully stole his attention for a couple of minutes. without even noticing, your other hand grabbed his shorts so tightly it was starting to color your knuckles white.

worriedly, gun-woo laced his fingers with yours and made him eye-level with you, damp hair and sweaty armpits ticking his brain saying you should shower after a training session that long but his mind was nowhere near worrying about himself.

“hey, look at me”. his voice sounded lenient enough that even woo-jin got quiet on the other side of the room. "it's okay, baby, i'm gonna be fine".

“you’re the one that should be exhausted, not me”. you complain about his kindness, starry eyes becoming glossy minute after minute, making the man in front of you almost panic.

“don’t think i don’t know you’ve been working the whole day”. he says brushing your hair behind your ear. “mr. seo said you’ve been taking your colleagues' shifts too”.

your pout only grows like a kid being caught stealing candies at a party. it was so frustrating dating a boxer when you built your whole life around saving people's lives, choosing the most efficient predicament to help someone on the verge of dying, or physically taking matters into your own hands to avoid any nasty side-effects that could change a person's life forever.

leaving patients behind to suffer wasn't an option for you, let alone postpone the pains and unattended injuries of your loved ones.

“the skin, gun-woo”, you return to ramble and point at the purple bruise on his body. “it needs bacitracin and polymyxin b otherwise it’s going to get pretty ugly. imagine the metal pierced your skin? that would be the end, god".

“baby, stop thinking about it”. he lifts your chin so you’d stop looking at the bruise. “i won and that’s what matters, right? just one more week and we’re going to the finals half, it’ll be over soon”.

a pout was formed and your lips quivered. honestly, you’ve never cried in front of gun-woo before and his reaction was pure terrific. you didn’t know what got you so worked up after the match against his stupid coach and that stupid ugly machine, but you winced every time his grunts on the ring got louder and louder.

a couple of minutes into the last round, you regretted coming to see his training, he kind of forgot to tell you that it wasn't the usual gym sessions anymore, and now they were approaching a more realistic season of monthly fights coordinated by his coach.

you hated his coach from now on and that was final.

gun-woo’s eyes were round and full of stress when you cleaned the first tear that have fallen on your left cheek, averting your gaze to the table behind him and trying to distract yourself.

“people with skin infections have a higher risk of low immune responses and vice-versa”, you continue, “they can vary from mild to serious”. gun-woo grips your arm.

"jagi".

"are your vaccines up to date?". you asked him and he nodded. "god, that could've turned into a fucking lockjaw or something, gun-woo". he looked at you with pity and panicked.

"i'm okay, see?". he points to his sweaty chest. "we came to the doc appointment last week and we were all good, right, hyung?". gun-woo glances at woo-jin silently asking for help.

unfortunately, gun-woo was inexperienced in this dating thing and sometimes needed the help of his dramatic hyung.

"oh, yes, yes, yes. the doctor said we were new as a baby and wonsuk-ssi even congratulated us". the boxer held his thumbs up in an exagerated sign and you resisted the urge to roll your eyes. "the diet has been doing good for us! stop worrying too much kid, you're sounding like his mom".

why did he have to be so drama queen-orientated?

you looked at your boyfriend with glassy eyes and a red nose, turning your back to woo-jin so he couldn't see your crying expression and hopeless state. you trusted the man with your life just as gun-woo did, but something about the ugly-looking bruise on your boyfriend's side was starting to look too scary for you.

"neomycin, compression, elevation, and a bruise-healing diet can also help speed up the healing process, but that looks scary". breathing deeply, you point to the injured local and grimace. "15—20 minutes of ice packs for 3—4 days will do it unless the skin is pierced". you pause, talking to yourself. "we better get going or you'll start bleeding soon".

"jagi".

"arnica gel is useless here". you take a step forward and breathe deeply again. "fuck it, i'm applying vaseline if it gets worse".

"y/n". gun-woo called you but none was working.

"tell me if it starts bleeding, please? do not press it or else the blood will fuck everything up".

“woah, she is a stress-talker i can see”. on the other side of the changing room, woo-jin's comment makes you think he deserves death, you were sure of it.

“aish-, will you stop?”. gun-woo hugged your head in his chest and grimaced at his best friend next to the door. he was starting to get frustrated with your state and didn't know what to do.

woo-jin also came to see the fight but it turns out he was only making things worse in this moment.

“what? i am too!”. woo-jin defends. “i get all talkative when i’m stressed, but just not all of that smart stuff she sayin’”.

“jagi, we’re going home yeah?”. gun-woo patted your shoulder, dismissing his friend and looking at you. “there you can take a closer look and then we order food, hm?”.

your boyfriend was waiting for your response when he got a change of plans.

“sounds good!”. woo-jin exclaimed and you could feel your boyfriend rolling his eyes.

you swear to god woo-jin wasn’t usually this persistent.

gun-woo ignored him, which you found a little cute in your opinion, and even laughed a little.

“okay, but you’ll have to promise me to rest tonight”. you look up at his eyes and your boyfriend smiles. it was different to have someone other than his annoying best hyung or his mother worrying about his well-being, and for sure it was the first time someone this 'brainly' took care of him.

after being alone for so long, gun-woo appreciated your nurturing nature like no other and wanted to stop the negative feelings blooming in your chest right now.

“okay, i promise”. he presses a quick kiss on your lips, which was accompanied by a little wince since he had to bend down to your height to reach your face.

"aigoo, i'm sorry". you grimaced apologetically.

he smiled and turned to reach for his shirt beside you, putting it on while waiting for you to pick his things up. gun-woo had to admit that was the most intense fake match his coach had put him into. maybe you were right and he should rest tonight.

"i met him first". gun-woo can hear woo-jin's voice threatening you at the door. he only went to wave his coach goodbye and came back for a bickering woo-jin and a pouty y/n. "he was just fine when it was only me and him".

"you smell like belly pork and not in a good way". you replied.

"aish-, respect your elders, kid". woo-jin's eyes were round and menacing. "i saved his life more than once, okay? we are brothers at heart, we even share our clothes!".

"his mom loves me, she even cooked me bulgogi when we first met!". that was you on your tip-toes beckoning woo-jin to the door, a man at least seven inches taller than you. his face was frightened and his hands were defensively in front of him. "and i know exactly when to turn the grill on when we're going out!".

gun-woo's shirt was too tight for him to keep listening to your argument, and he definitely was starting to feel his right side itching when the tissue came in contact with the bruise.

"aish-, that was one time!". woo-jin defended. "and you'll never know how a boxer's spirit works because we invented it".

"liar! you said you preferred mayweather when you guys first met, and i know this because he told me himself".

"oh please i am a manny pacquiao enthusiast at heart and forever will be. and! i've also seen his d-".

"ya, would you both stop?". gun-woo interrupted his friend with a glare, warily pulling you back so you wouldn't hit his friend across his face. "i'm tired and it's getting late".

"he started". you pointed at the older man. "and i've seen more than his dick, you old".

"ya!". gun-woo looks at you affronted and woo-jin starts laughing, hiding his mouth when gun-woo pretends to hit him.

"she gots quite the temper, bro". woo-jin had to point it out. "woo, i'm excited! finally someone who matches my energy".

"you both should stop". your boyfriend tsks and you look at him smiling. "and you shouldn't listen to him". he says.

"don't say it like we're finished, boxer". you threaten woo-jin with your eyes and gun-woo has to stand between both of you so you wouldn't jump the man scaringly.

"ya, take good care of my lil bro for me, yeah?". he taps gun-woo's shoulders and they both smile at each other intensively.

"aish-, it looks like you're both exactly in love, stop that".

"yes! she's getting jealous!". woo-jin exclaims.

"hyung, you're wife is waiting for you, just go". gun-woo whines at the man and he smiles, seeming to finally remember he has his own real lover. "woah, that's true, i'm going!". woo-jin starts running down the hall and waving at both of you goodbye, finally letting your boyfriend go smiling like an idiot.

gun-woo takes his bag from your shoulders and you both start walking down the hall hand in hand. for now, you choose to silence your concerns about the big boy and just plan a peaceful ride back to your home.

"take your clothes off". your voice sounded a little too low for gun-woo's liking and he couldn't suppress a smile. glancing at you, he couldn't help but find his all-black gym set a little out of place in your all-pink bedroom. to no surprise, you perfectly fit in the pastel colors you were wearing.

"buy me a dinner first, sailor". he had to joke looking at you and taking his tight gym shirt off. instantly, he felt his side ache. something damp ran down his ribs and gun-woo cursed when he spotted blood in the rem of his shorts.

well, wasn't that just great?

looking at the bathroom mirror, he grimaced pressing the purple and red spot with his other hand.

"don't". you came from nowhere, taking his bigger hand off of him and analyzing the situation with - what your boyfriend liked to call - doctor face. a first-aid kit was on your arms the instant you glanced at the little blood accumulating on the bruise. gun-woo attentively stared at your facial expressions worried about what you were going to do.

to his surprise, only a sigh escaped your lips, and the boxer was guided to sit on the bathtub behind him, your little hand holding two of his fingers so he could follow you. it was funny how larger his frame was compared to yours in the small white bathroom.

"does it hurt a lot?". you ask worriedly wiping his skin.

"no". he wasn't necessarily lying, you both knew how pain tolerance worked for gun-woo. "just itchy". he made a face and clicked his tongue boringly.

you looked attentively at the injury while avoiding your hands on the more reddened area.

gun-woo thought your size was the perfect complement to your cute personality. when he first met you, your height was the first thing that he noticed after your soft hair. of course, accompanied by your scary father he didn't dare to even look at your way properly, but his first impression of you was something the boy held dearly in his heart.

your smart brain was when everything became blurry to the boxer. for a recently graduated student, gun-woo knew your knowledge was freshly put into place, and added to the great things he had heard about your intellect before meeting your father, he knew you were smart. but imagine the surprise when he first saw you dealing with your father's disease from up-close, admiring your basically perfect approach and ripeness to everything handed to you.

it didn't click him. how could someone so delicate-looking be so splendidly clever and loveable at the same time. he thought it was unfair the fact that you were so effortlessly sexy in his eyes. and that was a first for the boxer.

you were his first everything.

"this has to have knocked the air out of your lungs". you state while kneeling on the floor in front of him, making the boy gulp and avert his gaze suddenly embarrassed.

“hm, yeah”. he gulped even harder. “but just for a moment, though. coach didn’t want to stop”.

between his parted legs, you were insinuating things he had trouble forgetting, and with one more glance at you, he had to part his lips surprised because jesus christ, why were you tying your goddamn hair?

"i'm talking to wonsuk-subaenim about this no matter what". you looked up at him and he quickly averted his gaze. "that stupid machine has to go away".

two weeks ago. in this same bathroom. you were wearing your pink PJs late at night and he swore he had never seen your lips that glossy. the position was the same. he remembers it all too well and has to shake his head to not make things harder for him.

"jagi-".

"i'm serious, gun-woo". now was his turn to sigh. why were you pretending this didn't do anything to you? was he the creepy one? oh god, he definitely was the creepy one. 

his eyes were as round as a golf ball as he looked at your innocent expression and silently cursed his inappropriate thoughts.

gun-woo swore he wasn't like this before meeting you. he was a decent young man with respectable beliefs and a proud mother that admired and trusted him blindly.

being an athlete, gun-woo was often proclaimed for his self-control and disciplined routines. now, only a glance at your smooth skin without too much clothing was enough to have the man spiraling and sweating.

four months ago he wasn't like this.

"it's the second time this happens. remember that day in your mom's apartment? you told me you'd take more care of yourself". you continue to speak nonchalantly, rambling your frustrations to the man.

"it was a snap kick i wasn't ready for". he clears his throat hoping to not sound too raspy. "coach didn't tell me on time". you suppress the urge to roll your eyes.

"i am going to need an elastic bandage for this". you say more to yourself, warm hands inspecting the swelled area while your boyfriend examines your face panicked. because why were you so close to his fucking crotch? "and also a heating pad to clear up the trapped blood. will you hold it for me?". you ask him to hold the warm cloth while you searched for more things for help in the first-aid kit.

"baby, could you work on this side first?". he shyly asked, thick thighs trapping you in place to gather your attention. the boxer had to summon all the courage in the world to politely ask you this. the little yelp you let out because of the sudden touch made him blush involuntarily. "s-sorry".

his voice was so low and raspy that made you question what the hell was going on. even involuntarily, his voice always gave him in.

"oh my god, did i hurt you?". you worriedly questioned, getting up quickly so you could examine him from afar.

"no, no". he waves it off, gulping a few times so the embarrassment could pass.

it wasn't working.

"it's just that... that position". he pointed to the floor where you were previously sitting and saw exactly the moment your expression changed.

"what?". your confusion was clearly shown by your knitted brows and opened mouth.

"the position you were in... you know...". he gulped more times than he could count and could feel the fire his cheeks were on at that moment. only when his hands fled to his crotch area as if trying to hide something that your brain finally clicked.

"kim geun-woo, is that a boner? oh my god". he grimaced embarrassingly. "how could you think of things like that when your skin is basically peeling?!".

"c'mon, baby, i was trying to be discreet". he interrupts you, dying to pull your hands so he could properly apologize to you but you kept getting away. "i'm sorry, it's just that it triggered a memory of us a while ago and you tied your hair and everything and my brain stopped braining".

"you need to go to church, you pervert". his pout was something you were accustomed to, and his shy whines were a great reminder that, even if your boyfriend looked like a war trunk and sculpted by the sky itself, he still was stupidly timid when it came to things like this. "i'm joking". you laugh and he rambles.

"i'm not asking for anything! just s-stay here". he points to the floor next to his right leg, a different space from where you were before. "please".

"how long have you been like this?". a shit-earing grin was starting to adorn your face, almost forgetting about the important task you had at hand.

"i-i'm not asking anything, i swear". he repeats in despair. "i don't want you to feel uncomfortable, please".

"uncomfortable?". you approach him laughing. "baby, you're my boyfriend for a reason, you could never make me uncomfortable. that happens sometimes, no need to feel embarrassed about it".

"well, i'm just worried sometimes because of... you know what". instantly, your heart grew all soft.

"oh my god, are you talking about what i told you the other day?". your round eyes were glued to the man in front of you, hands swiftly caressing his sweaty hair while you fought the urge to kiss his forehead.

"you said you didn't have great experiences in the past and, even though i wonder sometimes, i don't feel like it would be nice to ask you which ones. so i try to just avoid situations like this so you won't think of me as just another dirty-minded creep". he explains and you kiss him.

you wanted to cry. and suck the life out of him. at the same time. because that's just how dating kim geun-woo makes you feel.

"i'd never think of you in that way, oppa". you hugged his head on your chest and he nosely laughed, finally relieved for not completely fucking things up. "i would suck you anytime, anywhere you want, you know that". you say and he looks up at you seriously.

"ya, stop teasing".

"i'm serious, i literally am in love with you and your co-".

"oh my god, you need church". he closes his eyes and breathes deeply, trying to take control of his own body.

"you're like the most romantic and sweetest guy a girl could ever want. and then your dick had to be big too!".

"ya!". gun-woo looked serious and you smiled at that. what he didn't notice was that he was gripping your ass unconsciously in his nervous state.

"pervert". you whispered in his ear and he immediately stopped.

"i'm going to go, woojin-hyung is not so mean to me as you are". he pretends to start getting up and you hold his arms laughing. his whiny tone was so cute you could die.

"i'm sorry, sorry! it's just so easy to mess with you". he glared at you and you smirked. "i can't let an injured man run around the streets alone, especially an uncontrolled one".

"just wait for this fucking thing to heal, y/n". you opened your mouth in shock. was that veins popping on his temples?

"language!".

"sorry, sorry, can you please do your job?".

you laughed at that and kneeled at his side, sensing that he was starting to become frustrated. you weren't sure why, but at this beginning of your sexual life, you found yourself often giving in to his wishes afraid that you are stepping into a hole with no way up.

gun-woo made you feel safe - not uncomfortable in any way. but sometimes you doubted the man was engaged in this type of thing at all because he seemed to skip any opportunity he has to rock your world daily. you trusted him and respected his slow pace.

you made the order in your head, soothing the area with some polymyxin b and nebacetin, soothing oils for the itchy feeling to go away, and vaseline to keep the wound moist. after that, you wrapped the bruise with an elastic bandage and gently pressed the heated cloth there for a few minutes.

too tempted, you sneaked a glance at your boyfriend's shorts.

"oh my god, it's huge".

for one second, you thought you were flying across the bathroom and the other you realized gun-woo had got up so fast you fell backward and hit your head on the marble floor. the pain shoots straight to your neck and ear almost instantly.

"omo!". gun-woo came to the rescue in panic, seeing what he has done. "are you alright?". he asked worried.

"it was a compliment, idiot!". you screamed at him, grimacing at the new feeling in your head. "what is wrong with you?".

"so now it's my fault?". he defended. "you're not supposed to be saying things like that when is not sexy time!".

“don’t say ‘sexy time’!”.

“you can’t keep doing this, i’m trying to be polite here!”.

"i was just teasing you!". you glanced at his stoic face and got up with his help, patting your head where it hurt most, thankful to find no blood in the area.

"it turns me on!". he confessed and for a minute you were glued to the ground. "it makes me want to take you to bed and have sexy time when you're all bratty and mouthy". his raspidly voice said and you had to grip the counter behind you so you wouldn't fall again.

what did he just tell you?

"oh". it was your turn to feel the fire on your cheeks. "i-i didn't know, i'm sorry, i thought...". you guiltily gulped staring at gun-woo's chest before looking him in the eyes.

"i'm trying to take things slow but you don't help, y/n". the sincerity in his raspy voice made you almost want to shy away. forwardness never looked so sexy in someone like it does to him. "i'm not that experienced, you know that, so i don't know what you like and don't like and that makes me scared to fuck it up. and, god, that makes me fucking insane because all i can think about is you all the time".

your sweaty palms gripped the bloodied rem of his shorts and you closed the gap between the two of you, steading your wobbly feet with gun-woo's help. the proximity made him crazy and you could see the mental battle he was going through in his head. you pecked his lips three times before whispering.

"why be scared?". your starry eyes locked him in place and gun-woo swore he couldn't move, your question making him confused. "i also want you all the time, oppa. i think of you all the time, that's why is so hard for me to see you getting hurt and i want to cry my eyes out when it happens. you drive me crazy, oppa".

"i'm sorry". you didn't know he was talking about what have happened in the ring or about what he was going to do to you because suddenly his expanded pupils made his eyes get darker and darker and you were almost crying from the anticipation of feeling him anywhere.

"i'm worried you'll get more hurt". one of your hands traveled to his injured side, never leaving his gaze. "you should... i'm sorry, gun-woo, we shouldn't-".

"you promise to tell me if anything feels wrong?". he cuts you off by arching your back and locking his eyes with you, entirely invading your personal space. "if you don't like something, do you promise to make me stop? because i swear to god i can't take it anymore, y/n". he whispered the last part on your mouth and you swore the cat got your tongue for a minute.

