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studioghibelli · 17 days

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the old man and the sea- a joel miller x reader fic

summary: grief is a sacred thing, a nasty thing, a sensual thing. it grips you from the inside until there's nothing left but a void of darkness- a void that can never be filled. joel miller knows this fact very well, and all he wants to do is save you.

warnings: girthed up age gap (college age!reader x 50’s age joel), i’m exploring a new type of writing ok let me COOK!!!! idk i am delusional, reader has hair that at least reaches her neck, cigarette use, this whole thing is basically an allegory for grief and growing but there also a lot of sexy smut soooo yeah. (mentions of death and two brief mentions of suicide, but nothing too detailed.) that being said, smut (f receiving oral sex, soft kissy missionary sex, unprotected piv sex, some 'dirty' talk, etc.)

note: this has NOT been proofread or edited. any mistakes are mine. i just hate going back and editing lmao. enjoy! xx

In the august days of your youth, when the rocky line of the coast line glimmered beneath the flame of the sun, when the foamy waves would pool by your sandy feet, you could remember the towering lighthouse just south of the beach, the way it stood tall and proud, like the statues of Roman soldiers you knew from your school encyclopedias. It was vibrant and alive, no more dead than the clams bubbling beneath the surface of the ocean, no more dead than the bellowing of the whales far off the shore.

You remember how it would speak to you, late at night when you would walk alone, hoping to catch the light reflecting off the tail of a pretty mermaid, hoping that the local legends of talking fish would come poke their heads above the water, speaking to you in riddles from days gone by.

You remember the words of the light which shone strong from above, circling above your head , like the passing lights of a traveling carnival, your eyes caught like a moth roaming towards the flames, lost in the eternal beauty of its golden light.

Come to me, child. Let the lighthouse unburden your pain.

But back then, when you were quick to scare despite your steadfast stubbornness, you never garnered enough courage to explore behind its walls.

Now college had passed, and you moved back home to your parent's rickety beach house, alone behind her comforting wooden exterior. This home. This home that was once so full of life. This home that held warm laughter and late night board games. This home that housed your closest friends and their secrets of crushes and undeciphered dreams. This home where you grew into a young woman full of life and beauty, clever and brilliant.

This home that was now empty.

You had got the call the week after finals.

We're so sorry, they went out fishing and a storm came. We never found them.

Oh, yes.

Adventure pumped through your veins, the taste for freedom like salty water on your tongue. You knew where you got it from, you always had. Your sweet family, your loving parents. Full of life like that lighthouse, full of of love like the sun.

Now they were nothing, and this house was nothing. Those years of laughter and secrets and adventure were nothing.

Nothing.

Your favorite word these days.

Going through belongings and shuffling through old books had taken almost a weeks worth of tears. Hot, tepid, angry tears.

How dare they leave you alone? How dare they forsake you like this?

The thought of crashing water and striking lightning was almost too much to bare.

When the storm had rolled in that morning, you had been tucked away in the alcove of your kitchen, nursing a steaming mug that was more cream than coffee. You watched the droplets of rain paint pictures on the window, you watched nature wring her tears across the fluttering branches of trees, cracking soft splashes across the pavement with each gust of air. Your chest felt heavy with thoughts of them.

Mom and dad.

Mamma and papa.

Perhaps it was in hopes you would feel some comfort, perhaps it was in hopes you would feel whole. If you could just stare out at the ocean that took them, maybe they would speak to you. Maybe those fairytale fish would poke their heads up from the water and exclaim to you how happy your parents were, how they were fitting right in, how they had invited Mrs. Dolphin over for tea last Saturday, and how they were finally warming up to the funny shark that always lurked in the seaweed.

You stood barefoot on the cragged rock, staring out at the roaring waves, with nothing but the lull of distant seagulls and the song of incoming thunder.

No fish. No parents. No Mrs. Dolphin. Just another season of storms and a crater in your heart.

Your throat was raw from all the screaming. You danced to your fight song as you let the rain take you, your clothes felt like skin from how soaked through they were. Heavy drapes of fabric that cemented you in place on that cragged rock. That cragged rock that dripped with the blood of your raw heels, your toes scraped and ruined from the sandy surface.

It was dark by the time the storm rolled out, dark by the time your back found the safety of the sand, dark by the time your hair clung to your neck and became tangled up with the seashells.

There was a glowing orb of light far off in the distance that you could just make out through the hazy fog of your eyelashes, and you realized it was growing closer, the old handle of a lantern creaking through the night.

"Hello?" The voice was rough and unknown to your ears, yet held a certain warmth despite the weariness.

"Yes?" You asked softly, refusing to open your eyes. If you opened your eyes, all of this was real, all of this was raw, all of this was right there.

"Are you.... okay?"

"Yes."

The lantern creaked once more, and you heard the shuffle of fabric as the man leaned forward, pressing his knuckles to your cheek. "You're colder than a reindeer's antlers, girl." His touch was warm, his hand a welcome solace from the rain. "You live around here?"

You didn't want to go back to that house. You didn't want to smell their detergent or see their old clothes. You didn't want to waltz through that kitchen or hear the creak of those old stairs.

Perhaps it was from the way your lip quivered, from the rain or from the cold, perhaps it was from the defeat in your voice, or the weightlessness of your soul, but the man before you knew he had to do something about it. How could he not? You were laying there like a pile of unfolded laundry, and no one else was around to fold it all.

You felt an arm slip behind your back.

"C'mon, stand up with me. On three."

You groaned softly, using a thick arm as leverage as the mystery man helped you stand off the ground. When you opened your eyes, you saw a pair of umber orbs staring at you, tracing over your face, every line, scar, freckle, dent, he was soaking you in like a sponge, as though he wanted to know your face just from memory.

"I'm Joel."

Joel.

He was handsome, that was the first thing you noticed about him. You felt your stomach churn at the feeling, angry you could find him so beautiful, despite the darkness which shrouded over you. Joel was broad and rugged, no doubt rough around the edges. He was adorned with various scars and random freckles, with thick eyebrows and broad shoulders, plush lips and kind eyes- hardened by time, no doubt, but beautiful all the same.

You know you mumbled your name out somewhere along the walk, eyes cloudy with tears. It was a miracle you managed to speak anything at all.

As you neared the lighthouse, you realized just how foreboding it truly was. Its paint was cracking, yet its foundation remained firm, and it towered up into the clouds like a Medieval castle. Behind it's white structure you saw a small cabin, warm light seeping through the misty windows, painting the green grass with splatters of sunshine.

