#lettuce see who can be more stubborn about this :' )

[tvrningout-archived]

@wonderloste​ | continued from here!

     a frown curves along chiyo’s lips. " then i’m not asking anything of you, darcy. i’m telling you. ” perhaps she would be more delicate, but the rabbit is being so damn stubborn ( hey, mrs. pot? mr. kettle is calling )! watching him struggle simply to keep himself straight frustrates chiyo, makes her want to push him back and tell him to relax and quit worrying over her for one second so that he might actually worry over his own wellbeing. of course, she can’t bring herself to push him back, too worried that she might hurt him even if she’s gentle ( a broken heart apparently must hurt just as much literally as it does metaphorically ). chiyo does cross her arms, though, standing her ground and fixing darcy with a stern look that is more worried than it is cross.

     “ if something did happen, you aren’t in any condition to fight, much less traipse all the way to spade kingdom. ” he looks to be in such agony. chiyo can’t help herself -- she has to reach out, brushing stray strands of white away from darcy’s face in hopes that it may soothe him, even a little. she almost pokes the crease between his brows as well, but instead her fingertips ghost along his jaw before she drops her hand back at her side. there’s a little pink to chiyo’s cheeks as she meets darcy’s eyes again, expression softer than when she first began. “ i know you’re worried about me, but you’re the one who’s hurt. you can hardly stand. do you really think i’m going to agree to put you through more pain? ”

#wonderloste #i've been hoarding this in my drafts and at last here we go!! #darcy trying to tell chiyo no for her own good and chiyo's just?? um what about /your/ own good??? #lettuce see who can be more stubborn about this :' ) #interactions | chiyoko #a chain reaction in your heart | adulthood | chiyoko

[delopsia]

so we’ve all agreed that Miles is a beautiful shy boy who just wants be to taken care of. I’ve always imagined a world where he gets “rescued” (aka a wonderful person helps him see his worth and he runs away from the bad people back to the lovely little house his love owns) and because the world’s best house husband. he’s happy to cook and clean (big acts of service guy) and his love is thrilled that Miles is in therapy and trying things that interest him (he’s a phenomenal gardener and he loves to volunteer at the local library during storytime. because kids aren’t for him but he’s amazing at doing different voices and making all the little ones giggle.) instead of slowly withering away at that nasty hotel. I don’t really know what my question is here…. actually. Miles surprising his love with a nice home cooked meal for Valentine’s Day but he’s only wearing a frilly little apron and a plug with a heart on the end. that was he can eat them out, get fucked, and still have dinner be warm.

I've never wanted to rescue a character from a plot so much in my life. He's just a little guy! :( He didn't deserve all of that.

Miles would make such a wonderful little house husband 💕 cleaning, in general, is one of those things he's learned to master back at the El Royale, starting as one of the many housekeepers right before they started losing more employees than they hired.

Suddenly he was being pulled into the kitchen to help out, then he was put up at the front desk when the last clerk quit, and all of a sudden, he was the only employee there. He's a jack of all trades when it comes to the house, and it's so much easier than working at the hotel. Dinner? Cleaning the shower? Making the bed? He's got it, don't you worry about it.

But, omg, the gardening! He's got a little bit of everything going on out there, strawberries, lettuce, carrots (those aren't going particularly well, but he's..trying), okra, pumpkins. There are some marigolds, sunflowers, and other flowers scattered in there, too.

It's all surrounded by an adorable white picket fence that he installed because the neighbor's kid kept plucking his daffodils. He didn't wanna get the little guy in trouble, but God, he hates when folks mess with his flowers. Indoors, he's got a little corner dedicated to the plants he's rescued from folks who couldn't take care of them.

The way that Miles is so torn between wearing that little Valentine's apron, getting fucked, and cooking that he winds up trying to do all three at once 😌to be fair, he was clothed when the food went in the oven, but it was just taking so long. How could he not get up to a little trouble during that downtime?

You just so happened to walk in the door when he was tying the apron around his waist and got so nervous that he had to be coaxed out from hiding behind the kitchen island. Hands clasped behind his back, trying to hide that tiny little glittering heart on the end of his plug. He's not entirely certain why he's so nervous because none of this is new, but it still takes him some time to draw his heated face out of his palms.

Of course, the counter is right there. It would be a shame if you didn't bend him over the side of it and fuck him on your strap; gotta keep an eye on the timer, right? Those cute little knees of his keep knocking into the cupboard doors, chest flat against the cool countertop, struggling to peek at you from over his shoulder.

That initial shyness melts from him like ice cream in the summer sun, leaning back into the thrust of your hips, so vocal that you worry the neighbors across the street may hear him. He's barely quit shaking from his orgasm when he falls to his knees, a little too insistent that you take this dumb strap off so that he can eat you proper. Winds up between your thighs while you sit in the kitchen chair, stroking his hair.

Dinner is slightly burnt because that damn timer went off right as you started getting close, and Miles was too stubborn to let either of you move 🎀 he makes up for it pretty quickly, though, luring you into the shower with a little grin on his face.

It takes him until nightfall to realize that you got him a new plant for Valentine's Day, a little rescued orchid who hasn't shown her colors yet, still recovering from grocery store neglect. The plants who need a little love and care are Miles's favorite 🌷 they're just like him

Send Miles, Rhett & Bob thoughts!

#delgato's asks #miles miller #miles miller x reader

[greydaysandstarrynights]

Hi! What headcanons do you have about Claudine Frollo?

// Blanket trigger warning for references to child abuse.

Claudine is absolutely not her name, but I haven’t decided on what her name is. I like Catherine but I also like Magdalena, because I think Deenie is still a cute nickname and if anybody deserves cute things, it’s her.

She’s left handed—and Frollo took it about as well as you’d expect. This—and how terribly her father reacted to that—I’m pretty sure I got from a fanfic of yours, but I liked it, and thought Frollo’s reaction made perfect sense, for him and the time he came from, so both became my headcanons too.

She has a very good singing voice, but basically nobody knows that. She mainly knows medieval hymns—Gaudete is her favorite—but she may have picked up a few songs she overheard from the bell tower too. She doesn’t sing those, even though no one is likely to hear, because she doesn’t know what all the phrases mean, and this is the Isle, so they’re probably innuendos anyway, and she isn’t taking any chances.

She’s autistic, but this is less a unique to her headcanon and more the result of me being autistic too, and unable to write neurotypical characters at all. They end up ignoring nonverbal body language or being way too aware of sensory information even when I’m not deliberately writing them that way, and so I just conceded to the inevitable and boom, autistic!Claudine. This goes over, as an old history professor of mine once said, like a screen door on a submarine with her father, who just thinks she’s stubborn, spoiled, willful, etc.

That brings us to: her sensory profile and special interests! So every autistic person is different, but here’s how I usually list Deenie’s sensory aversions and preferences: She loves soft fabrics, like old cotton, silk and satin, but not velvet because it—and lace—are too scratchy. Dresses with high collars bother her, too, because if she winds up sitting on the skirt, she feels as if she can’t breathe. She loves bland, faintly sweet creamy foods, like puddings or mousse or yogurt or custard. The creaminess has to be evenly distributed though. If there are lumps, that’s a definite no go. At the total opposite end of the food spectrum, she also loves foods with the consistency of tanned leather, so, stale bread, chips, etc. if it has the texture of cardboard, she’s probably a fan. The in between, like lunch meat, or wilted lettuce or meat with gristle/fat, she can’t stand, or anything that’s a mix of chewy and hard. She likes dim lighting like candles or twinkling fairy lights, but finds direct sunlight or even really bright artificial light too overwhelming. Her special interests are, saints, Latin, and animals, so she can tell you anything and everything about any obscure medieval saint you can think of, conjugates verbs in Latin as a verbal stim, and knows all the native fauna of the Isle.

For reasons I’m sure are apparent, she doesn’t have meltdowns and hasn’t since she was really little. Instead, she has a mix of shutdowns and maladaptive daydreaming. Shutdowns are like meltdowns except internal. The person can become nearly immobile, and struggle to speak or respond. Sometimes people can go on autopilot, so they can move, but aren’t aware of their surroundings. Claudine does the latter, with accompanying daydreams. She also copes by losing herself in daydreams that are far more real than whatever is going on around her in the real world. Often, the daydreams combine with the shutdowns, and she will lose herself in both when the world around her becomes too overwhelming to bear.

TW Self harm so, there were medieval folks who self flagellated as a form of penance—whipped themselves with scourges, basically—and there’s actually a super small, fringe order of Catholics who practice “mortification of the flesh,” and I…..could see Frollo doing that, and Claudine, horrifyingly, either picking it up from him or being taught it deliberately. I think this is another thing you thought of, too. I have a really dark version of this where she uses matches/candles/the flame on the stove, instead of a scourge, belt, or a blade. I could see Frollo doing it to her, first—while making really disturbing references to hellfire if she doesn’t stop doing whatever it is—and then she just csrries on with it herself.

Frollo distrusts most modern technology, not because he doesn’t know how it works, but because he thinks it promotes idleness and sloth, so they only have electricity and hot water in the shop. In their rooms, they use candlelight and while they have running water, it’s cold, except in the bathroom sinks.

Deenie is scared of thunderstorms, the dark, and small spaces. Thunderstorms for sensory reasons—unpredictable, loud sounds and bright lights—and also, probably, because her dad made some offhand comment comparing the anger of the Lord to a thunderstorm, and the two conceits got fused in her mind, or, given that it’s Frollo, he could’ve outright told her that thunderstorms = God is angry, but either way, she isn’t a fan. Her fear of darkness/small spaces came from being locked in the closet as a child—Frollo’s version of time out. She was supposed to pray/ contemplate/repent of whatever. “sin” she’d committed to get locked up in the first place, but usually she just quietly panicked about what might be lurking in the dark.

#ooc #claudine frollo #mun speaks #Child abuse tw #self harm TW #dragoney

[blakocelot]

Tinies would be so much help in a garden

I've been thinking about this for a while now. Anytime I'm weeding in a flower bed or vegetable garden I think about this. A lot of times there are these large patches of little clover or oxalis sprouts that are just so small and close to the ground that you have to use the very tips of your fingers to get them up. If you pinch your fingers too far you risk cutting through the stem with your fingernails and a lot of weeds are stubborn enough that those little hair-like roots left behind are enough to regrow from. Just tilling them up isn't usually enough either because they'll typically just take root again if you leave them on the ground after uprooting them. The worst part is you usually just have to resign yourself to having to go over it again a few days later bc you know you probably only got about half of them.

Just imagine a tiny/borrower helping a farmer/gardener with their chores. The tiny would be able to get all the little ones easily while the farmer works on bigger more stubborn weeds. A little helper that can help find weeds growing under the low branches of shrubs would be a godsend. It doesn't stop at weeding either.

Anyone who has had a larger vegetable garden knows that a good chunk of time spent harvesting is just trying to find what's ripe (especially things like tomatoes or cucumbers). I usually end up folded in half with my head stuck in a mess of vines or branches, sometimes gently shaking the plant, because maybe I'll catch a glimpse of something. A tiny that could just walk underneath it all and call out where the ripe crops are, and it would probably cut the time in half.

Honestly I could go on for a while. Tinies could help sow some of the itty-bitty seeds that are really hard to pick up a specific number of, like lettuce or poppies. Being small enough to see the undersides of leaves would make catching pests or fungal infections early a breeze. Most of this would result in fewer chemicals being needed meaning minimal harm to pollinators and the watershed. I also love the idea of a farmer striking a deal with a borrower colony they find living in their house where the borrowers get to harvest what they please in exchange for help in the garden.

If I had the time and the talent maybe I'd write something with this idea, but I knew I wanted to just put this out there in some capacity. I don't think I've ever seen this done before. If anyone wants to use this as a prompt or something go for it, just tag me (I wanna see).

#g/t #giant tiny #gianttiny #giant/tiny #gts #tiny #tinies #borrower #borrowers #gardening #gt prompts #g/t prompts #gt writing #g/t writing

[acowardinmordor]

Eddie glanced up from the other side of the room, fussing at his guitar, tonguing the pick between his teeth so it flicked fast, up and down. Steve inhaled wrong, choked on his first hit of the night, and coughed for a few minutes while the rest of the group teased him relentlessly.

“I know how to smoke a joint!” he croaked, before coughing again. 

“Sure you do.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s so obvious.”

“You’re an expert.”

“I have smoked pot before!” He yelled.

“Aw, Dingus, you don’t have to lie to us.”

“Yeah, we’re your friends. Just ask and we can help explain it.” 

“You have seen me smoke. Stop it. I know how to smoke.” And then he coughed again, which set them all off again. “I no longer like any of you, get out of my house.”

Robin stole the joint while he was dying the first time, and it made its way around. Jonathan slid a can across the table, and Steve took a couple sips to get his chest to stop, and get his breathing to calm down. 

He glared at all of them. “Stop. I have smoked. I have smoked many times. I know how to smoke.”

“Everytime you say that, we believe it less.”

“Say Steve, you gotta be careful out there. Have you ever experimented with The Marijauna?”

“Mary Jane? The devil’s lettuce?”

“Have you or someone you loved experienced Reefer Madness?”

“Tried some grass? Some green? Ganja? Hash?”

“Steve, have you ever met a dope fiend?”

“We did this last weekend!” He flopped his arms and fell back in his chair, accepting defeat. He was going to hear about this months. Every time they remembered, it was going to come back. “I hate you. Robin, you’re no longer my best friend. Jonathan, you’re buying beer. Argyle, you’re back on Pizza.”

“Hey! Why don’t Nancy and Eddie get punished?”

“Because Nancy has a gun, and Eddie is sitting in the corner, not being an asshole to me. They’re my only friends now.”

He gestured to them both. Nancy was leaning over her chair, handing the joint to Eddie, who was watching with a wicked gleam in his eyes. He slipped the pick between the strings and set the guitar to the side before he took a short hit. 

Steve should have known better. Fastest way to get Eddie to show off was to point out that he wasn’t. 

He crossed the room, exhaling as he went. 

“Yeah guys, don’t be mean cause it’s Stevie’s first time. He just needs a little help.”

He took a long, deep draw, holding it while Robin accepted the joint. Hands on either side of the chair, Eddie leaned in. Steve knew what this was, and there was no way to get out of it without giving them more ammunition. Tongue caught between his teeth, and beaming at his victory, Eddie closed the gap. When they were close enough that the remaining choices were to shove him off or accept it, Eddie winked. 

He had to be running out of oxygen, but Eddie was stubborn as hell. 

Steve opened his mouth and inhaled while a perfectly controlled, easy, smooth stream of smoke flowed between them. It went long enough that he got dizzy, wobbling in his seat, very nearly breaking the rules. 

It wasn’t a real shotgun if your lips touched. 

Eddie followed the motion and kept them apart.

“See?” Eddie said after a breath “he’s learning. Just needed a hand.” 

Upright again, Eddie bit his lower lip where no one else could see.

Steve blinked, and immediately coughed on lungfuls of smoke. 

#Steddie #ficlet #Today; eddie has game #this is inspired by that text exchange #where they guy calls it an IED not an IUD

[scarfacewastaken]

𝙳𝙴𝙲𝚁𝙸𝙿𝚃𝙸𝙽𝙶  𝙵𝙸𝙻𝙴  on  …   JENNIFER MALLICK;  [  she/her  /  female  /  annet mahendru  ]  —  formally  a  MARINE  before  the  apocalypse  broke  out.  nowadays,  the  32  year  old  is  keeping  themselves  busy  in  many  other  ways.  our  records  show  they  were  quite  known  to  be  A BLEEDING HEART  and  MATERNAL,  but  given  the  circumstances  i  can  see  why  their  OPTIMISTIC and  LEADING attributes  might  shine  in  a  world  like  this.  i  wonder  if  they  remember  how  TOY SOLDIERS  by  MARTIKA  sounds,  or  if  they  still  kept  their  DOG TAGS WITH A WEDDING RING. 

MORE INFO BELOW THE CUT FOR LENGTH.

hello there! my name is BC. I’m an adult and this here is my pride and joy, Jenny from The Walking Dead: World Beyond. If you’re a big TWD fan, then you must know--without both of the spin-offs, none of ya’ll would have Rick Grimes back or a S11, so--tip your waitress.

BASIC INFORMATION (stolen from JEEERRRY)

FULL NAME: Jennifer Marie-Devi Mallick

NICKNAME(S): Huck, Jenny, Jen, Staff Sergeant Mallick.

AGE: 32 (she started the apocalypse off at 23)

DATE OF BIRTH: July 28th, Leo.

HOMETOWN: Queens, New York.

CURRENT LOCATION: Colorado QZ.

GENDER: Female

PRONOUNS: She/Her.

ORIENTATION: Bi-Sexual, married to Dennis Graham.

RELIGION: Buddhist.

AFFILIATION: CRM. Her mother runs it. 

PRE - APOCALYPSE OCCUPATION: Marine, Lance Corp.

CURRENT OCCUPATION: Staff Sergeant (Philly, CRM center), but she’s undercover at the Colorado QZ. 

LIVING ARRANGEMENTS: Apartment, but she spends little time there. 

LANGUAGE(S) SPOKEN: Farsi (because she’s Indian), Russian, English, Spanish and French.

ACCENT: New York (Queens.), Southern.

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

FACE CLAIM: Annet Mahendru

HAIR COLOUR: Dark brown with blonde streaks at the ends and her bangs.

EYE COLOUR: Brown.

HEIGHT: 5′7

WEIGHT: 125 pounds.

BUILD: Petite, athletic. Small, but mighty.

TATTOOS: None.

PIERCINGS: Ears, but she never wears earrings anymore.

CLOTHING STYLE: White tank top, leather jacket, black BDU pants and combat boots.

USUAL EXPRESSION: Smiling, optimistic, laughing. Rarely you’ll catch her morose, but you can catch her expressions during bad situations varying from a nervous wreck to a basket case. 

DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS: A long scar underneath her eye, cut by her in memory of dead ex-boyfriend, Drake who had the exact same one when they were touring Afghanistan. 

HEALTH

PHYSICAL AILMENTS: None.

NEUROLOGICAL CONDITIONS: Heavy PTSD. Barely any sleep. 

ALLERGIES: Kiwis, other than that--lead stomach.

SLEEPING HABITS: Light sleeper, always on guard.

EATING HABITS: Sandwiches without lettuce, lives on canned sardines.

EXERCISE HABITS: Up at the early ass morning running and doing her usual military training routine.

EMOTIONAL STABILITY: She comes from a broken home with an awful, controlling mother and daddy issues. Jennifer is a bleeding heart and does whatever she can to make sure good people live or are put down humanely.

SOCIABILITY: Like a goddamn butterfly, but she never talks about her past. 

BODY TEMPERATURE: Normal.

ADDICTIONS: None.

DRUG USE: None.