"uhum". you nod your head and gun-woo stayed still, arching his brows as if challenging you not to finish the sentence. "i promise, oppa". you said breathly, eyes focused on his and nowhere else.

you could feel all of gun-woo's desire pulsing deliciously beneath him, hard and voluminous, inciting your intimacy to slowly release lubricant.

you were curious. his face was cute and his body was a sin, but not all of the morals and good mannerisms in the world could hide the true desire of a person. you knew he always wanted more and you were so curious to find out what exactly his innocent brain had conjured in all these months of dating you.

gun-woo panted softly, having complete control of your body now that your toes were barely touching the ground, back arching even more while he took a deep breath next to your ear. and then he started teasing his own body as he rocked back and forth, slowly, in search of relief. and using you.

you kissed his neck, and there was when you worked him up with little kisses and shy licks, making him more and more susceptible to pleasure. gun-woo was such a selfless person that he felt scared of taking instead of giving and you wanted to prove him wrong. you wanted to prove to him that sex is good regardless of your position.

you didn't count on his strength in moments like this, but he was a boxer, after all, so you were silly to think he would take it easy on you. only one minute in and his grip was so strong on your skin that you were certain your ass was battered, squeezed, and still under the fabric of your slacks.

you knew his body all too well, you saw him naked countless times and so did he with you in the last 4 months. but never he did what he wanted with you. too shy, too aware, too scared to ask you. because that's just what gun-woo was.

selfless.

he pulled your face away from his neck so that he could bring his full lips to yours. you were kissed at the pace he dictated, in the way he wanted, fast and wild. both of your tongues collided in a hot, pleasurable slide.

you swore this wasn't the same man who had blushed at remembering you sucking him off minutes ago.

gun-woo sucked hard on your voluminous lips every time he withdrew his tongue, which you insisted on sucking in the most erotic way possible whenever he invaded your mouth. meanwhile, your hips were manipulated by the boxer's hands, which made them rise and fall slowly on his still-covered cock.

your hips were placed on the counter and you finally realized you didn't have much place to run after that. you were trapped between your sink and a 6ft tall man in front of you with sirened eyes that could kill you.

your pants gradually gained moisture, and the moan you let out when gun-woo gripped your ass with more force maddened the boxer even more, making him stop the kiss and go down with his stimulations on your neck and collarbone, seconds later capturing one of your clothed nipples between his lips and sucking it.

you bit your bottom lip and intertwined your fingers in gun-woo's hair, with his head tilted up, eyes closed and lips parting as he let out gasps of pure delight. the moan you let out when he invaded your pants with his hands and started unbuttoning your jeans and unconsciously scraping your clit was so purely erotic that even he grunted.

"sorry". his gruff voice was rushed as if he felt bad for you but at the same time didn't actually give a shit and was only trying to be polite - trying not to lose his complete sanity.

which was slowly faltering.

you pushed his head against your chest in response, undulating your hips over his hard prominence and the boxer's reaction was to feel a painful twinge in his pelvis and moan.

he raised his head, eyes even darker, then glared at you. he touched your chin with his thumb and slid it across your lips while breathing deeply.

you reached into his pants and touched him, initiating continuous movements along his entire length. gun-woo's lips parted and his brows furrowed, giving you the most obscene view you've ever seen of his face.

hot scar glowing in his sweaty skin and cutting the right side of his entire cheek. 

his body was getting hotter, your body was getting hotter, his cock getting harder and your pussy getting wetter. it was painful to repress his own urges.

"fuck". you brought his dick out of his shorts and jerked it off, hands almost trembling with so much tenseness your crotch area was feeling. getting him off made you want to cry.

gun-woo closed his eyes and gasped when you massaged his glans wet by pre-cum.

"oppa". you called him in such a whiny tone that made him go crazy, hiding his face on your neck and biting his lips until it draw blood to his mouth. "i c-can't". you tried to say and his ears perked up. "i'm too wet, i d-don't know what to do". it was embarrassing for you to confess something like that, but hearing gun-woo's grunts and quiet moans was making you wetter and wetter. and you weren't lying, you actually didn't know what to do because you've never been this turned on before.

what the hell?

"fuck, don't call me that, baby". he breathed on your neck and for a second you were afraid he could smell your fucking pre-cum pooling on your panties.

"stop moaning in my ear, for fuck's sake". you didn't know where the strength to say a full sentence came from suddenly but you were afraid a simple touch of the man was going to make you fucking cum.

is this how you feel when you fuck someone you love? mighty skies above, you'll have to do this every day now. 

"what do you want me to do when you won't stop squeezing my fucking dick, princess?". his voice sounded more like a growl than an actual human sound and you whined even louder in return.

you arched your body as he trailed his fingertips along your back, intensifying the contact of his thigh against your intimacy. you parted your lips and let out a high moan in response to his touches.

suddenly, you were so sensitive you could cry.

gun-woo felt your grip on his dick falter as if giving him a break. finally, the man could breathe properly again.

the next second, you felt your lips numb with such force that gun-woo sucked them, your body limp as he ultimately took control of your body.

not platonically, but literally.

"fuck, gun-... please".

like a ragdoll, he manhandled you in a position where your cunt was pressed directly on his flexed thigh, making you cry. frustratingly kicking your pants off of you, gun-woo helped you strip the rest of your clothes off before positioning you in the same place as before and teasing your bare pussy lips with his muscles.

you felt him capturing your left nipple and massaging it with his thumb, hearing your sighs between the kiss. as he stimulated the areola, he felt it getting rigid. gun-woo introduced his tongue into your mouth and played with your whiny moans.

your body was tactful to the boxer's touch, and when you felt the digits tightening around your areola, you couldn't help but dig your toes into his butt and moan muffledly, with gun-woo's tongue entering and leaving your mouth, slowly.

a trickle of saliva ran down the corner of the man's mouth. he closed his eyes to focus on the sensations. your excited pussy continued to be stimulated by his thigh, as well as your chest. he was still sucking your tongue when he felt his member pulsate painfully, brushing on your other thigh and moving a little farther to the left, bringing both of your crotches together and beginning a slow rub, undulating his hips in such a way that you stopped sucking his tongue and gasped in delight, squeezing his biceps tighter.

"gun-woo".

he kissed your lips and bit the bottom one, slowly pulling it away from your teeth.

his mouth moved down your jaw and onto your neck, where he could hear your gasps more audibly as he tongue-kissed the warm, milky skin of your throat, careful to leave pretty marks in his travel. his fingers were sadly no longer playing with your nipples, now they were on your bent thigh, holding it firmly as he rubbed himself shamelessly against your body.

gun-woo was using you to get off.

sensing what your boyfriend was finally doing, you cocked your head and with heavy, fluttering eyelids, watched your boyfriend's unholy face in pure delight. parted lips, messy hair, and one of your legs wrapped around him.

you watched, full of lust, as the boxer rubbed himself on you. kissing your neck ardently to the point of trembling eyes.

you already felt your opening releasing natural lubrication and wondered why haven't this man done this to you before.

"i can't anymore, gun-woo. p-please".

"please? do you need something, princess?". he spoke softly but with full of warning.

"fuck... you. need you".

"yeah right, you do". his comment was so lowered that you wondered if you had imagined it for a second. "need you too, princess, don't worry".

in a swift moment, your torso was thrown directly in his chest, your arms circling his neck for purchase while gun-woo hugged your body and finally walked towards your bedroom. when you said you were a ragdoll was because you felt like one, being tossed in the bed without an ounce of strength in your limbs and you weren't even fucked yet.

he then grabbed your waist again and kissed you, meanwhile, you took his shorts off completely, admiring the messy state he made with his liquids. gun-woo grabbed your ass once again and squeezed them, sliding his fingers through the partition between them and smearing all over your ass with his own lubrication.

oh my god. this man was sick.

"oppa". you called him whiny.

he climbed off the bed and pulled you to the edge simultaneously, manhandling your body as he wished. when both of your feet hit the floor, he tore his lips from yours and looked at you.

"do you mind?". for a second, his old innocent eyes shined in the pink light your bedroom had on. sincerely, your mind was too sex-hazed to even process he was talking to you in the first place, so you just tried to focus on his face and smile. "turning around?". he motioned with his fingers a cute circle and your eyes rounded dangerously.

"back?". you pointed to the bed and then at you, voice hoarse from all the torturous moaning.

"uhum". his smile was so pure you wanted to punch him in the face, nodding his head excitingly as if he wasn't asking you to expose your cunt in the air for him.

"a-all f-fours?". you asked him again, surprised and feeling your brain all fluffy inside.

"if you don't want, that's okay". for a moment, you felt his uncommon confidence falter and you were quick to reassure him.

"no, i want to". your doe eyes held all the stars in the sky, gun-woo was sure of it.

"ok". he smiled like a kid.

"ok?". you were too stunned to form coherent sentences.

"ok?". he asked confused, waiting for you to turn around with expectant eyes and arched brows.

"ok". you nodded your head finally.

again, he grabbed your waist, pressing his pelvis to your ass as you turned around. gun-woo started attacking your nape with chaste kisses that made their way to your neck, where he left hickeys and bites. you cocked your head to the side, leaving your neck completely free for the man to make as many purple and red marks as he wanted.

quickly, gun-woo left you to search for his shorts on the floor. when he came back, he surprisingly handed the condom to you, a silent request for you to put it on him which almost made you choke.

upon receiving it, you opened the package and took your hands back, touching the boxer's length. simultaneously, gun-woo slid his hands along your curves and massaged your breasts, making you fail on the first try of putting the condom on. a low moan escaped your mouth, but you didn't stop concentrating on holding your boyfriend's cock and positioning the condom on the glans, then holding the tip and unrolling it completely to the base.

you positioned the glans between your heat and thrust it into yourself, having to bite your lower lip to contain your murmurs due to the burning sensation. gun-woo hugged your body and let himself slide in slowly, with his forehead pressed against your shoulder. you opened your mouth and a breathless groan left your mouth painfully.

"opp-".

gun-woo's eyes opened slowly, just to enjoy the view from below, where his cock slowly came out of your hole, and seconds later, it went back inside a little faster.

"fuuck". his voice was gruff, head empty, and only the feeling of your walls gripping his member inside of you running through his mind. "fuck, princess”.

you threw your head up and brought your right hand back, tangling your fingers in his hair. your brows shaped like your entire face in a set of pained and pleasurable expressions. you felt the heat every time gun-woo entered and exited, but it also felt wonderfully good to feel his cock opening you.

"fuck you". you couldn't help but curse, vaginal canal struggling to keep his member inside as he slide out of you every time. "gun-woo, please, i c-can't". you felt your cheeks wet, confirming to both of you that you were crying over a man's cock.

gladly.

"breathe for me, princess, fuck". he stopped inside you, letting you accommodate him calmly. your moan when he pinched your clit was feral.

"big, big, big". was all you could say and the boxer started to want to laugh.

"hey, princess, you're hearing me?". you breathed deeply. “c’mon, don’t be so cock-dumbed already”.

“fuck you”. was all you could say, twitching around him like crazy.

"we can't stop if it's not what you like-".

"i swear to god, i'm going to kill you. don't stop!". you screamed. painfully.

"hey, you're too tight, jagiya. you need to breathe for me first, yeah?". gun-woo himself was struggling to contain his urge to fuck you relentlessly, but he wanted you to enjoy this as well. "fuck, you're squeezing the fuck out of me, prin-".

"i c-cant. too fucking stretched, gun-woo".

"we've done this before baby, remember? i know you can, now relax for me. i'm feeling a bump on your stomach here". he pressed the bulge and you keened, juices leaking everywhere between your legs.

“i’m so wet”. you didn’t know who you were talking to anymore if it was to him or yourself.

again, you were crying and involuntarily relaxed your lower half, turning limp in your boyfriend's arms and arching your back more making him hit a new angle.

"shit-". you moaned and he felt his member twitch because of the contraction. "that's it, that's it, good girl". he breathed deeply when he could move again, relieved to have some breathing space.

without warning, gun-woo penetrated you fast and rough, making your small body propel forward, and the only thing that kept you from falling was his firm hands on your waist.

a moan escaped your lips and the rest of them died on your throat when your eyes rolled back and gun-woo hit a new angle.

the boxer smirked. gun-woo knew perfectly well how to tease you.

he then squeezed your hips and wrapped his digits in your hair. for the next moment, he withdrew from inside you and came back again, fast and hard, eliciting moans from your drooling mouth. as much as your eager moans were constant, gun-woo continued to fuck you mercilessly, without chastity, inserting himself completely without stopping. the erotic noise of your bodies colliding became frequent, echoing throughout the room and almost moving your bed from its place multiple times.

the moans became louder and more constant, and if it weren't for the firm touch of gun-woo's hands in your hair and hips, you would certainly collapse on the mattress. a trickle of lubricant ran down between your legs, and the excess made gun-woo's cock penetrate more easily into you.

you let out a high-pitched moan, the loudest yet.

gun-woo smiled happily, almost proudly, starting to thrust in the same place, which generated a sequence of loud and tearful moans coming from you.

"fuck". he cursed once, twice, and countless times with how good your pussy felt. gun-woo was losing his mind with no restraints and overthinking.

you moaning his name was beautiful, too wonderful not to be heard and appreciated, and gun-woo wished you would call his name louder and louder so everyone would know you were his.

as much as he was yours.

"princess, you there?". he worriedly asked, sensing your lack of words and quiet whines while he fucked you.

"hmm". you couldn't speak, that was on period. it didn't matter how much you tried, your eyes were too rolled back in your head for you to make sense.

and gun-woo being the wonderful boyfriend that he was, started kissing your shoulders and the back of your neck, silently saying to you that it was okay to feel so good you turned completely non-verbal.

you bit your bottom lip and, glancing over your shoulder at the worried boxer, you threw your hips back and forward, repeating the same movement signaling you were okay.

gun-woo, on the other hand, had to tightly close his eyes and suppress a growl at your hips undulating while he was still inside. the veins on his neck, arms, and hand were surely evident while he hold his breath.

somehow, you sped up your movements, and little by little, the noise of both of your bodies colliding became louder, more frequent, hotter. you whimpered when gun-woo's glans hit your sensitive spot again, and it didn't take long for your orgasm to threaten to come.

you stopped bouncing and rolled slowly, contracting, the boxer's entire cock inside you.

"i'm cumming". you exclaimed. "can i cum? fuck, gun-woo".

he then grabbed your hair again and put the side of your face against the mattress, and in that position, you were able to see the reflection of your bodies in the wardrobe mirror. and when you thought that your pleasure could not increase, the opposite was proved when you watched gun-woo's hips investing quickly in yourself, while his face was a mixture of pleasure and lust.

your small doe eyes rolled back and your vision became more blurred, your fingers dug hard into the mattress, pulling it and squeezing it between your hands. your eyes water and you mentally asked him not to stop.

"so good". gun-woo grunted in your ear and that was your last thread, squirting everywhere your pussy reached and making a mess of gun-woo's legs. the heat you felt on your cheeks was so intense you started to feel embarrassed.

panting for air, your body couldn’t stop twitching and your muscles couldn’t stop contracting around gun-woo’s member. for a moment, your brain was only white and you were certain you were crying for fuck’s sake.

"jesus christ, what was that?". the man was marveled and lust-hazed, too surprised to notice you were almost passing out.

"baby, please". you whispered weakly, gun-woo slowing down his movements and reaching for your face.

"princess?". his tone was worried for a minute too long. "are you good?".

"squirt". you try to say, feeling your brain too hazed to work properly. "i just s-squirted".

"oh", gun-woo's face was too innocent for someone who had his cock deep inside you, in your opinion, and you hated it. "you gripped me so tight, i thought i was dying". he laughed meaningly and you glanced back at him through the mirror with horror. how could he react like that?

the next thing you know your eyes were as round as your mouth and your lungs were burning with the lack of air. you moaned uncoordinated, finding it hard to distinguish when your pussy stopped spasming and gave him room to move again.

"what do you think you're doing, gun-woo-!?". your scream was cut short by the man thrusting into you again. with full force.

your legs trembled with pleasure, and then they failed to hold themselves together. seeing that you would collapse on the bed, he laid down on top of you and held both of your closed fists, accelerating the penetration even more, which, due to the position, made you tighter.

your clit pressed against the mattress caused friction that only added to the maximum overstimulation. gun-woo took your hands to your pussy lips and made you pull the bands one on each side.

"keep it open for me please, princess?". he asked menacingly, another orgasm starting to build inside you.

"gun-woo!". this man was sick.

"cum with me this time, yeah, jagi?". he whispered in your ear, face turned to your reflection in the mirror and staring right back at your eyes.

"i'm gonna cum-". you affirmed.

"c'mon baby, just a sec, will ya?".

you closed your eyes and tried to hold back, however, gun-woo continued to fuck you deliciously. couldn't hold it anymore. that was final. having your clit constantly hit and neck kissed was too much to delay your orgasm any longer.

the overstimulation was killing you.

"gun-woo, i can't".

"i'm cumming, baby". he grunted out of breath. "cum with me, princess".

and as if it were magic words, you reached your orgasm right when he closed his mouth, followed by a slick and louder moan, making your whole body tremble with the wonderful spasms. breathing was frantic, and his hands were lying at your sides. gun-woo was still fucking in search of his own orgasm.

you contracted around him, squeezing him and, consequently, increasing his pleasure, and that was the climax for the boxer, who finally came deliciously inside the condom.

he was in heaven. searching for something to hold his sanity onto.

his nonexisted sanity.

you kissed him, in an attempt to distract both of you from the thoughtless state of mind. gun-woo turned your body with one hand and collapsed on top of you just after. your yelp was soundless to the boxer, head too pleasured for not stuffing his nose on your hair and trying to compose his fucking mind.

"you there?", gun-woo's voice was muffled by your skin, body too subtle under his.

"everything burns". you admitted in a whisper, throat flaming for moaning so loud.

"i think your neighbor will have complaints tomorrow". the man on top of you smirked and nosely laughed.

"don’t laugh, it’s your fault. you're crashing me, oppa". you whined trying to pull him off of you but not being able to move one muscle.

"omo, 'm sorry". he got off of you and smiled looking at you, almost shy to see your flushed face.

you smiled weakly in return and gun-woo took the condom off of him, making a knot and throwing it on the floor, next to the bed, to throw it away later. he settled on top of your body again and leaned on his forearms, and after facing you and smiling tenderly at your disorientated state, he kissed you tenderly.

you cupped his face and returned the kiss, calm but as delicious as any other one you both had. your hands were shaking while holding his chin and the man seemed to notice. his breathing was still labored, and because of that, he stopped the kiss but continued with both of your foreheads together, noses brushing against each other and lips open.

the two of you were sweaty, you were tired.

"you were amazing, oppa". your raspy voice came in contact with his ears and gun-woo tried to hide his burning cheeks on your neck again, you stop him and stared right back into his eyes.

"really?”. you giggled and he laughed at your hazy gaze. he then started sliding the digits of his right hand by your waist. "you're the one to blame".

"i love you". gun-woo smiled widely and you followed suit, without much exaggeration.

gun-woo tilted his head down and stared at your face; rosy cheeks, closed eyes and chest rising and falling with some frequency. he smiled small and kissed your slightly sweaty forehead, starting to stroke your damp soft hair.

"thank you, princess. i love you too". he whispered drowsily. "can't believe you squirted yet".

"stop". it was your turn to feel shy.

"it was hot".

"you sex beast. i am afraid of not being capable to get up to change your bandage". gun-woo almost choked.

oh god. the bruise.

"a-ah y-yes, totally". he looked down on his side and made a face at the kneaded band-aid.

you could not see that now.

"it's okay, though. i'm okay".

"are you?", your hazy doe eyes glanced at his sirened ones and gun-woo was quick to nod his head dramatically. "'kay". you replied tiredly, eyes almost closing. "can i take a nap, oppa?".

"of course, babygirl". the boxer keened, worried about your dimmed state and praying that he'd have the time to fix your bandage before you woke up.

his high pain tolerance scared him sometimes too, but gun-woo was sure that when the adrenaline left his body, he would feel the consequences of his actions the next day.

"want to shower with me first?". he asked before seeing your eyes completely closed.

"'m tired". you murmured.

"i'll be quick, okay? you don't have to do nothing, we can use the tub", gun-woo suggests.

you surprisingly laughed, and your eyes reduced to two tiny lines. it was so admiring the unique beauty of your joy that, spontaneously, your boyfriend also smiled. it was infectious and refreshing to see your smile so huge and genuine.

"are you suggesting that you shower me like a kid, sailor?". your voice was filled with happiness and the man next to you was quick to reply.