When Joel opened the door, an old dog sitting in front of the fireplace lifted his head, the soft thump of a tail beating against the wooden floors. His fur was gray and his eyes were old, his long fur a mixture of brown, black, and white patches. Like a makeshift quilt.

Quilts. Your mother used to make those.

"That's Moby." Joel explained, setting a kettle on the old gas stove. "Sit down. You're trailing blood." You felt embarrassment creep up your neck, and he must have noticed the way your eyes darted with shame. "No, no. I didn't mean it like that. Let me fix up your cuts. I-.... I wasn't trying to be a dick." He spoke like this was his first time having human interaction in a decade, and by the way he moved, you might have been right.

He fumbled through drawers and cabinets, eventually finding a metal first aid kit that had begun resting at the edges years ago. Joel pulled up a dining room chair in front of you with a loud screech, peering up at you as he shuffled through the remnants of the kit.

"What were you doing out there?" He asked, gently grabbing your ankle. He guided it to his lap, inspecting the raw flesh of your soles.

"Exploring."

"Exploring what?"

"Myself."

You felt his shoulders jerk with a bit of a laugh. Normally, you would not have gone home with a stranger. Normally, you would not have let a random man place your legs on his lap or nurse you up.

But then again, nothing was normal anymore. Normal was home. Normal was family. Normal was homecooked meals and late night board games and sleepovers and secrets and.... well, none of this.

The hot stream of tears threatened the dam that rest just above your waterline. Joel noticed, but he didn't say anything.

His calloused thumb rested on the side of your foot, the sting of alcohol soaked pads causing you to wince.

"I know." He muttered through an unlit cigarette which dangled from his mouth, the lines of his forehead prominent with each movement he made. "There we go. Right one's done. Let me see the left."

You obeyed wordlessly, gently propping it up onto his thigh. He repeated his previous work until that foot was cleaned and patched.

Joel stared at you. The tea kettle behind him was whistling for attention, its top sputtering from the roaring boil of water.

"Earl gray or green?" He asked as he rummaged for two cups, blowing the dust off of one. You watched Joel stare at one of the cups for a beat too long.

"Earl gray." You croaked, blinking hard. You felt wetness by your hand. When you looked down, the black nose of a dog was pressing into your palm. Your fingers found his fur, rubbing that spot right behind his ear that made his back leg go crazy. Who couldn't smile at that?

Moby laid down, his fur a puddle at the base of your chair as he rested his snout atop your foot. You stared at him, welcoming the softness of his body against yours.

"Moby is a sweet dog. He's old. Rarely gets up from that bed." Joel explained, handing you a cup. The words World's Best Dad were fading at the sides. This cup must have been older than you.

"I like him." You let the liquid glide down your throat with each sip, savoring the warmth it provided you. At the first sign of a shiver, Joel had wrapped a blanket around your shoulders.

"Why are you being so kind to me? You don't even know me."

Joel sat back down across from you with a soft groan, the ache in his bones creaking like an old, rusting elevator shaft. "I do know you."

"Have we met before?" Your eyebrow raised with interest, and you looked at him wearily, trying to deduce what he was up to.

"No. But I know what grieving looks like." There was a long pause before Joel decided to speak again. "Were you trying to kill yourself?"

"What? No!" You guffawed, neck snapping up to shoot him a scowl. "Of course not."

"Look. If you walked up on a half dead, soaking wet person on the shore, during the aftermath of a storm, you'd be thinking the same thing." He defended himself sternly, setting his cup down.

There was a thick moment of quietness.

"Those were your parents, weren't they?" His voice was barely a whisper. It floated through the air like smoke off a candle, hitting you in the face.

"Yes."

"It was all over the news. Loads of us went out there, tried to find them."

"They're out there somewhere. Fish food." Your voice was bitter.

Joel didn't say anything. He just sat and stared. You stared back.

It became a ritual after that night. You were over there every evening, usually with a paper bag full of groceries and treats for Moby. You taught Joel how to make Paprikash and Japchae, you taught Moby how to fist bump with his nose (old dogs can learn new tricks), and you taught yourself how to laugh again.

Laughing. Such an odd thing to do in the aftermath of grief. Such a weird feeling to allow ones self to feel after weeks of chaos.

And Joel, he had his uses too.

Joel taught you how to do a fishtail braid, he taught you how to use a fly rod, and what the inside of a lighthouse looks like. Joel taught you how to smile again, he taught you what the feeling of freedom felt like once more.

Summer faded into autumn, and the orange and yellow trees began to paint the prettiest of pictures on the canvas of the coast. It held a certain nostalgia that summer had always failed to do for you, and the promise of apple cider and pumpkin scented candles floated through with every passing day.

It had taken some convincing, but Joel had swayed in to your demands, and you both sat at a tiny table in a tiny cafe, the steaming pumpkin latte swirling between his hands.

"So?"

He stared at it for a moment before meeting your gaze. "It's.... not half bad."

"Well, well, well. Looks like I was right. I knew you'd like it." You smiled through your victory, drinking your own iced coffee.

"I haven't been here in years." Joel explained, looking around at the decorations. Local art, framed photographs, and signed albums adorned the exposed brick walls, the glowing salt lamps on each table bathing the air with warm, orange light.

"You've been here before?" This coffee shop was old, you knew that much, but even when you were younger and frequented its counter with your high school friends, you can't remember ever seeing him here. And this was a small town- you knew you would have remembered his face, despite the wrinkles and grays. He still would have been Joel.

"Over two decades ago. Sarah loved this place."

"Sarah?"

His upper lip twitched at the sound of her name. Joel looked at you with heavy eyes, glossed over with the mark of grief. The kind of grief that settles in to your body as though it's its home, the kind of grief that sits beside you on the couch and never leaves. The kind of grief you were learning to grow beside.

"My daughter."

The air hung above your heads like a rainy cloud, thick and desultory. It fell across your shoulders like a fur coat, and you struggled to shake it all away.

"I didn't know that you..." Words were useless. They always were when it came to matters like this.

Joel drank his coffee in silence, tracing the ridges of the wooden table out with his eyes. "Don't like talking about her."

"We don't have to."

"Yes, we do." His voice was stern as he looked up at you, your gaze connecting. Joel's eyes were far away, searching for something in the recesses of his memory, or perhaps gaining the courage to speak to you.

"I've been alone for over twenty years." His voice was softer than you had ever remembered it being. "And then.... you were there. Just there. Laid out on the shore like a beached mermaid, shivering in the moonlight. I didn't know you... but I knew you. You were me in that moment. I had been you."