ALCOHOL USE: She has a beer every now and then and talked about getting drunk with Felix Carlucci once during a party, but she abstains because her husband is an alcoholic and because she just isn’t like that.

PERSONALITY

POSITIVE TRAITS: loyal, passionate, hard-working, a true leader, good in any situation, always has your back.

NEGATIVE TRAITS: strong-willed, stubborn, excellent liar and manipulator, bleeding heart.

HOBBIES: She has this trick she used to do at bars where she throws darts while blind-folded. Jennifer never misses.

HABITS: Sucking back on her teeth, cocking out her hip in an annoyed stance, rolling her tongue on the inside of her cheek, storming off when talking to her mother.

FAVOURITES

WEATHER: any, she’s a Marine. She can handle it. But prefers fall.

MUSIC: 90′s rap. She’s a 90′s kid and prefers hip hop and maybe some dance music if she has a beer or two.

MOVIE: full metal jacket, it’s a classic among her squad. 

SPORT: she dug playing football and volley ball on the beach with friends or at BBQs.

BEVERAGE: water.

FOOD: any-fucking-thing that doesn’t involve lettuce.

ANIMAL: wolf. she relates so much with them and has even encountered a mother wolf and her cubs in the wilderness before Elizabeth found her.

FAMILY

FATHER: Preshaud Mallick, deceased (cancer)

MOTHER: Elizabeth Kublek

SPOUSE: Dennis Graham, childhood sweetheart.

SIBLING(S): Only child.

COUSINS: Tara Chambler 

CHILDREN: Adopted Silas Plaskett with Dennis.

PET(S): None, no time.

FINANCIAL STATUS: The CRM has everything anyone could dream of. She’s got everything that the former world had, but prefers to not have any of it. She’s happy just being outside and not bothered. 

THINGS TO KNOW

Jennifer trained Jadis in the CRM once she traded Rick Grimes for her ticket in. 

She is right-handed.

Jennifer has the highest body count in World Beyond, but has always killed people humanely if they have to die. In war, however before the apocalypse---it was sadly whatever it took to be on the winning side, but never children or innocent people. Never.

She is protective to the point of being a mama wolf to Hope Benett, Iris Bennett, Elton Ortiz and Silas Plaskett, even when they’re 40 she’s still going to mama them.

PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE: she washed up on a raft in the middle of the omaha river and was nicknamed HUCK by a civilian, as in Huckleberry Finn. After bringing Hope back to the CRM to be with her dad, Jennifer went back to her old life and had to sort things out with the falling out because of her husband’s mistakes and what she had to do to fix them. 

TOP - SECRET: she very much believed in the CRM’s bullshit for a long time, but ultimately saw that they were power-hungry and just wanted to bomb every settlement to take their resources. Jennifer is all about the future and bringing the world back by working together. The only people who know about her real life and her real name, are The Endlings kids, her mother, Jadis and her best friend, Felix Carlucci. 

Instead of, you know, getting stabbed and bleeding out thanks to Jadis, she survived with the help of Dennis Graham (whose gunshot wound wasn’t fatal), and they escaped all while she still blew up the CRM’s supply of gas so they could never hurt anyone ever again. Currently, she’s on the run which is where Colorado comes in. A change of scenery. 

Is canonly the cousin of Tara Chambler, she used to visit her in Atlanta when they were kids, but was then ultimately raised by her uncle when Elizabeth was too busy with her job to continue to be a mother. 

#endfmintro

[anonofseasons]

“Congratulations, you just won our game! WHO’S GOING TO THE RETIREMENT HOME!”

Vivian would think it wasn't him... surprise, Viv, it's you! I have way too many thoughts on this now, because I can see El getting stuck with 90% of the care if Viv remained at home. And it would mainly be out of filial duty. Beau would show up at random times and be like, "Hey, El, I've got this! Take a break for the night!" ONLY BEAU'S BOYFRIEND WOULD DO 60% OF THE WORK! Beau means well, he's just a real flake and I love him for it. And Howie would visit sometimes and help while he's there, but lives out of town. Shannon helps El figure out the arrangements and finances to put Vivian in a home, just to ease El's troubles. He doesn't visit more than 3-5 times when Vivian's health plunges enough for him to be in hospice Shannon is always alone then, because he's probably reminding Viv in detail what a terrible father he was. Only he's not angry, he just wants to make sure he reminds his father what a shitty person he was in case he has any dreams about dying while surrounded by warmth and love. Sophie, when told Vivian is super old and his health is failing, is like, "Ohhhh... That's really too bad. Stubbornness is a Liddell trait! Tell the cafeteria he loves lettuce." :) Vivian had better get his act together quick or he's going to be so lonely in his old age. 😂

#I'm so sorry I get so rambly with every chat #I appreciate these asks so much--you're all awesome!

[uzchis]

“  i feel like i’m one bad day away from becoming everything i’ve fought against.  ” 

some angst idk y’all i like crying . @burdenedreverance​

suengri is only half paying attention to the man across him and the other half on the gigantic burger left before him. man, when they say everything is bigger in texas, they mean it. seriously, what the fuck? do people even survive eating this? don’t get him wrong. it looks delicious with its slightly toasted bread, ketchup peeking out, the mountain of lettuce adding height, cheese dripping from its sides, the double delux patties, but... he looks over at hayden who is clearly conflicted. it’s 3am on a monday morning and suengri and hayden are at whataburrgerr , rethinking their life choices and what got them to this point.

“don’t think about it too much.” he says. whereas suengri’s conflict derives on whether he can finish the burger, he’s sure hayden’s line of conflict pertains to his diet. or rather, his will and stubbornness to adhere to his self-regulated rule. “it’s only your fourth day. you won’t fucking die from starting over. well... maybe from diabetes or some shit. gatta love america for that, but still. i visited you all the way from across the fucking ocean so you better eat with me, hayden. i mean it.” as if to prove his point, suengri grabs hold of the hamburger and takes a bite from it. he leers at hayden as he chews, and after a minute or so, drinks from his small ordered drink that looks like a fucking large from his country of residence.

although suengri was no longer an idol who constantly had to keep an eye on his diet, little tips and tricks to avoid fast weight gain still stuck in his mind like second nature. so he’s sure that after this weird escapade of theirs is over, he won’t be eating big meals for quite a while. when he see’s hayden still hasn’t touched his food, though, he chucks a piece of fry at him. “hurry up before more people start coming in and recognizing you. do you want that?” oh, he’s sure hayden would fucking love that. “i’ll kidnap celeste and ship her to south korea if you don’t.” celeste, one of haydens beloved horses. “don’t think i won’t.”

#burdenedreverance #i love their relationship so much your honor. #i know i asked for angst rb.ing that meme but hh. we can't have two depressed ppl here. #v. MUSICIAN. / things are going smoothly.

[divine-mistake]

'till death blooms us art

Summary: You’d rather die loving him than never getting to see the sun ever again.

(“Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. This number is not available. At the tone, please record your message.”)

Characters: Sam Wilson/Plus-sized Reader

Warnings: 18+ (no smut), strong language, Hanahaki AU, angst with a happy ending, weight insecurity, allusions to eating disorders, talk about death, blood, past domestic abuse and trauma, gun violence, original male character, book quotes, anxiety

Word Count: 12796

A/N: Thank you for reading! This fic won the vote during my 500 follower celebration and it's finally out now! This story has a lot of meaning for me, due to it being a bit of a metaphor for disorderly eating. I know that will make some people uncomfortable, but as someone who has struggled for a long time, I want to talk more openly about this kind of thing. Anyway, thanks so much for sticking with me and I hope you enjoy!

main masterlist | AO3 | playlist by @tripleyeeet

—STUBBORN WEEDS—

They are everywhere—covering the space of the sitting room like an overgrown garden made of glass and paint, canvas and pages torn from old waterlogged books, stained mugs filled with decaying brushes. Wanda walks through your room like it’s a maze, her fingers trailing over the air but never touching the art. She’s pretending she’s in a museum, or a gallery, or something fancier than what you could ever appear in, but a twinge of something akin to warmth stabs through your heart at the thought.

“These are incredible,” she says, not looking at you. “How do you do it?”

With a shrug, you bend down and pick up one of the canvasses from the floor, holding it out to look at it.

“I don’t know,” you lie.

White space in the shape of flowers, uneven and missing petals here and there, is outlined in streaks of paint that go every direction, in every different shade, hard edges and soft, blurred lines and covering the entirety of the canvas except for those spaces where flowers once sat, pinned to the medium.

“They are beautiful,” Wanda says.

Your nail sneaks under one of the dried chunks of acrylic and you chip it—a fleck of ultramarine blue falls from the painting.

When you turn, Wanda studies a different piece in careful hands. It’s a glass case, trimmed with shitty, shaky lines of gold you painted on a whim. But inside, between the thick panes, dried flowers painted over are encased in eternity, arranged to match their exact placements on the canvas where your brushes stroked life onto them, around them, through them. Two perfect pieces that once belonged together, separated like an act of Adam against his God.

Maybe they were meant to be together, but no one will ever know their story.

“They’re amateur,” you tell her, laughing. “I’m not much of an artist. It’s just for fun.”

She smiles at you, placing the glass piece down. “You have a talent.”

Wanda takes another turn about the room, another circuit, another spin. She looks at every piece in such focus, taking in every single detail, fingers stretching and curling as if she wants to caress the dried flowers, the dried paint, and feel their meaning. You wonder what she would say if she could read their minds—the art you’ve made. Would your pieces tell her the true meaning behind their existence? Or maybe they would laugh, or cry, or howl in pain.

But Wanda only stares, at the paintings and at you, a small smile on her face like she knows something you don’t. Like she’s keeping a secret. Is she keeping the secrets that the flowers have whispered to her when you weren’t looking?

“What inspired them?” she asks, the very tip of her nail tracing a different glass box filled with dyed petals reconstructed into a larger artificial flower, protected by its own display.

You wring your hands together. “I like flowers.”

She laughs. “That’s obvious. But what makes them special enough to paint? To—To make such lovely art out of?”

Chewing on the inside of your cheek, you place the small canvas you’d been holding back on the side table, crossing the room to your bookshelf. Your fingertip finds the spine of a hardcover book you’re too familiar with, pulling it out and into your awaiting hands. Sheets of paper, a little bent and crooked, stick out of the pages.

You crack it open, the dulling white petals of a daisy pressed flat between the crackling spine fluttering from between the black inked words, then fall to the floor at your feet.

“The Devil’s hand directs our every move,” you read. “The things we loathed become the things we love.”

Wanda stares at you as you fiddle with the book, tracing the words of the cover.

“Les Fleurs du Mal,” you say. “The Flowers of Evil.”

Gently and without word, she bows at your feet and picks up the drying daisy, cradling it in her pale hands, but you don’t have the strength to take it from her.

(“Hey there darlin’, it’s just me. I had to run some errands this morning, y’know how it is, so I’m out of the Tower right now. I was just wondering if you needed anything while I was out. Anything—really, anything at all. Even breakfast, or maybe a latte? Just a little pick-me-up. Well, give me a call back if you need anything. If not, I’ll be back soon. See ya.”)

—BETTER TOGETHER—

“Steven Grant,” you say his name like a curse, shaking your head. “This is why you spend three hours a day in the gym.”

Too busy shoving the first bite of his first hoagie into his mouth, Steve doesn’t reply. You roll your eyes, but the smile on your lips gives you away. When he’s finally swallowed, wiping crumbs from his mouth, he looks a little indignant.

“Are you calling me fat?”

“Well, you would be if you didn’t have that serum running through you.”

He frowns, brows furrowed, a little confusion on his face. “I thought it was because I work out three hours a day. And I’ll have you know—”

“—you work out six hours a day between your morning runs and training, I know, I know. I’ve heard it all before Steve.” You groan at the thought. “It’s like it’s your job.”

“It is my job. Saving the world and all that.”

“Okay, you really need to let America know that it’s giving you a complex, ‘cause if I hear one more thing about you saving the world, I think I’m going to scream.”

He shrugs, taking another gigantic bite out of his sandwich. Scraps of shredded lettuce fall out from between the buns and litter his plate. You pick at your own, pulling uneven pieces of sliced onion and stray pickles from the hoagie, content to sit and stare at it instead of eating.

Food is good. You brush the grainy crumbs of bread from your fingers. Food is good, but you just aren’t hungry. And you don’t work out three hours a day. Maybe you should start. Your body feels like a balloon with all your insides threatening to come up in a retch and choke you. Food is good. Food is good. You just have to pick up the sandwich and eat it.

Fingers shaking, you take the sub in your hand and stare at the corner where you mean to take the first bite.

“You good?”

Steve, still chewing, looks at you with concern clear in his crystal blues and it makes you put your food back down on the plate. Instead, you busy yourself with another sip of your water, nodding at him.

“Yeah. We can’t all be Steve Rogers, demolishing two hoagies in less than two seconds, y’know.” You throw in a snort, trying to sound nonchalant. “Wipe your mouth, Captain. You’ve got mayo on your cheek.”

He doesn’t, but him grabbing a napkin to embarrassedly wipe a nonexistent condiment from his face gives you enough time to pick your sandwich back up and contemplate taking the first bite. You’ve just gotta start with the first bite and the rest will go down.

But you aren’t hungry. How can you be hungry when you’re already so full? Stuffed, even. There isn’t room in your insides. All your organs are bursting. It’s so painful sometimes, the expanding of your skin to accommodate. Waves of sickness roll through you, spreading. Your stomach is stretched, bloated, filled with all the swallowed—

“What are you doin’ to my girl, huh Steve?”

The sound of his voice alone makes the ache inside of you dissipate, the nausea escapes from your throat, the anxiety twitching through your hands steadies. Your head perks up, shoulders rolling back as your entire body relaxes, and you look behind you.

And there, dressed in a tight blue polo and a pair of pants clinging to his legs like they were made for him, the very angel who blessed you, the devil who cursed you, the god of the fucking sun and everything it could ever touch, stands before you with a smile saved just for you.

Sam Wilson.

His dark eyes are piercing, like he’s trying to peel back the layers of your skin to see underneath, as he shoves his hands in his pockets and grins with all his teeth.

“Hey honey,” he says—simply and easily and not serious. Never serious.

Your lungs burn. Your mouth feels too dry to answer him.

“Oh, your girl?” Steve asks him, brows a little too furrowed to be joking. “When did she become your girl?”

Sam shrugs, walking toward the empty seat next to you, placing his hand on the back of your chair so dangerously close to your body that it makes you pull in a deep breath. His thumb could brush against the fabric of your shirt, run along the seam of your spine. And, goddamn, it should be illegal for him to look so casual and so unbothered while still looking that handsome.

Like this, you can smell the spice in his cologne, a powerful mix of something you’re sure is designed to drive you crazy.

He looks down at you, still hovering over where you sit, and throws a wink your way that brings heat to the surface of your cheeks.

“Aw, she’s always been my girl, ain’t that right? Tell him, darlin’.”

You stare at Sam for one second too long, breaking away to gaze down at your uneaten sandwich again. With every flutter that Sam sends down your stomach, the heaviness inside it seems to fade away. Your fullness is replaced by a familiar hunger—the rawness of your throat waning as a burning itch takes over. A cough is threatening to bubble up. You choke it back, smiling instead.

“He’s right, Stevie,” you say all bright and cheery again.

Steve meets your eyes with a stony gaze, unreadable, his blue eyes looking gray in the light. Beside you, Sam throws himself down in one of the chairs and pulls up to the table, hand still sitting on the back of your seat. His knees are spread a little wide, thigh resting against yours.

It’s so innocent but your brain thinks it’s so intimate. A lie. A lie.

In the end, Steve relaxes back, his eyebrows lifting as he watches the scene unfold in front of him. He tosses one of the sticky plastic menus toward Sam, nodding at it.

“Order up, man,” Steve says, his tone more neutral than you think you’ve ever heard it in regards to Sam. “But I’m not paying for yours. You’re on your own.”

At that, Sam laughs, full and robust with his face up to the ceiling. He rocks back in his chair, shaking his head, and he looks so beautiful even in the shitty sub shop that Steve drags you to for lunch every other week that it makes you ache and your lungs contract in an attempt to cough.

You swallow it back again, trying to even out your breathing. The itch in your throat is so bad that you almost pick up your sandwich to eat again, but your hand passes it up to take another few sips of your water. It’s cool, clear, refreshing—but it can’t make the tickle of the cough go away.

“So,” Sam starts once he’s finished ordering his own hoagie, “how’s that apartment hunting going? Found anything good yet?”

A frown forms, heavy, on your lips. You pick off a flaking piece of bread from your sandwich, watching it turn to crumbs underneath your fingers.

“It’s going,” you say, but anyone who ever responds to a question of how’s it going with it’s going is absolutely lying and it is absolutely not going—and maybe Sam knows that, or maybe Steve does, or hell, maybe they both do but it makes you look weak to admit that things aren’t going so well out loud.

And you—you can’t admit the truth, so it’s just better to lie about it.

You don’t want to leave the Tower.

“It’s going, huh?” Sam asks, his tone proving that he can see right through you. “You need help looking at some places or something?”

“Well—”

“You know,” he barrels through your words as if they are nothing, “I think I actually know a realtor around here. Maybe he can get you some leads on rentals or something. I could make some calls for you, honey.”

It’s not supposed to—Sam only means well, he always does, always trying to do so much for people—but it hurts to hear. Because you don’t hear him saying that he’s trying to help you out. You hear him saying he doesn’t want you around the Tower anymore.

Because, well, why would he want you there?

To him, you’re just an outsider. A girl who doesn’t belong. Someone who daydreams and doodles flowers on every surface as soon as she thinks of him. And you always think of him.

Before you can think about it, your hand flies to your mouth reflexively to hold back a cough. Instantly, Sam’s leaning closer and that damned hand of his falls soft against your back.

“You okay?”

There’s barely a moment for you to nod, signaling that you’re fine, before Steve’s got on his game face, all hard lines and furrowed brows and thin lips pressed tightly together.

“Hey,” he says, grabbing Sam’s attention. “She’s allowed to stay as long as she wants, alright? The Tower is her home now, too. So there isn’t a rush for her to find a place unless she wants to leave.”

The passion and care in Steve’s voice is strong, almost so overpowering it’s oppressive, and something rises up from within you and threatens to send salty tears careening down your cheeks if you don’t blink them away.

Sam raises his hands in front of him dramatically. “Okay, okay, I get it. I wasn’t trying to run her off or anything, just wanted to lend a hand if I could. Damn, Steve.”

Something changes at the table, then. It’s like a fog, thick and cloying, falls over the three of you and keeps you lethargic—so much so that the only words spoken in the next few awkward minutes are Sam’s thanks when the waiter brings his sandwich by.

You still haven’t even touched yours, and you hope it seems like you’re just waiting for Sam to get his, because Steve’s tearing into his second and by the looks of the mustard dripping down his fingers messily, he’ll be done any minute now.