"no, no, no, that's creepy". his brows were arched and his eyes round, you wanted to laugh because of his pure reaction. "i just wanted you to rest... to not be tired and sticky".

"okay, baby. you can take care of me".

gun-woo opened a huge smile and left your body on the bed so he could turn on the bathtub and quickly come back to you.

staring at you sprawled in your element, kim geun-woo realized that he had never been more happy in his entire life than right now.

and he didn't give a fuck if his right side was completely numb when he had you.

don't normalize arguing with your boyfriend's best friend while he is injured and horny ! that might have consequences... hope you guys enjoyed and i'm so sorry for any misspelling 🥺 (this is how sex with kim geun-woo post ep.6 would be and you cannot prove me otherwise)

#this took me 3 days to write #ignore if its bad pls 🥺 #woo do hwan #kim geun woo x reader #kim gun woo #bloodhounds kim geun woo #bloodhounds #bloodhounds netflix #smut kim geun woo #fluff kim geun woo #bloodhounds smut #smut bloodhounds

[stemmmm]

Close to a year and four rewrites later, I present to you...

Stem's Thoughts on the Game Design of Harvest Moon on SNES

I’m not going to lie, if you don’t like farming sims, you won’t like this one. At their core, every farming sim (at least in the rpg genre) is nearly identical, and that’s because of this game. In a way, I might dare to say that Harvest Moon for the SNES is the perfect farming sim because it has every one of the usual elements in their most simplified form and it just works straight from the get-go. It works so well in fact, that after this game came out in 1996, four more entries to the series were released before the year 2000.

If you are someone who does like farming sims, I can’t recommend this game enough. It’s simple and to the point, with a fast pace and enough random events and points of intrigue that the game kept me relatively engaged for my whole playthrough.

Also, by nature of this being the first game and therefore hard to cover concisely and by nature of taking so long to write this... it's long as hell! Enjoy! :) <3

I can’t say my appreciation of this game doesn’t come with a few caveats. I’ve intermittently played HM games all my life, starting with the GameBoy port (GB1) all the way to Pioneers of Olive Town, so while I don’t know exactly how the series has evolved, I’ve seen it at some of its earliest and at its latest. My vague childhood memories of GB1 (a game I didn’t own and didn’t play much of) were that it was pretty sparse and bland, so knowing that this original game was allegedly the same thing but with a little more content, I was expecting the bare minimum. I was prepared to never even be able to leave my farm, but the first thing the game did was shuttle me off to the nearby town and blocked the exit until I talked to everyone there. 

(Maps of the town, mountain, and farm via The Spriters Resource)

You learn everything you need to know about the game right here at the beginning; Firstly, that this town is small as all hell and has hardly anyone in it aside from the five girls you can marry and their immediate family members. The next thing you’ll learn is that there’s a fence on your farm, and you need to be taking care of that. Of the few repetitive lines of dialogue any given person in town has to share with you on any given day, a fair amount are devoted to reminding you to fix your fence, to make sure it’s in good repair. There was just a big storm so watch out! Remember to check it every day! Are you chopping enough wood? Because you’ll need it for that fence!

I’m being dramatic of course, you aren’t reminded about it that much, though the thin variation of dialogue means it comes up a lot. The emphasis on your fence does exist, and it isn’t for nothing: while it doesn’t matter as much if all you do is grow crops– if you keep animals, the game tells you that the ideal thing to do for yours and the animal’s happiness is to put the animals outside to graze. Animal feed bought from the livestock shop will keep them fed, but it's nothing compared to fresh grass grown on your farm. You can’t even buy animals without a certain amount of grass planted! And sure, you can cut the grass to store for later, but it’s at its best straight out of the ground. However, the way the game is programmed, the animals only eat when the day rolls over, so putting animals outside for the day and taking them in at night isn’t an option, and on top of that, there’s things that come out at night that can hurt your animals. This is where your fence comes in.

The Utility of Fences

At the entrance to your farm is a cluster of buildings: your house, a small lumber shed, a barn, coop, and silo, a tool shed, and an old, dried up well. Just barely surrounding all of these is a little wooden fence that looks more like a row of upright logs than anything else. Despite this farm having presumably been abandoned, the fence is in perfect repair. You’ll quickly discover that the fence as it is won’t work out; there’s hardly space to plant anything within it, and with the well dried up, you’re forced to hop it to get to a water source to fill up your watering can. It’s pretty clear that you’ll need to expand your fence, and it’s easy to do with all of the tree stumps littering the massive field that it’s blocking off. 

On top of needing to expand the range of your fence, the individual planks eventually will rot away and leave useless stumps. They show up more frequently after rain or a large storm. The posts don’t rot away completely so they have to be manually removed, but replacing them is as simple as smashing the old post with a hammer or ax and popping a new post in its place. It becomes a very natural part of your daily routine to run a lap around the farm’s perimeter before you go to bed to make sure everything looks safe and secure. It’s a good way to ensure your animals are put away and debris is cleared out, too! It slotted very nicely into my daily schedule until a certain point.

With how much time you have to spend hopping over the logs to get to the rest of the area too large to fence in, you might be tempted to leave one out of place for easier traversal. When night comes, it’s clear why that would be a mistake. Sometimes when you go to bed, you’ll hear your dog barking. It’s a small detail, one that took me a long time to notice because I didn’t always play with the sound on. There are wild dogs that prowl around the wilderness surrounding your farm, and only at night do they dare to come close. Your dog, if left outside, isn't able to do anything other than warn you of their presence if they show up. There’s nothing to notice during the daytime if it happens, unless you happened to leave one of your animals outside. There was one night that I left my chickens outside, having thought my fence was in perfect order and repair. I went to bed and heard the dog barking, followed by a horrible crunch. When I went out in the morning, I saw where my chicken had been before, it had been replaced by a pile of feathers. On the north side of my farm was a rotted fence post I’d failed to fix. 

The Reality of Fences

After losing my chicken, a cluster of pixels on my screen it may have been, I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my animals outside. I didn’t want to take a risk again, the sound and sight of feathers was upsetting enough. On a more logical note, the chickens didn’t even lay eggs if left outside so there was no value in it. Cows were a pain to put back inside the barn too, because of some silliness with the game’s collision. As much of a disappointment as it was to not have my animals roam around, it was just easier. At the time, I was focusing on upgrading my house anyways, so I didn’t have time to take care of my animals outside where time would pass when I could use that time gathering wood, and everything I had was being saved up for the house so I didn’t have any extra materials to repair my fence with. My fence was all rotting away. Because it was inconvenient for getting to my crops, I started smashing all the old posts as they went, too. That’s when I noticed something: the wild dog wasn’t coming anymore.

I didn’t pay much attention to it until I was looking up a completely different mechanic and discovered a forum explaining how the fences were broken. Rotted posts attracted the wild dog, they said. It didn’t matter if you had gaps in your fence, or even a fence at all–in fact no fence was the best kind to have because the mere existence of posts that could rot was a liability. 

I was hesitant at first to test this concept, after all there wasn’t much I could gain from it. My chickens wouldn’t lay outside, and my cows would be too challenging to get back in if the forecast called for rain. The thing that got me to finally try it was when I was trying to hatch more chickens. My coop felt like a nightmare to navigate due to its current population. I wanted less animals inside that I had to feed, so I threw a couple chicks outside–they weren’t laying yet anyways. Lo and behold, the dog didn’t come. More days passed and more animals were left outside, and it never came. My fence had rotted until there was nothing left at all. No dogs could ever come to my farm again. And I realized that the game’s own insistence on its mechanics was all a lie.

How You’re Told To Play - How The Game Lies

Of course, my animals didn’t stay outside. For a minute it was fun having a crowd of cows milling about while I tended to my crops, but letting them wander free and uninhibited made it impossible to find and milk all of them without any trouble, and there were the rainy days to watch out for. After the novelty wore off, they went back inside and stayed there. The thing is, that didn’t make a single bit of difference in how much they liked me compared to how they were living in the barn. On top of that, they didn’t seem to care whether I was feeding them grass or store-bought food either, though I mostly stuck to the grasses since they were cheaper and easier to get. Nothing about how I was told to care for animals really mattered past feeding them every day, petting it and maybe brushing it, if it was a cow.

It gets worse. The most basic aspect of the game is the fact that time passes. The story takes place over 2 and a half years, running through each day until the end, and these days last from 6AM to 6PM according to the game’s own internal time setting. After 6PM, all of the shops aside from the bar will close and you lose the ability to sell anything as you’re told it would rot in the shipping bin overnight, so there’s nothing to do but sleep until the next day. Issue with this is that when the days stop at 6PM… they just stop. Time doesn’t flow anymore. The game doesn’t give you any kind of clock to know the exact time it is until after you’ve upgraded your house, so all you have to go by before that is the color of the environment and whether or not your character has played an animation to eat something (you’re automatically fed when you wake up, at noon, and at night). I discovered this because I was curious if I could actually see the wild dog by staying out, and left the game running for probably 20 minutes in real life only for nothing to happen. Because of the time freeze, the time after 6PM actually becomes really valuable for farm logistics. You can’t sell anything, no, but you can pull up all the weeds on the farm, water your crops, fix your fences, feed and care for animals if you hadn’t already, and harvest wood for fences and house upgrades which would have taken a lot of valuable time to get during shipping-hours. The only thing that gets in the way of doing all that is you running out of energy.

Your energy is what allows you to use your farming equipment like your ax or watering can. Running out of it doesn’t mean you fall unconscious or anything, but your character will play an animation of them stumbling over and will fail to use any tools. The most obvious fix to this is to simply go to bed, as sleeping gives you a full recharge. You can also, however, recharge it by going to the hot spring on the mountain, or by eating food bought at the restaurant in town or foraged for in the forest. You can’t tell easily how much is refilled, as there’s no visual indicator like a health bar, but you’re able to eat more than once, and jumping into the hot spring seems to count whether you did it or not more than how much time you spend in there, so you can hop in and out a couple of times and call it good. 

Individually, time freezing at 6PM and energy being endlessly replenishable aren’t bad things. Even together, they’re not the worst. Having free time to focus on profitless chores is nice, and I think it’s important to be able to replenish your energy in case you have a limited amount of time to do things like for example, cut all of your grass before winter kills it. What makes an exploit out of these is the fact that the resources in the forest will never run out. Every time you re-enter the forest, all forage items and tree stumps are respawned. The infinite amount of forage makes for infinite energy refills, and could also make for an incredible money exploit if you didn’t have a very limited amount of time to ship things. You don’t have a limited amount of time to cut up tree stumps though. If you wanted to, you could run up to the forest after 6PM, chop every stump, then simply reload the area, and everything’s back. You can get all of the wood you would ever need to fully upgrade your house in one night. It’s a bit of a grind to do all at once, but it’s a grind you’d be doing over time anyways. It’s not the worst exploit in the world, since you still need money to pay for the house upgrade, but arguably because of how you have to focus your energy elsewhere for most of the game, the wood is the harder thing to get. Additionally, when the game has very little to do in both fall and winter due to the lack of crops, this exploit takes away just about any reason to play those two seasons other than to take care of animals. It’s an optional exploit of course–as all exploits are–but once you learn about it, it’s hard to resist the desire to get the grind out of the way all at once and mess up the pacing of the game.

The Charm of the Game

Learning that the fences were completely broken as a mechanic was a huge disappointment for me. From the moment I got a grasp on how the game was supposed to work, I wanted to eventually surround my whole field with fencing and keep my animals outside so I would have some life on my farm while I worked. I didn’t just want this, I was excited for it! This was something I’d never done in a farming sim that didn’t already manage putting animals in and out for you like Stardew Valley or newer Story of Seasons games do. My routine is always the same: I go into the barn and coop to tend to each of my animals, I take care of my crops outside, then run straight to town to talk to everyone, and go to bed. The change in routine that would come from taking care of the animals outside and patrolling the fence every night felt fresh to me. It made me feel that even though this was the first game of its kind, it was different and required new things of me. But in the end, I played it exactly the same.

Harvest Moon is still very different from all of the games that followed it, though. In many ways, it’s because it has less “stuff” in it– both in terms of items and things you have to do. But I wouldn’t say that it feels incomplete. Harvest Moon runs over the course of 2 and a half years before your work is evaluated. Until that happens, you have the ability to farm four different crops, you can raise both cows and chickens, you can upgrade your house to have more features, upgrade your working tools, build relationships with the townspeople to a small extent, go to town festivals that happen each year, and you can get married to one of the five girls living in town with whom you can have up to two children. Everything that you would come to expect as a fan of games like this is already here from the very first iteration. The most notable lack this game has, and one that seems to be completely unique to this game, is that there aren’t any crops in the fall or winter, which means that unless you have animals, there’s a whole half of the year that you don’t have anything to do. The game is clearly aware of this though, because in an average playthrough, this is where you’ll start to run into the story events.

There isn’t much of an overarching story in the game, past the general concept that you’ve run away from home to work on an abandoned farm. The conclusion rests on how good of a job you actually do. In between those two points are smaller events, usually tied to when you get tool upgrades or special ones for each of the romantic interests. The first event you’re likely to run into happens on the very last day of summer, where one of the woodsmen comes to your house in the morning to ask if you’re okay because he heard a huge crash at night and you should check your farm. What I found was that a tree in my field had fallen over, and its remaining stump had a big empty hole in it. When I inspected the stump, I was suddenly underground in a cave filled with loud and industrious music, and I was faced with two, little green people–Harvest Sprites, though I don’t know if they’re called that yet here. One asked me if my scythe worked well, and when I said yes, told me that they had made it and that I should check my shed tomorrow for a better one. Other tool upgrades are obtained in similar fashion; one comes from feeding a starving sprite a mushroom and another comes from another hole in the farm opening up to reveal another part of the cave system that has a couple of hints on how to unlock other things. 

The events for romantic interests happen at less scripted times, as they’re tied to how strong your relationship is with each girl. Each girl only has one event, and it only triggers when your relationship is high enough that you would ask her to marry you. The events usually take up a whole day, and don’t necessarily add much to each character. Ellen’s revolves around how she’s no good at keeping pets– something established on your second day at the farm when you get your dog from her, Eve’s hammers in her fraught relationship with her grandpa, and Ann’s is about losing the chicken weathervane, or “weathercock” which sits on the roof of her workshop and goes missing every time there’s a storm. Conversely, Nina and Maria’s scenes bring up entirely new events that bring up a number of questions while providing no answers. Nina disappears while looking for a medicinal plant because her mother is apparently sick, and Maria vanishes for days until you find her hiding away with the woodsmen for some reason. All of these events, whether they share new information or not, manage to add some greatly appreciated depth to each character by giving them more room to speak and be sincere than their short and repetitive day-to-day dialogues do.

The dialogue in this game is simple, to the point, and sparse– probably because there was only so much memory that could be reserved for approximately 15 people who all have multiple lines of dialogue, and only so much money to pay someone to write more. There is simple dialogue that doesn’t tell you much more than “hello, how are you” would, more dialogue that I’d label as tutorial text, and a few lines that I truthfully couldn’t understand well because of the sub-par translation this game received for english. The dialogue that exists to inform the world really manages to create a unique vibe though. Nina’s dialogue, almost always about plants, goes into forays about how they’re creatures with wills to live, too. Ellen’s uncle who runs the ranch shop tells you that it’s much better to feed your animals fresh grass if you try to buy any from his store, and if you decline to purchase he laughs as if he’s won something. There’s even dialogue referencing the silent player! Multiple lines exist to comment on him not paying attention, and inspection prompts have people telling you not to touch something rather than being an item description. It was the last thing I expected, to get the same level of personality out of the main character as I did from each of the girls, albeit very subtly. He went from a kind of nothing, self-insert into being what I perceive to be a hyperactive boy, akin to a border collie who was let out into a field of sheep for the first time–the exact kind of person crazy enough to take on an abandoned farm and succeed.

It’s these short little character details that bring life into the game. Each day, you’ll really only see one line of dialogue from each character, be it new or old, with that dialogue usually only changing if there’s a change in season or festival coming up. The repetitive, pretty mindless routine of the game can turn into a sort of meditation if you let it, where you spend your time working thinking about the folks in town and what they had to say to you the previous day. The developers took this concept in stride and gave the side characters loads of dialogue about life, about God and religion, and about… very basic morals, but morals nonetheless. It’s a children’s game after all. When you take the thoughts, questions and prompts the characters give you back to the farm to do your long and tedious routine, you have to ask yourself– what are you working so hard for? For the feeling of accomplishment? Recognition from your peers? For the sake of some higher power, if you worship one? For me personally, it was to write this essay, but it was also for a good grade on the high score screen at the end, so to be honest a lot of this stuff was lost on me until just now when I was reviewing the game to get screenshots.

Setting The Standard - Why You Should Play HM SNES

You may read all of this and still think, well, it doesn’t sound like the game has much in it. And you would be right, it’s a very small game, but it’s also extremely quick. On average, my days only lasted about three minutes of real life time. Everything flew by, and I think I finished the game in 20 hours or less. I barely got a chance to notice that there wasn’t much going on because every second of my day was spent busy doing something, and when I wasn’t busy, the break was appreciated. I didn’t start to run out of things to do until I was finished with the second year, and when I looked up what I needed to do to get a decent ending, I was already most of the way there. It was easy to push through those last two seasons to get to the end, and it was so, so worth it. 

As I mentioned earlier, the game ends with a high score screen, meaning it has to track all of your accomplishments. These include, but are not limited to: the number of things you ship, number of each crop you grow, number of animals you have and how much they like you, how upgraded your house is, who you married, how much all of the girls in town like you if you didn't get married, how many kids you have (which basically equates to how long you were married), your happiness score (increased by going to festivals and decreased by having animals die), and how many times you’ve pet your dog. In addition to these being tallied up and presented to you, you get special cutscenes not just for each one of these accomplishments, but additional ones for if you managed to do even better! I got a cutscene for having a cow, followed by one for having lots of cows, followed by yet another for having cows that loved me! Watching them play one after the other felt like taking a victory lap even without getting the best possible result. Seeing all of my numbers come up at the end made me want to try again to actually get those other cutscenes, not to get to see them, they’re so easy to find on Youtube, but because the game made it feel like an accomplishment! If I weren’t following this game up by immediately playing its GameBoy port, I absolutely would have started a new file right away. I’ve been playing the Harvest Moon series since I was a little kid and this was the first time I’d actually managed to beat one of these games. I struggle to think the finale of any game following this will feel as good as this one did.

I started writing this whole thing about the fences because it was an easy and silly entry point to get into my core issue with the game, and so I could have an opportunity to dig into game mechanics and the way the knowledge you have of them will completely alter your playstyle, because that’s all fun and interesting for me to talk about. Another reason why I focused on that was because it was near impossible for me to pick any kind of focus point when talking about this game. After all, I’m trying to study a whole series of games that spans multiple decades, and this is not only the first game in that series, but a game that created the whole genre of farming sims and defined that genre so thoroughly that you can see its DNA in every single game that followed.

 I didn’t expect much to come out of my experience with this game. My expectations for it before I even picked it up were that it was going to be basically featureless, as informed by my experience with one of the first games I ever played as a child, Harvest Moon GB, which I will get into next. This game was not that at all. I think that everything it did manage to get working right came together just about perfectly. Harvest Moon is exactly what it wanted to be, and where it wasn’t, it lied about how it worked to try and make you play the correct way anyways. When I believed that lie, my time playing was even more enjoyable. Maybe if farming worked just a little bit more like how you’re told it’s supposed to, and if there was just a little bit more story, those would cover the things I felt wanting for the most. But maybe a little flexibility and ambiguity is a good thing. Maybe actually maintaining a fence is just too hard, and maybe if the girls were more fleshed out, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy filling in their gaps in my head.

There are many more things I could say and wanted to say about this game, but this has grown far too long already so I'm cutting myself off here. I'm sure my later entries aren't going to get near this length. If you managed to get to this point, thank you so much for reading!