Your lips were pressed into a tight, thin line, and you watched as he spoke. There was a subtle shake to Joel's hands as he picked at his thumb nail, a tick you had picked up on the first week you had known him. The bouncing of his knee vibrated through the table.

"I know what grief is. I know the stain it leaves on someone's face. It was all over you.. just-just dripping."

You hadn't noticed the tears welling in your eyes.

Joel reached over, his palm engulfing your cold hand like a blanket, warming your skin up with his touch. He laced your fingers tight in to his own, cradling your palms close between his two hands.

"I know what all this does to a person. How it rots, how.... how it erodes. I knew I needed to help you."

"What's why you took me back to your house."

"Yes. That's why I bandaged you up, that why I made you tea, that's why I let you keep coming back. Because I wanted to help you, because I lov-"

"Are we doing okay over here?" A barista walked up with a smile, a tray in hand. "I'm just going to take these empty cups away! It's such a beautiful day outside."

You managed to shoot her a smile.

As she walked away, Joel continued staring at you, and there was a sense of something..... else in his eyes.

"Lets go back home? To- well, uh, to my home."

You nodded silently, letting go of his hands as you both walked out the door.

There was something unspoken between Joel and you, and it had settled between the two of you over the months. You knew that he knew, and Joel knew that you knew, yet it was never brought up, it was never allowed to spoken out loud. If it was spoken out loud, then it became real, and if it became real, then it would end up being a burden. Or a promise. Or a nightmare. Or a dream. Or a beautiful, welcoming, loving thing that lasted until the day you died.

How terrifying was that?

You don't know when you had started holding Joel's hand, but the walk back to the lighthouse was quiet and chilly.

Because I lo-

His words echoed through your skull with every single step you took along the cobbled path.

Lo, lo, lo, lo. Love? Loathe? Long? Look?

Your chest compressed against itself as your thoughts wandered. You must have been squeezing Joel's hand too hard, or your nails must have been digging into his skin too deeply, because he stopped and looked at you.

"Are you okay?" He asked quietly.

"I- um. Huh?"

"You're practically making me bleed with those nails of yours. Are you okay? Thinking about something?"

"Oh, I'm sorry." You muttered sheepishly, gently recoiling your hand away. Joel stopped you, placing it back in the grasp of his own. "I just... what were you going to say to me?"

"Hmm? Say to you?"

"Back at the coffee shop?"

"Oh." Joel shuffled his weight between both of his feet, his eyes shifting to meet yours. His warm, gentle, dark eyes. Those honeyed orbs of warmth that you had grown to love so deeply. Love? Oh, yes. You were certain it was love.

What part of Joel Miller didn't you love? He had rescued you from much more than that shore on that fateful night. Fate. Hell of a thing, that.

Joel squeezed his eyes shut. It was like ripping off a band-aid. When he spoke, he opened them once more, allowing his words to drip off his tongue. They were soft, gentle, they swayed through the tresses of your hair like a breeze through a field of flowers.

"I love you."

And there it was.

Time must have stopped. Your ears rang with silence, the weight of the universe funneling and funneling, closer and closer to your head until there was nothing. No noise. No air. No nothing.

Joel stared at you with a blank expression on his face, as though he couldn't believe what he had just said.

"I shouldn't have... that was- I'm sorry."

You took a step towards him, his hand was still wrapped around your own. You felt the subtle sheen of sweat on his palm, you tasted the tang of metal on your tongue from biting your cheek too hard, too deep, too long.

You knew it as sure as the sun rose in the east, you knew it with every vein in your body, with every hair on your head. You loved him, too.

Oh you did, didn't you? What a fool you were for him. If he told you to jump, you would jump. If he told you to run away with him, you would ask where. Joel Miller had bewitched you, every ounce of you, and you couldn't bare the thought of leaving him, or forgetting him, or even worse- never meeting him.

Some brave rush of courage overtook you, and before you could think you had grabbed his face in your hands and pressed your mouth into his own, nearly knocking him off his feet with the force of your movement. Joel's hands instinctively grabbed your waist, and his back found the support of a stop sign. The tips of his fingers gently dug into your waist, and he held you close and tight to his chest. You could feel the beating of his heart against his torso, pumping and pumping and pumping its vibrations into your own chest, ricocheting through your body as you tasted him on your tongue.

You pulled away only when your cheeks ached, burying your face in to his chest, allowing the smell of Joel to overcome you. He always smelled like the sea air and cotton, sweet and nostalgic against your nose.

"Lets get home." He whispered in your ear.

Home. He hadn't corrected himself. Home.

Joel's fingers refused to leave yours, locked tight as you made it to his house. Moby greeted you with a kiss to the knee, waddling back to his bed with a heavy huff of air. You gave him the bone you always picked up for him on the way there, before turning around to see Joel in the kitchen, a cigarette in his mouth.

"Want one?" He asked as he brought the lighter to his mouth. You walked towards him, nodding. He took the item out of his mouth, before placing it between your own two lips.

Joel watched the way you took the cigarette, the way your glossy lips looked against the white sheen of paper.

"You're so damn beautiful. God, I just..." Joel shook his head as he kept his thoughts to himself, lighting another smoke before tossing the half empty pack on to the table.

"You just what?" Your voice echoed through the bellow of smoke, and you leaned against the counter, challenging him with your words.

"I just... got so many things I want to do to you."

You smiled, alluring eyes beaming up at him as you puffed and exhaled, slowly putting out the embers on the clay ashtray you had bought him months ago. "Like what?" Your words were teasing.

Joel watched you step towards him, and his chest rose and fell underneath the unlit kitchen light. He took in a deep breath of tobacco before flicking it in to the metal sink.

He'd deal with that later.

"How 'bout I just show you, baby?"

Your lip caught between your teeth as you nodded.

Joel had never moved so fast in his life, whisking you off to his room with a loud bang of his door. He had you nearly naked and on his bed in record time, his knee resting between your legs as he kissed you, the hair of his moustache tickling your nose.

He allowed you to grind yourself down on his leg, soft moans flooding in to his mouth as his tongue explored your own, tangling and dancing with one another as his fingers worked the back of your bra. Joel threw the material across the room, your breasts pressing in to his chest, nipples hard and tantalizing.

That was the first time Joel had pulled away. He left a trail of wet kisses down to your nipples, his lips wrapping around the stiff bud. You watched him suckle at your flesh, shivers causing the hair on your arms to stand up. His curls became tangled with your fingers, a leg resting on his shoulder as he adjusted himself, sucking and licking at your tits as though he were starved.