But as you prop your head up on the table, leaning on your elbow boredly, Sam nudges his leg into yours to grab your attention. When you turn to look at him, he’s got that grin again, all pearly and white with the little crooked gap you think you could stare at forever as long as it meant he was smiling and laughing and happy.

“You gonna eat, girl?” Sam picks his sub up in his hand and gestures at you to do the same. God, he makes you dizzy just by talking. The butterflies in your belly are fighting tooth and nail against your organs, trying to take up all the space, but they aren’t really butterflies. The soft monsters in your stomach leave a taste on your tongue you can’t explain.

“Oh.” You mimic his movement and then Sam toasts his hoagie against yours with a chuckle.

“First bite,” he says, and there’s no thought in your head or balloon in your stomach and no bloated skin to make you second guess yourself.

You follow Sam, sinking your teeth into the bread of your sandwich, and its flavor explodes over your tongue just enough to take away all the bitter, floral, fragrant taste of the daisies that are building up in your stomach, their petals choking you out, downy fluttering things inside you.

(“Hey girl, it’s me. I couldn’t find you anywhere—where you at? I was coming to see if you wanted to grab a bite with me for lunch, maybe at that little Italian place you like to go to around the corner? Or maybe sushi or something? Been a while since I got to go out for lunch, so I thought I’d ask, but I guess you’re busy right now. I’ll catch you later, darlin’. Enjoy your lunch.”)

—NEW BEGINNINGS—

You’ve got to call him. You have to. You have no choice anymore.

Danny is on the other side of the locked door, his fist pounding on the wood and threatening to cave it in from the repeated force. The sound is louder than it should be, really, echoing off the tile of the bathroom you’ve barricaded yourself inside. He’s shouting above the sound.

“You fucking bitch. I’m gonna kill you. I’m gonna fucking kill you. You lied to me? What else are you lying about, huh? You fucking whore. I took you in, I gave you a home, I gave you everything. Fucking fat slut—how many other guys are you sleeping with, huh?”

None, you had answered earlier when he was questioning you in your shared bedroom, his fist tight around your soft arm and squeezing so hard it made you want to scream. None.

But that wasn’t the answer Danny was looking for. And, well, once he threw you onto the ground and stomped to the dresser, clothes strewn around the room as he furiously ripped through it until he found the shiny black firearm you didn’t know he had, you were gone.

But there was only one place to go and that was the bathroom.

Now, trapped inside, you know you have no choice. You have to call him—the man from the coffee shop you’ve been going to regularly for a few months. The man who noticed the bruises Danny always left on you after a rough night. The man who pressed and pried and tried to do anything to get you to open up to him even as you refused over and over again. The man who put his number in your phone because he wanted you to call him if you ever needed him, not because he was a hero, but because he was worried about you.

You press the number two on speed dial. The phone rings.

“Hello? Who is this?”

“Steve?” Your voice is nothing but a sob. “Steve, you were right.”

He doesn’t miss a beat, but you hear the rustle of clothes and a jingle of keys on the other side beyond the static, a sound that makes you almost cry with relief or hope or maybe just stress.

“Hold on,” he tells you. “FRIDAY is pulling up your address. I’ll be there as quick as I can. Are you safe?”

“Bathroom,” you’re able to mumble out from behind the waterfall of tears rushing down your face. “He’s locked out but—but I’m scared.”

“I’m on my way. He’s not going to hurt you. I promise you.”

And then Steve hangs up, and you wish he hadn’t because now you’re left all alone with just a flimsy wooden door, painted fucking white so the blood will show up real pretty when Danny kills you, between you and your boyfriend.

Well, ex-boyfriend if you get out of here alive.

“Four fucking years!” he shouts from outside. “I gave you four fucking years of my life, you stupid bitch. I put up with your dumb fat ass for four years and this is what you do? Is this love? Do you think this is love?”

You figure anything is love as long as it doesn’t look like this. The ring of bruises around your upper arm from Danny’s grasp is already turning black and blue, a sight that makes you flinch.

Honestly, if it’s anyone’s fault, it’s yours. All the cash you were stashing should’ve been hidden better. You knew better. A shoebox up on the top shelf of the closet? Amateur. You should’ve cut a section out of one of your prized books or something. Danny never fucking reads. He probably doesn’t know how. He would’ve never found all the money if you’d stashed it there.

“Six thousand dollars!” he roars, punching the center of the door. The wood bends slightly. “How long’ve you been fucking stealing from me, huh? Fucking bitch. Stupid fucking bitch.”

And then it happens.

Danny’s fist breaks through the first layer of the door with a curse of pain falling from his lips. Then, a laugh. He’s laughing.

“I’m gonna kill you.”

He punches the door again and then his hand is through, wood splinters shattering and flying toward you, and with a scream you shield your face with your arms and duck down. You’re sitting beside the bathtub, squished against the toilet, and you scoot back as far as you can trying to wedge yourself to safety.

But there is no safety here. Danny’s bloodied fingers find the doorknob and unlock it with a click, and it’s over. It’s over. It’s fucking over.

With a kick, the door comes flying open and you’re screaming again at the top of your lungs, throat tearing itself raw. Danny’s broad frame possesses the entire room as he shoulders his way inside, his lips pulled back to show all of his teeth in a feral grin, the overhead lights catching the shine of the sleek gun he’s carrying.

You can’t even look at him. All you can do is stare at his back in the bathroom mirror hanging over the counter, your mind completely devoid of thought.

“Fuckin’ dead,” Danny says, and you don’t see him aim the gun at you. You stare in the mirror, right in the mirror and memorize the pattern of the plaid jacket he’s wearing, how the colored stripes form new colors, how the fabric all blends. It’s a pretty shirt. You bought it for him two Christmasses ago. He looks good in it.

You are going to die.

Then, suddenly, you can’t see the plaid anymore. Instead it’s a gray shirt on a much bigger body blocking out the mirror, and when you turn your head to look, Steve’s there.

Steve’s here.

He’s got Danny in a chokehold, grappling for the pistol in your boyfriend’s hand. Ex-boyfriend. Despite Steve being completely unarmed—he’s Captain America for christ’s sake, a goddamn super soldier, he doesn’t need a fucking weapon—he easily brings Danny down to his knees and onto the floor, kicking the gun away from their bodies and out of the bathroom completely.

“Fucking whore,” Danny manages to spit out, the sound strangled as Steve’s arm buckles over his neck. “You’re fucking him too, huh? I’m gonna kill you.”

“Shut up,” Steve grits through his clenched teeth, pulling Danny toward the destroyed door. “You’re done.”

They disappear from the bathroom in a tangle and thrashing of limbs. Danny curses the whole way down the stairs, struggling to break out of Steve’s grasp you presume. He’s a fighter—that’s what he always said. Dog meets dog eats dog world, he would tell you. You can’t ever trust anyone.

And, well, he certainly proved his beliefs. You had the bruises to show for it. The scars as evidence.

Sitting alone in your wrecked bathroom, still sprawled out on the tile, you stare down at your hands. The lines run deep in your palms, fingers stubby and chubby and not at all feminine. Too small to grab Danny the way he always grabbed you. Too soft with fat to deliver a good punch.

You don’t know how much time passes before a much larger hand enters your vision, slowly, like approaching a kicked mutt on the street, and when you don’t flinch, Steve lays his fingers across your palms. Apprehensively, you grab onto his hand, and he squeezes back.

Looking up, he’s crouched in front of you, the beginnings of a bruise forming on his left temple. With your free hand, you reach out and let your fingers brush over it, but Steve just smiles at you.

“Let’s go,” he murmurs.

“Where?”

“Anywhere but here,” he says, gently tugging on your hand. You hold onto him a little tighter and let him help you up off the ground, his arm immediately sliding around your waist to steady your shaky legs.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” you say. “The money I saved…”

You don’t even know what happened to it. For all you know, Danny burned the cash. Or stashed it somewhere else.

“It’s alright, sweetheart,” Steve says in a soft voice. “I’m taking you back to the Tower. The police are dealing with Danny right now. Can you help me pack some clothes for you?”

And so you sat on the bed among your wrecked bedroom as Steve picked through the messy drawers that had been pulled from their dresser, some articles of clothing crumpled on the floor where Danny flung them in his mad search for your secret money stash. And the gun. You almost forgot about the gun.

Steve helps you pack, his face only a little pinker than normal when you’re shoving your intimates into the black duffle bag he fished out of his car, and then he’s helping you slip on your sneakers and guiding you out of your house.

You don’t say goodbye to it, though. That house. Even after four years, you don’t call it home. In a lot of ways, you’re happy to watch it disappear from Steve’s rearview mirror, hoping you’ll never be back.

“They’re going to love you there,” he says quietly in the silence of the car, both hands tight around the steering wheel. He glances over at you, then back at the road. “You’ll fit right in. You’ll be safe. Right at home.”

But you think Steve is a bit of an optimist. Homes, you think, are for people who are loved.

(“Hey honey, just me here. Look, I remembered you saying something about how you wanted those, what were they called, the fairy lights for your room? The ones that look like Christmas lights? I thought we could go pick some up and I’ll hang ‘em up. You’re too short to do it yourself, girl, you know that. Anyway, give me a call if you want to, or just come down to my room and get me, anytime. I’ll be waiting. Talk soon, honey.”)

—KEEPING SECRETS—

Wanda hums a tune under her breath. “I just can’t wait to get out of this place! It’s been too long. Mission after mission after bloody mission.” She sighs and starts to apply a thick coat of mascara, eyes wide as she stares in the mirror.

“Agreed,” Natasha says from somewhere behind you. The sound of her bare feet on the bathroom tile is the only warning you have before she sidles up beside you, gracefully lifting herself up onto the counter and sweeping various cosmetics aside to make room.

You’re still undressed, standing in your panties and an old t-shirt with a stretched out neck, just finishing up your eyeshadow when Nat taps a black bottle on the marble top near your fingers.

“Want me to do your eyeliner?” she asks.

A few months ago, you would have seen it as an insult—a beautiful, dangerous woman telling you in less words that your makeup looked like shit. Now you know it’s an expression of Natasha’s unending love for you. A willing act of service. A small thing she can do for you.

“Yes please.”

Natasha motions you forward, between her legs, and when she takes your face in her hand you close your eyes.

“Pretty colors,” she says, probably about your eyeshadow.

“Thanks,” you reply, and then you feel the cool wetness of liquid liner right on your lash line as she begins to paint a wing on your lid. “You always look pretty.”

“So do you.” She blows softly on your left eye. “It’s like you never need makeup, I swear. Are you even wearing foundation?”

A smile works its way onto your face. “Nope.”

From beside you, Wanda giggles.

“Slut. You’re so perfect it makes me want to scream sometimes,” Natasha says, tongue clicking her teeth as she finishes off your right eye.

All the breath seems to leave you in that moment. Like someone punched you straight in your gut, your bones like the gel shock-absorbing layer protecting your organs. Your eyes want nothing more than to shoot open, but Nat is blowing cool air over the newly formed wing and you force yourself to relax so you don’t mess everything up.

“I’m not perfect,” you tell her. “Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

“Don’t deflect.” You hear her cap the eye liner and set it down on the counter, then her palms engulf your cheeks. Slowly, you let your eyes open, blinking gently.

She’s staring at you, eyes narrowed.

“Just because I’m beautiful doesn’t mean you’re not beautiful,” she says, simply, as if it’s just easy for her to not compare herself to anyone else. “If you’re perfect, you’re perfect. Doesn’t matter if I’m perfect, too. And that Wanda is perfect. Or that anyone is perfect.”

Natasha takes your chin in her fingers and grabs a tube of lipstick—the one she and Wanda always tell you to wear because it looks so damn good on you.

“Your beauty and your worth doesn’t come from other people.” She runs the silken rouge over your lips. “It comes from who you are, not comparisons to other people.”

And, god, you want to scream at her. You want to shout and tell her that she isn’t allowed to say that to you when she looks the way she does—slim and picturesque and every human being’s wet dream. She doesn’t get to say that you shouldn’t compare yourself, with your heavy chest and your wide hips and all your soft pockets of skin, to someone like her. To someone like Wanda. To anyone else that doesn’t need liposuction with a side of diet pills, please.

You can’t be perfect, because if you were perfect, if you were enough, you wouldn’t be dying in agony every night over someone that doesn’t look twice at your too-large stomach and your too-large thighs.

They’re just trying to make you feel better, but all it does is make you feel worse.

“Look,” you say when she’s done with your lipstick, “I get what—”

In a split second, your chest is wracked with hard coughs, lungs struggling for air. It’s choking you, your own insides, and you’re hacking and wheezing and grasping at the bathroom counter and Natasha’s hands are on your shoulders and Wanda is slapping your back in hope that it will help and someone, somewhere, is saying the word heimlich and you can taste it on your tongue like old wallpaper from the 70s, floral and disgusting and toxic and ugly.

You throw your arm over your mouth, smearing your lipstick. It doesn’t help. Natasha is looking at you, eyes wild. You’re coughing and coughing and you think you taste blood underneath the overwhelming velvet on your tongue.

They’re saying your name. Shredded petals are between your teeth.

And then you break, pushing past them to the toilet, skidding on your knees until you’re doubled over and retching. It’s all burning acid and fresh flowers. Rot and fester and earth and greenery. A pair of cool hands—Wanda’s, you think—rest upon your forehead and move your hair away from your face.

Vomit and daisies leak from your mouth until your stomach is done contracting and your insides are empty. All that’s left is your sputtering coughs that taste caustic and beautiful.

It’s getting bad.

When you finally pull away from the toilet, slumped back and wiping your mouth, the toilet is full of an explosion of crisp white and bright yellow, tinged with the faint pink of blood. Wanda is glancing back and forth between you and the unflushed toilet, horror stitched on her face.

Before Natasha approaches, a glass of tap water in hand, you lean over and flush the petals down the drain. The look you shoot Wanda is pleading, but you don’t even know what you’re asking for.

Everything on the inside hurts, burning like a pit of snakes in your belly, hissing and spitting venom and biting into you like they mean to kill you. Perhaps the daisies have grown fangs. Your lungs feel chewed.

Nat places the glass in your shaking hands, her fingers holding your own as if she knows you can’t do it yourself. She helps raise the glass to your soiled lips and you gulp the water down like it’ll flood the valley unfolding in you.

“Who is it?” she asks, her voice calm but her eyes uneasy. You nearly choke, a hand pressing against the middle of your chest as if you need to feel your lungs as they work to assure yourself of your own survival.

“What?” you barely eke out, throat thick and scratchy. One of Wanda’s hands strokes down your back and she doesn’t speak, only shakes her head.

“Who is it?” Natasha repeats.

You look away.

“God.” Wanda sniffles behind you. “How could we not have realized?”

“Because it doesn’t happen,” Nat says, shifting from crouching in front of you to sitting on her knees on the floor, a hand resting on your thigh. “I’ve never known a single person—until now, I guess—who had it. I thought it wasn’t real.”

“They tell it like a fairytale in Sokovia,” Wanda says, her words just as watery as her eyes. “A story you lull children to sleep with! But I should have seen it. We should have seen it.”

A new abundance of petals tickle the back of your throat.

“All that art,” Natasha hisses, but she isn’t looking at you. She’s glaring down at her lap.

“All the daisies,” Wanda cries. Her head drops against your shoulder. You feel the wetness of her tears.

“It’s okay,” you tell them, but your voice is too small. “It’s okay,” you say, louder this time, tasting the flowers like they are the blood of your bitten tongue.

“Who is it?” Natasha asks again, a begging in her voice you don’t think you’ve ever heard before.

“It’s okay,” you say again.

And with this, Nat’s face changes from one of concern to something of realization—like she’s been struck with a thought she never considered, like she’s seen the future.

“It’s him.” Her jaw is slack, staring at you even as Wanda looks at her with confusion etched on her visage. “You have to tell him.”

“No,” you say simply.

“This is bad,” Nat snaps, as if you don’t know it already. “This is getting bad. You need to tell him or you’re—you’re going to die.”

A laugh breaks through the bathroom, echoing. “How can I tell him? How could I ever tell him that I love him when the simple fucking fact that these flowers are growing—rooting—in my goddamn lungs is proof that he doesn’t love me the way that I love him?”

You lean back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling.

“Sam Wilson doesn’t love me the way I love him,” you whisper.

The tips of Natasha’s fingers catch the tears you don’t feel streaking down your cheeks like the screaming of shooting stars, hot and bright and dying.

“It’s sort of beautiful, don’t you think?” Your nails dig into the fat flesh of your thighs, trying to puncture skin. “To make art of your own death. To make something lovely out of something so tragic.”

You can’t swallow it back this time. A cough wracks through you, jostling your bones, and you fold yourself in half as soft white petals emerge from your esophagus and choke you. You grind them against the backs of your teeth with your tongue, trying to mash them into nonexistence, but it’s not enough. You retch another wave of daisies into your awaiting hands.

Wanda calls your name and it sounds broken.

“Death like this,” you rasp, catching your breath, “is the most beautiful way to go.”

Your finger drags over one of the downy petals, a bead of blood catching on your skin and smearing across it like a brushstroke of paint, ruining it.

“Death like this is the only way I want to go.”

(“Hey beautiful, it’s me again. I heard you were going out with the girls tonight—I hope you have fun. I just wanted you to know that if you need a ride back home, or you get into trouble and need a hero, or anything, really, I’m just a phone call away. You need me and I’ll be there, ‘kay honey? I’ll be up if you need anything, at least ‘till you get home. Have fun, girl.”)

—INNOCENCE—

You’re beginning to ask yourself if the mirror lies.

It doesn’t. You know that. You’ve been trying to find the lies in it for years at this point, pinching and pulling at all the places you find are thicker than the women you see on TV, the women you see floating around the Tower, the women you’ve seen on the arms of Sam Wilson. Chubby hands caress down your soft belly, poking and prodding the skin you wish you could make disappear. The mirror never lies.

But you wish it did when you stare at yourself and all you see are the bruises beneath your eyes, the hollows in your cheeks, the drained look in your gaze. The longer you stand there, the less you recognize yourself.

You aren’t hungry anymore. You never get hungry—the flowers filling up all the space in your stomach, coughed up from your lungs and swallowed back in pieces. Perfume is what your mouth tastes like now. Perfume and iron. The vomiting hasn’t stopped since the night your secret was revealed to Natasha and Wanda.

And you’ve never looked better.

That’s the part you hate. The part where when you look in the mirror and you can see the places where those daisies have shaved you thinner. It almost makes you laugh. People say you pack on the pounds when you find love. Maybe they should try having toxic flowers take root inside of them and slowly steal their lifeforce while they watch the person they love never love them back.

It’s a slow process, this death. You wonder which will kill you first—the starvation or the suffocation.

The walk down to the gala is as equally exciting as it is dreadful. You’ve never been to a Tony Stark gala before and you’re eager to dance the night away with your friends. But you’re also exhausted.