#harvest moon #story of seasons #harvest moon snes #hm snes #game review #m.txt #hm posting #i think i hit the image cap also? it wouldn't let me put in more even though i dont think there are that many. maybe it was a different cap #im happy to answer questions about things i didnt cover here too lol and i have notes from my playthrough if anyone is interested in those #those notes are the only reason i was able to keep all of this straight given how long it took me to write #anyways finally hitting post after like 3 days because i keep forgetting until weird hours

[sugajimin]

✧ prince jimin ✧ moments

(cr. namuspromised,0613data,dwellingsouls,jung-koook...click here for detailed credits)

#jimin #park jimin #bts #btsgif #btsedit #myedit #mygifs #full credits on the link it will take a huge paragraph to write them so i did this #HONESTLY i am not sastified at all #but it took me 3 days to do it #so thats why i ll post it #color consistency idk her

[tenderfxck]

hello!!! i really like ur sub characters they make me giggle ngl cause like awww <3 if it’s okay can I request a Zhongli x reader where during the night he lets his half dragon form out while he rests, so he has his horns and tail out but still looks human (I think that is his morax form) however the reader doesn’t know about him being a dragon so one night as he has his form out, she is having a wet dream and poor Li’ has to grit his teeth and try not to whimper and buck his hips up as she grinds and humps his tail :(( poor baby is getting all the stimulation but not enough at this same time :(( Eventually he’ll come and twitch while slapping a hand over his mouth to stop his whining as his beloved continues to grind all over his tail, rubbing its most sensitive parts and he just has to endure the overstimulation. (Have a good day!)

zhongli//restless night//f!reader//18+

contents: half dragon! zhongli, f!reader, somno, accidental voyerism, shit anon you got me good T T

notes: AAAAAH i'm so late, sorry this took forever, there was a whole lot going on in my life but i’m still so happy you sent this spicy prompt to me, it was so much fun to write💕

it was a time of rest. a time when he allowed himself to relax just enough that he wouldn’t have to keep up the appearance of a human anymore.

the long amber horns were allowed to sprout from his temples, while his long tail resembling that color of oudh wood was permitted to spread itself across the fine sheets that wangshu inn provided.

and yet, now you have spread yourself across him. . .

this certainly wasn’t the plan, but can anything ever go accordingly when it comes to you?

zhongli wasn't expecting to be in such a vulnerable position with you. he was typically vigilant about hiding his dragon-like form, dismissing himself from your company to his own room for the night before unwinding.

but tonight, wangshu inn was fully booked except for one solitary room.

with only one bed.

you fussed about the arrangement, but zhongli merely chuckled, assuring you that as long as you were comfortable, he did not mind the prospect of sharing.

so the two of you shared this bed together. zhongli had thought absolutely nothing of it. he'll just retain his human form all night.

well, that was the plan, until he felt your weight dip the other side of the mattress, settling so comfortably against his form as you quickly dozed off. he could smell the sweet scent of your perfume, feel the soft cotton of your nightgown against him. it was just so. . .cozy. warm and safe

soon enough, zhongli could feel his human form slipping, sprouting those more dragon-like traits without him noticing.

well. . .then he'll just wake up before your pretty eyes even think to flutter open. zhongli will change back and you'll never be the wiser to this altered state he finds himself in now.

yes, a fine plan.

(and one that would let him indulge in the warmth and comfort of you as he dozed off)

but of course, that's when you saw fit to strike upon him.

it is had all started so innocently. just you clinging to him, snuggled up so cutely even as he faced away from you. you had been positioned against him, cradling his back as you spooned his resting form. his great tail was in between those soft thighs, but zhongli had decent enough self-control to ignore it.

that’s when he first felt the thrust of your hips.

he was on the cusp of waking and asleep until the sudden motion enticed him away from the edge.

he thought nothing much of it. just the shifting of your body to a more comfortable position. he was settling in to his pillow once again when he felt the rock of hips against his tail again.

a gasp was caught in his throat, unsure if what happened wasn't just an active imagination on his part. zhongli held his breath, waiting to see if it was just a trick of his mind.

and then there it was again. a long, drawn out stroke of your hips. and this time, the heavenly sigh of your voice to accompany it.

zhongli grit his teeth, listening intently for any sign that you had awoken, but all that graced his ears was your soft snores accompanied by tiny little whimpers escaping you.

unknowingly, in a fit of passion only clear to you in whatever blissful dream your sleeping form had conjured up, you were nonetheless grinding upon zhongli’s ridged tail in what was now becoming a slow, yet steady pace.

“a-ah~ excuse me,” he stuttered, barely able to process the scene enfolding behind him. he stumbled over his words, desperately searching for any way to wake you up without mortifying the two of you. “you seem to be-aah!” zhongli couldn’t contain that little outburst. he gasped at the steady friction you provided.

zhongli couldn’t believe the circumstances. he turned his head, chancing a look back upon your peaceful form.

sure enough you were still soundly asleep, unaware of the lewd situation playing out before you.

it didn’t help that his tail was overly sensitive to stimuli (something left over from more primordial days) and especially that of your wet cunt catching on each prominent bump along his long tail.

“a-ah, wait, that’s. . . nngh!” zhongli tried to protest. he knew the implications this would have if you were to wake up and discover more than just the illicit situation you found yourselves in.

but zhongli had desired you for so long. thought about just what noises you would make in circumstances like this long before he found himself here tonight. and now it was all coming true. right in his ear.

and right against him. . .

fuck. your needy pussy humping his sensitive tail was just too much. the worst part is he could feel just exactly how wet you had gotten using him to get yourself off. he grasps at the waistband of his pants, dragging them down and letting his already weeping cock spring forth from the cotton confines.

it’d shame him to admit just how quickly this little routine had him stiff and aching in his pants. but his self restraint had already eroded to much.

if you were enjoying yourself, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to indulge himself as well?

zhongli took his cock in hand and began to slowly stroke, focusing on the distinct feeling of you moving against him. he bit his tongue, willing any moans to die on his lips before he dares disturbs your slumber.

it continued like that for archons knows how long. the thrust of your hips, followed by zhongli silencing his moans and fisting his cock quicker, all while enduring all those sweet little whimpers escaping you as you chased your own pleasure on his tail.

it was too much. too much stimulation, too many little sounds. the slick of your cunt against him, the wet noise of him fucking his own fist, the knowledge that you were so close, using him to get yourself off while that pretty little head dreamt about all sorts of perverse things.

too much. too much. he’s gonna-!

he comes with a particularly deep grind of your twitching pussy gliding against his now glistening scales. he clasped a trembling hand over his mouth, willing himself quieter as dragon fangs catch against his palm, feeling himself finally come undone. he basks in the sensation of you humping so diligently against his most vulnerable area as he spills his thick load all over himself.

he panted, tremors still finding their way through his body as he lay spent, thighs and stomach covered in his seed.

he gasped, moaning and twitching in the aftermath.

yet you still continued.

fuck. fuck. archons, you weren’t stopping-!

you kept on grinding onto his newly overstimmed tail, letting out those sweet little whimpers, chasing that high while zhongli has to sit and bear this whole lewd scene as he writhed and panted against you.

this was going to be a long night. . .

#damn anon you really hit like 3 of my big kinks props to you #pls enjoy even though it took me forever to write #i would have given him 2 cocks but i am tired and need to sleep #perhaps another day #a normal person: who posts a fic at 3 in the morning? #me: oh boy 3am! #i wish i could ever post something at a reasonable hour but here we are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ #tender library #zhongli x reader #zhongli x you #zhongli x y/n #zhongli #zhongli smut #genshin x reader #genshin x you #genshin x y/n #genshin smut #somno #somnophilia #accidental voyerism

[oblongbirb]

everything will be okay

- a prologue -

#ff7 #final fantasy vii #ffvii #sephiroth #ifalna #aerith gainsborough #professor hojo #cloud strife #tifa lockhart #lucrecia crescent #jenova #this took me 3 days 💀 #idc if its cringe its MY au and I get to write the story that makes 0 sense

[mrs-gauche]

“Your abilities declare the world real. Who, if not the Maker of this world, could grant such a gift?”

#dragon age #solas #cassandra pentaghast #dai gifs #my gifs #one of my favorite banters actually #tells you so much about him #I may or may not have cried while making this (‾◡◝) #this took so long...... #love how I'm at a point where I'm basically writing screenplay before actually taking the footage lol #because I try to have the shot match the dialogue.. #but I can only do so much with the flycam when there aren't different facial expressions you know 😂 #it's very tricky but I love the result regardless <3 #my first edit including two of my favorite characters.. how did it take me so long? 😂

[tonberry-yoda]

Reaper's Wife - Reaper

Pairing - Reaper x f!reader

Warnings - mention of blood

Word Count - 1,383

Notes - there's a voice line between reaper and widow where they talk about reaper's wife and it just inspired me to write this! i hope everyone enjoys because i am a huge fan of this teddy bear and got a brainrot smh. i hope everyone has a great rest of their day/night and stays hydrated!! enjoy!!! <333

Not a lot of people know about Reaper's wife.

Gabriel Reyes. An old officer. A fighter. A killer. A monster. Nothing more. Always in excruciating pain and never able to catch a break.

No matter how many people surrounded that man, he would still have secrets. Thousands. Even with the people he is closest to.

"Wait, you have a wife?!" Sombra's jaw was to the floor in disbelief.

"I thought you knew this." Reyes put his face in his hands and sat down. He was already in enough pain, he didn't need a headache on top of that.

"I know a lot about everyone, sure, but not about you! You know it would be nice if you shared a little more about yourself."

"We aren't friends, Sombra." Reyes pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Sure, but does that really matter in the long run?" Sombra was checking all over her databases for even an ounce of information on who Gabriel's wife could be. "I would've liked to know that Mr. Dark and Brooding would have a cute little wife at home."

"What are we talking about in here?" Everyone recognized Widowmaker's thick French accent as she walked into the room with a dramatic fluffy robe and 2 cups of coffee.

"Cute face mask," Sombra giggled and took the other coffee that Widowmaker had. "No wonder your skin always looks so great."

"Maybe I'll show you my routine sometime," Widowmaker smiled and sat down on a nearby couch. "But I seriously doubt you were talking about my flawless skin, Sombra. Tell me. What were you and Reyes talking about?"

"Don't answer that." Reyes' voice was clearly angry, but Sombra didn't care one bit.

"Reaper has a wife!" Her voice was just as surprised as when she found out moments ago.

Widowmaker, on the other hand, just chuckled, modestly covering her mouth.

"Widow, did you know this or something?!"

"I've known since the day I met him, chère."

"What?! Am I the only one out of the loop here?! Not fair!" Sombra threw her arms down like a child and pouted.

Moira walked into the room already dressed and ready for battle. "I heard we were talking about Reyes' wife?"

"¡Oh vamos! You have got to be kidding me!" Sombra just took an angry sip from her coffee cup. "What do you know about her, Moira, since you're so keen on knowing everything about everyone."

"I thought that was your job, hacker."

"Shut up and just tell me! I want to put it in my records."

"No, absolutely not! We don't need her lingering in your records, Sombra." Reaper stood up. "Moira, don't you da-"

"She's one of the strongest women I've ever met. An interesting soul, that's for sure."

Reaper groaned and buried his face in a throw pillow.

"You've met her?!" Now Sombra was interested.

"Of course I have. I think everyone has in Talon except you, Sombra. Sorry."

Sombra just crossed her arms with a little pout. "It doesn't matter, just tell me more."

"I don't think I mentioned this yet, but she is beautiful. Reyes' sure knows how to pick them."

"Shut up." Reaper's voice was muffled in the pillow and everyone could tell that he was blushing.

"She's not a fighter, but I guarantee she could be if provoked. I would absolutely love to run some experiments on her if given the chance."

"Okay Moira!" Reaper sat up, now furious. "That's enough! Lay one finger on her and I'll kill you."

Moira just sighed and left the room, mumbling to herself about some experiment she's been working on.

Sombra just groaned, leaning back on the couch she was sitting on. "It's not faiiiiirrrrrr!!!"

"What's not fair?" Reyes' voice was getting more and more frustrated. Why did he have to work around these psychopaths?

"I want to meet your wife so baaaaaad!!!"

"I'm with Sombra on this one," Widowmaker stared into her empty coffee cup and back up at Reyes. "Let her meet y/n. I bet she would like her."

"I don't care who would like who! Plus... um..." Gabriel's face went bright red and he looked away.

"Ah, I see." Widow giggled, placing her empty cup on a nearby table. "Things aren't going so well at home, huh?"

"Um..." Gabriel rubbed the back of his neck, his face going a dark shade of crimson. "It's not really that it's more... uhm... how do I say this without sounding like an asshole."

"Ooooohhh." Widowmaker came to realization with a smirk. "You haven't talked to her in a while, have you?"

Reyes went silent and Sombra turned to him, looking concerned. "When is the last time you talked to her?"

Reyes stayed quiet and her and Widow turned to each other with a plan brewing in their heads. If they were going to be a menacing duo to Reaper, they really had to go for it now.

~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~

Reyes walked back to the hideout reeking of sweat and blood. Probably exhaustion on top of that. He needed to soak in a bath for the rest of eternity, maybe that would make his aching body stop, even for a second.

"Well, it was very kind of you to invite me over, Widow."

Reyes quickly paused hearing a familiar voice. Your voice. You could kill him. He needed to find a way out and fast.

"Ah, Reaper!" Sombra spotted him from across the living quarters and quickly ran up to him before he could get away. "Good to see you! Wow, you look like shit! Perfect condition for your surprise." Sombra smirked something of malice and assholery.

She was just milking it at this point.

Reaper walked into the living room with his mask over his face, helping hide it's bright red tint. You saw him and ran up to him immediately. "Gabriel! Oh my god, you're okay! You don't know how worried I was!"

He looked up at you, clearly shocked. "You were worried about me?"

"Of course I was worried about you!" You moved his mask away from his face and gave him a kiss on the lips before a slap on the face that left his cheek a stinging red. "What the hell, Reyes! You could've at least called! I was worried sick that you may have died or that stupid scientist tried something! If you do that again, I will kill you, do you understand me?!"

Reyes' attention went to the other two girls in the room, who were snickering at both of you. He grabbed you by the shoulder and led you to the bathroom. "Look, I don't want them to hear about our marital problems, okay? Let's take it in here."

"Fine." You grumbled, allowing the tight grip he had on your arm.

Gabriel slammed the bathroom door shut and threw off his mask before holding you in a tight embrace. You quickly hugged him back with a smile, not caring that he smelled like iron and sweat.

"I'm just happy to see that you're doing okay, Gabe. I don't like being out of contact for that long."

"I know." He pulled away and chuckled at the bright red stain he left on you.

You looked down at your now blood stained tank top and looked at Gabriel with a pout in your lip. "Are you kidding me?"

"My bad."

You just giggled and slipped off your shirt, starting a bath for the two of you. "You are a menace, you know that, Gabe?"

"I try." He landed a few kisses on your bare collarbone as you felt for the right temperature.

"You could've at least called." Your voice was small and sad. Gabriel never usually sees you this way, so it always catches him off guard.

"I'm sorry."

"It's just more odd that Widowmaker sounded more eager than you did for my arrival."

Gabriel sighed, undressing himself. "It's not like that, really. I'm happy you're here, I just hate when you see me like this."

"I understand, love. I just want to see you more often. We are married, you know?"

"I promise I'll make an effort to see you more often, my angel." He pressed a kiss onto your cheek and led you into the tub with him.

You couldn't stay mad at death himself.

---

overwatch masterlist --- pinned post

@tonberry-yoda

#writing #my writing #fanfic #fanfiction #reaper #reaper x reader #reaper overwatch #gabriel reyes #gabriel reyes x reader #overwatch #overwatch x reader #overwatch 2 #overwatch 2 x reader #i hope you enjoy #i love this one #took me forever lol #have a great day/night #stay hydrated #<3

[suddencolds]

Small Price to Pay | [1/1]

you know all those posts about making out with someone with a cold and the associated consequences? This is that in fic form, ~8.8k words. I'm embarrassing myself typing this, so here it is.

This is an OC fic ft. Vincent and Yves - you can read more of these two here! :)

Summary:

“So,” Brendon says. “You’re still dating him.” Something about the way he inflects the word still makes something sour in Yves’s chest. Yves frowns at him. “Is that supposed to be surprising?”

Yves has a birthday party to attend and a fake relationship to prove. Vincent is nothing if not adaptable. (ft. fake dating, an argument, contagion)

—

Here’s the problem:

Francesca throws a party.

It’s a birthday party, strictly speaking, but functionally it’s more of a college reunion—Francesca invites everyone from their year who rowed crew, which means that one: Yves will be surrounded by some of his best friends from college, and two: Erika will be there.

He thinks up an entire contingency plan—if Vincent can’t make it that weekend, for one reason or another, Yves will show up, hand Francesca his gift, spend the rest of the hour avoiding Erika and Brendon, and leave early, citing some excuse or other. It’s not that he doesn’t think he could handle talking to Erika—it’s just seeing her feels like reopening a wound. A part of him is scared that he’ll see her, and feel the loss intensely all over again—or, worse, he’ll get ideas about forgiving her, about letting her into his life again, about accepting her explanations.

And Brendon, too—seeing Erika means seeing Brendon, most likely, and Yves doesn’t want to justify himself to him any more than he already has. 

The point is: the less of the both of them that he has to deal with, the better.

When he asks Vincent a week before the event, though, Vincent’s response is immediate.

V: You can fill me in on the details later. I’ll be there.

It’s a little strange, he thinks, that Vincent always agrees so readily. Vincent isn’t a fan of parties—he’d been clear about that. He doesn’t seem interested in talking much about himself, either—he’s just the kind of person, Yves is realizing, who likes to keep his personal details close unless they offer some sort of utility.

Perhaps there’s something else that Vincent is getting out of this, then.

But when Yves asks, he’s met with the same cryptic answer:

“I don’t mind it,” Vincent says. “And you have something you want to prove to your ex. Ultimately, it’s a net positive.”

“While that’s technically true,” Yves says, “this seems like an unfair arrangement. I mean, you’re only doing this because I dragged you into it.”

“If I didn’t want to be dragged into it,” Vincent says, “I would say so.” as if it’s really that simple.

It can’t be that simple, Yves thinks—there must be more to his reasoning that he’s omitting—but he doesn’t press. Vincent is right. Vincent is the kind of person who knows precisely what he wants. If he really had a problem with this arrangement, he would’ve said so.

And, besides—a little selfishly, perhaps—Yves has started looking forward to their outings as of late.

—

Nevertheless, he doesn’t think about the party again until the Friday before it, when Vincent shows up at his desk.

“Do you have a moment?” he says.

“Yes,” Yves says, saving the spreadsheet he’s been working on and shutting his laptop. “What’s up?”

When he looks up, Vincent looks a little tired, though that’s not unusual—it’s been a long week, and busy season always means long hours and little sleep. 

“We can talk later if you’re busy,” Vincent says.

“I’m very free,” Yves says. He’s decisively not—and he’s sure that Vincent knows this, too, so whatever Vincent is approaching him with now must be important. 

“Regarding Francesca’s party tomorrow,” Vincent starts. He looks a little sheepish—as if he doesn’t quite want to be the deliverer of bad news. “I can still go. But I’m…”

“If something came up,” Yves says immediately, “you don’t have to come.” “It’s not that,” Vincent says.

“Or even if nothing’s come up,” Yves backtracks, “and you’re just not feeling it anymore? Also totally fine. Seriously. I can always just go by myself.”

Vincent seems to consider this. Yves is starting to get worried that something might actually be very wrong—something that Vincent is hesitant to even bring up—when Vincent takes a generous step backwards, raising his elbow to his face as his eyes squeeze shut.