Your sweet melody of arousal was like music to Joel, who finally gathered the strength to pull away from your chest and move down between your legs, his mouth planting a flurry of pecks to your stomach. He hooked your panties in his fingers and tugged them off, large hands resting on your thigh as he spread them.

Joel stared at your pussy, now open and bare for his eyes. It glistened with arousal, the soft pink of your flesh causing his mouth to water.

"Jesus." He breathed out slowly, eyes darting up to your gaze. "You were made just for me, weren't you?"

You felt your cheeks heat up. You were. Oh, God, you were!

His free hand snaked up to yours, and you held it tightly, nervously. His hand was your anchor, tethering you to the ocean floor of his bedroom.

Joel leaned forward, his tongue pressing flat against your clit. You whimpered out once. He sucked it in between his lips. You whimpered out twice. He worked your aching bud until you were singing a song composed just for him, pants of hot, heavy air swirling through the four walls of his room.

He was devouring you. You were his Eucharist and your pussy was his prayer. Joel worked you in ways you had never been worked before, licking and sucking your pussy with the fervor that could only ever be found in a religion. You were his religion. His idol. His worship. His solace.

Oh, solace. What a sweet, sweet thing when it was found in you.

Joel's chin was quickly soaked in your sweet wetness. He would have drowned in you if you had let him.

His tongue pushed deep in to your folds, exploring your most precious pf places, tasting every inch of you like a starved man, like a frenzied man, like a mad man.

You were his. He was yours.

Your hips were bucking, your body like a wild animal caught in a trap. Except you weren't in a trap. You were in his arms. His strong, thick, heavy arms, and ecstasy was overtaking you. His tongue was coaxing you towards an explosive orgasm, the likes of which had never been known to you. Not one so intense. Not one at the hands of a man who loved you.

Joel's grip tightened around your own, his lips sucking at your clit, tongue tapping and swirling, licking and lapping.

You could barely get any warning out before your orgasm rushed through you, thighs shaking with earthquakes of pleasure. Your fingers tugged at his hair, holding his head tight in place. Joel licked you through the height of your euphoria, sucking softly at your bud before you could barely take it anymore, before you had to gently push his head away.

"Joel." You whispered, staring at the ceiling as the white hot heat of your climax rushed over you. "Joel." You spoke it like a mantra. His name was a promise to you.

"Baby?" He climbed over you, weight supported by his elbows, and allowed the tip of his nose to gently brush over yours.

"Take me." You whispered, the palms of your hand moving to his cheeks. They were warm, and you could smell your pussy on his facial hair. You leaned forwards, kissing him, tasting your cum and his spit. A moan tumbled out of your mouth, straight through your teeth.

"Make me yours. Fuck me." You begged, although Joel didn't need any begging.

"Anything for you."

His boxers were off in the blink of an eye, and you glanced down at his cock. Tanned, slightly curved, hanging low and heavy, the mushroom tip gleaming with pre-cum. Your mouth was watering at the site, but his grasp on your chin moved your line of sight to his face.

Your legs instinctively wrapped around his waist, and a soft gasp escaped you at the feeling of the tip of his cock pressing against your folds. He grinded against you, his shaft rubbing up and down the folds of your pussy, jolts of electricity causing you to shiver each time he brushed your clit.

Joel was teasing you. He was making you in to a mess. A mess all for him.

His eyes never left yours. Joel watched you lovingly, noses pressed tight, lips brushing past the others. You were as close as two people could possibly be, and you were unsure where his skin ended and yours began. Stray curls of his hair tickled your forehead, and your chests rose and fell in unison.

"I love you." His breath was hot against your face.

"I love you too-" He pushed his length in as you spoke, stretching out the lips of your pussy, hitting deeper than anything had before. You moaned out a wanton noise you had never heard before, nails gently digging in to his shoulders.

Joel sat there for a moment, heavy eyelids half closed. He was soaking you in, literally, allowing himself to relish in the feeling of being inside of you. Of being one with you.

He had not afforded himself many of life's pleasures. Not after Sarah had died. Not after he had let himself go. He had paced the same shore as you many moons ago, gun in hand, trying to urge himself to just put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger. It sounded so easy.

But something had stopped him. Something hadn't let him.

He had wondered, many years after that, why he hadn't done it. He had wondered what could possibly be worth living.

And then he saw you.

In that very same spot, rotting beneath the silver light of the moon.

It was you. Everything had been for you, hadn't it?

And now there you were, beneath him, as pretty as a picture, the embodiment of everything he had ever yearned for, everything he had ever dreamed for. You were everything to Joel, and he was everything to you.

And now there he was, deep inside of you. You were all he could feel, all he could smell, all he could see. You, you, you. The most beautiful thing he had ever saw, the most wonderful thing he could have ever waited for.

The shiver of your body brought him back down to reality. He kissed you deeply, and all you could do was smile against his mouth.

Lucky. That is what you were. That is what you both were.

"You feel so good." You whispered softly, hands gently running down the back of his head, finding a resting spot on the broad stretch of his freckled back.

Joel rubbed his cheek against yours, slowly moving his hips, grinding down against you, eliciting a sweet moan out of you. "Yeah?"

You both giggled in unison, and he watched your eyes shut as he began to pump deep inside of you. The feeling of your nails pinched at his skin.

Joel glanced down, watching his cock disappear into the depths of your cunt, sloppy noises of your arousal filling the air. Your pussy lips looked so pretty wrapped around his length, your wetness looked so pretty glistening off his cock.

You were made for him, and he for you.

"Take me, Joel." You begged, and his movement increased, growing slightly rougher as his forehead met yours, lips pressing together once more.

"God, you're so beautiful. So fucking beautiful. So fucking pretty. You feel so fucking good. This pussy.... fuck. Fuck, I never want to leave it." He was rambling through his thrusts, hand reaching down to rub at your swelling clit.

"Fuck me, Joel. Fuck me." You whined out, bucking up against the touch of his fingers as he fucked you harder in to the mattress.

"You're my girl. You're my beautiful fucking girl. God, you're everything to me. You're my world." His breath was hot against your face as he kissed you, coaxing you towards another orgasm with each rub of his middle finger across your clit.

"That's a good girl. I can feel you getting closer. I can feel that pussy tightening against me."