Oh well. The makeup helps you look less like a corpse and more like a dancing queen. The dress, which you’re sure someone paid far too much money for, is part of the solution. It’s all flowy and gorgeous as if you are a Greek goddess meant to be worshipped and highlights your figure while hiding all the imperfections the mirror seemed to find.

And when you finally enter the room, classical music playing from the live band and people laughing loudly and champagne twirling about the floor for people to take, the first thing you see is him.

Grin taking up his entire face, lighting up the entire ballroom, dressed beautifully in a navy suit that makes him look utterly dashing, is Sam Wilson.

He’s surrounded by people—women who are better dressed than you are—so with a shaky breath and a pain in your lungs, you quickly turn on your heel and head toward the next familiar face.

“Woah there, doll, where you hurryin’ off to?” Bucky, hair neatly pulled back and wearing a black suit, grabs you by your waist.

“Nowhere,” you blurt. “The bar. I just got here.”

He raises a thick brow at you, a silent question, but when you choose not to answer he shrugs.

“Well I can’t refuse to escort a pretty lady, can I?” With a charming smile, he holds his elbow out to you and gestures for you to grab on. You slip your hand around his arm and grasp him tightly, shooting him a grateful smile.

“Thanks, Bucky.”

But as the two of you start dodging through the crowd of excited party-goers, on your way to the bar in the back, Bucky stops short and gets a look on his face that you’re not quite sure you can describe as mischievous, but it’s close enough to make you frown.

“Y’know what,” he says, glancing over at you with that boyish grin, “I think we should take a spin on the dance floor instead.”

“Oh no,” you tell him, eyes wide. “I can’t dance—”

He snorts. “I’ve seen you dance around the kitchen, doll.”

“I can’t dance in front of all these people.”

“Can’t is a word for losers.” Bucky closes his hand over yours, locking you to his elbow. “Don’t wanna be a loser like Stevie, do ya? Oh Buck, I can’t stop fighting, gotta teach ‘em a lesson. Oh Buck, I can’t rinse out my cereal bowl, I gotta go for a run.”

It makes you laugh, maybe a little too loud, but it eases you just enough for Bucky to pull you into the menagerie of dancing couples, and then he’s moving your hand from his arm and onto his shoulder and clasping your other in his fingers.

“There we go.” His eyes shine like the ocean sparkles under the Tower lights.

Bucky has something magic in him, you decide, after two songs of him swinging you along the floor. He has something magic that makes everything so easy, which is something so admirable after all he’s been through. He has you laughing and smiling and spinning across the room with so little effort you forget all your worries in an instant.

“See?” Bucky dips you in his arms, making you squeal with glee, collecting the stares of the people peppered around the room. “Knew you could dance, doll.”

Panting, you rest a hand on his chest, still giggling. “Only ‘cause you’re so good.”

“Song’s over, Buck,” a new, familiar voice cuts in. When you look up, Steve is standing there, eyes crinkling with his own smile. “I can’t wait for another.”

At that, Bucky rolls his eyes with such drama it has you laughing yet again.

“See? I told you. It’s all can’t this, can’t thatwith Stevie. But fine.” Bucky guides you by the waist over to Steve, passing your hand over, and then gives you one last grin with all his teeth. “I had fun, doll. Thanks for dancin’ with me.”

“Anytime,” you tell him, and then Steve’s adjusting your grip on him. The song changes from the upbeat tune Bucky was twirling you to down to a slower classical piece.

“You doing okay, sweetheart?” Steve asks, his eyes roaming over your face.

“Yeah,” you hum. “Bucky and I had a lot of fun.”

Steve’s grip at your waist tightens a little. “No, I mean in general. Are you doing alright?”

There’s worry there—in the wrinkles on his brow, the blue skies of his eyes, the curve of his lips. You know he’s staring at you and seeing everything the mirror told you. All the gaunt places. The hollow, haunted look you’re parading around. The weight you’ve been steadily losing. You know he sees it.

“I’m okay,” you tell him, and you wonder yet again if the mirror ever lies. You know you do.

Steve sways you gently, more carefully than Bucky had. Steve dances with you like you’re made of something fragile. You still don’t understand why. You don’t know why he ever looked at you and saw something important, someone to protect. Maybe it’s just how he was born to be.

“You can tell me anything,” he says, so seriously that your heart breaks a little.

You move your hand from his shoulder and up to cradle his cheek, smiling.

“I know, Steve. I know.”

And if he pulls you into him, crushes you against his chest, and holds you like that for the rest of the song, no one mentions it. Steve lets you rest your head on his shoulder and, not for the first time, you think this must be how it feels to have a family.

But then the lights in the ballroom brighten a little and a spark finds its way into the music, changing into something jazzy and fun, and someone slaps Steve on the shoulder.

“Alright Rogers, she’s ours now.”

There, dressed like she could kill a man with her heels alone, Natasha has her arms crossed over her black satin gown. Beside her, in a red, flowy dress, Wanda has her hands on Nat’s shoulders, giggling from all the bubbly you’re sure she’s consumed.

Steve pulls away from you with a chuckle, holding his hands up in surrender.

“Alright, alright—she’s all yours, ladies.”

With that, Natasha pounces on you, and the three of you start to shimmy the night away together.

You lose count of the songs you spend dancing with them, sweaty and out of breath and having the time of your life, before you wave them off and step out onto the outside patio where hardly anyone is loitering. You pass up a couple sitting on a bench, cuddled up in the cool air of New York, and leave a man smoking a cigarette to himself.

Instead, you find a lonely bench far away enough from the gala that you can hardly hear anything but the bass strings resounding through the building. There, you sit, and turn your head up to the stars you can’t really see anymore.

“You okay, girl?”

Startled, you whirl around to face the object of your affections, standing behind you with his hands shoved casually in his pockets. He isn’t wearing his usual smile. Just staring.

And then you taste dirt. Freshly upturned soil coated in congealing blood. You cough into your hands and hear him approach, laying a warm palm on your back as you choke the daisies down and down and down, swallowing as many as you can, the pungent taste still ripe in your mouth.

“Honey,” he calls out all smooth and sharp like whiskey. “Honey, are you okay?”

You lick the blood from your lips. Sam crouches before you, gathering your cold hands in his, looking up at you with such a fucking expression that you want to kiss him so solidly he can taste the vines growing up your throat. You want his tongue to taste the soil of your suffering—the flowers of your own doom.

“I’m worried about you,” Sam says, his dark eyes searching your face for something.

“I’m okay,” you tell him, just as you’ve been telling everyone.

“You’re not looking so good these days,” he murmurs, and you recoil.

“Wow.” The hurt in your voice is so palpable it makes you cringe. “Thanks, Samuel.”

You move to get up from the bench, heart twisting, but Sam grabs your arms and cages you there.

“I didn’t mean it like that, darlin’, you know better than that.” He gives your arms—too soft too wide too fleshy too—a squeeze of reassurance. “You’re not painting much anymore either. You think I wouldn’t notice?”

Sam holds your gaze until it’s too much and you have to break away.

“C’mon, girl. Are you even sleeping?” Sam shakes you a little. “Eating?”

The flowers of evil root in your chest. See, you know how this book ends. You don’t need to read the last page to find out. It’s just as Baudelaire wrote, you know: “My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.”

Your organs have been replaced by daisies. Sam Wilson won’t love you—not tonight, not tomorrow, and not in time.

So you shrug, forcing your lips to curl into what you think might be a smile.

“I can’t paint. I’ve got too many flowers to press,” you tell him. Sam’s visage morphs into confusion, and he shakes his head slightly. He doesn’t understand. He won’t understand.

You take his arms from your body, holding his hands for a split second, long enough to steal their warmth and imagine what it would be like to hold them every single day, and then you pick yourself up off the bench and give him a wave.

“See you inside, Sam.”

And you leave him there, confusion still frozen on his face, the gritty blood ripping shreds in your damaged throat as you swallow it again and again and again in an attempt not to taste it anymore.

(“Hey, uh, it’s Sam. I was just calling to, uh, y’know, remind you about the gala. You have a date yet? I didn't ask anyone. I, uh, I wanted to ask this girl, but uh, I ended up waiting too long and I’m a little late so… I’ll see you there, honey. Try not to kill me with your good looks tonight, you hear? Save a dance for me, baby.”)

—THE SUN AND ALL ITS STARS—

Dishware rattles into your room, signaling Nat’s arrival. By the time you gather the energy to sit up in bed, she’s already entering, a tray of food in her hands and an icy look on her face.

“Breakfast in bed,” she says monotonously.

You shift and pull your duvet up as she fits the tray over your lap. There’s not much—a sweating glass of cold water beside an amber glass of apple juice, two slices of buttered toast, and some melon she cut up.

“Thanks,” you say, voice strained and weak.

Natasha doesn’t leave, but you wish she would. She seats herself on the edge of your bed, staring you down as you sip on your water. You purse your lips in frustration, but pick up the fork and begin to poke at the fruit.

“Eat,” she says.

“I’m trying,” you grumble back. “Stop staring at me.”

Natasha throws her hands up on the air. “Well if I don’t watch you, you’ll just sit here and waste away,” she snaps. “You’re not eating, you’re not sleeping, hell, you aren’t even coming out of your room anymore. You go to work, you come home, you don’t talk to any of us. Steve says—”

“Steve doesn’t know anything!” you shout, interrupting her. As soon as you do, her eyes narrow into slits and you shut your mouth, gulping. That wasn’t what you wanted to do.

Natasha takes a deep breath. “Steve says you’re still looking for a place.” It’s eerie how calm she keeps her tone. “Leaving isn’t going to stop them, you know.”

Even now, not doing anything but staring at the food in your lap, you can taste them like a funeral home, saccharinely floral, covering the smell of death.

“I can’t stay here,” you say.

“You’re dying,” Natasha stresses. “Please. Please, I am begging, krasavitsa. I’ve not begged for much in this life. But I am begging you to please, please tell him. Tell him or consider the other option.”

Two options in the scale, tipping weights. To die or to have the roots of true love carved out of your lungs, peeled away from where they wrap around your heart.

You stab your fork into the tender flesh of the melon. It gives way so easily, letting the tines puncture it. Natasha stares at you, her gaze heavy. Your fingers fumble with the fork and it falls, clattering, to the tray of dishes.

The blood is too hard to swallow anymore—it builds up in your mouth and stains your teeth red, the petals colored pink when they fall from your lips.

“Okay,” you whisper. Maybe you don’t even say it aloud.

“Okay?” Natasha asks. You nod your head, not looking at her.

“I’ll tell him.”

It takes you hours, it feels like, to gather the courage. With all the energy you have left in your bones, muscles only satiated a little by Natasha’s breakfast, you drag yourself out of bed and to your bookshelf. It’s memorized, the place where your book sits, and you pull it out with a gentle tug of your finger.

The Flowers of Evil, its pages nearly chock-full of pressed daisies that have ejected themselves from your body, eager to find the man you love and spill all your desires to him. You thumb through it, gaze flitting over all the damn flowers that have dried in this damn book, and you close your eyes in order not to cry this time.

You press the book tight to your chest, feeling the desperate beating of your heart echo through it, and you head to Sam’s room.

The walk is long and lonely—the Tower feels empty. Devoid of people. You’re a little glad because you’re sure that anyone could see the sickness painted on your body, the illness from inside you that’s staining your outsides. It’s not anyone’s fault but your own, really. The flowers are too beautiful to supplant.

And now, you’re in front of his door, a fist raised to knock, a loud buzzing in your head that keeps saying no, no, no. But your heart, traitorous thing still hammering away in your chest, it just keeps saying yes, yes, yes, finally.

Sam Wilson doesn’t love you.

But do you have any other choice except to take a garden spade to your lungs and dig them out of your chest cavity, to destroy your ribcage and break through the mulch that makes up your nervous system? Is the only option left to die at the hands of Sam or to wither away until your decomposition will feed the very things that killed you off?

You shudder a breath and knock on the door. And you wait. And wait. And wait.

He doesn’t come. He isn’t there. He doesn’t love you.

The tears come suddenly—unexpectedly. They are hot and stricken and fast. They drip off your chin and careen down your neck and dampen the collar of your shirt and your hands are trembling, grasping your book too tightly, to even begin to wipe them away.

You don’t know why you’re crying. You already know this. Sam Wilson could never love you the way that you love him. Sam Wilson is perfection, you know. He possesses the strength of gods, he radiates love, he’s passionate about every fucking thing he does. He’s beautiful. He’s everything and you are nothing when standing next to him, but you love him. You love him.

Sam Wilson doesn’t fucking love you.

“Well,” you laugh to yourself, “I can either die a fool or live a life without you.”

I can either die in love or live my life not knowing what it feels like to be in love with you.

Something tickles your tongue. You reach between your lips and pluck it from your mouth, letting it sit upon the center of your palm. Blood drips down your arm like a river, violent and sooth.

The daisy covers your entire hand, white petals tinged with pink reaching toward your fingers. The center, all yellow florets seeming to seek out warmth, are so bright and full and so big—these are too big, they could choke anyone, anyone, they are choking you.

And like them—god, just like them, just like these daisies that grow from your lungs and destroy you from inside out—you are heliotropic. Everywhere you go, you’re focused on the sun, looking for the sun, stretching toward the sun.

You need the sun.

So you crumble the daisy in your hand, fist tight, blood still easing from between your fingers. You back away from his door, then turn and break away to head back to your room in silence.

You’d rather die loving him than never getting to see the sun ever again.

(“Hey girl, it’s me. Just calling to let you know that Steve and I got called for a mission. It looks like an emergency, wheels up in ten and all that. I wanted to catch you before we gotta go, in case you wanted to say goodbye. To Steve, I mean. Just in case. Take care of yourself while I’m gone, sweetness.”)

—FAREWELLS—

It happens faster than you think it will. You swear you have weeks, or a month at least. You swear you have time.

Four days later, your knees buckle and slam into the wooden floor beneath you, stomach contorting and contracting, balloon finally bursting. Someone is shouting your name from the common room, something is knocked over, scrambling. You barely hear it over the sound of your own vomiting.

On your hands and knees, you stare down at the lump of flowers you couldn’t swallow back. They’re coated in a mixture of soil and blood and stomach acid, but the sweet perfume scent breaks through the rest and makes you retch again. It smells so sweet. So sickly sweet. Dead people and churches.

Did churches always smell so much like blood?

There’s a hand on your shoulder. It’s pulling your hair from your face. Someone is saying something—something—something you can’t make out over the blood rushing between your ears.

You’re dying. This is it.

You collapse upon the ground, rolling onto your side, arm thrown over your mouth as if that will stop the flowers from pouring out of your body. And when you blink, trying to see through the dizziness, it’s him again.

The god of the fucking sun, your sun, mouth moving frantically as he says things you can’t hear and the little gap in his teeth that makes you feel at home when he smiles at you and his eyes, oh, Sam Wilson has eyes that set you on fire and burn you alive and you’d be happy to die like this, you’re so happy you get to die like this, so thankful that the daisies chose you, so thankful you chose him.

You were right. Death is so beautiful like this.

“It might be too late.”

Helen Cho’s heels clack on the tile of the medbay’s room as she shoos the nurse out with a wave of her hands, shaking her head. He shoots to his feet, fingers already curled into fists, and he shoves them in the pockets of his jacket to hide them.

“Too late?” It’s impossible for him to keep his voice low. “How can it be too late? What even—What’s wrong with her?”

She frowns at Sam, folding her hands together in front of her.

“It’s… rare,” she says. “Some of us didn’t think it was real, to be frank with you.”

His brow furrows. “What is it?”

“A disease caused by unrequited love,” Helen says plainly, staring straight at him. “Typically, the patient finds themselves in what is regarded to be true love, but the feelings are not returned, so they build up. It’s theorized that the stress of that creates the problem.”

Sam swallows and it tastes like vomit. “Unrequited love?”

She ignores him, continuing, “The part that is normally so hard to believe is that flowers begin to grow inside the patient, the roots puncturing their lungs and creating masses that eventually will suffocate their host.”

It’s a bag of bricks to his stomach. A super soldier punch to the gut. A bomb blown up in his face. Sam doubles over, clutching his middle, trying to breathe again. He can’t breathe at all. The flowers. The flowers.

“It seems she was swallowing them in an attempt to save herself,” Helen explains. “It’s what kept her alive much longer than she should have been. But now, I don’t know. It may be too late to save her. If she’d just said something earlier, than the surgery might have been able to stop it, but—”

“Surgery?” Sam asks, still gasping for breath. “What surgery?”

“You can extract the roots,” she tells him, glancing at the sleeping woman in the sickbed. “It’s a difficult procedure but it would have saved her. But, from the very little research we have on it, removing the roots also removes the feelings entirely. The love that the patient has disappears. They aren’t able to ever feel anything for that person ever again.”

He falls back into the plastic chair, his limbs numb. Or, at least that’s what he wants to do. But Sam doesn’t. He steadies himself, crosses his arms over his chest, plants himself so firmly there in the hospital room that he doesn’t think an earthquake can move him, and looks at her.

She’s sleeping, but she doesn’t look at peace. Her eyes, lovely things, are sunken in and it makes him so mad. Her collarbones have shadows beneath them and he feels fury wracking his own bones. And how long has it been since he’s seen her smile?

“Do the surgery,” he demands.

“You know I can’t do that without her consent,” Helen says, sighing.

“Then I’ll wait until she wakes up and get her consent,” he seethes through a locked jaw.

Helen’s face doesn’t change. “She might not wake up.”

“She will.”

Sam doesn’t get it. He understands—in a way—but he doesn’t really get it. He knows why she wouldn’t want to get a surgery like that. But he loves—he loves just as fiercely as she does, and that’s why he understands. Why he knows.

So why did the flowers pick her? Why would they pick her and not him?

Helen glances down at her feet, says nothing, and turns to exit the room. He’s left there in the silence, with the crowing of the machine keeping her alive to punctuate all his thoughts. If there is one thing he hates in the world, it’s feeling helpless.

He lowers himself in the plastic seat, leans his head back against the wall, and closes his eyes.

“You’ll wake up,” he says to her, but he can’t look at her.

Or maybe he’ll wake up and it’ll all be a dream.

There’s a soft rapping of knuckles on the door, and it opens slowly and quietly, and Sam has to lock his fingers around the arms of his chair to keep from jumping up and sending a right hook right at Steve’s face.

“How’s she doing?” Steve has the audacity to ask, has the audacity to look worried, has the audacity to pull up another plastic seat next to Sam.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he mutters under his breath, spite burning his tongue.

Steve glares at him. “Yeah, that’s why I asked. What’s your problem?”

“My problem is you, Rogers.” Now, Sam can’t help but stand, towering over the super soldier. He immediately grabs Steve’s arm and hauls him out of his chair, through the door, and out into the hallway. Steve stumbles, a hand on the wall, and Sam’s nostrils flare.