“hhih’nGKTsHuhh-!”

The sneeze sounds harsh, even muffled into the fabric of his sleeve; it tears through him with little warning, loud enough to echo slightly in the confines of the office space.

That’s when it all clicks into place: the tiredness. The slight off-ness to his complexion, the tension to the way he’s holding himself, the fact that Yves hasn’t caught him in the break room at all over the past couple days. The fact that he’s currently standing so far away from Yves’s desk.

“You’re ill,” Yves says, comprehending.

“Yes,” Vincent says. His voice sounds a little off, too, now that Yves knows what to look for; it has that quality it often takes on after a long day of discussions with clients—not quite hoarse, but getting there. “I’m positive it’s just a cold. I just wanted to give you a heads up.”

“Don’t worry about it at all, seriously,” Yves says. He feels guilty, suddenly—here he is, asking Vincent to spend his already-limited free time at a party, when Vincent probably has a high volume of important clients—and a burgeoning head cold—to deal with. “If you want to take a rain check, you should. I’m sure this week has already been rough for you as it is.”

“When is the next time you’ll be going to an event where Erika’s going to be there?”

That question makes him pause. “I don’t know. In another month, or so, if I had to guess?”

“So this event is important,” Vincent says, sniffling. It’s the kind of light, liquid sniffle that implies that whatever he’s caught, he’s just at the start of it. “In that case, I’ll go.”

“Wait,” Yves says. “That’s not what I—your health is more important than any event. You shouldn’t push yourself.”

“I feel fine,” Vincent says. “No headache, no fever. It’s just a slight cold. I will be fine tomorrow if I make it a point to sleep early.” he sniffles again, his expression growing hazy for a brief moment before he blinks, rubbing his nose on one knuckle. “I just wanted to make sure you were fine with it.”

“I am completely fine with it,” Yves says, reaching for the box of tissues that’s perched on his desk. He holds it out. “I just feel bad about making you go if you’re sick.”

Vincent takes a handful of tissues out of the box, brings them up to cover his nose, just in time for—

“hh- hH’nGKT-! snf-! hH-Hhih… hh’hiHhh’iiZSCHHh-uhh!”

“Bless you,” Yves says, with emphasis, pushing the entire tissue box towards him. “Times two. Seriously. I think you could use the weekend off—you know, to catch up on sleep.”

“Assuming that things haven’t changed from the event details you forwarded me, the party will be in the evening,” Vincent says, taking the tissue box from him, a little hesitantly, and tucking it under his arm. “I’ll have plenty of time to sleep in.”

Yves opens his mouth to protest.

Vincent says, “I’m fine. I’ll call a rain check if I wake up with a fever.” He turns on his heels. “Otherwise, see you tomorrow.” 

—

Vincent, as Yves is coming to realize, is very good at appearing presentable, even when he’s under the weather.

“You made it,” he says. This time, they’d driven here separately. Yves had thought, initially, that it’d be easier to just drive Vincent places, so that the only thing he’d had to account for was his actual presence—but Francesca lives between them. I don’t mind driving, Vincent had said. You’d be going out of your way to pick me up, but he’d coordinated a spot a couple blocks down to meet up, so that it would look like they’d come together.

It’s cold outside still—it’s the sort of indecisive weather that seems to periodically hint at spring: a cold front, then a few warm days when all the ice thaws, a few flowers lining the grass along the road where the snow’s melted, and then another snowstorm. It’s easy enough, then, to chalk up the slight redness of his cheeks, the redness at the tip of his nose, as another effect of the not-quite-spring weather.

Yves is carrying his present for Francesca under one arm—a hardcover book—a sequel to one she’d read last year and gushed to him about liking; a couple fridge magnets, which she likes to collect; film for the polaroid camera her sister got her last year; and a letter, all wrapped up in a brown paper parcel. 

It’s nice to have an excuse to see everyone again, especially some of the members from crew whom he’s not close enough to invite to parties personally, that he knows Francesca was closer to. 

“It was a pain to find parking,” Vincent says. He’s wearing a red scarf today, and a white overcoat with black buttons and a sharply cut collar. Personally, Yves thinks it’s unfair that someone can be down with an irritating head cold and still look so good.

“No kidding,” Yves says. “You would’ve thought there’d be more than one tiny parking lot for all those shops.”

Yves asks how he is (fine, Vincent says—perfectly capable of spending a few hours at a party. Yves says, I feel like you would say that even if you were like, dead on your feet with a high fever, to which Vincent laughs, but doesn’t explicitly deny.)

Yves supposes he isn’t one to talk—he’d showed up to a crew event, near the end of the season, with the flu, just because it had been their then-captain’s last big event, and he’d been planning to give him a farewell speech. The speech had gone fine—and so had the first few hours—but then all his symptoms had hit at once—fever chills, exhaustion, a pounding headache, the likes—and Francesca and Erika had practically had to drag him home.

But that had been an important event—a once in a lifetime thing—and he’d drafted that speech for two weeks. This is so much less high-stakes. 

“I prombise I’m fine,” Vincent tells him, lifting up the side of his scarf to muffle a cough into it. “It’s just all the - hHIh-! all the annoyidg symptoms. I dod’t - snf-! - feel any worse than I did yesterday.” “Any worse?” Yves says. “Does that mean you were already feeling pretty badly off yesterday?”

“I barely even feel udwell at all,” Vincent says. “It’s just— I keep havidg to— hHih-! hihH’IIITshHHh-uuH!”

He sniffles, raising a sleeve to his face to cover the next, resounding, 

“hHih’iITTSshh’Uhh! snf-!” He buries his face deeper into his sleeve, his shoulders trembling with another gasp. “Hhih…. HIih’nNGKT—SHhuh!”

“Bless you,” Yves says, laughing. “Okay. Point taken.”

Vincent lowers his arm slowly with a curt sniffle. “Are Erika and Francesca close?”

“Yeah,” Yves says. “I think they still keep in touch pretty frequently.” it’s one of the reasons why he hasn’t told Francesca—or anyone else in the friend group—about the specifics of their breakup.

It feels wrong, somehow, to paint her in a bad light, to give people reason to take sides, when it’s always been all of them together as a group. 5am practice was a hell of a bonding experience, she was part of all of that, too. He has no right to take that from her. 

“How about Brendon?”

“Brendon’s sort of an odd one out,” Yves says. “I don’t think most of us had met him until he started dating Erika during our senior year. He usually hangs out with a different crowd, so he’s only really around when Erika is.”

Perhaps that’s better, too—more merciful—that when Erika had left him for someone new, it hadn’t been one of the people he knew and deeply trusted. If Brendon had been there too, at all those 5am practices, at all those oddly timed meetings—if Yves had had that much time to look back on, to wonder when Erika’s feelings for Brendon had materialized, to watch her fall for him firsthand, to look back and know that he was losing her…

It’s better, this way, he thinks, that at least he can look back on his time rowing crew as he’d always wanted to—not like the way he feels when he looks at Erika: heartbroken, and a little betrayed.

“I guess I’m in that positiod now,” Vincent says.

“In the sense that you didn’t meet everyone through crew?”

“In the sedse that I’m an outsider.”

Yves considers this. “My friends really like you, though,” he says. “I don’t think they think of you that way.” It’s a short walk to Francesca’s doorstep. Vincent really does seem to be okay, Yves notes—aside from the frequent sniffling, and the sneezes he turns away to direct into his sleeve, he isn’t shivering under his coat, and he doesn’t look more tired than usual.

Despite everything, Yves finds himself feeling cautiously hopeful. Something about Vincent’s presence has that effect on him. Vincent is always so sure of himself, even in situations Yves thinks he can’t possibly be certain will go well.

It makes Yves want to have faith in this too. Yves will see Francesca and his friends from crew, and he won’t have to say anything to Erika and Brendon, his friends will like Vincent very much, and everything will be just fine.

“Wait,” Vincent says, right after Francesca’s let them in through the apartment buzzer. “We should look like we actually like each other.” He holds his hand out, expectant.

“Good point.” Yves takes it. Vincent’s hand is warm, and a little calloused—when Yves tugs his hand a little closer, Vincent’s fingers interlace nicely with his.

“For the record, I do like you,” he adds.

Vincent laughs. “You kdow what I meant.”

—

It’s almost a relief, seeing everyone again. Yves used to feel a little apprehensive about reunions—around the possibility for the people that he’d known and loved to have changed past recognition, to have internalized everything some way but to come back and see that everyone’s moved on in their own ways, grown a little more into themselves—and a little further from him—than he remembers them to be. 

But when he sees Francesca, she still greets him with the same hug — one arm looped around his shoulders, for a firm squeeze. He hands her her gift, and wishes her a happy birthday, and she laughs and says the only good part about getting old is having an excuse to have everyone back in her living room.

“And Vincent’s here too,” Francesca says, turning to Vincent, who—after looking caught off guard for a second—smiles back at her. “I’m so glad you were able to come!”

“It’s good to see you agaid,” Vincent says. “And happy birthday. You look great, by the way.”

“Thank you!” she says, beaming. She’s wearing a cocktail party dress which slips elegantly over her still-bare shoulders. “I needed to pick something out for the occasion. I swear, these days, half my closet is just business formal attire. It’s depressing.”

“If that mbeans that the other half of your closet is filled out with idteresting clothes,” Vincent says, with a quiet sniffle, “you’re doing a lot better than I am.” 

Francesca laughs. “It’s just for my sanity,” she says. “Can’t let the clients dictate everything I wear.”

“It’s ndice that you’re celebrating your birthday, though,” Vincent says. He lifts a hand to rub his slightly-reddening nose with one knuckle. “My coworkers are always sayidg that they’re too old to want to ackdowledge it anymore.”

“It definitely feels that way sometimes,” Francesca says. “But it’s a good excuse to have everyone here, while we still can. Speaking of which—Yves is the worst at planning things for himself, which is ironic, because he’s always the one planning things for everyone else.”

“That is not true,” Yves says.

Francesca gives him a pointed look. “Last year, you were practically banking on having everyone forget your birthday.”

That is an exaggeration. “I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t let that happen, even if I wanted it to,” Yves says.

“You’re damn right.”

“The ndext time you’re planning a birthday for him,” Vincent says, clearing his throat with a quiet cough, “I’ll pitch in.”

Francesca brightens, at this. “Finally another soldier on the right side of the war,” she says. “You can definitely be part of the secret planning council.”

“Thadk god,” Vincent says, playing along. “I was starting to thidk I was going to have to do it all alone.”

“It’s not a secret if I’m right here,” Yves says. Francesca ignores him in favor of having Vincent type his number into her phone.

—

Halfway through the evening, Vincent disappears into the kitchen for a moment. When he comes back, it’s with two drinks in hand—canned cocktails, Yves realizes, judging by the cans. He hands one over to Yves.

“I actually don’t think I’ve ever seen you drink before,” Yves says to him. “Even at happy hours.”

“I don’t drink very often,” Vincent says.

“Does this mean that I get to see you tipsy? I’m sure our coworkers will be jealous.” 

“If you’re expecting my personality to change,” Vincent says, “you will be disappointed.” he says it with such certainty that Yves pays closer attention to him after that. 

Vincent does hold his alcohol well, as it turns out, with the exception of the slight flush to his cheeks a few drinks later—though even then, Yves can’t be entirely sure it can’t be entirely attributed to his cold. He listens intently as Yves talks to Diane—who’s a couple years younger than Yves—about how Crew has been ever since Yves graduated (mostly the same; the new underclassmen are good at showing up to practices on time, but that’s partially because their captain this year is a little intimidating). He gives several of the crew members a candid summary of his relationship with Yves, when asked. He tells Marin how they first met and he tells Kenneth what it’s like keeping their relationship secret at work and he laughs—a little sheepishly—when Sasha says they make a cute couple. If lying so openly is difficult for him, it doesn’t show.

If there’s anything that’s off, it’s subtle. It takes some time for Yves to notice—

The next time Vincent sneezes, his breath hitches with a sharp, desperate, — “hHhiH—!” Then he turns away, craning his neck over his shoulder for an uncovered, “HIiiIKTshH-uh-!”

He blinks in the wake of it, as if a little dazed, before he seems to straighten, lifting a hand to wipe his nose on one knuckle. It’s not stifled, as it usually is, nor is it neatly pinched off into his fingers, which is unexpected.

It’s as if the sneeze has fully caught him off guard—as if all the systems he has in place to sneeze as quietly and as unobtrusively as possible are just slightly impaired by the alcohol. Not that it matters much—Francesca has put some music on, and it sits in the background now, a low thrum, all but the percussive elements muted by the chatter of conversation.

“Bless you,” Yves says, leaning over to grab a cocktail napkin from one of the neighboring tables. He hands it to Vincent, who blows his nose and emerges with a small cough. “How’s the cold?” 

“Fide,” Vincent says, with a sniffle. “Ndo worse than before.”

“Are you just saying that to get me to drop the subject?”

“I’m sayidg it because I actually mean it. It’s a very tolerable cold.”

Yves laughs, and reaches for his drink. He’s about to take a sip when he feels Vincent’s fingers close around his wrist

 It’s only a brief moment of contact, but the warmth it leaves around his wrist stays, even when Vincent lets go.

“Sorry,” Vincent says, a little panicked. He withdraws his hand. “That’s mine.”

“What?”

“The cocktail.”

“Oh.” Yves looks down to the can in his hands. He supposes Vincent might be right—they’ve both had a few drinks, so he’d lost track awhile ago. A lot of the canned cocktails taste roughly the same to him, anyways. “Is it? I can get you another one if you want.”

“No,” Vincent says. “I drank from it.” As if that explains everything. And then—a little quieter, as if he’s embarrassed to say it: “I don’t wadt you to catch this.”

Truthfully, the possibility hadn’t crossed his mind until Vincent mentioned it. It seems a little endearing that Vincent would be worried about it in the first place—Yves has certainly shared food and drinks with friends who were worse off. “I’m not worried about that,” he says. “It’s just a cold. Didn’t you say it was very tolerable?”

“It’s still…” Vincent trails off, averting his glance with a sniffle. “...an annoyance.” 

He looks like he’s about to say more when his expression goes distant, his eyebrows furrowing.

“HHih’IIIzSCH-uhh!”  It sounds so thoroughly unsatisfying, half-shielded by a hand raised a few moments too late. “hh-HIh-! Hh…” He pauses, his eyes watering, his breath still wavering, and—after a few seconds of nothing—sniffles; a forceful, liquid sniffle that practically emanates frustration. “hIiIIh’kSHhhhh! snf-!”

“Bless you!”

Vincent emerges, teary-eyed, still sniffling. “Case in point,” he says. 

—

He doesn’t see Erika when she gets there. It isn’t until she passes him in the living room, halfway in a conversation, that she makes her presence known to him.

“Hi Yves,” she says, and he looks up. Today she’s wearing a pink dress which cuts off at her knees—a strapless dress, save for a pink rose over her left shoulder which blooms into a sleeve. She is every inch as beautiful as she always is.

He smiles at her, cordial, tight-lipped. “You made it,” he says. She looks at him expectantly, waiting for him to say more, and he realizes—with a flash of panic—that he doesn’t know what more to say to her. He hasn’t kept up with her over the past few months. He knows that she’s working as a quantitative analyst, at a company she’d been hired at a couple months after they’d broken up, but he doesn’t know if she likes her work, if she likes her coworkers, if it’s been busy as of late. If she works long hours, if she’s taken up any new projects. “Glad you found time. I assume work’s been keeping you busy,” he says,  

“Are you kidding? It’s Francesca,” Erika says. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

And there it is—that decisiveness. That same resolve that, back then, made everything with her seem so easy. Erika and Francesca have always been close—through college, back when they met during crew, and even after, when all of them had been still settling into their jobs or going off to grad school or moving halfway across the country; when seeing each other no longer meant just a fifteen minute walk across campus. 

“Yeah,” Yves says. “I know.”

They don’t speak, after that. Yves thinks it’s probably for the best—he doesn’t have anything to say to Erika right now. Back then, he could talk to her about anything, even if it was pointless or insignificant or of no real importance, and she’d make the conversation fun. 

These days, he only tells her things on a strict need-to-know basis, and—given that the only times he sees her these days is at events like this—there’s not really all that much to talk about. 

It had been difficult, at first. He’d wanted to share everything with her, still, back when his work schedule had settled enough for him to take long walks downtown, to start to go to concerts and bars again; when he’d redecorated his apartment, when he’d gotten someone to mentor at work, when he’d gotten back into cooking. For some time after the breakup, it still felt instinctual to turn to her, to text her about something interesting that’d happened, to ask her to try out something new that he’d found. 

But he hadn’t. Something about feigning normalcy seemed worse, even then, than accepting that she was really gone.

Perhaps her avoidance of him tonight is merciful. It’s easier, when he’s not thinking about her, to slip into the familiarity of talking to everyone, to enjoy all of it just as himself. 

It’s only when he excuses himself to get another drink that he runs into Brendon.

Yves has always been civil with Brendon. 

Brendon is—well, to say that Brendon isn’t someone he considers a friend is a vast understatement. The less of Brendon Yves sees, the better. Yves avoids him when he can, but he is good at holding up small talk, when it’s necessary, and on most days, Brendon has enough good sense to not start a fight.

Today, it seems, is not one of those days.

“So,” Brendon says. “You’re still dating him.” Something about the way he inflects the word still makes something sour in Yves’s chest.

Yves frowns at him. “Is that supposed to be surprising?”

“I guess I’m surprised,” Brendon says. “I have to say, I wasn’t expecting it to last.”

“Well, I’m happy to have exceeded your expectations,” Yves says. “Though it doesn’t sound like they were very high.”

“I don’t mean it like that,” Brendon says, waving a hand. “It’s just—new relationships can be fairly unreliable. Especially when you’re dating around.”

“Maybe in your experience, that’s the case,” Yves says. “But personally, I tend to date people I can see myself with long term.”

“That’s the thing,” Brendon says. “I’m surprised you can see yourself with him.”

Yves sets the drink he’s holding down and turns to face him properly. “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

Brendon scoffs. “It doesn’t take a genius to see that you two are very different people.”

“So people can only date their clones,” Yves says flatly. He’s already tired of this conversation. “My bad. I must’ve missed that rule somewhere in dating 101.”

“Obviously, I don’t mean it to that extent. You’re blowing it out of proportion. I just mean that you can only be so different from someone before you’re incompatible. ”

“I agree,” Yves says. “And I don’t think we’re incompatible.”

“Are you sure?” Brendon crosses his arms. “This isn’t his scene, is it? Cocktail parties? I mean, he’s practically married to his work. Does he even like parties?”

Vincent doesn’t like parties—Brendon is right about that point. But hadn’t Vincent been the one who’d agreed to come here in the first place? To imply that he’s only here because Yves has dragged him along seems somewhat disingenuous.

Yves says, “If Vincent didn’t want to be here, he wouldn’t be here.”

“Sure, but from what I’ve heard from Erika—” Yves doesn’t like this implication that Brendon and Erika talk about them behind their back, but he supposes it’s to be expected. “—he’s not exactly the type of person you’ve tended to go for in the past.”

That sounds awfully like an accusation.

“What exactly are you getting at, here?”

“I’m saying that it sort of looks like you just picked the most convenient rebound you could find,” Brendon says, quiet. “But usually people are honest with themselves when that’s the case.”

That startles a short, indignant laugh out of Yves. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says.

“Do you really not think that’s the case? Wouldn’t you say you’d usually go for someone more personable?”

“Personable?” Yves repeats. “Personable? Don’t make me laugh. Do you know how many clients I’ve seen Vincent talk down to a pleasant resolution because he’s so good at negotiating? Do you know how many conferences I’ve been in where Vincent is the one people come to after to privately compliment, because he’s so good at knowing how to talk to people?” he thinks to Joel’s housewarming party—to how compellingly Vincent had lied for him, then; to how good he had been at conjuring up a sense of history between them, of warmth. “His ability to answer difficult questions on the spot, with virtually no preparation at all, is something I can’t even begin to comprehend.”