Your back arched off the mattress as you cried out his name, moaning as his praises filled your ears. Joel rested his face in the crook of your neck, hips slapping in to your thighs as he filled you up with every inch of his length.

"That's my girl, that's it, baby. Cum for me."

You did as he said. There was no use in holding back. As your orgasm rushed through, his own was approaching. Your name tumbled off his lips, the only word he could remember, as he came deep inside your walls. His hot cum filled you to the brim with a warmth you had never experienced, and Joel kept slowly pumping as his high rushed off, as his orgasm died down.

You shivered beneath him, another kiss being planted on your mouth. Then you cheeks. Then your nose. Then anywhere else Joel could get to.

A moan tumbled off Joel's tongue as he slowly slipped out of you, falling beside you before grabbing you and pressing you in to his chest.

"Stay with me."

"I always do." You whispered in to his chest.

"No, stay with me. Permanently. This can be our home."

"Our home." You whispered quietly, nuzzling closer into his body.

"Our home." He established firmly, resting his palm on the crown of your head.

The world would always spin, and sorrow would always lurk. That was how the world worked. That was the way of the universe. When you both awoke in the morning, the pain of yesteryears would still be there. The horrible, nasty tug of old memories and distant lives would always be somewhere deep within you.

The cosmos, however, were full of possibilities. You could have stayed in your parents home and succumb to a darkness greater than yourself. Joel could have drank himself to death or tasted the metal of a bullet. Those waves could have taken you, and he could have never decided to take a walk down to that beach.

There were many what if's.

But right now you were alive with passion, eyes wide and awake with a newfound love. The bitterness had gone, and something much brighter and better was waiting for you in the future.

Beside you, Joel Miller sat puffing on a cigarette, smiling at you through dreamy eyes. The sheen of sweat was still glistening across his chest, and the gentle smirk on his lips reflected the tales of a lovesick fool.

"Ready to go again?" He asked cheekily, handing you the smoke.

You took it with a smile.

For now, grief would have to wait.

932 notes · View notes

cordeliawhohung · 4 months

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Whoa whoa whoa, why did you have to make mafiaunderboss!Simon sound so hot 😩😩??

Can we see what it looks like when Price’s wifey brings a friend around, and she’s nothing but heart eyes for him and vice versa? I honestly just love this au

mafiaunderboss!Simon has my whole fucking heart i have so many ideas for him it's not even funny. and you know what's even better than price's wife bringing a friend around??? being that friend she brings around..... (we truly are out here living our best y/n lives)

also, i've created a mafia!141 masterlist here <3 because i don't think i'm getting out of this phase anytime soon.

warnings: mafia!underboss!Simon x shy-ish!fem!reader, reader doesn't know simon's in a mafia lmao, sorta sexual tension, short-ish drabble

When your friend invited you over to a family dinner, you weren't sure if you should go or not. Family events always seemed more like a private and cut off thing, not something a friend should attend, and you were terrified about intruding. But when she insisted that her husband wouldn't mind, and how she would love it if you were able to meet the others, you begrudgingly accepted.

You arrived right on time wearing a cute little outfit that you hoped would keep you cool enough so that you weren't sweating all throughout dinner. Once you were led into the dining room of your friends home, you very quickly realized that this was not the type of family dinner you had expected. At first, you had thought of extended family, some brothers and sisters, maybe nieces and nephews. Instead, you saw your friend's husband, John, at the head of the table, along with three other men, none of whom looked related.

After a few quick introductions, you took your seat in between your friend and a kind, boisterous man with a mohawk who the others called Soap. Once dinner was served, conversation erupted throughout the table, and while you found yourself actively listening, you didn't add a whole lot to the conversation. Instead, you were perfectly content glancing around the table, watching the men around you curse and joke with one another.

However, there was one man who caught your eyes more than anyone else. The others called him Riley, and he was almost too large to fit comfortably in the small, wooden dining chair. You swore you heard his knees knock against the table a few times. The simple black t-shirt he wore perfectly displayed the sleeve of tattoos on his arm, and you found yourself enchanted by the way the sinewy muscles of his forearm flexed as he raised his glass to his lips. It seemed impossible to tear your eyes away from him, until you realized his dark and alluring eyes had caught you. You quickly averted your gaze just in time to miss the smirk that pulled at his lips.

Dessert was served in what you assumed was the entertainment room. There was a dartboard shoved up against the wall and a billiards table towards the side of the room, both of which looked very loved with years worth of holes and scratches. While you and your friend indulged in the mouthwatering tiramisu she had made, the boys started up a game of pool, where they played long enough for John to get either too bored or too fed up with the others. They tried to get your friend to play so that they could continue playing doubles, but she quickly declined.

"What about you?" Kyle spoke up.

It took you a moment to realize that he was speaking to you. All three men had their eyes on you, including Riley. Swallowing, you shook your head as you set your dishware on the side table next to you.

"Oh, I don't really know how to play," you excused.

"That's alright," Soap said as he tapped his pool cue on the floor. "Riley's a good teacher."

Before you knew it you were standing next to the table alongside the others, your own cue in hand. It didn't take long to realize just how better at the game they were than you as they made shot after shot, and when your turn rolled around, you swallowed hard, not exactly excited to make a fool of yourself.

Still, you conjured as much confidence as you could as you leaned over the table, trying to line the stick up with the cue ball. Yet no matter how hard you tried to steady your hands, you couldn't quite get stable enough to make a good shot.

"Here," Riley spoke up as he leaned his stick against the table.

The warmth of him engulfed you as you found your back pressed against his chest. It took everything in you not to boil alive under his touch as he moved your guiding hand into position in order to strike efficiently. His hand engulfed yours as he helped you hold onto the stick, and you attempted to ignore the way his breath fanned across your ear as he spoke.

"Steady, yeah? Strike right here in the center, angle a bit to the left," he guided.

Eventually his hands slid off of yours so you could make the shot, but your brain was too overwhelmed to fully focus. Yet you tried anyway, striking the ball just like he told you and barely pocketing one of the stripes. A quick round of whoops escaped the boys as they congratulated you on your shot, despite the fact you were on the other team. Riley went for a more tame reaction, and he rested his hand on your shoulder and gave it a tight squeeze.

"Nice shot."

Heat rose in your face at his touch, and you tried to swallow the warmth back into your stomach as you tapped your cue against the tip of your shoe. "All thanks to you, Riley."