“How could you do this to her?”

“Me?” Steve sounds genuinely taken aback, but Sam doesn’t buy it. “What are you talking about? Helen told me—”

“I thought you loved her, too!”

He really did. That’s why Steve brought her to the Tower, didn’t he? That’s why they go out for lunch every other week and why Sam never gets a chance to take her out himself. Why he always makes sure to say goodbye to her before a mission, like he doesn’t want to leave her behind. He really thought Steve loved her too. If he had thought for one second that Steve didn’t love her...

“What?” Steve’s jaw slackens. “Not like that! She doesn’t—She’s not in love with me, Sam!”

He pants, unable to catch the breath that’s leaving him like a slow leak.

“Then who the hell is she in love with?”

Steve stares at him, a look that Sam can’t recognize, can’t name, in his eyes. Steve stares at him and smooths his hand down his beard, shaking his head.

“She’s in love with you,” he says, and Sam chokes.

Because all the pretty things in his world lead back to her and man, if she loved him, it would all be so perfect that he would never want to leave it. He would never want to say goodbye. He’d ask god and anyone else who would listen to grant him a deathless life so he could look at her forever, with no end in sight, because he would. He would. Sam would love her forever.

“No,” he says, a dry chuckle escaping his lips. “That can’t be true.”

“It’s true,” Steve says.

“That’s impossible.” He backs up, against the wall, holding his head in his hands and staring at the floor. “It’s impossible.”

“It’s true,” Steve repeats, staring past Sam and through the window of the medbay’s room to look at her, lying so still in her bed. “I know it is.”

“Steve, I’m in love with her,” Sam confesses, an ache in his chest. “It can’t be me. I’m in love with her. I’m so fucking in love with her.”

A heavy hand clasps his shoulder, and when Sam looks up, his breathing unsteady, Steve has a look of regret smeared all over his face.

“But does she know that?”

And, for the first time in years, Sam cries.

(“It’s me. I need to tell you something. Even if it will hurt, even if it will destroy—destroy what we have, I don’t know. But I need to tell you, baby. I need to.”)

—SINCERITY—

Sam Wilson thinks she’s starlight.

When she first arrives she’s a collection of stars and their ashes, explosions and deaths, supernovas and black holes and earthbound meteorites.

What he means by that is she’s covered in bruises but she’s so beautiful, and he wants to gather her in his arms and tell her it’s going to be okay.

Steve introduces her, and Sam tries to bite his tongue, but all his words pour out of him anyway as she holds out a hand to him and he takes it, soft and trembling, and he knows she’s special somehow. She’s special.

“You’re the prettiest thing I think I’ve ever seen,” he says, and he means it, but she ducks her head and tries to hide the little smile on her face.

Sam Wilson thinks the world of you. But even when the bruises fade, you’re still left with all the land and the water and the galaxies hidden in your eyes when he catches your gaze, and he looks at you and he swears that you’re reaching into his chest and taking his heart in your small hands and squeezing him dry. You have realms inside of you, he’s sure, all the worlds and all their wonders. But you—you look at Steve like that sometimes, and then Sam is just grateful that you even let him breathe in your general atmosphere.

He can fly, sure, but he certainly isn’t an astronaut, so this is about the closest he can get to you.

(“Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system. This number is not available. At the tone, please record your message.”)

—TRUE LOVE—

The first thing you see is the ceiling, hazy and sleep-filtered, but it looks just like the ceiling in that bathroom, back in Danny’s apartment, back when you thought the pain of love was bone crushing, before you knew the pain of love was slow suffocation.

It makes you stutter back to life and that sends you into a coughing fit. You can still taste them—the daisies. They taste like the rawness of sunlight.

Hand pressed against your chest, your eyes dart around the room, trying to catch your bearings. There’s an IV in your arm, the bed railings are plastic, Sam is sitting in the corner, the lights are dimmed.

Sam Wilson is sitting in the corner.

You gasp, looking at him, and he’s staring right back at you, a familiar book in his hands.

Sam Wilson is sitting beside your bed, holding The Flowers of Evil, and the look on his face is far from happy to see you. It’s not anger. And it’s not sadness. It just… is. And Sam is never “just” anything.

Even if he thinks that sometimes, like the times when he calls you and says, “It’s just me,” as if he isn’t something special, so important you can’t live without him in your life.

Well, you can’t live with him, either.

After a solid minute, Sam looks down at the book between his dark hands, and he begins to sift through the pages. He stops sometimes, lingers on the sheets of dried daisies that have been pressed, their color leaking onto the text only slightly. But then he moves forward, searching for something. You don’t know what.

“How long have you been here?” you ask, throat sore when you speak.

“How long have you been in love with me?”

Your teeth gnash together, bite into your bottom lip, worry a sore there as he doesn’t look at you. He just keeps flipping through the book as if he didn’t just thrust a dagger straight through your heart, as if it isn’t beating so fast and hard like it’s trying to stay alive. You feel like you can’t breathe and you don’t know if it’s the flowers crawling out of your lungs and trying to get to him or if it’s the fact that he knows.

You can’t answer him.

Sam stops on a page, his finger trailing over the script, and then he begins to read.

“And yet

to wine, to opium even, I prefer

the elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;

and in the wasteland of desire

your eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.”

“Les Fleurs du Mal,” he says, shutting the book with a thump and striking his palm with it. “Baudelaire sure had a lot to say, didn’t he?”

Your mouth is suddenly so dry. There’s a pink pitcher of water next to the bed, just like a hospital would have, and you reach weakly for it. Sam grabs it immediately, pouring you a cup, and passing it gently to you. You gulp what you can down through the straw, hardly breathing.

When you finally feel like you aren’t going to cough your lungs up into your hands again, Sam takes the cup back from you, and embarrassment is a cold shiver down your spine.

He sits back down beside you, looking straight at you. “Do you want to get the surgery?”

Your lips part to speak, but he interrupts.

“Be honest.”

Chewing your lip, you take a deep breath. “No. And I never planned on it, either.” From the corner of your eye, you see his jaw tighten.

“Why not?”

“Because what is a life without the fucking sun, Sam?” The words are spat from your mouth. “A life spent not loving you—not knowing you, not feeling you anymore—it wasn’t worth it. Because I love you, Samuel Wilson. I have loved you since the day I met you and you told me—told me I was pretty for some goddamn reason. And I’ve loved you every day since. I love everything about you and there is not a single iteration of life that I would want to live if it meant not loving you.”

This time, nothing tastes like blood. It’s all just daisies, like they’re populating your mouth, changing the way your tongue works, turning to paste in your teeth. It’s so strong that it hurts. Like you’re eating paper valentines and crying too many tears as you say goodbye to a body in a casket.

But it’s beautiful and lovely and gorgeous because you swear that, somewhere beneath it, you can taste what you think love might taste like.

Sam doesn’t speak and it hurts, but it tosses your book down on the side table and reaches into his pocket and it still hurts. He pulls out his phone. You swallow down the rising earth in your chest.

He pulls out his phone—no, it’s your phone. He turns the screen toward you and punches in your password. You furrow your brows. When did he learn your password? But it doesn’t matter, really, because he just swipes to your call log and pulls up your voicemails. And then he begins to play them.

“Hey there darlin’, it’s just me. I couldn’t find you anywhere—where you at? I thought we could go pick some up and I’ll hang ‘em up. You need me and I’ll be there, ‘kay honey? I, uh, I wanted to ask this girl, but uh, I ended up waiting too long and I’m a little late so… I’ll see you there, honey. I wanted to catch you before we gotta go, in case you wanted to say goodbye. I need to tell you something. Even if it will hurt, even if it will destroy—destroy what we have, I don’t know. I’ll catch you later, darlin’. Have fun, girl. Save a dance for me, baby. Take care of yourself while I’m gone, sweetness. But I need to tell you, baby. I need to.”

The sobs fall from the broken seal of your lips, loud and crashing, like a waterfall. Your hand, shaking and weak, comes up to try to cover your mouth, but Sam lunges forward and catches your wrist in gentle fingers.

He’s looking at you like you’re everything—and you know, you know now that you are—to him.

“You’ve been saying that this whole time?” you ask, a laugh bubbling up from your lungs. No flowers retch up your throat.

Sam smiles, lips pulling back to reveal that gap in his front teeth.

“You haven’t been listening, baby girl. I’ve been tryin’ to tell you I love you for months.”

He rests his forehead upon yours, and as close as he is, all you can smell now is the spice of his cologne. Nothing smells floral.

“I never would have thought,” you whisper. “I was sure—so sure—that you didn’t love me. I thought because of the flowers, I thought that meant for sure that you didn’t love me. I mean, why would you? Why would you ever love someone like me?”

“Honey,” he says, so softly, “you’re starlight.”

Tears flood your cheeks and Sam cups your face in his large hands, wiping them away with gentle thumbs.

Sam Wilson is sunlight. You never considered that you could be starlight.

“Why wouldn’t I love you, darlin’? You’re so good, so gorgeous, so perfect.” He laughs and it makes you laugh too, but it comes out like a sob. Your heart feels lighter. “But you’ve never considered yourself worthy of love before, have you?”

“I’m sorry,” you cry. “I’m so sorry, Sam.”

He hushes you, soothes you, smooths his palms over the planes of your face and over your hair,

“You don’t have to be sorry, baby. It’s okay. You’re okay.” He presses a warm kiss to your forehead and the memory of every single time he’s kissed your forehead like this flashes through your mind, an electric current, and you wonder how you never saw it before now.

“I love you,” you say, and this time, your lungs don’t feel as though they will burst from the pressure, the roots, the vines twined around them. You don’t feel choked by petals. You don’t taste blood in the back of your mouth.

“I know,” he says, “and if you let me, I will spend the rest of my days with you convincing you that you are worthy of love, honey. Because I’m in love with you. I’m so in love with you.”

When he presses his lips to yours, he doesn’t taste like flowers. Not like the daisies that wrote your death sentence. He tastes like golden pools of sunlight, warm and wanting. This is your heliotropism. You are a magnet for him, Sam Wilson, god of the fucking sun.

And maybe he’s phototropic, always drawn to you, moving toward your starlight.

(“Hey, it’s me. Sorry I missed your call! I’m on my way home now, and guess what? I have a surprise for you. It’s a bit ironic, but I think you’ll like it. What do you think of the name Daisy for a baby girl?”)

#sam wilson #sam wilson x reader #sam wilson x plus sized reader #plus sized reader #sam wilson angst #sam wilson fanfiction #hanahaki au #sam wilson fluff #thanks for supporting me! #divine masterlist #the flowers of evil

[falcor-thee-luck-dragon]

Love Cuts Deep

Chapter 2- Together We Stay

Bucky Barnes x (f)reader Series Rewrite (Civil War, Infinity War/Endgame, TFATWS) 

Summary: After learning that you’re on a national watchlist from the exposure of Hydra, and seeking the only other person who’s lived a life like you have. Now you and Bucky adjust to being around one another in Romania.

Warning: big fluff, SMUT, more fluff i promised

Masterlist

5 weeks.

That’s how long it’s been since you’ve been allowed to stay with Bucky in his little one bedroom apartment in Bucharest, Romania. Fortunately for you, he’s kind enough to let you take the shit excuse for a bed while he claims the hardwood floor on the opposite side of the room, just about every single night. That’s just how its been, through true at it is, either one of you could handle sleeping on stone, but this bed is admittedly nicer, and you’ve got someplace to stay for the time being.

And Bucky.

He’s a quiet type for sure, keeps to himself, only really speaks when spoken to or when asking if you want something from the marketplace. But you’ve begun to witness first hand how he’s kind, funny in his own right, and respectful of your space and body within the time that you’ve had the chance to really know him. Which is more then most could say while you’ve been on the run in the past, from authorities and the Winter Soldier alike. 

Most days the two of you wander the various streets of this large pleasant bustling city, watching for any signs of danger or an odd person out of place as you go about your day. Other times the two of you would go hiking to the outskirts of Bucharest where no one could be of a bother, there, the two of you would spar each other for hours. Gotta keep alert, he’d always say. 

When he did speak.

But the nights when the city was sleepy with brightly beaming stars blanketing overhead, now those became your absolute favorite. You and your new found companion would spend those hours playing cards against one another, lasting deep into the wee hours of the morning when the sun was just barely rising into the sky.

Although as of late, Bucky has begun to speak more and more to you, even just yesterday when you shit talked some cheap vendor who was being very persistent as he wanted you to buy his ugly scarves, Bucky cracked a smile. Maybe even stifled a laugh. If you weren’t so invested in messing with the annoying little man, you would have seen the way Bucky’s eyes trailed adoringly over your mischievous face.

Maybe you would have seen how the corners of his eyes crinkled with amusement as you flipped the guy off and practically swaggered away like the coolest person he’s ever met. Too bad you didn’t, but you would have loved to have seen it. Even for just a moment.

That’s what it’s been like recently between the two of you, small fleeting glances here and there, friendly nudges when you’re walking out in the park, and more time spent laying side by side with one another after an excessively intense workout session. Granted you’re sprawled out in the dirt and grass, sweaty and appearing like you just ran through a dust storm, but next to Bucky, things feel pleasantly different.

It’s strange, you can’t remember the last time you’ve actually felt comfortable around anyone since your mother, but that was a very long time ago. And she’s dead, and you’re not.

Unlocking the apartment door, you quickly turn the faded golden knob and walk into the dull sunlit room. The windows are covered in thin faded newspapers for the dying sunlight to struggle through, as this appears to be the only real source of efficient lightning since all lights are currently turned off. Though you can see well enough due to your body’s enhanced vision, small perks of the serums mutation that made you.

It’s almost 7pm on this cool breezy evening as you walk into Bucky’s apartment, shutting the door just as swiftly; letting your black cotton trench coat slip gracefully from off of your shoulders, you kick your boots off next before walking over to the kitchen and setting the coat on the back of the old wooden chair.

A tired sigh escapes from your parted lips as a sudden smirk begins to break out upon your sleepy face, “James.” You muse with a genuine smile as you turn to face your mattress for a bed, and the man sitting on it, “Nice to be greeted when I come back.”

He hands you an apologetic look before swiftly rising to his feet, “Just making sure you’re paying attention.” He quips with the flash of a grin, “You passed.”

“Alright smartass I brought you a sub from that little coffee place.” His cheeks dust pink as you hand him the sandwich from out of your bag, God he loves your accent, Bucky hands you a pursed lipped grin as you wink, “Just how you like it, old wet lettuce, a chunk of rat, and a moldy bun. Your favorite.”

He lets out a breathy snort as you practically swagger over to the fridge, opening it up to grab two beers before finding yourself a chair right across from him. “Here.” He quickly accepts your thoughtfully brewed offer of friendship, “Drink up Barnes it’s a new day tomorrow and we’re still kicking.”

He watches as you laugh before popping open the glass and taking a hearty chug, a small yet joyous grin pulling at the corner of your lips after you set it down again.

“To another day.” States Bucky before doing just the same.

Soon enough the two of you find yourselves seated comfortably on opposite sides of the old mattress with cards in each of your hands. A solid look of determination and fake suspicion on either of your faces as you stare each other down.

“Got any fives?” Asks Bucky with a raised brow as you simply roll your eyes, then biting your lip while you watch as he tucks a stray tuff of dark hair behind his ear.

“Fuck you.” Slips from your mouth as he bursts with the sweet sounds of laughter, his cards fall from his hands as you throw yours at his stupidly attractive yet winning face. Dammit you could have won.

“I can’t help that you’re a sore loser Y/N, I’m just that good.” Brags Bucky as you throw him a deadly glare.

“Whatever. It’s nearly 4am I’m off my game tonight.” You retort, shrugging as a yawn approaches right on cue.

Bucky glances at the wall clock before looking back at you, an tinge of disappointment lacing his soft voice, “Right. I’ll just head over to my spot then...”

Rolling your eyes yet again, you gently slap his folded thigh before he can attempt at leaving, “Awh come on Buck, you’re back has got to be shit by now. Let me sleep there tonight okay, it’s only fair.”

“Y/N I’m fine, seriously.” Admits Bucky kindly as he shows the flash of a smile, “Don’t worry about me. I’m good.”

Your teeth press firmly against your bottom lip as you think of how to thwart his stubborn mind, soon you look down to pick up some cards, “No, we gotta take turns. And don’t say “I’m good” because if you go over there I will have no choice but to fight you.” Words wrapped in sarcasm, you lay it on him, yet your face appears to flash with something different. 

“Fight me? You’d fight me for the shitty hard wooden floor?” Asks Bucky in bewilderment as you simply nod, agreeing to your last stated truth.

“See! You even admit it’s shitty.” You exclaim with a humored laugh while shaking the cards in his beautiful face. Y/N don’t you dare think about it, stop flirting idiot.

“Well...yeah.” Mutters Bucky as you both suddenly sit in an awkward silence, nothing heard except for the wind as it rattles against the old windowpane. You both are breathing a tad more heavily from the teasing argument a couple seconds ago, but now, some unseen yet intrusively felt emotion shifts the air. Is this what you think it is, or does your underlying feelings for him just like fucking with your better intuition.

Something is afoot, however your mind still doubts it. God he can be so hard to read sometimes.

Bucky’s blue irises flicker from you, to the floor-like-bed across the room and then back to you again, conflict clear in the way that his face shifts apprehensively, suddenly he moves to stand, “Wait.” You command with urgency, causing the man to stop dead in his tracks, curious eyes on you in a second.

Letting out a nervous breath, you decide to make sure he gets some proper rest for once, “Just sleep on the goddamn bed.” You deadpan as his face keeps unusually stoic, his body as still as a statue before without so much as a warning does he swiftly lean over and immediately crash his lips to yours.

Within seconds the cards are left for tomorrows cleanup as they flutter to the hard ground, completely forgotten as he presses a metal hand onto the bed for some stability while his lips move sweetly against your own, his flesh one positioned comfortably against your left jaw and partial cheek.

The shock you feel quickly gets shoved to the back of your mind as your hands immediately begin there exploration as they sift through his long dark hair. He tastes impeccably more delicious then you could have ever even imagined, not that you fantasized about tasting the Winter Soldier or anything, though maybe it popped into your mind as a harmless curiosity. Now however, you’re pleasantly satisfied to find out by the way his soft plush lips dance across your own; it’s enough to send your heart fluttering into a thousand excited butterflies, more like an avalanche for Bucky.

All too soon does be abruptly pull away to seat himself next to you while you begrudgingly retract your hands from exploring him further. His eyes quickly find the floor in embarrassment as you smile adoringly at him, “Sorry that was...”

“Fucking hot?” You muse as his flustered face immediately snaps over to yours, hope clear in his shimmering gaze and a tad bit of puzzlement. Guess he didn’t expect his little move of bravery to produce such an apparent positive reaction.