He’s not sure why the accusation from Brendon makes him so upset, only that it does. Only that he wants to do nothing but tell Brendon just how wrong he is. “If you’re trying to imply that I’m settling for him, don’t patronize me,” he says. “Vincent is one of the smartest and most thoughtful people I know. Do you seriously believe I’d be dissatisfied with someone who holds himself to such a high standard?”

“I’m happier than I’ve been in months,” he says, resolute. “Because of him.”

Through the adrenaline, Yves realizes, faintly, that he hasn’t lied about any of it. He certainly could have—after all, Brendon would be none the wiser—but everything he’s said about Vincent is something he really, genuinely believes.

“Ah,” Brendon says, knowingly, as if he has it all figured out. “I got it wrong. This whole time I thought you were the one that felt lukewarm about him. But it’s the other way around, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re so sure he’s the one that you’re willing to overlook all of your obvious differences,” Brendon says. “Have you ever stopped to consider whether he feels the same way?”

“Presumably, he does,” Yves says. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in a relationship.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Brendon says, as if Yves should already know this from past experience, which—if Yves is being really honest—makes him want to punch him.

Instead, he takes in a deep breath, schools his expression into a smile. “Usually, people in relationships aren’t still looking for other options.”

“Yes,” Brendon says. “Unless they’re unhappy.”

“Yves!” 

When Yves turns to look, Vincent is standing in the doorway. How long has he been here? Just how much of the conversation has he overheard?

“Sorry for the wait,” Yves says sheepishly. “I was getting us drinks.” Evidently, he’s been away long enough for Vincent to come check up on him, so he’s already spent unreasonably long getting drinks, and now he doesn’t even have the drinks to show for it. “Or, I guess I got a little sidetracked, but I swear that drinks are on the w—”

Vincent leans in, unprompted, and kisses him. 

Yves’s brain grinds to a complete halt.

It’s only a moment later that Vincent pulls away, but the decisiveness with which he’s carried it out, the broad confidence on his face as he smiles, unwavering, is—

Fuck.

“Oh,” Yves all but stammers. His face is most certainly red right now, and he can’t even blame it on the alcohol. “Um. Did you need anything?”

“No,” Vincent says. There’s something telling to his expression, some sort of quiet acknowledgement. “Just wanted to see what was takidg you so long.”

Suddenly, it makes sense.

Vincent must have heard. Everything Brendon said—or at least, the last part of it; the implication that Vincent isn’t as invested in this relationship as Yves is; the implication that their attraction towards each other is somehow one-sided. Vincent is doing this to cover for him, because he wants to make it excruciatingly obvious that Brendon is wrong.

The fact that he would go to such lengths to make a point makes something settle in Yves’s chest.

“It’s actually good that you showed up,” he says, playing along. “I don’t know what kind of drink you want. I was just going to get you something generic.”

He heads over to the ice box on the other side of the kitchen, and Vincent follows.

They’re far enough that they’re separated from Brendon by the granite island—and, beyond that, the cushioned high stools lined up next to it, but not so far that Brendon can’t still see them. 

So he certainly can see, Yves thinks, this:

Yves leans in, reaching up a hand to cup Vincent’s jaw, and closes the distance between them.

It’s nothing like the kiss at the New Year’s party.

That one had been all nerves—brief, impulsive, all adrenaline. This kiss is much more involved—Yves presses in closer, so close that he can feel the heat radiating from Vincent’s skin, so close that he can smell the faint, not unpleasant smell of laundry detergent on Vincent’s shirt collar. So close that he can feel the breath that Vincent exhales, warm on his cheek; can feel the softness of Vincent’s hair as he shifts. He feels Vincent’s hand settle on his chest, feels his fingers curl inwards to rest on the fabric of his shirt, and—

On the other side of the kitchen, Brendon is watching, and Vincent is here—here, present, in the flesh, looking as put together as always, looking like someone out of a goddamn magazine—so Yves kisses him like he’s used to kissing—greedily, as if he’s been wanting this for ages. It’s been awhile since he’s kissed someone like this. Back then, there was university—the people at parties who he’d met and kissed out of momentary attraction, or out of alcohol-induced courage—though of course back then, neither party had harbored any delusions about how impermanent that connection was, or how little it meant. And then there was Erika, who, for the longest time, he thought was going to be the last person he’d ever kiss like this.

For months after they’d broken up, he hadn’t looked for anything. It felt wrong to subject others—even strangers, to which he had no allegiance—to the messy remnants of his feelings, to attempt to get into something he knew could only be half-hearted, at best, when there was a person in his mind who lingered so sharply.

But Vincent crowds up every corner of his mind, as if to say, pay attention, and Yves finds that for once, he’s not thinking about Erika at all.

When he feels the small hitch in Vincent’s breath, he thinks nothing of it.

Except, then—abruptly, and with barely any warning—Vincent is wrenching away, craning his head over Yves’s shoulder to let out a sudden, uncovered—

“hh-hIIIH’hH-IIKTshHuh!”

Their proximity to each other means he feels the way Vincent’s body jerks forward under his hands, his chest tensing. For a moment after, the rigidness of his posture doesn’t dissipate, tension still strung through the line of his shoulders.

“Bless you,” Yves says, surprised.

Then Vincent curses under his breath, drawing away with a sniffle. “I’mb sorry,” he says, sounding really, honestly panicked—a reaction which Yves finds both disproportionate to the situation and a little endearing. “That was— sorry, I should’ve—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Yves says, with a laugh; “I honestly couldn’t care less.” Impulsively—and maybe to prove just how little it bothers him—he leans back in.

Vincent is less hesitant, this time around, when it seems to register to him that Yves really doesn’t mind. He’s a surprisingly good kisser—Yves probably isn’t the first person he’s kissed, and he probably won’t be the last, but the second Vincent’s mouth works around his, Yves feels himself nearly go weak in the knees.

Fuck. Yves can’t say he expected to spend this evening making out with his very attractive coworker-slash-fake-boyfriend, but at the same time, he isn’t complaining. Yves thinks he could do this for hours, given the chance. He kisses Vincent as if to say, thank you—for the New Year’s party, for going along with this, for lying on my behalf—and Vincent kisses him back as if he wants this just as much.

It registers to him, faintly—as Vincent pulls away with a sharp gasp before he pitches forward, smothering another abrupt, wrenching sneeze into the palm of his hand—that he’s probably dooming himself to Vincent’s cold ten times over. But it occurs to him, too, that if he were really dating Vincent—if, after the party, they’d head back to Vincent’s place together; if they were really close enough to share car rides and food and drinks on the regular, to see each other frequently both in the office and outside of it—he would’ve almost certainly caught this anyways.

Something about the intimacy of it, the false closeness it seems to imply, is a little intoxicating. 

When he finally pulls away, Vincent is breathing a little heavily, his glasses askew, his hair slightly unkempt from where Yves had—mid-kiss—run his fingers through it. Yves looks over his shoulder to see that Brendon has, at some point over the last few minutes, slipped off. Presumably, he’s gotten the point, then.

It’s a relief. Yves is glad to not have to talk with him for any longer than he has to. 

“God,” Yves says, with a laugh. “Where did you learn to kiss like that, anyways?”

Vincent smiles. “I’ve had some practice,” he says, which Yves thinks must be a massive understatement. “Do you think it was convincidg?”

“I don’t know what kinds of standards Brendon has,” Yves says, lowering his voice so that he’s certain no one outside of the kitchen will be able to hear. “But I’d definitely be convinced.”

“He seems strangely idvested in our relationship,” Vincent says.

Yves sighs. “I think he was just trying to make trouble. How much of our conversation did you hear?”

“Just the tail end of it,” Vincent says. “I—”

His gaze goes distant, which is the only warning Yves gets before he’s turning away, steepling his hands over his nose and mouth with a forceful:

“hH-! hhH-hH’iiKTsSHH-uhh! Hh-! Hih… HIIh’IzsSCCHh’hhh!”

“Bless you,” Yves says.

Vincent is quiet for a moment, his expression still hazy, the irritation evident on his features, before he’s ducking away again.

“hIiih’GKTTSHh-uhHh!”

The sneeze is loud enough to scrape against his throat. It leaves him coughing a little, his eyes watering.  

“Bless you,” Yves says, with emphasis. He takes a small stack of napkins off of the kitchen counter and hands it over to Vincent, who eyes it for a moment. There’s a slight flush to his complexion—whether it’s from the alcohol, or from embarrassment, or from slight fever, Yves can’t tell.

“I hope you dod’t regret this in a few days,” Vincent says, carefully extricating one napkin from the stack to blow his nose softly into it. “You—” His breath hitches, sharply, and then he’s pitching forward into the handful of napkins with a muffled, “hiiHh’IZSSCHh-uhh!”

He emerges, sniffling, looking a little apologetic. “You’ll almost certaidly catch this.”

Yves laughs. “It’s fine. I know what I signed up for. Besides, I’m glad you stepped in.” He kneels down, at last, to procure two drinks from the long-neglected icebox. “A cold was a small price to pay for getting out of that conversation.”

He hands Vincent a drink. “Can I have a sip of yours? Now that I’ve doomed myself to it already, I suppose you don’t have to try so hard to keep me from catching it.”

“That’s not very reassuring,” Vincent says, but he lets Yves try some, nonetheless.

Brendon is suspiciously quiet for the rest of the evening. Neither he nor Erika so much as look Yves’s way, which Yves thinks is better than another confrontation. Vincent looks happy—a little tired, a little tipsy, but happy. At some point into the evening he resorts to crossing his arms as a means to keep warm (“Is it too cold in here?” Francesca asks, passing him from where he’s sitting on the couch, to which Vincent shakes his head quickly, his face flushing red. “I’mb just slightly under the weather,” he says. “The temperature’s perfect.” to this, Francesca brings over a quilt from one of the closets and drapes it over his shoulders. “Your friends are very nice,” Vincent says, pinning the quilt in place with one hand, and Yves laughs).

At some point, Francesca brings out a cake (“earl gray with buttercream,” she says, “Erika and I made a smaller one as a test run last week, and it was a little too dense, so we’ll have to see how this one turned out.” which Yves thinks is very impressive—he’s certainly better than average at cooking, but that expertise does not transfer well to baking—truly, he’s not sure he’d be confident in his ability to pipe frosting in a straight line. When he tells Vincent this, Vincent laughs and says, “I’m sure people would forgive you as long as it tasted good,” to which Yves says, “I think you’re underestimating how bad I am at decorating.”) She’s piped small blue flowers around the periphery of it, and leaves that curl around the edges of the cake. Diane says, “this is way too pretty to eat,” and “are you sure you want us to destroy it,” while Kenneth—their year’s Crew captain—helps Francesca with setting up the candles around the periphery of the cake and lighting them one by one.

Francesca laughs when Erika tells a story about a series of errors pertaining to their last grocery store run and tears up when Marin gives a speech about how Francesca is the main reason she stayed in Crew. After that, everyone sings—for a brief moment, the clamor in the living room becomes strictly unified. Then she blows out all the candles in one go, and everyone claps.

All in all, it’s a good evening.

—

It’s really not a surprise when Yves wakes up a few days later with a sore throat.

It’s not a surprise, either, when his nose starts running shortly after, or when—a couple hours later—a harsh, wrenching sneeze catches him off guard at work.

It’s as if that first sneeze has opened the floodgates. After that, he finds himself muffling sneezes into his elbow, scrambling for tissues from the rapidly depleting stash—a travel sized tissue pack that he keeps in his briefcase, just in case. The persistent tickle that settles in his nose seems impossible to appease, no matter how many times he sneezes, or how diligently he tries to ignore it. Worse, the sneezes are forceful enough to leave his throat feeling tender and painful, and violent enough that he finds himself coughing a little after.

Vincent was right. The cold isn’t particularly miserable—aside from the sore throat, he’s a little tired, but he doesn’t feel strictly worse than usual. It is irritating, though, to deal with—and irritating, too, to be at the office as it settles in.

It’s probably not worth taking a sick day for. It’s more an annoyance than a tangible inconvenience. Besides, he has only a couple days left of work before it’s the weekend, when he can catch up on sleep.

He’s scheduled himself for a morning’s worth of back to back meetings—two meetings with clients, one with a coworker he’s been working with to go over her findings, another status update meeting to review the work they’ve all done over the past few weeks.

Yves is prone to losing his voice when he’s ill. It’s one of his most embarrassing tells—it’d certainly garnered more attention than he’d wanted in college whenever he was under the weather—but in a work setting where his participation in meetings is non-negotiable, with every meeting he takes, he can feel his voice get closer and closer to unusable.

His second meeting ends a few minutes early, which is a relief. But when he heads to the break room to make himself a cup of much-needed tea, he finds that the hot water machine is out of order.

Just his luck.

He pours himself a cup of cold water and looks through some of the storage cabinets for tissues, though he has no luck with that, either.

The office is always turned a notch too cool—air conditioned to keep everyone awake in the afternoons—but today, it feels brutally, unnecessarily cold. He really should’ve dressed warmer. Yves heads to the conference room his next meeting is booked in, speaks on the material he’s prepared, and tries his best not to shiver too visibly. His meeting before lunch runs over, too, which is not uncommon, but today it just feels like insult to injury.

All in all, he’s exhausted. He eats a quick lunch in the cafeteria, downs two glasses of water, and goes through an embarrassing number of cafeteria napkins.

“Coming down with something?” Stanley, one of his coworkers, asks him.

Yves smiles at him sheepishly. “I wish it wasd’t so obvious,” he says.

“It’s just the season for it, I think. Vincent was just sick last week.”

“Oh, was he?” Yves says, feigning ignorance. His cold is definitely, most certainly not related to Vincent’s. “I was just goidg to grab a bottle of hand saditizer to keep at my desk,” he says, with a small cough. “I thidk there’s somethidg going around.”

Thankfully, the afternoon is—for the most part—just occupied with work. Still, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to focus on the financial statements in front of him, the slew of emails he has pulled up.

His nose is running fiercely, the trash can at the foot of his desk is close to overflowing, and the stack of napkins he’d taken from the cafeteria—certainly not an ideal solution, but it’s the best one he can come up with at the moment—is almost entirely gone.

He grabs one off the top of the stack—he’s only able to unfold it partially before he’s jerking forward with a wet, spraying, “hhEHh’iiiZZSCHh’EW!” 

Fuck. The napkins, while infinitely better than nothing, are not as soft as tissues would have been. Given the frequency with which he’s been using him, he’s almost positive that his nose is redder than usual.

The next sneeze nearly catches him off guard. He barely has time to lift the napkin up to his face again before his breath hitches again, sharply.

“Hhehh… HEHh—’IIDDSCHhiew! hEHH’iITSSHh’Yyew!” 

His nose is still running fiercely, and worse, the sneezes are loud enough to scrape against his throat. He thinks his voice is never going to recover if he keeps this up.

From behind him, he hears someone clear their throat.

Yves freezes. His first thought is that he’s probably being disruptive. His second thought is that even if he isn’t, whoever’s behind him must have been waiting to speak to him for some time—he’d just been too caught up with sneezing to realize, which is a little embarrassing.

His third thought is—whoever it is, he wants to face them looking at least marginally presentable. He’s almost certain that right now, he doesn’t.

He blows his nose into the napkins he’s holding, runs a hand through his hair, and pivots around in his office chair with a smile that is admittedly a little forced. “What’s up?”

He expects to see Cara, who he’s been working more with, or perhaps Laurent, who he’s been shadowing. But standing there, looking every inch as formal and as put together as he always does, is Vincent.

For a moment, Vincent just stares at him, as if he’s cataloging Yves’s appearance in silence.

Yves tries not to fidget under his scrutiny. “Did you ndeed anythidg?” 

In lieu of responding, Vincent steps past him to set a box of tissues down at the edge of his desk. 

“I figured you’d want this back,” Vincent says.

It’s the same tissue box he’d handed off to Vincent last week, he realizes, when Vincent was the one who had a use for it. Vincent has taken care to set it down at the same spot where it was initially: at the right edge, next to his monitor.

“Thadk you,” Yves says. “I’ll treasure it.”

“This, too,” Vincent says, setting a mug down in front of him. Whatever’s in there is hot enough to be steaming.

Yves muffles a cough into his hand. “What?”

“Tea,” Vincent says, as if that explains everything. “Chamomile, if it matters. I didn’t know if caffeine would keep you up.”

“Oh.” Yves stares at it. “You got the hot water machide workidg. It was broken this morning. Or maybe I’mb just really bad at using it.”

“Actually, no,” Vincent says. “I got this from the third floor.”

“You walked all the way up here from the third floor?” Yves says, a little surprised.  He’s about to say more, but then—in a progression that he should probably be used to by now—he finds himself succumbing, with little warning, to another sneeze, which he muffles into a perhaps-too-generous handful of tissues. At this rate, he might run out of them, even given Vincent’s generous contribution.

“It was just two flights of stairs,” Vincent says. 

“Still,” Yves says, lowering the tissues from his face so he can take a sip. The thought of Vincent precariously taking the tea up two flights of stairs, careful to not let it spill, just to get it to his desk is so endearing that he finds himself smiling. “Thank you.”

Vincent blinks at him, as if he wasn’t expecting to be thanked. “I don’t think it will keep you from losing your voice,” he says, at last. “But it might help with your sore throat.” 

Yves doesn’t remember mentioning that. “How did you kdow I had a sore throat?”

“How do you think?” Vincent says. “I had the same cold a week ago.”

Even so, the idea that Vincent already probably knows, and knows intimately, how he’s feeling right now, even though Yves hasn’t said anything about it, feels a little incriminating. Yves is under no illusion that his current affliction is subtle, by any means, but at the very least he’d thought that the less visible parts of it—his sore throat, the growing exhaustion, the pressure he feels building at his temples—were things that no one else would have to think about.

“Was it this bad for you?” he says. “I’d feel terrible if I mbade you talk to all my friends if your throat was already— Hh- heHh-! hHEH-heHh’iSSSchh-Iiew!”

It’s a good thing, Yves thinks, hazily, that he’s still holding onto the tissues from earlier. His nose is running again, and the tissues feel traitorously soft as compared to the napkins he’s been using all day.

“No,” Vincent says, frowning. “I think you just wore your voice out at work.”

“That mbight be the case,” Yves says. “I had a lot of meetidgs this morning. Ndow it’s pretty much just heads-down work, thankfully.” He muffles a yawn into one hand. Vincent is probably here for a reason—but Vincent is usually very conscientious about the work he passes onto others, so whatever he needs Yves to do for him, Yves doesn’t expect it should take too long. “Did you ndeed me to look over somethidg?” “I just wanted to see how you were feeling,” Vincent says, which is not the answer Yves expects.

Yves blinks at him. “How did you find out I was sick?”

“I heard from Cara.”

“Ah.” He probably owes Cara an apology—he’s sure that she’d probably prefer to work somewhere quiet, and his cold is certainly making that difficult. “Yeah, she would kdow. I’ve been like this all day—well, sidce this mording, I guess.”

“It came on quickly for me, too,” Vincent says. “Can I get you anything?”

“It’s just a cold,” Yves says with a laugh. “I’ll mbanage.” He means for it to be reassuring, but Vincent just frowns, looking off to the side.

He looks… strangely upset, Yves realizes.

“It’s ndot really all that bad,” Yves insists, backtracking. “And the weekend’s coming up soon. I’ll catch up on sleep when I get the chance.” Now is a really inopportune time to have to cough. He raises an elbow to his face to cough as quietly as he can, though the effort only seems to prolong the coughing fit—it leaves him slightly breathless, blinking away the tears that surface in his vision. “Seriously, don’t worry about it.”