For a moment, he was silent as he leaned over the table for his turn where thick fingers guided his cue along the table. Pudgy skin and muscles forced his shirt to tighten along his shoulders, and you stood there speechless as he hit his shot. He easily pocketed yet another ball before he straightened back up and turned his attention to you. His dark eyes, the ones that had been sneaking glances at you all night long, gave you a quick once over before he tilted his head slightly.

"It's just Simon to you, sweetheart."

i am fucking feral for this man. also, unrelated but mafia simon has a dick piercing <3

#mafia!ghost #mafia!141 #simon riley x reader #ghost x reader #simon ghost x reader #simon ghost riley x reader

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musical-chick-13 · 2 years

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*sigh*

#good news is I got all my previous homework back and I got a's on them #bad news is I submitted my test corrections a few minutes late #and I know that I didn't do too great on this test #(that's not me Being Anxious like I straight up didn't finish a giant chunk of this test because I Was Anxious And Exhausted)#who knows if my professor will accept them #if he does then there's a good chance I can bring my test up to a decent grade because I think I fixed most if not all of the problems?#but if he doesn't...I don't even want to know #why are tests WORTH so much??#like there are so few of them and if you have one bad day then there goes a third of your grade even if you understand the material #I have decided that I like learning but I hate school lmao #mc13's grad school adventures #it doesn't help that I never fully recovered from undergrad burnout #like yes I know it's been years but sorry I never did #and that makes trying to do this SO hard #I just want to be a normal functional person #GOD I want that so bad #but here we are. I get this brain instead.#I wish the pool was open this late because dunking my whole body in relatively cold water while swimming laps sounds great right now

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spite-and-waffles · 1 year

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I always wonder whether Batfam fans really get just how fucking rich the Waynes are. Like of course we shy away from thinking about the fact that we're talking Musk and Bezos money, and focus on how Bruce funds the freaking Watchtower and has what is functionally a high-tech military base and lab and the world's most expensive vehicles. But this is the one time you don't have to factor in the implications of wealth-hoarding, so there's nothing preventing y'all from understanding exactly how much money we're talking about here.

For instance, there doesn't seem to be any concept of how palatial Wayne Manor is, simply going by the outer facades of it that appear in the comics and movies. Or how decadent the lifestyles that accompany that kind of ancestral home. Alfred couldn't run that place on his own even if he had super powers, which is why even the movies occasionally show a rotating probably-temporary staff in the background. The house probably has like 3 hundred-foot pools. Their garden is a protected heritage park.

The Waynes are 10x richer than Crazy Rich Asians. They buy and wear the jewelry worth hundreds of millions that belonged to royalty. They own private islands. The art in the house alone is worth more than the GDP of a small country. They went to school with like every US President since Teddy Roosevelt and still think the Rockefellers are new money. They're personal friends with Beyonce and can get her to perform at private parties. They can rent out an entire three-star Michelin restaurant and fly out to one for every date. They have top-line penthouse apartments in every major city in the world. They can buy a luxury sportscar instead of hiring a vehicle anywhere they visit and then just toss the keys to the nearest person on their way out (Arab royalty is known for this appearently. There's been some very lucky parking valets in the UAE iirc).

Bruce is as rich as Ra's Al Ghul, regularly make social calls to heads of state and his family has a history of being king-makers. Every one of Bruce's children, from Dick to Jason to Cass, is poised to inherit one of the largest and most powerful empires in the world. That means every time Bruce adopts an orphan off god-knows-where, the entire global elite is thrown into consternation and horror. Even Tim is barely acceptable to these people because he doesn't have the pedigree. I don't follow the reboot comics so Idk if Duke is adopted, but it would be so fucking funny if he was because they'd react a lot like the British establishment did to Meghan Markle (except the family and WE would have Duke's back completely). As for Damian, the fact that he's not white would get him snubbed if everyone who's anyone didn't 100% know who Ra's Al Ghul is. And they're fucking terrified because, for maximum hilarity, they probably figure that Bruce doesn't.

I just find it incredibly fucking funny when I'm reading fics that the writers can only imagine Bruce and the kids's civilian privileges extend only to "big house", "a lot of cars" and "Gotham famous". Lol. Lmao even.

...

Edit: Explanation for people justifiably skeptical that Bruce could be rich as Ra's (scroll down)

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genericpuff · 3 months

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Lore Olympus Episode 265 Betrays the Series' Own Messages of Consent

I've been keeping it on the down low lately with new episodes of LO, both for the sake of my mental health and because LO itself has just become so... pointless and boring. There's only so much to say when nothing is happening, and in that regard, I will preface this with a "congratulations" towards Rachel, because she's finally found a way to best the "haters" - make the comic so boring that there's nothing worth talking about to begin with.

At first glance I thought this was going to be another one of those episodes. Good job, Rachel, you managed to pad out another episode with pointless fluff to get you closer to that looming end date. Just keep dragging, just keep dragging, just keep dragging-

But the longer I sat on it, and read the comments and posts about it in discussion circles, the more I've realized that this episode in particular has a load of issues that I don't feel good just sitting on and not talking about. Primarily because, over the course of about 90% of this episode's length, we see Lore Olympus - and Rachel - slyly undo everything that ever mattered in its subtext about consent, healthy relationships, and strong communication.

Granted, Lore Olympus has never exactly been the poster child for those things, but it's trying to be, so we're going to dissect it with an equal amount of scrutiny. It wants to be taken seriously, so I'm going to take it seriously and criticize it seriously.

CONTENT WARNING: EPISODE 265 SPOILERS AHEAD, AS WELL AS DISCUSSION OF SEXUAL ASSAULT, MENTAL HEALTH, GROOMING, AND SYMPTOMS OF MANIA, PROCEED WITH CAUTION

Episode 265 opens with an attempt at plot progression, returning to Morpheus who, last we checked, had been targeted by Kronos as the cliffhanger for Episode 259 before being shoved aside entirely for multiple episodes worth of Demophoon, pool-fucking, and a vision from Hera.

Honestly, I won't waste my 30 image limit on the episode's opening sequence because it accomplishes absolutely nothing. And by the time it starts to try and state what that goal is, it transitions away, because Rachel has the attention span of a squirrel on meth and having Morpheus state what her plan is would just be too much dedicated writing for her at this point, she needs another week at least to figure it out.

So instead we get exactly what was promised in the FastPass previews - the entire episode is spent, yet again, on Hades and Persephone, with the exact same topics, conclusions, and terrible sex as the pool scene.