“Uh, well...that’s uh, good..” He mumbles while rubbing the back of his neck, eyeing shifting across the bare mattress before they slowly glance up to find yours once more. This time he hands you a shy nervous smile,”...can I kiss you again?” Wonders Bucky with the sweetest puppy dog eyes you have ever seen in your entire life.

Smirking mischievously, you gently caress the side of his cheek while he happily leans into it, “Bucky Barnes....you can do a lot more then just kiss me.” And with that said does your sweet man press his lips against yours, admittedly more hungry then the first.

He kisses you with such vigor and passion this time, becoming more bolder by the second as he gently tugs at the bottom of your shirt. Smiling against him, you quickly break from his charm to give him your approval, “Shirt comes off if yours does first.” You tease as he plants a chaste kiss to your cheek, then jaw.

Rolling his eyes while continuing to plant love marks around your neck, you take that as a positive sign to reach over and hastily remove his top, he then wastes no time in carefully slipping yours off as well, taking a second longer to unclasp your bra and fling it to the side. Problems for finding later. After the introductions are had, you both immediately take a long heavy moment to trail your eyes over every curve and blemish of each other’s body. You’ve never done this with him before, never even witnessed him without a shirt on, God is he ever more divine then you could have ever even imagined.

Trailing your eyes over ever muscle and crevice in the dull shadowed lighting of the room, your heart begins to sink with sadness and anger while you study the scarring on his left shoulder, the area between where metal meets flesh. Bucky watches as you frown before he takes your left hand in his, eyes softening while he holds it gently, “They hurt you like they hurt me.” He whispers.

Your eyes quickly flicker over to see his shadowed face, and the dark hair that frames it so perfectly, “They hurt everyone.” You whisper back as he brings your wrist up to his mouth, a second later be places the softest of kisses against your weathered skin, right where your tattoo is. The one you’ve had since you were eleven, the one Hydra gave you.

“Did they do this too?” He wonders, already knowing your answer as you slowly nod in silent reply; the black inked marking shows 00X13 as it sits horizontally against your wrist from where those bastards essentially branded you.

Frowning deeply at the black ink on your wrist, you take a slow breath as Bucky watches your every move, “I’ve tried to cut it off of me a couple times long ago.....but they did this to me before the second serum altered my body so that I could heal faster. I guess my body registers it as part of the skin now, but I’ve grown to live with it. It’s a reminder of my past and survival, I cannot stay angry with the dead forever.” You mutter thoughtfully, referencing to the former doctors and scientists who did this to you, understanding that those people are all dead now or incredibly old.

Bucky bows his head, dark hair tickling your hand and wrist as he holds it close to his stubbled face, brows furrowing you wonder what internal turmoil he may be processing, soon he rises his stormy ocean of blue to find your gaze, “I hate them. All of them.” He grumbles lowly, the icy dark storm clouding over in hidden rage that flashes within his eyes.

Not wanting to darken the blessed moment a second more, you push a piece of hair out of his eyes before placing a gentle kiss against his lips, pulling away he slightly follows, “It doesn’t matter now. We’re two lonely souls together in this fucked up world and I want you to make love to me.” A small grin replaces the once bitter frown as he leans in closer.

“Then I will.” Answers Bucky, his voice as soft and velvety as the most precious flowers, he soon moves forward to gently push you on to your back, stealing another kiss along the way while he hovers over your heated body.

His form is much broader then your own as he pins your vessel to the bed, hands drag lazily through his increasingly messy hair as you slowly part your legs for him to rest his clothed nether regions against your own equally as kept queen jewels. Now he lays flush against your clothed bodies, fitting perfectly like two golden pieces of a Kings prized puzzle.

The growing friction of his hardening member against your sensitive nerves is enough to make you growl in frustration from lack of satisfying contact. Tugging his head back from your lips, you smirk as he pouts, “I’m enjoying this Buck, I really am, but our pants gotta go.” He promptly breaks out into a knowing grin.

“I was thinking the exact same thing.” Muses Bucky in agreement as he leans back to give you some space for safely kicking off your pants and undies as he fumbles with his own from the spot next to your left. Naked and shining in all your magnificent glory, you watch in amusement as he struggles to shove down his jeans before a small giggle escapes your lips when he frustratingly throws them across the floor.

Knees guarding your hidden treasure below, you smirk while resting your arms against the bed, eyes flashing in entertained contentment as they glance up at him, “I’m not going anywhere, Buck.” You quip as he shakes his head in embarrassment.

“Yeah. Well...” He’s quickly interrupted as you pull him back down against your naked form, “oh, hi.” Whispers Bucky as his face keeps mere inches from your own, pieces of black hair tickling the sides of your face.

“Hi.” You mutter back with a shy smile before raising a brow and glancing downward for a brief moment, “Care to take those off?” You ask in referral to his underwear that’s still keeping it all in, his poor manhood that looks just about ready to rip through his boxers any second now.

Glancing down as well, he quickly smiles as a dust of pink coats his stubbled cheeks, “oh, right......just a moment.” His body leaves yours once again to kneel on the mattress as he almost trips out of them, you stare on in anticipated excitement as he swiftly pulls down his undies to reveal a very hard member indeed. He was packing this whole time!

Cheeks flushing pink once more, he gives you a shy nervous grin before placing his hands on either side of your closed legs. With pleading eyes of dashing cobalt, they flash a stormy sky of hunger and lust. Bucky draws his lips closer to your knee before suddenly placing a gentle kiss against your naked skin. “Is this okay?” He asks cautiously incase you might have changed your mind about everything, still completely uncertain if this is all some cruel dream and he’s about to wake up at any moment.

Parting your legs on your own accord, you smile fondly at him, “Of course. Now come here.” You beckon with a confident nod of your head, openly inviting him to join you now in the most intimate of ways.

Heeding to your pleasing command, the super soldier hovers over your naked body once again as you part your legs even wider for his wanting hardness that just barley brushes past your inner upper thigh, so close to your entrance. You could just about melt into a puddle of goo.

Your breaths are more heavy now as you both anticipate the sweet moment to come; both flesh and metal arm fall to either side of your face as his lips ghost over yours, breath hot against your smiling face, “I haven’t done this in awhile, I’ll admit. Sorry if I don’t do grea...”

Kissing him roughly, you shut him up real quick, “It’s fine. No judgment here, I promise.” You add honestly with another sweet kiss as you feel downward for his hardened cock, finding it rather quickly he hums in surprised delight as you grasp it before leading him to your slick entrance.

Once close enough to get there on his own will, do you smirk up at him with a face more valuable then all the diamonds in the whole entire world; your hands grasp either side of his biceps, as he studies your nodding face, “I’m ready.” And with that does his tip touch your fiery skin, slowly he pushes into you with a pleasurable groan escaping from his parted lips. 

Immediately do you gasp in surprise at his fullness graciously stretching your walls, “Did I hurt you?!” Worries your new lover as you wrap your legs around his hips before sending him a confident wink and a kiss for good measure.

“Nothing can hurt me.” You confirm with another heated kiss to his lips, soon you begin grinding into him the best you can manage as he starts moving pleasantly against your core. His strong hips pushing you back into the mattress in the absolutely best way possible.

Bucky soon finds an effective pace and with that begins thrusting into you harder now as he gains more and more confidence with your wanting body of pure flame and desire; only the delicious sounds of skin on skin contact making itself present in the tiny apartment, besides your labored breaths of intense love making.

Your mind is nothing but foggy mush as he pushes himself deeper and deeper into your slick entrance with each beautifully graceful stroke of his godlike hips. Soft moans and muffled grunts continue to leave his throat as he pumps in and out of you over and over again. Ugh, you could just about die happy.

Causing you to whimper in pleasure as the tiny growing coil inside you gets tighter and tighter with every new thrust to your center walls. His hard cock twitches against your sensitive nerves as his own orgasm begins reaching its inevitable climax, he’s so fucking close.

With a couple more powerful thrusts does he finally succumb to your glorious body and cum hard inside you, his voice gravely and deeply enthralling as he moans in pleasure of the golden release. Feeling his member twitch angrily from within is enough to send you over the edge with ecstasy, causing your walls to clench instinctively against his dexterously slick cock. Fuck he feels good.

More whimpers and moans fall helplessly off of your tongue as your fingers trail pink fiery lines across his glowing skin, he’s without a doubt just as sweaty as you are by this point, and all the more beautiful.

Kissing your lips hungrily, Bucky pounds relentlessly harder into you now as the two of you silently decide to continue on for a swiftly approaching round two. In no time he has the both of you cumming even harder and messier then the first, with moans and groans of plenty reverberating off the aged old walls of his tiny apartment.

Leaving your body a shaking and sweaty mess as he thrusts a couple last pumps into you for good measure, pink swollen lips not once leaving yours until at long last does he gently pull out for the first time in what seems like hours. Though you definitely weren’t complaining, both of you have a plethora of stamina to spare, though you did wear him out.

Falling into an exhausted heap of Bucky next to you on the messy bed, his chest quickly rises and falls with heavy breaths as your does the same. For a few long moments do the two of you keep silent, just the sounds of your heavy breathing the only thing of any significance in the darkly room lit room.

After giving yourself a couple minutes to cool down, Bucky blissfully chuckles, causing you to turn your head towards his beaming face as he stares up at the ceiling, “Something funny Barnes?” You muse in that gloriously prominent accent of yours that drives him wild. He turns his sweat covered head over to you, pieces of long hair sticking to the sides of his handsomely beaming face.

“Are we dead? This feels like a dream and I’m going to wake up alone any second now.” Mutters Bucky, eyes blinking in hopes this is real and true as life itself.

Laughing, you move from your back to lay flush against his left side while watching your every move, kissing his chest you hum, “Well, you’d have a real mess in the morning.”

Bucky immediately scrunches his nose up in slight disgust as you sling an arm over his bare chest, “Thank you for that image Y/N.” He retorts with a short burst of air leaving from his nostrils, indicating he did indeed find it rather amusing.

Kissing his cheek you shrug, “It’s not like your load isn’t still....in places, it’s sex Buck. It’s messy and beautiful and I’m glad I could do this with you. Seriously, I thought we’d never get here.”

Bucky’s face appears rather thoughtful for a long moment before he finally speaks, “I didn’t think you liked me like that.”

“What!?” You exclaim in bewilderment, causing him to snicker as you continue with your explanation, “Was I not obvious enough with the stolen glances and whatever else I could get away with? I was trying actually if you wanted to know....in my own way, but still.”

“I did try to kill you once.” Confirms Bucky as you lay comfortably against his metal arm, head resting on his upper chest while his eyes flicker back up to the ceiling.

Scoffing, you flick a piece of his hair, “I didn’t take it personally.”

Thinking for a moment, he finally looks down at you, “I’m glad you didn’t. And I’m glad that you found me.” Whispers your lover as he reveals the most dashing smile you’ve ever seen, while his flesh arm gently caresses down your shoulder in a blissfully comforting manner.

“Me too.” You add, pressing another soft kiss to his lips as you trail a finger down his side, “Now let’s take a shower......and probably change the sheets.”

“We don’t have sheets.”

——

An annoying ray of golden sunlight shines brightly in your closed eyelids from a small tear in the middle of the window newspaper, as your senses slowly come back to the world. You squint before taking a deep breath and shifting your gaze to make a full circle of the room, since you do happen to be facing away from the wall.

Your eyes trail over to Bucky’s usual spot only to reveal absolutely nothing, your heart suddenly jumps in your chest as the pleasurable memories of last night come flooding into your head once again, and some of the leftover smells, you can thank those fucking scientist for that. 

That’s right, you think, you slept with Bucky, and he’s literally snoozing away right behind you.

Smiling into the morning sun, you quietly sit up before turning your head to look down at Bucky, his hair is an absolute adorable mess as it lays across his face in various dark strands. He’s currently shirtless with the exception of some sweatpants and the thin blanket he owns that’s positioned across his torso.

You’re clothed as well, deciding it best to be dressed and comfy after the heated shower session you two shared; oh to be back in that moment for another minute longer, how nice that would be.

Slipping away from your daydreaming of Bucky, your heart skips a beat as he stirs, soon enough does his beautiful blues open up to the world. Finding your adoring gaze, he rests a hand on your folded leg, “Mornin’ Y/N.” Mutters Bucky in that raspy early morning voice of his, the actual greeting sounding more like a toddler learning to speak for the fist time then anything truly coherent. Or like a drunken man.

Rubbing a hand through his dark locks, you smile lovingly down at his stubbly morning face as he closes his eyes yet again, showing pure bliss while your fingers run through his scalp. “Touch starved much?” You quip as he opens his eyes and yawns like that of a sleepy old bear, metal arm flashing a quick stray beam of light when he shifts.

“Maybe.” Teases Bucky as he silently beckons for you to lay down with him, heeding to this hopeful inquisition, you scoot yourself onto your side and graciously welcome as his flesh arm reaches over your torso to pull you in closer.

Noses mere inches from one another, you raise a brow as he stares lovingly into your eyes, “Cozy?”

Gently kissing your lips in reply, he pulls back to reveal a positive lazy grin, “I think so.” Jests Bucky as he pushes you onto your back so that he can sling an arm over your rib cage, essentially pinning you to the bed with no real intention of letting you go any time soon.

The both of you stay like that for a good couple of minutes, just enjoying each other’s company in the late morning sun before he finally decides to speak, “Was last night....uh, good?” Wonders Bucky in nervous apprehension as his head rests comfortably against yours.

Giving him a light peck, you grin, “The best I’ve ever had.” And you mean every single word.

He gently squeezes your side in reply before muttering, “You were great too.”

Lightly chuckling, your eyes squint as you smile brightly at him, “Well that’s good to know. Glad I hadn’t lost my incredible seduction skills.”

“Yeah, I was thoroughly seduced.” Quips Bucky as you snicker.

-

Tagged: @minigranger @bibliophilewednesday @holyhumorliteraturelight @diegos-butt​

#bucky barnes series #the winter soldier x y/n #the winter soldier x reader #the winter soldier x you #the winter soldier #Bucky Barnes #tfatws x reader #Bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes x y/n

[franklyautistic]

The Autism Spectra

Uninitiated NTs often think that “the Autism Spectrum” runs from NTs on one side all the way through to severely autistic people on the other side.

If you’re following this blog, you probably know that’s bullshit. You’re probably familiar with alternative metaphors, like the salad bar. All autistic people are salads, but some have lots of tomatoes and no dressing, while others have lots of lettuce and rocket and black pepper. Feel free to roast me in the notes for my lack of salad knowledge.

Now, here’s the thing. Reality is messier than either of these metaphors acknowledge. OK, all autistic people are salads... but what are allistic people?

Furthermore, autism is not binary. Some allistic people are more autistic than others. A classic example is the parent of an autistic kid, who doesn’t have enough impairment to qualify for a diagnosis but still exhibits behaviours and traits we associate with autistic people. I certainly see parts of myself which could be interpreted as autistic in both my parents - I have my mother’s stubbornness and my father’s introversion, for example.

So if some allistics are more autistic than others, are some autistics more autistic than others? This is immediately problematic. No. If you are autistic, then you are autistic. However, we would all acknowledge that different autistic people experience different intensities of autistic characteristics. Personally, I’m relatively good at handling uncertainty, particularly compared to where I was five or ten years ago. I’m relatively bad at social nuance. But having a more severe symptom doesn’t make you more autistic, and having a less severe symptom doesn’t make you less valid as a person.

But, all that being said, it’s important to acknowledge that there isn’t a sharp dividing line between “autistic” and “allistic”. Lots of allistic people - in fact, probably all of them - will have some behaviour or another that you will find on a diagnostic checklist for autism. A sizeable portion of the population will have quite a few of these behaviours, but will come just below the threshold for a diagnosis. And lots of people exist in a space where some clinicians will diagnose them, and others will not. This isn’t an issue that can be solved by switching to community diagnosis and similar concepts, either, because any gatekeeper can fall into the same trap.

Autism is fuzzy. Many of us have an instinctive understanding of it which we have developed from experience of being around autistic people, but these judgements are inherently subjective and come wrapped up in all our own personal biases. Ultimately, there is no reliable way of telling an autistic person from a non-autistic person.

So what’s my solution? Well, autism is a useful label for some people. It helps them understand themselves and be understood by others. If you’re one of those people - and I am - more power to you. But we shouldn’t think too much about the hard dividing line between autism and allism. Many allistic people will display greater intensity of at least one autistic trait than some autistic people. Our experiences exist as spectral conditions, not a single binary condition.

#actuallyautistic #actually autistic #autism #neurodiversity

[stusbunker]

AGA: Spit It Out

A Supernatural Denny AU

Featuring: Dean Winchester/ Benny Lafitte

Other Characters: John and Mary, Jody, Garth, Anna, Castiel, Sam, (mentioned) Benny, Jo, Jack

Word Count: 4222

Summary: Dean has the toughest conversation of his life. Cas asks questions. Sam is a little shit.

Warnings: Homophobic language, internalized biphobia, coming out

Series Masterlist

Shout out to the amazing @cracksinthewalls​ for all her help on this series.

       Dean hadn’t realized how terrified he was of facing his father until he broke down at Jo’s. It hadn’t felt like something he would ever have to do until then. Now, it felt as inevitable as a death sentence.

John had always been a huge force in Dean’s life, but since he had gotten hurt to the point of disability, he was less of a presence and more of an imprint. Letting down his folks was the ultimate sin, one Dean had fought his whole life to resist. He knew they loved him, but would it be enough for them to see beyond the idea of Dean they had in their heads. Could they love a pansy?

His mother would be easier to bring on board; he was her favorite whether she’d admit it or not. On the other hand, John was a Marine, he was a mechanic; he didn’t deal with feelings or things he thought were reckless, selfish choices. Dean had never been selfish a day in his life, but this was something that seemed worth it. Benny was worth it. Dean couldn’t give up on family, and he needed them in his corner if it was going to work at all.

First, Dean just needed to get the words out.

The wind whipped through the neighborhood he grew up in like a child unleashed upon the playground. Direction and speed split its focus until it stilled long enough to move on to the next distraction. Dean parked on the street, letting the familiar siding and newer front door center him as he approached, trying to ignore the uneasiness that was unfurling in his gut. Sam was having lunch with some guys from high school who were in town early for Thanksgiving, granting Dean this window of privacy.

Not that Dean told Sam anything. He had done enough talking at Jo’s, even Benny didn’t know everything that he’d been processing the last few days. He hadn’t wanted to make any promises. Dean walked into the house, calling out his greeting, never one to knock at home. John was parked in front of the television in the living room while Mary sent her welcome from somewhere in the basement. 

“Hey! Talk about timing, lunch is just about done,” John teased. “What brings you ‘round? Sammy’s out for the day.”

“Yeah, Dad, I know. Kinda why I came,” Dean shoved his hands in the pockets of jeans, still standing.