“I’m sorry,” Vincent says, quiet.

“For what?”

“For giving you my cold.”

“I dod’t think you can even take credit for that,” Yves says. “I was the one who kissed you.”

Vincent does smile, at that—a small, almost imperceptible smile. “Even so.”

Yves wants to tell him that he would do it again, if he had the chance to. He wants to tell Vincent how easy it had felt to kiss him, how right.

How it felt to forget about Erika, and Brendon, and all of it—even if just for a moment—to feel so perfectly grounded in someone other than himself. To let himself experience the sort of closeness he’s been scared of seeking out, after the breakup, after Erika, in fear that no one would ever fit quite the same. To lean into the warmth of someone who still, even now, continues to be kind to him for reasons he can’t quite rationalize. 

How long has it been since he’s been able to place his trust into someone, blindly, in the way he trusts Vincent to keep up this act of theirs, to lie on his behalf? Vincent is nothing if not competent, but Yves hadn’t expected that competence to extend to this arrangement of theirs. How long has it been since Yves has been able to lean on someone the way he’s leaned on Vincent, to trust someone to meet him where he is?

“For the record, I dod’t regret it,” Yves says. He finds that he really means it.

#snz fic #sneeze fic #snz kink #sneeze kink #parts of this are very self indulgent and familiar but also #this took me 3 weeks of writing every day after i came home from work to finish T.T #the number of hours i sat there just deleting and rewriting a few sentences #but it's done! at last! (and i will not look at it for the next 24 hrs) #thank you to everyone who read foreign home and left their thoughts on it!! #reading your tags makes me really happy 🥹 thank you #my fic #me writing vincent's part: just a slight cold :) not miserable at all #me writing yves's part: ...okay. maybe a little miserable #yvverse

[eskawrites]

the funniest part of the celebrity fake dating au is that dustin spent years teasing robin and steve for being blatantly in love, when in reality anyone with eyes could have seen that robin and nancy were head over heels for each other the entire time

#writing things #ronance #celebrity fake dating au #i can't believe #like a week ago i was like 'gosh idk this story is so intimidating idk what to do about it' #and then motivation came out of nowhere with a steel chair. knocked me down and took over my life again #and now i'm here #i've written over 12k words in the last 3 days #and granted at least half of that was spur of the moment smut but YOU KNOW WHAT #i'm still having fun

[thou-babbling-brook]

Sanctuary

AO3

Rating: T

Warnings: Graphic depictions of violence

Relationship(s): Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad/Maria Thorpe

Word Count: 6344

Tags: Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, Maria Thorpe, Al Mualim, Original Characters, Assassin's Creed I, Masyaf, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Crusades, Implied Happy Ending

Summary: After stumbling upon a small caravanserai during a narrow escape, Maria has questions about Altaïr's past - particularly, his defining scar.

This fic is based on some of @nebulacrum's thoughts and headcanons about Altaïr's relationship with Al Mualim, along with his lip scar.

You can click here to see @ramshackledtrickster's accompanying pieces!

I hope you guys enjoy!!!

“Baba, we have customers!”

Fahmi glanced up from his ledger, brow furrowed and eyes squinted as the setting sun squeezed through the cracks in the sandstone walls. His son bounced before him while gesturing wildly to the door. His words blended together with the constant ringing present in Fahmi’s ears. Setting his hands against the desk, he rose, groaning as the aches in his joints cried in protest.

“Ameen,” he murmured, hunched as he shuffled to the gnarled wooden door, sand seeping onto the floorboards as the evening gusts of wind swept the hot sand inside. Maryam wiped her hands on her tattered apron before laying them on Ameen’s shoulders. 

“Come, it is late, and your father is tired,” she whispered, kissing her son’s head while guiding him away from the door. Fahmi nodded his thanks, shuffling to the window and shielding his eyes from the golden glare of the sun as it sank into the horizon. 

“But Mama!” Ameen protested. Maryam shushed him, her words inaudible as she and her son walked through the narrow doorway. Fahmi groaned as he reached down to the floor. Grabbing a few wooden panels, he straightened his back and placed them against the open window. His wrinkled hands trembled with each movement. Each knuckle ached as he flexed his hands and flattened his palms against the wood.

A resounding thud against the door disturbed the sand and dirt gathered by the entrance. Squinting, Fahmi poked an eye through the minuscule cracks in the wood panels. Two camels knelt before the water trough. Their backs were still covered with blankets and saddles. Yet, aside from the rushing winds of sand, the quiet hissing of nearby snakes, and the low chuffs of the camels, Fahmi found no sign of visitors.

Ameen rushed to his side, much to the protest of his mother as he tugged at his father’s robes. “I told you!”

Fahmi quieted the child, hobbling to the door as he pressed his ear against the wood. Another resounding set of knocks, this one more desperate than the first, echoed in the sandstone room. Broken Arabic shattered the silence. A woman, her voice high and exhausted, shouted through the door. Her accent was foreign, reminding them of the soldiers that had marched through the desert not long ago. Maryam tightened her hold on Ameen, pressing him against her front with wide eyes.

Maryam turned to her husband. “We were not expecting any caravans for another week.”

“I know,”  he replied, voice barely above a whisper. Ameen curled against his mother as the pounding continued.

The voice begged and pleaded behind the door. Her pronunciations were muddled and awkward, but the desperation caused Fahmi to move his knobby hand. Slowly, he unlatched the door, prying it open enough to peer an eye through the crack. Immediately, he gasped, hobbling back and slamming open the door. The voice (a Frankish woman, it seemed. Though, it was nearly impossible to differentiate between their accents) was not alone. The pale woman stumbled forward, thanking Fahmi in her jumbled Arabic while Maryam covered her mouth.

“Help,” the woman pleaded, her eyes wide as she looked at her companion. Arm slung over her shoulder, a hooded man collapsed against the woman’s frame. An arrow stuck from his side, covered in gore. His linen robes were coated in dark liquids, sand, and dirt, a few notable slashes still seeping blood into the cloth. Maryam rushed to his side, shouting over her shoulder for Ameen to grab freshly drawn bandages, wine, and washcloths. The boy scrambled backward before turning and sprinting through the doorway. Fahmi knelt before the strangers, eyes darting to his wife as they shared a fleeting, anxious look.

“What has happened?!” Fahmi demanded, still breathless as Ameen returned, arms full of supplies as he tripped and stumbled into Maryam. The foreign woman could only stare with furrowed brows in return, her eyes jerking over Fahmi’s face.

“Mercenaries,” the wounded companion spat. It was clear that he was from the region. If not, a traveler passing through to his home. His face remained hidden beneath his cowl, eyes toward the ground while Maryam gestured for the woman to help her. The two laid the man on his back, flat against the cool floorboard. With the glaring sun hidden behind vast mounds of sand, Fahmi reached for two candles, placing them by his wife’s feet once they were lit. “We barely escaped.”

“God has willed it,” Maryam praised. Ameen sat awkwardly by his father’s side, face growing pale as Maryam and the strange woman attempted to treat the man’s wounds. Fahmi laid his hand on Ameen’s back, rubbing it soothingly. 

“Ready a room for them,” Fahmi instructed his son. “They will need somewhere to rest if he survives, God willing.” Ameen nodded and rushed off down the side corridor. In the meanwhile, Fahmi came to his wife’s side, his hands laying on the strange man’s stomach while Maryam surveyed the entrance wound. 

“It is shallow, praise be,” Maryam explained. The man grimaced, clenching his jaw and nodding. He turned his face to the woman, trading Arabic for a language Fahmi could not quite identify. French? German? It had been so long since he had served in the sultan’s army. He could not recall the languages of their adversaries. The woman shouted frantically back, to which the man turned to Fahmi and Maryam.

“Can you pull it out?” the man asked through gritted teeth. Maryam and Fahmi exchanged glances. 

“It would be unwise.”

“I did not ask if it would be wise. I asked if you could.”

The foreign woman seemed to understand enough of their conversation to slap his shoulder, grasping his chin and forcing him to look at her. She shouted again, her voice choking while her eyes glistened. The man squeezed her forearm, groaning and murmuring something that managed to calm her enough for him to return his attention back to Fahmi.

“You were a soldier. Have you dealt with this before?” the man asked.

“How can you tell?” Fahmi redirected. 

“You avoid resting on your knees.”

“You are right, but I have not seen this in decades.”

The man hissed as Maryam accidentally brushed her hand against the arrow. “Please, sir. My… my wife can help, but I will not be able to translate while you pull it out. I need someone with experience to help your wife.”

Fahmi, for the sake of the man, ignored his own, visceral reaction to such information that the strangers were married. Instead, he nodded, motioning for the woman to join him and Maryam by the arrow. Maryam handed the woman a cloth damp with wine, offering a weak smile as Fahmi placed his hand on the man’s stomach and the end of the arrow.

There was a silence before the man’s screams echoed off the sandstone walls, Fahmi quickly ripping the arrow out of the man’s body. The foreign woman slammed her hands down against his side, the damp cloth preventing blood from pouring out. While the woman kept pressure on the wound, Fahmi helped Maryam wrap the bandages around the arrow wound. They bound the cloth snugly around the man’s muscular torso, then turned their attention to the other slashes on his body. To the mysterious man’s credit, his screams only lasted as long as it took for the arrow to come out. Instead, he huffed through his nose, turning on his side and retching as nausea struck him all at once. His wife stroked his hair beneath his cowl, shushing him in their shared language until he fainted from the pain.  

“We need to examine his body for more wounds,” Maryam explained. She turned to the man’s wife, hesitating before gesturing to her own eyes, then the rest of the man’s body. It was enough for the foreign woman to understand as she crawled to the other side of the man, raising his robes high enough on his chest to view his other wounds. The trio worked diligently, trading supplies as they wrapped the wounded man’s body. 

“How is his face?” Fahmi wondered. He pointed to his own face, and the foreign woman nodded in understanding. However, she paused at the cowl still covering her husband’s head, as though debating whether to look. Her brows knit while her lips formed a pout. Maryam scooted closer, offering to help. The woman hesitated, but finally gestured for Maryam to continue. Fahmi thought nothing of it until Maryam gasped. 

“My God! What happened to him?!” she demanded. Fahmi hurried to her side while the woman tilted her head, squinting her eyes. His eyes widened at the scar adorning the man’s chapped lips. A man younger than what his eldest son would be now, God rest his soul. He laid his fingers against the scarred tissue, twisted and stretched from his chin to his cheekbone. A scar several years old, yet poked and prodded at judging by the abnormal healing.

“God help him,” Fahmi murmured, bowing his head and murmuring a prayer. “This is no sword slash.”

“And these are no normal wounds. Who is this man?” Maryam replied quietly. She raised the cowl once more. The man’s wife glanced between the two with a puzzled expression. Ameen returned with the commotion now ended, awkwardly shifting from foot to foot by the corridor.

“The room is made, Baba,” he spoke. Fahmi nodded, groaning as his knees protested as he stood. The foreign woman stood alongside him, glancing between him and Ameen.

“Room,” Fahmi spoke to the woman, gesturing to his son. “He will take you to your room.” He spoke slowly, overly annunciating his words. The woman nodded along, reaching inside her pockets. She handed him a heavy bag of coins. When Fahmi poked inside, his eyes widened. It was nearly a month’s revenue inside the bag. He protested, shaking his head and shoving the bag back into her hands.

“Too much,” he protested. The woman chuckled tiredly, laying it on the desk regardless of his protests. She knelt down to her husband, slinging his arm around her shoulder and heaving him onto her back. Her muscles strained beneath her tunic and trousers. Fahmi had to admit his astonishment at the woman’s strength, knowing he would be of little help. Regardless, he did loop the man’s other arm around his own shoulder, helping the woman carry her husband to their room. Together, they laid the man down on the bed. Maryam laid a fresh set of bandages, linen cloths, and a bottle of wine by the bed.

“For the wounds,” she explained. The woman nodded, eyes downcast to her husband.

Ameen scampered forward, offering a small bucket. “He might be sick,” he mumbled, cheeks flushed with color. The foreign woman managed a smile, mustering her best Arabic as she murmured her thanks. Fahmi and Maryam bowed their heads in respect, ushering Ameen out of the room and closing the door behind them. The couple shared fearful looks.

Just what kind of man had arrived at their doorstep? Worse – who had this man angered that dared mutilate his face before God?

.~.~.

“I have questions.”

Altaïr retched into the bucket, coughing and sputtering while nausea overcame him. He gagged, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand before turning to Maria. “Right now?”

“Yes, but I will give you the courtesy of finishing,” Maria decided, scooting closer to the Assassin. Her palm rubbed his back as he heaved. 

“How kind,” Altaïr muttered.

“I rather thought so.”

Altaïr heaved into the bucket again. This time, Maria slid her hands to Altaïr’s chest, holding him up while he kept the bucket close to his frame. Freshly changed bandages demonstrated that Altaïr’s wounds were healing appropriately, but they did little to dissuade the nausea. She laid her cheek against his toned back. 

“You called me your wife.”

Altaïr panted, setting the bucket down by the bed. “What?”

“Your wife. You called me your wife when you spoke to the couple,” Maria murmured. 

Altaïr said nothing. He laid back against the pillows, eyes closed as he steadied his breathing. Maria propped her elbow on the pillow next to him, cheek resting on her palm.

“You were a fool for taking that arrow to your side,” she chastised. 

“You would have done the same for me,” Altaïr replied. His eyes remained shut, brows furrowed as beads of sweat cascaded down his face and chest, his robes long abandoned as they sat folded neatly in a nearby chair. The sweating was good, Maria reminded herself, though it was harder and harder to do so with how pale her companion was becoming.

“It does not make you any less a fool,” Maria murmured. She laid her hand on his chest, fingers splayed over his torso. Altaïr laid his hand over hers, his heart thumping against her palm. 

“I thought you had questions,” Altaïr whispered. He opened an eye, peering down at Maria. She hummed.

“I do. You ignored my first one,” Maria replied.

“It was not a question.”

Maria huffed, pushing on Altaïr’s chest. “Fine. Why did you call me your wife?”

“To avoid suspicion.”

“You could have called me your sister.”

Altaïr paused. “Would you have preferred as such?”

Maria pursed her lips. After a moment, she answered. “No.”

“Then I see no reason for concern,” Altaïr responded tersely. He grimaced as he shifted on the bed, holding his side. Maria sat up, easing Altaïr into a more comfortable position.

“I did not mind it,” Maria clarified. “You know I did not. I… I was just curious.”

Altaïr nodded, though Maria could not tell if he agreed. She fidgeted next to her friend, eyes falling to his lips. His familiar, plump lips, marked by his most defining feature. She leaned forward, reaching up to his lips and pressing her fingertips against his scar. Altaïr stilled. She could feel his body tense under her simple touch.

“They seemed horrified when they saw this,” Maria explained. “I did not understand why. They spoke too fast.” She repeated the few Arabic words she remembered, but they felt clunky and heavy on her tongue. Altaïr’s lips parted slightly, dry and chapped from their journey through the arid dunes. He avoided her eyes, tilting his face to the side as he reached for the goblet of water.

“Your Arabic is improving,” Altaïr complimented. 

Maria frowned. “You are avoiding the question.”

“You did not ask a question.”

“You know damn well what I meant.”

Altaïr shot her a look. Maria gulped. Yet, she held her chin high, too proud to back down from her words now. “I thought your scar was a battle wound, like mine. The man seemed to think otherwise.”

“It is, in its own way,” Altaïr muttered.

Maria laid her hand on Altaïr’s cheek, turning his face toward hers. She studied his scar, eyes narrowed as her fingers returned to trace the sensitive flesh. His upper lip split into his scar, providing a small slit into his mouth and exposing a sliver of his teeth and gums. It was barely noticeable from afar, and rarely had any man reached Altaïr’s face long enough to observe how his scar melded into his face. But for Maria, it had been the first feature she noticed, the cool metal of his hidden blade nicking her throat while she sneered. Admittedly, it had terrified her upon their first meeting. No man’s lips should form such a gruesome tear, after all. She was surprised it took the older couple so long to notice it. 

Maria was no doctor, but she had experienced more agonizing pains and wounds than the average man could dream of. The scar marked just above her left eyebrow proved it, nicked by a Saracen sword in a battle alongside Richard I. For years, Maria wore such a wound with honor. It was her first permanent scar since she had traded a wedding ring for a sword. A sign that no man, nor woman, could confine her. An affront to the English nobility that once trapped her. Such scars were not becoming of a woman, so Maria puffed her chest and bore hers with pride. Her scar was not a trap, but an escape from desirability as she wandered to the ends of the Earth. Her scars were gnarled and twisted and deep, but they had healed.

Altaïr’s most prominent scar differed in this regard. It was gnarled and twisted and deep like her own, but the flesh had not healed as hers had. Her eyebrow scar healed over a decade ago. Altaïr’s lip scar looked nearly as old, but the flesh had not healed. Not until recently, at least. The outer edges of his scar were light, contrasting against his deep tan and dark hair. The edges were fully healed. His lower lip and chin had been spared as well, the scar a faint pale against his skin. But whereas these areas were faint and light, the rest of the scar remained an irritated red. Not infected, but irritated, as though prodded at constantly. The dark shade of his upper lip failed to conceal the redness of his scar. Only in the last month or so had it begun to heal, slowly fading into a pinkish red.

Even as Maria trailed her fingers along his scar, Altaïr sat eerily still. Too still, as though he was bracing for impact. His jaw was clenched. His biceps tensed as Maria moved closer, her face lingering by his. She guided her fingertips to his jaw, brushing her thumb against his jawline. 

“You should shave,” Maria hummed, eyes glancing up. “Your face is growing scraggly.”

Altaïr cocked a brow. “Is that a question?”

Maria shook her head and pursed her lips, brows raised. “No. A suggestion.”

Altaïr stared at her. Those piercing, golden eyes that made even Maria shift under his gaze. She remained so close, barely a breath away from his lips. The puff of air from his nose as he exhaled tickled her own. 

“I can do it for you,” Maria suggested.

Altaïr almost smiled. “This feels like a demand rather than a suggestion.”

Maria rolled her eyes, huffing as she stood and walked to their things. Searching his bag, Maria located a small razor amongst his barren things. Throughout their time together, he always packed lightly. Truth be told, she was surprised he even possessed a razor. She returned to the bed, guiding Altaïr to sit up further with a candle in hand. She set the candle down on the bedside table, then unsheathed his razor. Carefully, Maria raised the blade to the Assassin’s jaw and scraped away a few wrily strands of curly, dark hair. 

“No water?” Altaïr asked.

“You will be fine,” Maria remarked, eyes focused on her work as she brought the blade closer to her thumb. “Besides, it is a trim. I rather like your facial hair. You should let it grow out.”

It did not escape Maria’s notice how Altaïr tensed at her words. For his sake, Maria paid it no mind and continued her work, trimming his coarse hair. A moment of comfortable silence passed, interrupted only by the scraping of the razor against Altaïr’s sharp jaw and the snoring of their camels just outside the minuscule caravanserai. Much to Maria’s surprise, it was Altaïr who broke the silence. 

“You said they were shocked to see my face?” Altaïr spoke. His words were uncharacteristically soft.

Maria frowned. “Not your face, your scar.”

“Is it not one and the same?”

Maria stopped in her tracks. She leaned back, narrowing her eyes as she tracked Altaïr’s movements. His golden gaze avoided hers, cast down upon the scratchy sheets. His lips were parted ever so slightly, Maria watching as he quickly swiped his tongue over them. Her eyes flicked to his hands, which lay awkwardly in his lap. Once again, his body was tense, muscles straining and breath shallow.

“What makes you say that?” Maria questioned, tone harsher than intended.

Altaïr’s throat bobbed as he shifted his gaze back to hers. “What makes you ask?”

“No, no,” Maria argued, setting the razor down against the bed. “We are not starting this. Altaïr, what makes you say that?”