Seriously, this might be a nitpick, but I'm so tired of Persephone not being allowed to swear. We've seen other characters swear. We've even had Kronos call her a "dumb fucking bitch". But this "girlboss" character who we're supposed to believe has "agency" can't be allowed to swear even when they're in an ACTUALLY STRESSFUL SITUATION? You know purity culture isn't exclusive to sex, right, Rachel? If you're gonna deconstruct it, maybe don't have the poster child of that deconstruction be relegated to a church girl? She's literally the Queen of the Underworld - adjacent to the ruler of Hell - let her fucking swear LMAO

Anyways, we see very quickly that Persephone is still feeling the ill effects of her anxiety that she was feeling in the last episode. Anxiety that, by the way, caused her to pass out. Please keep that in mind, don't let it escape.

And what is she stressing over? The genocide? The fact that they still don't have an actual solution to the ongoing "plague"?

Nah. The sleep dive. She's stressing over her husband doing the sleep dive again and - like last time - turning into a dad-possessed monster.

As always, the fear and anxiety is in no way linked to the actual devastation happening outside - it's just concern for the main male lead, because that's all Persephone's character and thoughts and opinions and "agency" can revolve around.

But uh. Remember that scene where Hades got possessed by Kronos and literally strangled her? Remember that scene I just asked you to keep in your brain about her panic attacks getting so bad she's been passing out?

Hello? No? Okay. Next.

I hate, I loathe, I detest this dialogue. Not because it's cliche as fuck - it is - but because the whole "I trust you, it's just xyz I don't trust" shit has been overplayed and debunked as a plausible response in relationship communication for years now.

We talked about this back during our discussion of Leuce - how it shouldn't matter if Persephone doesn't trust Leuce because ultimately Leuce can't do anything to her or Hades' relationship if it's built on as much "trust" as she claims it is, trusting Hades is all that should matter full stop - and it repeats itself here, albeit with Hades' dad instead of his canon first wife. This is a copout. Relationships actually built on trust can definitely still be worried about the issues posed by other people, but if you trust your partner, if you truly trust your partner, that's it. That's where the sentence ends. No shit you don't trust Kronos, we've been over this song and dance multiple times before and while he's definitely a bigger real threat than Leuce, your distrust for Kronos has nothing to do with how you're communicating with your partner who knows there's likely no other way and a solution has to be found. Nothing's being accomplished at this point from Persephone moping around and having sex with her husband, and he's showing 10x more initiative in actually finding a solution - even if it means putting his own safety at risk - than Persephone.

I didn't edit any of that, those are the legit real panels. Literally what the fuck is this dialogue, my tinfoil hat theory about LO being written by ChatGPT is becoming more and more plausible and I hate that, my crackpot theories shouldn't actually become reality.

Is there an owl in here?

LO is just spinning its wheels over the exact same conversation and points that have already been made. Nothing is being accomplished here, it's just more moping and going over the same problems - the centre of which being "what about H x P's relationship?? :(((("

All of that repetitive meandering and moping for "okay fine but if anything feels weird, get out" "okay". It, again, accomplishes nothing that couldn't have been accomplished during the pool scene.

And now we get this line. "I experienced greed in that way, and you do not possess it." Don't be alarmed if you were confused, I was confused too, as were many people in the discussion circles. Thanks to the ULO Discord, I realized she was talking about Apollo. She's literally comparing him to Apollo.

"After all this time, I can't comprehend you causing me harm. I've been at the receiving end of harm so I would know" is literally all she's trying to say. And even with it translated... I don't really like the implications of it at all. This has been a problem since S1, but there's always been this subtext in LO that because Hades didn't rape her, that somehow makes him less abusive or a better partner for Persephone than Apollo, that's all the SA has really been trying to achieve.

But Hades is abusive. He's intentionally pursued women who are in a crisis. He's trapped women in financial dependency. He's sabotaged women from having power and status on the same level as him.

And now, we're about to see actual abuse from Hades - the subtle kind that demands co-dependency, but is still abuse, full stop - but it's being framed as "romantic".

"Being an Originals creator was my big chance to prove myself, and I flopped"- wait sorry I misread. We're talking about Persephone failing at being Queen. Yeah, she definitely flopped. And it goes to show her true intentions in wanting to be Queen, now that she's hit rock bottom and isn't putting on a brave PR face - she wanted to become Queen not to make the Underworld a better place, not to be an example of being a better ruler among a gallery of scumbags, but to "prove" that she could belong and be one of the big guys, that she could be more than just a cereal box mascot.

Don't get me wrong, I can absolutely get wanting to rise above the odds and "prove" to everyone that you can be more than people's perceptions of you, but becoming the literal ruler of a realm that you then go on to destroy due to your own hubris, just to whine and cry about it and have your husband and your colleagues and your friends carry the burden of that destruction on your behalf... therapy would have been a better first step to overcoming those insecurities, not taking control over the lives of innocent people.

Especially when Persephone DID have status and power before becoming Queen, it just wasn't the specific kind of status and power she wanted. She was only a trust fund child with a huge net worth, a full-ride scholarship, and everything she could ever need provided to her with little struggle to get it - but she didn't have control over other people so it just wasn't good enough.

This is the perspective and attitude of a 19 year old who never matured. Who never could mature because she transitioned from her mother's control into Hades'. There were far better ways to prove herself, ways that we had seen her try to do, only to drop so she could pursue her co-dependent relationship with Hades - she gave up her schooling, gave up her apartment (which we only see her use maybe 2-3 times), gave up so many of her connections and support so she could be with Hades.

This is the result of 5 years of real-time grooming that we're seeing play out.

No, you are just saying them because she's your wife. You'd be saying it to Minthe, or Leuce, or Hera, or any other woman in Persephone's position because it's not about taking accountability, it's about keeping these women in a position of submissiveness and co-dependency, by giving them reassurance that nothing they ever do is wrong and that he's the only one that can give them that freedom from consequences.

And then we get the reinforcement.

I'm gonna spare you all the cringe of the actual sex scene (and yes, they do straight up go into having onscreen sex and it's... not hot at all), but here's some of the dialogue spoken by Hades during the entire sequence:

Again, let's remember the actual situation that led up to this and the position Persephone is currently in. For the third time Persephone has "accidentally" killed thousands of people. Over the past few episodes we've seen her try to realize how so many of these problems have been her fault and she clearly doesn't know how to make things right (and Rachel has made it obvious how much she doesn't want you to agree with this kind of self-awareness because much of it is being said through the mouthpiece of a rapist). And now we have Hades, reinforcing the thought patterns that would prevent her from growing and learning and changing. In this, a comic that's supposed to be "feminist", a comic that's trying to preach the importance of consent, a comic that's trying to make us believe this is a healthy, consenting relationship with strong communication skills.