“Jayhawks are playing at two if you wanna stay,” John offered. Dean hummed in uncertainty. John dragged his feet from the ottoman to sit up and face Dean better. “Is everything alright?”

“Yeah, nothing we can’t talk about over lunch. I’m gonna go see if Mom needs anything,” Dean nodded towards the basement steps and left John to his football.

Dean bowed his head as he reached the bottom of the steps, clearing the duct work to find Mary folding laundry at the long narrow table they used for everything from school projects to writing out Christmas cards. 

“I thought that was you,” Mary said pleasantly. “Did your dad tell you lunch was almost ready?”

She dropped the shirt she had finished atop an awkward pile and opened her arms for a hug. Dean scooped her up, probably a little too enthusiastically, but he didn’t care and she didn’t mind. A simple gasp told him she noticed though.

“So--- what’s the occasion?” Mary asked, turning back to the basket.

“Nothing really, just wanted to catch up,” Dean downplayed, grabbing a pair of jeans to help. Neither of them pointed out that they’d see each other the next day for Sunday dinner. Mary welcomed the visit as much as Dean was dreading it.

“Your father had physical therapy yesterday. I don’t think they get paid enough,” Mary conspired with a heavy side eye.

Dean chuckled, “I’m guessing not his at least.”

“And supposedly I’m the stubborn one,” Mary muttered. “If you want to make some sandwiches, I’m almost done down here. I don’t want to spread the soup too thin.”

Dean nodded and handed her the sweater he had folded last. “Sounds good, anything in particular?”

“Just don’t let him trick you into letting him have the salami, his doctor says he needs to watch the fats,” Mary warned.

Dean perched against the edge of the steps, listening. He slapped the banister and headed back upstairs. “On it.”

The kitchen’s layout hadn’t changed in thirty years and Dean quickly set up an assembly line with poultry, condiments, lettuce and tomatoes. He tucked the cheese with the processed deli meat back in the drawer, hiding the temptation from John. But not before stealing a slice for his and Mary’s sandwiches. He set the table, like hundreds of times before. John’s spot was the head of the table, Mary to his left. Dean set his own plate on John’s right, a seat he fought Sam for more often than not.

Dean stirred the pot, which was much more a vat, of chicken noodle soup. John’s approach was announced by the steady clink of his cane on the hardwood floor of the hallway. Dean pulled out John’s chair before settling down to his heaping sandwich and extra large bowl of soup.

John lifted the top tier of his sandwich, judging the contents. “She got to you, didn’t she?”

Dean just chewed purposely and gave John innocent eyes.

“Figures,” John muttered before bellowing through the house. “Mary! Soup’s ready.”

They ate comfortably, fighting the cold outside with the warmth of the familiarity of a shared meal. The grease from the chicken made bubbles in the broth and Dean blew across the surface mixing them back in. Meanwhile Mary made small talk and John teased her about her part time job. 

“Well, I need to get out of the house, or we’d kill each other, you know that,” Mary flicked John’s ear as she cleared their bowls. 

“How’s that going?” Dean asked, eyes fixed on his mother’s face. Panic clogged his ears at the thought of never seeing her again.

“‘S fine. People are picky, but it isn’t bad for what it is. Better than being behind a desk or answering the phone,” Mary explained of her work at the local sporting goods store. “Friday will be nuts, lots of sales, but it’s not like we would have been doing anything anyway.”

“So, Bobby and Ellen’s on Thursday?” Dean verified.

“Yup, dinner’s at 1. He says you’re on pie duty?” John asked, surprised.

“That I am. Sam’s stuck with sides, so please remind him. I don’t want to show up and only have rolls and turkey,” Dean asked Mary.

“Can do. We’re bringing the---,” Mary started.

“Cranberry sauce,” Dean and John said in unison.

“And the wine!” Mary said in dismay at their laughter. “Jerks.”

John and Dean grinned as Mary rolled her eyes. 

“So, was that everything? It seemed like you had something to hash out with us,” John asked Dean, picking up the last of his sandwich.

“Yeah, mostly. I gotta check with Ellen first, but I might be bringing somebody along,” Dean rushed out. He tipped his bowl back, finishing the final dregs.

“A special someone?” Mary asked delicately, looking at John in hope.

“Yeah, you could say that,” Dean grunted, standing to grab another sandwich.

“Well, is it somebody we know?” Mary prodded, not trying to be too pushy, but obviously curious. “Dean, why are we just now hearing about this?”

Mary’s tone had shifted to apprehension, Dean felt their silent conversation behind his back as he slapped the ingredients together. He shrugged in response, unable to find a proper jumping off point.

He tried to remain casual, but the dred had clawed back up. Without enough wherewithal to speak, Dean sat back down and ate, drawing out his confession to the point of confusion. 

John chuckled at Mary’s suspicion. “He’s nervous. Let the boy get it out.”

Dean rolled his eyes at the phrase. “I’m thirty six, Dad,” he said through a mouthful.

“Is that right? Coulda fooled me.” John tisked his tongue. Mary ignored his teasing tone.

“Dean, what’s the matter? What’s this girl’s problem that’s making you act so--- cagey all the sudden?” Mary asked anxiously. John slipped Mary’s hand into his, silently soothing her as they waited for Dean’s answer.

“Uh, yeah, about that,” Dean started, sitting back, and shooting for blase. “Turns out I actually like guys, too. So, uh, there’s no problem with a girl. I just wanted to bring, um, this guy I’ve been seeing, Benny, to Bobby and Ellen’s.”

Mary inhaled and clenched John’s hand. John stopped stroking Mary’s arm and twisted in his seat. Dean exhaled slowly, like a pin prick in a deflating balloon, he couldn’t take any of it back. Dean took a chance and looked out through his lashes, face tilted towards his plate. First to Mary’s blue worry and then a flicker to John’s almost black disbelief.

John swallowed and ducked low enough to force Dean’s eyes onto his. "You tellin' me you take it up the ass, is that what you're sayin?"

"Jesus. John!" Mary reproached. But neither man's glare faltered. The dark challenge in John's eyes caused Dean's lips to turn up in a silent snarl.

Dean finally broke the silence. "You really want me to answer that?" 

"I think I have a right to know exactly the kind of man my son is," John countered.

Mary stood abruptly. “He's your son! What's the matter with you?! You asking Sam his jerkin' habits now that he's single, while you're at it?!" She went to the sink, bowing over it as if it would cleanse the images the conversation had conjured.

“Oh, hell, that’s not the point,” John muttered.

Dean had been arrested in high school for drag racing. The whole ride home from the police station he was worried what his dad was gonna do to him once they got home, it was the same quiet rage that had terrified Dean as a child. But it was Mary’s disappointment when they walked in the door that tore into Dean to the point of scarring. He could live with his father’s anger, Sam had taught Dean how to slowly stand up to John over the years.

But Dean didn’t know if he could live in the shadow of Mary’s disappointment. He needed somebody to see him as himself, not just a screw up or a queer. 

Dean sighed. "I am your son. But if you can't handle this, Dad. I don't think you have any right to know me anymore." He looked from Mary to John as the last sentence left his mouth. Maybe he was asking too much after all.

Everyone in the room froze. But not even an ultimatum like that could stop John Winchester from digging himself deeper. "Christ, son, Jo really did a number on you, didn't she? Made you turn tail to the other team all together."

"Leave Jo out of this,” Dean spit out as he stood up. “This is about me and who I'm with now." He stalked the long way around the table, shoving chairs in as he went. He approached Mary alone, carefully, one terrified animal to another. "You'd love him, Mom. He cooks, runs his own business, even got an old Harley in the garage."

Mary couldn't hide her tears, but she tried to smile through them for Dean's sake. "Sounds like a catch, sweetie. But what matters is if you love him. You don't need our say so."

"Don't I?" Dean replied sadly before glancing over Mary’s shoulder to John. "You know Jo told me to give you the finger if you couldn’t see how happy I am. How important Benny is to me. And maybe she's right. But I wanted this to work. I wanted to keep the family together. That's why I'm here. The rest is up to you, Old Man."

Dean kissed his mother on the cheek, between murmured reassurances and left without another word to John. He teetered on the brink, somewhere between busting his knuckles against the cold glass of the impala’s window and losing his lunch on the frostbitten ground. Somehow, Dean made it into the solitude of the driver’s seat before he broke down and sobbed. The only saving grace he got was when his mother's voice roared from inside the house.

Dean dragged the salt and snot from his face with a heavy palm and started the engine. He couldn't stay there, but he didn't know where to go either. He just drove.

    Dean pulled into the parking lot at The Pearly Gates on autopilot. He’d spent the afternoon equally suppressing and dissecting his conversation with his parents as he kept it even between the lines of two lane country roads. Now, Dean was ready to be somebody else, to make drinks and flirt and just forget everything that had happened.

    The college football crowd was winding down, which allowed Dean some time to catch up with the day shift bartenders Garth and Jody. Back before Cas got blindsided with the responsibility of business ownership, Cas, Dean, Ash and Artie would claim a booth near the pool tables and blow their grocery money every weekend. When Sam moved back after law school he and Mick joined the crowd that were regularly praised for paying for Jody’s son’s braces.

    Garth had been the first dragged from the friend pool to fill the schedule when Cas’s brother dropped off the face of the earth. Though Garth volunteered, Dean knew it was just out of the goodness of his heart, not a need for extra cash. 

    “Here he is!” Garth announced Dean’s arrival. Luckily for Dean, Garth was pouring a beer otherwise he would have been wrapped in one of Garth’s spider monkey-like hugs. A few regulars in the corner raised their glasses to Dean in greeting as he passed by with his company smile. Jody whipped by him, fresh out of the stock room with her arms full of their dollar bags of chips they sold to keep from having to run a full kitchen.

    “Look who’s early,” Jody exclaimed before dropping the load onto the back counter. “You trying to cut into my time there, Winchester?”

    “You know if you ever want more hours, you just gotta ask,” Dean offered suggestively, strolling behind the bar.

    Jody sputtered dramatically, “And work nights? No, thank you.”

    “It was worth a shot,” Dean replied, shrugging at Garth who knew better.

    Jody sighed and cocked her head. “You’re cute, but you’re not that cute.”

    Dean ducked his head against the compliment as she patted his arm apologetically. 

    “Want me to split your tips before you go?” Dean asked, bending out of his jacket.

    “That’d be lovely,” Jody answered, sorting the chips by kind. “Garth get’s an extra twenty because Bess and Donna were ‘round.”

    “Look at you, Mr. Slick,” Dean teased as he grabbed the old milk bottle filled with mostly singles. Garth blushed.

    “You know what they say Dean-o, flattery is everything,” Garth explained. Dean, who routinely had the most tips out of any of the staff, including Bela, just nodded at the quirky dude. Dean doled out their shares and washed up before officially punching in. 

    Jody was gone as soon as Anna arrived, but Garth waited for Jack to show before leaving her and Dean on their own. It was seven o’clock before Cas arrived instead of his unreliable nephew.

    “Everything alright?” Dean asked knowingly as Cas hung his trench coat on a broken notch on the rail beside the server’s station.

    “Jack is under the weather,” Cas explained blandly. Dean eyed the windows, taking in the light flurries that danced in the streetlight. “I guess I’ll have to do tonight.”

    It was a surprisingly unremarkable shift, the weather kept traffic bearable even after Anna’s shift ended at midnight. Dean walked her out the back to her car, like he always did as the plow eased out of the parking lot. 

    “You gonna be alright with him for the rest of the night?” Anna whispered before they breached the cold. Her big brown eyes held more mischief than worry. 

    “Goodnight, Anna,” Dean drew out as he held the door sternly. 

    “Night, Dean,” Anna chuckled. Dean watched her tiptoe around the icy patches and make it to her old Tahoe. He made sure it started before heading back behind the bar, and three more hours with Castiel. 

    The speakers were set lower than usual to balance their minimal customers. On his shifts, Dean had always insisted on having control over the musical selection. So when he walked into a pop singer’s version of mopey folk he did a double take before bee lining for the stereo. 

    “Please, don’t,” Cas’s simply requested from somewhere to Dean’s right. “I kind of like this song, but more importantly one of the customer’s requested a change of station.”

    Dean eyed the patrons like suspects in a line up, uncertain who would blaspheme in such a way. No one seemed particularly guilty and he had to let it go. Between drinks, Dean washed glasses in the small sink behind the bar until Cas was finally able to start his nightly paperwork. The last couple paid their tab just after 1:30, leaving them holding their breaths in hope as they started to put up the chairs. 

    “Is it often this quiet?” Cas wondered aloud, “I don’t recall Saturday’s business to dwindle so.”

    Dean smiled to himself; leave it to Cas to look a gift horse of a slow night in the mouth. “No, man, this is not the usual. But, it worked out. And thanks for filling in for the kid, I know you don’t like getting your hands dirty.”

    Cas quietly beamed at Dean’s gratitude before pausing at the not so subtle jab at the end. They went through the remaining end of day routine in silence. Dean turned off the faux neon signs in the windows to signal the early close as Cas handled the money. Dean would usually even out the till and split tips with Jack, leaving the deposit for Cas to handle the next day. Instead he was left with cleaning detail as the boss man did the accounting.

    Before long Dean was rolling the dirty mop bucket back to the office/store room/ kitchen/ employee area. Exhaustion had eaten at Dean’s internal walls, leaving him on the slippery edge between slap-happy and zombie. He hummed to keep his eyes open, waiting on Cas to finally call it a night and let Dean clock out.

    “We don’t talk anymore,” Cas said abruptly, without looking up from the cash machine. Dean’s head shot up, concern furrowing his features. “In fact, I’m prone to think you don’t like me at all, Dean.”

    “What do you mean, we’re talking right now,” Dean downplayed defensively. Cas glanced up over his desk, mild surprise evident. Cas always seemed such a mystery to Dean, from his social awkwardness to his blunt observations. Dean had come to envy Cas’s almost innocent lack of need to perform for others, to be anyone but himself. He had forgotten that Cas would read into his demeanor in the uncanniest of ways.

    “True, we are. But are we?” Cas typed the code into the safe and waited for the time delayed entry. “We used to hang out, watch football, play pool, or cards even.”

    “We’ve got bowling every week, man,” Dean wrung out the mophead and latched it onto the rack on the wall. He was trying to remember the last time he and Cas had fun, just the two of them and couldn’t recall a single occurrence over the past year.

    “I miss you. I miss my friend,” Cas replied sadly. “And I don’t know what I did to ruin it, but I want you to know that I didn’t mean to.”

    Dean closed his eyes and grimaced. “Hey, no, it’s not like that,” Dean started. He walked over and leaned against the edge of the desk, assertive reassurance written all over his face. “Look, I’m tired. Working all week and then coming here is kicking my ass. So I don’t have a lot of free time or brain capacity to hang out like we used to. But I’m doing my best, man.”

    Cas looked like a confused puppy, eyes drooping and head tilted. “That isn’t it. There’s something else, something you’re not telling me?”

    Dean huffed and shook his head, hands raised in exasperation. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I like you, okay? We’re still--- you know--- buddies.”

    “Buddies,” Cas said it like it was a war crime.

    “Yeah, man, friends. Do you need me to pull up a dictionary on my phone?!” Dean was getting anxious. He didn’t know what exactly had set Cas down this path of questioning, but he was certain he needed it to end. So much for a quiet night.

    After a few weighted stares, Cas squinted and turned them down a different path. “Did me employing you negatively affect our relationship? Should I not have asked that of you?” 

    “Wait, that would have stopped you?” Dean asked, surprised by Cas’s sudden, if extremely late, realization.

    “I wouldn’t knowingly do anything to hurt our friendship, Dean. Has working here hindered you?” Cas asked apologetically.

    Dean’s mouth dropped open and his shoulders slumped. “Yeah, man. Working here--- everyone is great, don’t get me wrong--- but man I need a break. I wanted to help out here or there, but I’ve got no time for a life if I stay on.”

    “I see,” Cas sat back, poorly masking his own discomfort with Dean’s confession. “Look, I know I’m not the best at what I do. But I find it very hard to trust new people. Employees, especially, tend to let me down. I guess--- I guess I’ve relied on you for too long, Dean. I’m sorry if I’ve taken advantage.”

    Dean chuckled. “To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded if you had.”

    Missing the joke, Cas continued, “I am taking this conversation as your verbal resignation. I hope you will stay on for the customary two weeks time?”

    “You’re serious?” Dean asked, stunned.

    “You’re unhappy. I don’t want to cause you anymore grief,” Cas replied simply.

    “It wasn’t that bad, Cas.--- But, you gotta do something about Jack. Man up and light a fire under his ass, or just kick him to the curb until he’s ready to live up to the family business. You need to hire people who want to be here,” Dean offered. 

    Cas nodded dejectedly. “I know, I just have an awful gauge for people’s reliability from a simple interview. And past employers rarely ‘spill the tea’ as Bela would say.”

    Dean giggled, but stopped himself once he saw the worry in Cas’ eyes. “Hey, what if somebody does the interviews for you? I bet Jody would weed out the bad seeds before their asses ever hit the bar stool.”

    Cas was surprised by that option. “That could work. She is very intimidating.”

    “Right?!” Dean exclaimed, feeling lighter than he had in a long time. “So, we’re really doing this? Two weeks and I’m out?”

    “Yes, Dean. You’ve done more than I should have asked of you.” Cas stood and extended his hand.

    Dean grabbed it and pulled Cas in for a hug, their bound hands stuck between them. “Thanks, man. But, I’m glad it worked out. It will work out. This is gonna be good.”

    “And we’ll---,” Cas asked as they broke apart.

    “We’ll still be friends. Hell, if I’m free maybe we can reclaim our old table every once in a while,” Dean offered, patting Cas’s shoulder. A genuine smile crept across Dean’s face for the first time all day.

    “I’d like that,” Cas admitted as the safe alerted his time was up.

    The next morning, Sam held the door for Dean who was smirking as they walked in. Exhausted and needing the comfort of his favorite diner to fill his empty stomach, Dean agreed to Sunday breakfast with a seemingly none-the-wiser Sam, certain he'd be missing their weekly dinner with his parents for possibly the first time.

"Not that one. Let's see if there's a spot in the back," Sam muttered as Dean tried sitting in the first open booth he saw. 

"What? Why?" Dean groaned, but straightened up and followed Sam passed the bustling counter.

Sam lifted his chin and motioned Dean to the second to last spot. Slightly annoyed, Dean threw himself onto the bench seat, only to have Sam slide beside him, caging him in. 

"Glad you boys could make it," the all too familiar drawl of their father's voice greeted them from across the table.

Dean looked at Sam and cursed beneath his breath. Sam had the nerve to look guilty, but his puppy dog eyes didn't hold an ounce of potency now.

"Wow, Dad, I had no idea you'd be here. Funny coincidence, hey, Sammy?" Dean snarked.

"Shut up," Sam grumbled.