There was a long pause. In the past, Maria would have dropped the subject entirely, writing it off as some sort of Assassin trick to dig into the deepest pits of her heart and mind. Now, however, Maria held her chin high as she forced Altaïr to keep her gaze, her heart thumping against her chest.

“How did the scar upon your brow form?” Altaïr asked. 

Maria closed her eyes and inhaled sharply. “Altaïr, I am not going to–”

“Do you want to know or not?” He snapped. Maria’s brow furrowed, and Altaïr quickly cleared his throat. He repeated his question, his voice much softer and weaker than before.

Maria stared incredulously, but ultimately decided to play along. “My first battle. One of Salāh ad-Dīn’s men slashed my brow.”

Altaïr nodded. “Were you shamed for it?”

Maria shrugged. “A few soldiers from my infantry joked here and there, but no.” She squinted her eyes and furrowed her brow. “What are you getting at?”

“In Islam,” Altaïr explained, “it is believed God places all of our senses and beauty into our faces. It is why Muslims avoid striking the face.”

Maria scoffed. “My scar begs to differ.” 

Altaïr did not laugh, though she did see the corners of his lips tug up in a phantom smile. “It is taboo to do so. It can leave the face… disfigured,” he explained. “It is not so easy to conceal as a scar on one’s arm or leg.”

Maria’s expression fell. She hesitated before she finally asked her burning question. “Where did you get your scar?”

“Who do you think?” Altaïr all but answered.

Maria should not have been surprised. She only knew of Altaïr’s master through his stories and his codex (Maria could not help it – his journal had been left wide open). Despite Altaïr’s almost nostalgic tone toward a man who had betrayed him time and time again, each story left a sour taste upon her tongue. Now, her tongue tasted bile and copper in disgust. 

“How old were you?” she demanded, her words eerily still. Her blood boiled. 

“Old enough to know better,” Altaïr replied, quiet. 

“Horseshit. How old were you?” 

“Thirteen winters.”

Maria stood from the bed, pacing back and forth by the side. “You were a boy. A boy!” She rustled her dark locks from their meticulously braided bun as she grasped and tugged at her hair.

“I knew better than to speak out of turn,” Altaïr replied, his voice raised almost defensively. “I owed everything to him. My progress, my training, my life. He cared for me, in some twisted way, after my father’s death.”

Maria flocked to his side, kneeling before him on the bed as she cupped his cheek. Her thumb grazed over his scar. She tried not to gag imagining a small boy, voice yet to crack, begging the one guardian in his life for mercy. Apologizing desperately for words that should not have offended an allegedly wise leader so greatly. 

“That is one thing,” she managed once her voice was composed enough. “But it should be healed. It should be healed by now. For God’s sake, Altaïr, you are twenty-seven! Why is it only now healing?!”

Altaïr caught his lip between his teeth. “I have never been good at staying my tongue. I needed reminders.” His jaw clenched as his throat bobbed. Maria nearly choked as he spoke. “If I would not close my mouth, he would pry it closed for me.”

Maria stared. What else were she to do? She stood, pinching the bridge of her nose while Altaïr silently stared – no, glared – down at his own hands. 

“Your master would mutilate you before God,” Maria murmured, her head spinning, “and you would defend him?”

“He was an ordinary man,” Altaïr replied softly, “in control of illusions.”

“This is no illusion, Altaïr.”

“I know.”

Maria tossed her hands in the air before setting them on her head, pacing once more. She inhaled, standing and placing her hands on her hips. She gestured to Altaïr, speechless as she attempted to form words on her heavy tongue. “For thirteen years, Al Mualim slit and prodded your mouth to silence you, on top of his manipulation. As a boy, I understand your hesitance, but you never once fought back?”

Altaïr stood, hand clasping his side while he straightened his back. Maria took a step back, eyes wide but jaw tensed. “How do you fight a man who thinks himself God?” he questioned with narrowed eyes. “What would I have gained? Where would I have gone?” Altaïr winced and sat back down, eyes cast down shamefully. Maria sighed, sitting next to him on the sheets.

“Assassins are not always required to hide their faces,” Altaïr confessed quietly. He tenderly rubbed his stub of a ring finger, thumb brushing over the seared and scarred skin. “Most lower their hoods in Masyaf if they are not patrolling. There is no reason to hide amongst brothers.”

“And you?” Maria dared ask.

Altaïr shook his head, running a hand through his coarse curls. “I was no brother. I was his personal weapon.” His throat bobbed, and Maria tore her face away when she noticed his golden eyes begin to glisten in the flickering candlelight. “He created me. He could mold me into whatever he pleased. He could slice and strike my face. He could shave my beard and treat me not just as a boy, but a dog. He could isolate me. He could tear my name from me and make me the son of no one, loved by nobody. He could do whatever he pleased.” He turned to Maria, voice wavering as he spoke. “Where would I have run to? Who would I have hidden behind that would not whisper my arrogance to Al Mualim?”

There was silence as both Altaïr and Maria turned to stare at the cracked sandstone before them. “My face was unsightly, he told me,” Altaïr whispered. “Disrespectful, even.” He bent forward, elbows digging into his knees while he craned his head and rubbed his eyes. “Better kept hidden beneath a cowl, even in the arms of my brothers.” Altaïr swallowed. “He was correct.”

“No,” Maria opposed. “Your scar is not unsightly. It is not disgusting, or disrespectful, or anything that blabbering fool would have you believe. Your face is not unsightly. You are not unsightly.”

Altaïr chuckled, though it nearly sounded like a sob. “You do not have to lie, Maria.”

“I am not!” Maria all but shouted, coming in front of Altaïr and bending her knees slightly, stopping when she was level with him.

“I am nothing.”

“You are everything,” she pleaded. Maria cupped each of his cheeks, thumbs brushing the heavy, dark bags beneath his kohl-covered eyes. “You are kind and good and curious and wise and beautiful.”

It was Altaïr’s turn to scoff. “Beautiful? I hoped in our time together, you would have some respect for me, even if minute.”

Maria bit back an argument. Instead, she reached for his hands, squatting on the ground while she squeezed them. “You are not some ‘ugly, old Assassin’ beneath your hood,” she murmured, briefly lowering her voice and swapping her accent to mimic his words from Cyprus. Once she had seen his face in Cyprus for the first time, she had thought he was joking during their initial meeting with his Cypriot allies. Now, staring into his piercing eyes, Maria’s heart shattered knowing he had truly not lied. At least, he did not believe so.

She held his hand to her lips and kissed each knuckle. “You are so beautiful. Strikingly so. In fact, it is embarrassing to admit,” she managed a soft laugh. “You are not some broken, shattered weapon. You are the Mentor of the Assassins. You are a scholar. You are a man. You are Altaïr. And Altaïr is more than enough.” 

Altaïr was quiet. Maria did not press for an answer. His tear-stained cheeks, illuminated by the candlelight, were enough to signal the power of her words. Her heart pounded as she imagined the utter agony one man could carry. Maria had little autonomy under Robert’s control amongst the Templars, but Altaïr had possessed none under Al Mualim since the age of eleven. His name was stripped from him. His masculinity was torn away in favor of a boy to manipulate. His face was mutilated simply because Al Mualim could. To be at the mercy of a man with none, who believed himself worthy of the powers of God… Maria choked back her tears, instead burying her face in his hands and kissing each palm. 

“Altaïr,” she murmured, gazing up into his tearful eyes, “you are everything to me.” She cupped his cheek, ignoring her own hot tears as she smiled solemnly. “You have given me a fresh start. You have given me compassion, wisdom, love.” She swallowed a sob, standing before repositioning herself on the bed. Altaïr still said nothing, his eyes simply following Maria with every movement.

“Please,” Maria begged softly. She cupped her hands around Altaïr’s. “We are more than the instruments people would craft us to be.” Shuffling forward, Maria laid his hands over her heart, her own hands keeping them flat against her chest. “You are Altaïr. I am Maria. That is all we need be.”

Maria could not recall what resulted in Altaïr’s lips melding perfectly against her own. Perhaps it was the thump of her heartbeat. Perhaps it was their matching tears and snotty noses. Perhaps it was Altaïr’s released anguish. Or perhaps, it was merely Altaïr distracting himself from his nausea. Whatever the case, Maria gladly opened her mouth, finding Altaïr’s mouth absolutely delectable as her fingers combed through his curly locks. It was not the first time their lips had met so fervently. It was not even the first time their lips had met with so much love. But it was the first time their lips had met so unencumbered. There was no hesitance as Altaïr deepened their kiss, no weariness behind his lips. Nothing but relief and love and catharsis.

Eyes fluttering, Maria dug her fingers into Altaïr’s coarse hair. The warmth of their breaths mingled with each kiss. She sank her teeth into Altaïr’s lower lip, tugging it and slipping her tongue into his mouth. All the while, Altaïr pressed fervently in return, deepening their kiss as he tugged her forward. Maria’s head spun as her lips lingered by Altaïr’s long after they parted for air. His breath was hot and ragged on her cool skin. She tilted her head up, squinting her eyes as she analyzed his face. Tears stained his sharp cheeks. His eyes were red and puffy. Even with his mouth shut, Maria could see his teeth and gums through the exposed sliver of his scar.

Maria cupped both of his cheeks, her thumbs swiping the stray tears from his skin. She watched as his eyes crinkled and his lips tugged into an awkward hint of a smile. His curved nose, slightly crooked from Maria’s boot to his face only a few months prior, bounced the candlelight off his face. The flickering light highlighted his strong, sharp cheekbones. His eyes, a piercing swirl of gold and amber, were only emphasized by the kohl beneath them. Every inch and crevice of his face captivated her. The longer she stared, the more he strained against her palms as if tugging away from the attention. Tears welled in his eyes as her hold left him utterly exposed. But she could not let him tear away. His dark curls and his striking gaze and his full lips and his winding scar and his scruffy beard and his tan skin enchanted her very being. 

She had never seen anything so beautiful in her life. 

“Say something,” Altaïr croaked.

Maria did not. Instead, she leaned forward, peppering gentle kisses to his scar. Maria was careful not to irritate the slit in his upper lip any more than it already was. Rather, she gingerly trailed her velvet lips up along his scar, leaving small caresses along the trail. His facial hair – not quite a beard, but not quite stubble – tickled her cheeks. She smiled. 

“My first demand as your wife,” Maria murmured between kisses to his scar, “is that you must grow your beard out. I am fond of it.”

The world spun still with her words. Beneath her gentle touch, Maria could feel Altaïr’s body stiffen. “What?”

“Oh honestly, Altaïr, you cannot just stop listening to me immediately!” Maria huffed. “You have to wait at least a year.”

“I do not understand.” His voice shook – perhaps from nausea, perhaps from nerves, or perhaps from both.  Maria laid a hand on his bandaged chest. His heart threatened to thump out onto the floor. She grinned.

“We have been like this for many months,” she explained. “Stumbling around our feelings like some prepubescent children. One might think us virgins the way we stammer about.”

“Aside from insulting our maturity,” Altaïr spoke, his face contorted in confusion, “I am assuming you have a point to this.”

Maria waved her hand in dismissal. “Hush, let me get there.” The Englishwoman grasped Altaïr’s hands in her own, her thumbs stroking his calloused palms. “But tonight… something… it is difficult to explain.” She inhaled and squeezed his hands. Her pale, cerulean eyes met his amber stare. “I love you. I think you and I know that intimately by now. But it was not until tonight, with the mercenaries, the arrow, your scar… that I understood the extent of my love.”

Altaïr furrowed his brow. “I still do not understand. Why now?”

“Because for the first time,” Maria breathed, “I thought I would lose you.”

“This is not my first arrow. This is not even our first battle.”

“No, but I have never seen you so injured or ill. I have never seen you, the great Altaïr, retching over a bucket with bandages covering your entire torso.”

“If you do not make a point soon, I fear you may again.”

Cautiously, Maria handed Altaïr the water-filled chalice, waiting until he had drunk his fill to continue. Her throat swelled with tears as she gulped down her pride. “You have been so truly and utterly vulnerable tonight. You have shared with me the deepest parts of your pain. You have let me care for you and stay by your side.” She smiled through her tears, rolling her eyes as she wiped a few away and scoffed at herself. “Oh good God, this is humiliating.”

Altaïr managed a smile. A true smile. Not the phantom of a smile, or a mildly amused look. A small, bright smile that tugged his lips into his cheeks and formed a pair of dimples. Good God, Maria had never even noticed that before, and the revelation was not aiding her poor attempt at an explanation. “No, it is not,” he assured quietly. It was his turn to cup her pale cheeks. He swiped a tear from her eye, then leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her forehead. Maria inhaled sharply, praying that God would not see her break into some weeping wildflower.

Mustering the courage and dignity that remained, Maria tightened her jaw and stared up at Altaïr. “I would walk with you to the ends of time, Altaïr. To our glory, to our doom, I do not care. As long as I walk beside you and chastise you for your foolish decisions to put yourself in front of arrows for the rest of my life, I will be content.”

Altaïr hesitated. “How can you make such a decision so hastily?”

Maria laughed. “My life is nothing but hasty decisions, Assassin.” She crawled beside him from the edge of the bed, wiggling by his side to find a more comfortable position. “But this is not one of them.”

Altaïr laid his head against the creaking headboard, closing his eyes. “So, you have decided that you are my wife now? I have no say in the matter?”

“Is that a question?”

“Maria.”

“No,” Maria answered plainly. “Not yet. But I will be.”

“What makes you so sure?” Altaïr taunted.

“I am a stubborn woman. You are a hot-tempered man. One will wear the other down eventually,” she teased.

“What if I said no?”

“You would not have called me your wife, then.”

Altaïr grinned. “That is true.” He opened his eyes and turned toward Maria, who quickly shot out her hand to ease the pain in his side. “Then you will need to learn more Arabic. It was horrendous before.”

Maria feigned a gasp. “You said I was improving!”

“Both can be true,” Altaïr countered.

“Fine. Next time, I will leave you to die amongst the vipers and vultures in the dunes.”

“You would not.”

“I will stab the arrow back into your side, Altaïr.”

“Now that, you would do.”

The two glared at one another, squinting their eyes and puffing their chests, until finally, Altaïr began to gag. Maria swooped for the bucket, lifting it to her lover’s face before he heaved into it. He murmured apologies, but Maria merely shushed him, her fingers stroking his curly hair. 

“You are still a fool for taking that arrow,” she reminded.

“You still would do the same,” Altaïr grumbled, panting into the bucket before wiping his mouth and gulping down what water remained inside the goblet. Maria kissed the top of his head, grabbing the nearest rag and wiping the beads of sweat from his face.

“You are not a weapon, Altaïr,” she reminded, careful as she dabbed around his scar. “You are a man. You do not need to earn my love or any other through reckless acts. You are a man, and that is enough.” 

Altaïr nodded, and Maria prayed he believed her.

#assassin’s creed #altaïr ibn la'ahad #maria thorpe #ac1 #fanfiction #ac fanfic #i love fucking bitches up #this took me like three days to write #but I'm very proud of how it turned out!! #and I hope u guys enjoy it as much as I had fun writing it #poor Altaïr <:( #im evil >:3 #altmar #altaïria

[disney-trigger-warning]

uh oh! the TWST dorms only have one bed!

Heartslabyul

Immediately Riddle is suspicious that this is some kind of set up because really they only have 1 bed that somehow will fit 5 people but not 5 beds for each? Sus.

Anyways there’s no reason to bring this up or time because everyone is arguing where to sleep.

Riddle and Ace can’t be beside each other, they might kill each other in their sleep, and Riddle refuses to sleep by anyone who’s not Trey. Cater is filming the arguments.

It ends up with Riddle in the middle, as he is the smallest and less likely to get up in the middle of the night. He also eats only 800 calories a day and is underweight, so he won’t overheat like everyone else will because the middle is very toasty. 

Deuce is to his left, then Ace on the edge. Trey is on the right and Cater on the other side. They all sleep on their backs. Well, try to sleep, since Ace and Deuce keep whispering/kicking each other and Cater is playing on his phone.

Riddle finally snaps at all of them to knock it off and then they go to sleep.

They don’t wake up the same way.

Somehow, Deuce has ended up in the center of the bed under the blanket, curled up around a pillow. Riddle and Ace are cuddling on the left side. Trey is in the same position but skewed a little and Cater is now splayed over him.

Cater snaps 37 pictures of Riddle and Ace and has not moved from laying on Trey.

Savanaclaw

Leona is not amused but Ruggie is. Jack is embarrassed. 

They settle much easier than Heartslabyul did at least, since Leona doesn’t really care as long as he has his ~space~ and Ruggie is used to sharing a bed with others. Jack is a bit nervous but he’ll get over it.

They end with Leona on one side and Jack on the other, Ruggie in the middle. Ruggie lays on his back and the other two face the other direction.

Jack says goodnight and they both mutter it back.

Jack wakes up on the floor with his leg hurting because Ruggie kicks. Hard.

Ruggie has also taken over his spot on the bed, starfish style.

Leona is still somehow undisturbed but he does have more blanket than he started out with.

Octavinelle

Ah, how benevolent of Azul to let Jade and Floyd on the bed with him, how kind of him!

Actually it’s more like Jade and Floyd squished Azul between them before he could say he was just going to sleep under the bed, but details, details!

This isn’t really any different from back in the Coral Sea, where merfolks napping in the open would just curl around objects or each other not to float away in the current.

They had often taken quick naps while exploring or in Azul’s octopus pot so the closeness doesn’t bother them at all.

Azul is stuck in the middle, with Jade laying like a corpse on his left and Floyd clinging to him on the right.

Azul hates how good he slept that night.

Scarabia

It’s not that big of a deal to either of them. Kalim often slept in Jamil’s bed when he had bad dreams or his bed got soaked in blood from a would-be assassin, and Jamil sometimes slept in Kalim’s when there was a bug he couldn’t find and kill before bed.

Kalim says it’s a fun sleep over so they have to share the bed! Jamil is too tired to argue.

They settle in back to back and go right to sleep.

They wake up cuddling.

Pomefiore

Vil is appalled that such a grievous error could be made but Rook is quick to assure him that it is an honor to sleep beside such a glorious beauty like Vil. Epel wants to go home.

After being forced to endure a beauty routine he always claims he does, Epel finally says that he’s super tired and wants to sleep. Vil agrees, beauty sleep is important.

Rook insists he’s in the middle, which is fine because Epel thinks the temptation to smother Vil in his sleep might be too much to ignore.

They wake up with Rook is clinging to Vil like an octopus and Epel is embarrassingly holding Vil’s hand.

Ignihyde

This isn’t a big deal to either of them, as they are brothers.

Also Ortho is a robot who does not need a bed to sleep. Idia is a gamer who does not sleep.

Idia plugs Ortho in and spends the night on his phone playing gacha rhythm games like the loser he is.

Diasomnia

Welp, this happened. 

Sebek is Offended Horrified someone would make such a grievous error when booking rooms.

Silver is already passed out on the floor, which also makes Sebek yell louder.

Neither Lilia or Malleus care. At all.

Lilia picks up his sleepy son and tucks him into bed before flopping down beside him. Malleus lays beside Lilia.

Sebek then passes out when he realizes the only spot left is beside WAKASAMA.

Lilia also puts him in bed then digs out his game to play. Malleus doesn’t sleep but he does lay down for the whole night because as it turns out Sebek and Silver are cuddlers and it’s nice to be wanted.

#disney twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland #this took me like 3 days to write lol #riddle rosehearts #deuce spade #trey clover #ace trappola #cater diamond #leona kingscholar #ruggie bucchi #jack howl #azul ashengrotto #jade leech #floyd leech #kalim al asim #jamil viper #vil schoenheit #rook hunt #epel felmier #ortho shroud #idia shroud #malleus draconia #lilia vanrouge #silver #sebek zigvolt