"I made him drag you here, Dean. So if you wanna be pissed, be pissed at me," John began. "I ordered your usuals, to give us some privacy. It seems we need to talk."

Tagging: @flamencodiva​​ @dolphincliffs​​ @dontshootmespence​​ @fookinghelljensensthighs​​ @fangirlxwritesx67 @dawnie1988 @mrswhozeewhatsis​​ @cosicas-cuquis​​ @foxyjwls007 @tumbler-tidbits @wingedcatninja​​ @defenderrosetyler​​ @ericaprice2008  @crashdevlin​​  @mylovelydame21 @cajunquandary​​ @itmighthavebeenintentional​​​ @thoughtslikeaminefield​​ @there-must-be-a-lock @tatted-trina6​ @cracksinthewalls​​ @atc74​​    

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#A Gentlemen's Agreement #bi!dean #dean winchester fanficiton #dean/benny #dean x benny #coming out #john and mary #aga: spit it out #spn fanfic #spn au #supernatural fanfiction #supernatural au

[nhlandotherimagines]

Tell Me A Lie- Frederik Andersen

@natbarzal @anastasiyaigorevnadobrodevskaya @jonnytoews19 

This hurt me to write, but here we go! Blurb number 7 of the Up All Night series with one of my favourites! Warning this is straight angst, a super toxic and unhealthy relationship, and it does have some strong language at times! Anyway I hope you enjoy! ❤️

Can't ever get it right, no matter how hard I try, and I've tried

Fred tries. You know he does. However, it always ends up here. The two of you once again fighting over seemingly nothing. This time, it was his shoes that started the fight. Stupid? Absolutely, but this is how the two of you function. One of you does something that irritates the other, and your tiny argument blows up into something much larger.

Today when you get home with an armful of groceries, you trip over Freddie’s shoes. You aren’t hurt, and the groceries are fine, but that’s not the point. “Can you not for once put your shoes in the damn closet?” You yell out in frustration.

“Jesus Y/n, it’s not a big deal!” Fred rolls his eyes as he stumbles into the kitchen, where you are now angrily putting away the groceries.

“Right,” you roll your eyes, slamming a cupboard door shut and turning to him. “I nearly dropped all the groceries and broke my neck, but tell me again how it’s not a big deal.”

“Well it’s not like I put them there to hurt you!” He huffs back, grabbing a beer from the fridge. The sound of the can opening sends a new wave irritation through you.

“That’s why you put them in the closet! What about that is so hard to comprehend?” You scoff out loud as he settles himself against the counter, taking a long sip of his beer. “Oh don’t worry about me, I will put away all your groceries. Enjoy your beer love, don’t let me get in your way.” Your words are dripping in sarcasm, and you hear Freddie groan.

“Are we seriously doing this again?” He asks incredulously.

“Doing what exactly? Because if you mean you being lazy well I tend to your every need once again, then no. I’m not doing it. Put away the fucking groceries yourself.” You make sure to drop the lettuce you had been holding to the counter, for dramatic effect. Then quickly you shuffle to your shared room, slamming the door behind you. Sure you are being dramatic, you know it better than most.

Well, I put up a good fight, but your words cut like knives, and I'm tired

Fred curses under his breath, as he runs a hand through his hair. After giving you a few minutes to calm down, he places his beer on the counter and turns to walk to the bedroom. As he lifts his arm to knock on the door, it flings open. The anger, hurt, and sadness flash across your eyes in waves. Fred doesn’t know what to say, and when you realize he isn’t going to speak, you throw the bag you packed over your shoulder and push past him.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Freddie’s voice calls out for you, angrier and louder than you had expected. You jump slightly at the sound, but quickly compose yourself. Wrapping your fingers around the doorknob, you glance back at your boyfriend.

“I don’t know. Away from you.” The venom in your voice makes you yourself shiver. Before Fred can even think about responding, you’re slamming the door behind you.

Freddie wasn’t expecting those words from you. They felt like a knife to his chest, and it hurt. Like really hurt. Sure, you two fight all the time. You scream, curse, and call each other names, but you never run from him. Normally you’d end up in his arms while the two of you cry over the hurtful things you’d said, but not tonight. Tonight you just left him.

The scariest part for Freddie, was the fact he didn’t go after you. The both of you now too exhausted for the fight. The pair of you like a pot of water continuously boiling over on the stove. Except now, the water is all gone. Both of you on empty, no more fight and it absolutely terrifies him.

As you break my heart again this time tell me I'm a screwed up mess. That I never listen, listen. Tell me you don't want my kiss. That you need your distance, distance.

“She’s not with me Fred.” Your best friend, Maddison, assures him for probably the fifth time since she had answered the phone. Freddie was sure you would have gone to Maddison’s, she was your closest friend. Panic starts to set into his bones when he realizes it’s been 24 hours, he hasn’t heard from you, and he has no idea where you are. He doesn’t know if you’re safe, if you’ve eaten, if you’re coming back. Maddison soon squashes his fear though, by speaking up again. “She’s at her co-worker Brady’s house, she’s okay. I was just talking to her.”

The wave of relief that floods his chest is soon suffocated by a cloud of jealousy. Who was Brady? You had never mentioned him, and now Freddie’s brain was going into overdrive. “I’ve got to go get her Mads. Where is she?” Maddison can hear the desperation in his voice, so she caves. She texts him the address, and wishes him luck before hanging up. She knows he will need it.

———

“Fred? What are you doing here?” You ask, confused as to how he even knew where to find you.

“I’m here to take you home Y/n, we need to talk about this.” Freddie says calmly, reaching out for your hands. As he goes to take them in his, you immediately pull away. A frown settles onto Freddie’s features, as he pleads to you with his eyes. “Please baby? Come home. You can yell at me, tell me to put my shoes away, tell me I’m a mess, because I am. Scream about how I never listen, and then when I try to kiss you to apologize you can be stubborn and hold out as long as you want. Hell if you want some space baby, I’ll sleep on the couch, but you need to come home. Please.”

Tears burn your eyes, but you take a deep breath to steady yourself. You’ve spent the last 24 hours preparing yourself for this conversation. How could you tell your boyfriend you were done? You thought you were ready, but him showing up with no warning proved you weren’t.

“Who is it Y/n/n?” Brady asks as he walks up behind you, placing a hand protectively on your back.

Tell me anything but don't you say he's what you're missing, baby. If he's the reason that you're leaving me tonight, spare me what you think, and tell me a lie

“I’m her boyfriend-“ Fred starts, but you quickly butt in, “ex-boyfriend!”

Both men stare at you in disbelief, as you avoid eye contact with both of them. “Y/n come on, we can’t even talk about this?” The hurt is evident in his voice, tears threatening to spill down his pale cheeks.

“I think it’s best you leave man.” Brady speaks, standing up a little straighter. Likely, because he was expecting Freddie to fight him on it.

“It’s him isn’t it?” Fred starts, chuckling in astonishment, “I guess I should have seen it coming, huh?” He watches your face closely, hoping to see some emotion. Preferably a protest. Nothing comes.

“On second thought.” He pauses a moment taking a deep breath, “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me he’s the reason you’re leaving me. Just lie okay?” His eyes are watery when they meet yours. He can’t handle the truth, he knows it, and you know it.

So instead of being honest, you choose to lie. “I love you Fred, I’m sorry.”

#Up All Night-series #frederik andersen #frederik andersen x reader #Frederik andersen fanfiction #Frederik Andersen imagines #hockey imagine #hockey imagines #hockey fanfic #hockey fan fiction #hockey fanfiction #nhl fan fiction #nhl fanfiction #nhl fanfic

[bittykimmy13]

Field Trip (GT Fluff)

In which Ramona introduces Will to some plants in need. Characters and print/trinket universe belong to me and the lovely @marydublin5 / @little-miss-maggie 💕

The longer Ramona was away, the more certain Will was that she wouldn’t come back. Maybe she had finally come to her senses and would steer clear of him from now on. But he knew she was too stubborn for that, so a different worry surfaced. What if someone had stopped her from visiting him? When she first sought him out in the rebellion base, she’d needed to beg to be allowed near him.

As he paced his room, he debated on going out to look for her. His room wasn’t locked. He was no longer under careful monitoring. The problem was he wouldn’t know where to start looking. His own reclusiveness kept him from knowing his way around the base.

“Will!”

He stopped, eyes dropping to seek the tiny voice. Ramona stood at his ajar door, hands cupped over her mouth to be heard. She waved when he spotted her. Jolting, Will dropped to his knees and swept both hands around her.

“What are you doing down there?” He stood quickly, instinct telling him that the further she was from the floor, the safer she was. He looked her over for any sign of injury. “Why didn’t someone bring you instead?”

She sat up on her knees in his palm, taking a second to get her bearings from the sudden grab. “There were a few people around to ask, but I…” She shrugged and averted her gaze. “I’m still getting used to being around anyone else. Some days it’s harder than others.”

Will could understand that, though he imagined it was even more jarring at her size. Still, though. “Well… could you get over it long enough to go from one place to another without danger of being stepped on?”

“I’ll think about it.”

As he started to carry her inside the room, she tapped on his palm to get his attention. “Not so fast! I’m taking you on a field trip today!”

He hesitated. They had ventured into the base together a few times, and he never felt any better for it. The determined look on her face was not to be brushed off so easily, so he tried to work around it instead.

“I think I’d rather just relax today,” he said.

“Oh?” Ramona tilted her head innocently. “Could you get over it long enough for me to show you a surprise?”

An involuntary smile seized him, but it dropped as he looked at the doorway. He had grown comfortable with his four walls. Some might see it as a self-made prison. To him, it was security. If it weren’t for Ramona, he wouldn’t leave at all. One more glance at her eager expression made him cave. Sighing, he started for the hall.

“Is it really that good?” he asked, relieved to find that there was no one immediately outside.

“I’d blindfold you, but I don’t think things would end well for me if you ran into a wall,” she said lightly.

At the mere idea of that, Will’s hands cupped her more securely. He forced a chuckle. “Wouldn’t it be worth it to surprise me?”

“See, that’s the kind of selfishness I need to hear from you more often.”

They turned down a few more halls. She guided him into an area he’d never explored before, which only set him more on edge. They passed a few people along the way—humans, prints, and trinkets alike. At any moment, he felt like someone might do a double-take and declare he didn’t belong there. Not just in that hallway, but at the rebellion base at all.

Ramona patted his palm soothingly; in his anxiety, he nearly hid her entirely from sight with his curled fingers. “You don’t have to be so nervous,” she said.

“I’m not,” he muttered, unfurling his hands a bit.

“Really? You look like you’re ready for a tiger to pounce.” She scooted closer to his thumb and tapped it enthusiastically. “There—take a right down there.”

He could excitement wiring her little body as they finally reached their destination. When the room came into view, he stopped short. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t this.

It was a massive room with rows of shelves. About a quarter of them held plants. From a distance, he could discern a few as if they were old friends. Herbs, peppers, a few types of lettuce. They were in pitiful shape. He said nothing, prompting Ramona to speak uncertainly.

“I overheard some people the other day saying that taking care of the plants is such a chore. It’s hard to keep them alive underground, even with the light panels. So… I sort of volunteered you for the job. Told them you couldn’t kill a plant even if you had a flamethrower and a chainsaw strapped to your hands. I know things are in pretty rough shape here. You can say no if you want to, but—”

Will swept her into a hug against his chest. He pinned one hand over the other, feeling like he couldn’t embrace her enough. He gave a shuddering little breath, looking around in disbelief at the gift she had volunteered him for. She squirmed against him after a few seconds, and he tilted his hands just enough to let her breathe. His gaze darted back to the shelves, his thoughts moving a mile a minute.

“Are there any fresh seeds I can use? And some deeper containers. I might be able to get some bigger vegetables growing in here.” Making his way down one row of shelves, he shook his head. “Half of these are dying of thirst, and the other half are overwatered. Hardly any of them were planted right. Who was in charge of this?”

Ramona chuckled. “I think I’ll keep that to myself. For their safety.” She leaned out to scan the shelves with him, wrapping both arms around his thumb and giving it a squeeze. “You’re up for the job, then?”

He smoothed her hair down with his thumb, reaching out with his free hand to gingerly touch a wilting leaf. He huffed. “I don’t think any of these will last much longer unless I start right now.”

“Sounds like you better get to work. I’ll supervise.”

#g/t #gt #gianttiny #sfwgt #size difference #gt writing #gt fluff #will #ramona #print universe #trinket universe #mywriting

[madqueenalanna]

i did not expect it but working at a vet office has made me so crucially, deeply aware of death and the pain of grief, i almost don't know how to handle it

the people i work with (at least when it comes to pets) do not think death is the worst thing that can happen, not at all. euthanasia means "good death" and i truly believe that– people talk about going into medicine to relieve suffering, first do no harm, and to me there is honor in being able to recognize the end and, unnatural or not, ease the way into it. the gift of mercy

i have lost people before. i lost my babysitter's daughter (like a big sister to me, but i didn't see her that much, didn't know her very well), my grandfather (a good man but neither of us knew what to do with each other, he was sick so often), my grandmother on the other side (lived hours away, saw her twice or thrice a year, i felt for my mother more than anyone), and my brother (sick all my life, borrowed time, an awful grief but it came with a breath let-out for the inevitable)

now i'm forced to imagine things closer to home. my parents are both over sixty, my heart catches in my throat every time i go fishing with my dad bc i think of watsky's wounded healer ("didn't notice it til now but dad's been movin' slower every time we go play catch"). my one remaining grandparent, my paternal grandma, i love her, i really do. but she's closer to 90 than 80 and i know there's only so much time i'll have with her. but my parents? my dad, who i can call every time i'm having trouble figuring something out, who helps me develop film, who devotes hours of driving and hundreds of dollars and time off work to take me fishing every autumn, who is even-tempered and always available for a joke and a 'we'll figure it out'? my mom, from whom i inherited my dark hair, my stubbornness, my artistic impulses, whom i think of every time i listen to sugarland, who cried when i gave her the christmas gift i made her last year?

and i work at a vet, so i think about my cats. i was approved to adopt merlin just before my brother died and i picked him up a few days after the funeral, he moved cities with me, he outlasted my divorce, he taught me unconditional love. he's almost 6. he will need dental work every few years and has preliminary kidney issues and a heart murmur that only shows up when he's very stressed, he loves eating pieces of lettuce and watermelon from my hands, when he's comfortable he streeeeeetches out his front legs so that he can touch me. if i'm lucky i'll have a little over a decade with him. if i'm not, even less. i'm going to have to live a long, long time after he's gone. how am i supposed to do that?

idk what i'm even talking about. i was exposed to a lot of grief in my first 20 years but it felt understandable, it felt like it was "time." now what? how long do i have left with my parents? all i can hope is that my little brother outlives me. i can't imagine having kids if i worry over them half as much as i do my cat. he's trying to steal a piece of cheese as i'm typing this and my eyes hurt from trying not to cry

i know that grief is just love with nowhere to go but i don't even know where the love is supposed to go. i'm so tired

#Personal #I might delete this. This is a lot #Tumblr diary time!

[sylvie-writes]

Four weddings was AMAZING!!!!

Can I request the reader telling Andy she’s pregnant seeing his reaction?

Dumbfounded Drew

a/n: yes, I’ve run out of titles. thanks for this request, I love love love it. and ahhh thanks once more!

Lately, you’ve felt nothing like yourself, always tired and a constant headache here and there. Then, cue the nausea and Andy was soon begging for you to visit the doctor. After being stubborn for some time, you finally listened to your husband and had made an appointment for today, specifically while Andy was at work.

When you had arrived and spoke to the doctor that morning, she asked your symptoms and you listed them once more. Nodding her head, she requested that you take a urine test and at the time, you thought nothing of it, thinking it was just a mere common procedure. After a few minutes had passed, the doctor came back in and you had expected that she'd ordered some more tests and whatnot, but instead five words left her mouth, ones you hadn’t anticipated.

“Congratulations, Mrs. Barber! You’re pregnant!”

Her words went in one ear and out the other as you tried to comprehend what had just happened. You were very confused, but happy nonetheless. It’s not like you and Andy had been actively trying for a baby, but it wasn’t a bad thing if it were to happen.

The doctor talked with you once more, recommending a few gynecologist docs and how to handle your symptoms for now. Eventually, your visit ended and you left the office, a large smile on your face and an even bigger plan in your mind.

It was around noon already and you were growing quite hungry, not having an appetite for the last couple of days. You stopped at the grocery store to pick up two mini salad kits, hoping to go visit Andy for lunch at his office.

After your quick trip, you made it to Andy’s workplace, politely greeting the people who knew you. Stella, who worked the desk, led you back towards the office where you saw Andy and Lynn chatting over the manila file in his hand. You thanked the young girl who scurried back to her desk, many people already in line during her absence. Once Andy saw you, he waved you over, bidding goodbye to Lynn who greeted you as she passed.

He placed a hand on your bicep, leaning in to kiss your cheek.

“How’d your appointment go, honey?”

Andy walked towards his office and you followed. The man tidied up his desk, making room for you to set down the salads and drinks. He pulled a chair around to his side of the desk, allowing you to sit beside him.

“It went better than expected.”

You smiled, looking down as you fixed your own salad. Apparently, Andy was doing the same, except he was examining your small smile, a bit confused about it.

“Hmmm. Does it have anything to do with that pretty smile of yours?”

Peering up from your salad, you watched Andy pop a piece of lettuce into his mouth, quickly setting down the fork as you began to speak.

“It does,” you reached out for his hand, holding it in your lap, making the man worry for the worse.

“Honey, what’s going on?”

His expression turned distressed and you quickly shook your head. You set your salad on the desk, getting up to sit in Andy’s lap as he mimicked your actions with his own salad.

Placing a hand on his bearded face, you kissed his nose, Andy’s forehead wrinkling in delight.

“We’re expecting, Drew.”

His jaw went slack and he instantly stood from his chair, you going up with him. You couldn’t read his reaction until he beamed brightly.

Your husband slowly unbuttoned your trench coat, slipping it away from your front half. Gently, he pushed you to sit on his desk, then lifted up your shirt, just for a peek of your tummy to show. You giggled at the touch of his cold hands on your sides and when warm lips met your stomach, even though a bump was yet to form.

Andy then straightened up, wrapping his arms around you for a hug, making you stand to your feet once more. His face was in your neck and you felt a few warm tears, presumably happy ones, from the man. You lovingly squeezed your arms around his waist.

Just as you were about to kiss Andy, you heard a sudden shout of congratulations, followed with a round of applause. Curious, you looked to Andy’s office windows, which were left open, unbeknownst to you.

All of a sudden, you felt heat rise to your cheek as the whole office staff just saw you and Andy. You shoved your head into the junction of his neck, while the man just comfortingly rocked you back and forth, laughing deeply and waving thanks to his coworkers who then scurried away.

#andy barber x reader #sylvie’s queued post