These are literally grooming tactics. Hades is reinforcing the same thought patterns that will prevent Persephone from acknowledging her errors and mistakes. People are dying and Hades is telling her that if anyone has anything to say about it, they deserve to die anyways. The same man who literally rewarded her with sex for vandalizing a nymph's home is now telling her that she's not cruel, but kind:

Hades might not be Apollo, but he literally choked her out less than a week ago while possessed by his dad, and for the last SEVERAL episodes he's had the starry skin making him resemble who? Oh yeah, his dad.

Hades is literally holding Persephone in the same position Kronos did, while she's experiencing a literal meltdown that she's trying to stuff deep down - in fact, exhibiting a LOT of symptoms of mania - and initiating sex.

Doesn't this feel a little familiar?

Oh right, but he asks her if she's "still okay" mid sex only AFTER initiating chokehold sex with her without her consent and love-bombing her, so it's fine, clearly.

I remember being 17 years old and reading Fifty Shades of Grey for the first time, and even then understanding fully how toxic their relationship was. I can only hope the teenagers in Rachel's comment section can realize that as well, but judging by the comment section, I'm not holding out hope. This is literally "fifty shades of fucked up" material, and what's worse is that I can't tell if Rachel genuinely thinks this is healthy, or just doesn't realize how unhealthy it's coming across as. Even beyond how "cringe" this sequence is, it enters into the realm of being deeply uncomfortable and unsettling, and it needs to be talked about, Rachel can't be let off the hook for this especially when this is supposed to be, again, a comic that's intending to "deconstruct purity culture" and teach young girls about consent and boundaries.

And that's it, that's the end of the episode. It reads like the manifesto of a villain in the making at the hands of a predator, like Anakin being manipulated by Palpatine - "so long as you're with me, you'll have all the power, all the glory, and everyone else will be crushed underneath your heel."

Is that really the message we really want to come away from LO from? That it's fine for husbands to initiate sex with their wives through trauma-bonding and reinforcement of toxic thought patterns rooted in grooming because... they're married? That being a "girlboss" means sabotaging and abusing anyone who you perceive as a threat?

Is Hades really that much different from Apollo? Because so far, the line between his actions and Apollo's are seriously starting to blur. The parallels between Persephone and his past partners - Minthe and Hera - have always been clear, but they've never been quite so loud as last night's episode.

This is Hades' play, the play of a groomer and an abuser who depends on making their victims dependent on them - taking advantage of women while they're in a crisis.

For Minthe, it was financial - she had lost her job, blamed it on him, and he found a way to "solve her problem" that strategically put her into a position where she had to continue to financially depend on him for what's assumed to at least be a year or longer, through her apartment, her bills, and her job.

For Hera, it was emotional - she had chosen Zeus over him, and instead of addressing her marital concerns within the marriage, she participated in an affair with Hades in an attempt to have what she could have had if she had chosen Hades instead, a man who resembles her own abuser. Not only did this put her into a much more vulnerable position than him - if the affair was found out, Hera would have suffered the consequences far more than Hades - but it's also manifested itself into Persephone, who Hera has been using as a stand-in for herself, even going so far as to manipulate Persephone's image and how she goes about her decision-making, from intentionally pulling the strings to get Persephone a job with Hades so she could get closer to him as a "test" for Hades, to forcing Persephone to wear a wedding dress she wanted her to wear over the one Persephone had actually picked out herself.

And now there's Persephone, the newest addition to the cycle of abuse and untreated trauma, the true culmination of Hades' years trapping and manipulating women - financially dependent on him, emotionally dependent on him, and only where she is because she's made her entire identity revolve around him.

I'm not going to psychoanalyze Rachel in any way, I don't want anyone to think that this is permission to do so because Rachel's personal life is her own and I want to examine the material rather than the person. But so much of LO gives me such a gross impression that Rachel herself never matured past middle school, that she never grew beyond the mindset of being a 13 year old girl who felt like the entire world was against her and that no one could understand her, that she never gained the perspective most adults do by the time they're 25 at minimum after they've entered the "real world" and had the lived experiences that make you realize "wow, that girl I hated in high school for stealing my crush from me probably wasn't as bad as I thought she was and we were all just teenagers trying to navigate the hellscape that is adolescence."

And instead of actually analyzing those thought patterns and mindsets, Rachel is instead reinforcing it in her own audience of 13 year old girls and teenagers who will only hopefully maybe outgrow it and not just repeat the cycle themselves.

And this isn't entirely on Rachel's shoulders. It's on the shoulders of E.L. James, of Stephanie Meyer, of Colleen Hoover, of every "young adult" romance author who's peddled this strictly heteronormative "submission culture but not like the 1950's kind I swear" crap, that women should only aspire to find the richest man they can bag in their pursuit for power and after that everything in the world is owed to them and any problem they have can be solved by riding dick. Trauma? Solved. Genocide? Solved. The very real consequences of your own actions that affect others to such a degree that it will be felt for decades? Solved. Just ride that dick and get that money, girlboss.

Just like 50 Shades of Grey, if Lore Olympus was any other story, it would be a tragedy. It would be a masterclass in understanding and showcasing the signs of emotional abuse, financial abuse, grooming, trauma-bonding, love-bombing, and enforcing co-dependent habits for the sake of trapping people. It would be a precautionary tale to young girls to stay alert and be wary of older men, that men like Hades are depending on girls to fall for their tricks, their praise, their affirmations that they're so mature for their age, that they're not like other girls, that they would just be so set for life if they spent all their time and attention with them, so that they can "have it all".

I can only hope that even a third of the young girls who read LO naturally grow up, gain perspective, and learn that LO isn't the pillar of healthy relationships and consent that it tries to be. It's certainly a common thing to see these days, for people to join the UnpopularLoreOlympus / #antiloreolympus community with sentiments that they started reading it at age 14 and then (thankfully) learned that what LO was preaching wasn't healthy.

But for every other girl who doesn't realize this, it's reinforcement of the same cycles - the cycle of women being only objects for sex, pitting themselves against one another, confusing gender empowerment with abuse towards others, and making their entire identity revolve around a man and justifying it as healthy so long as it makes them rich and powerful.

Even if Rachel some day gets her own head out of her ass and realizes what damage she's causing in her audience, like Persephone committing genocide, no amount of self-awareness will undo the consequences. She'll still have the awards, the money, the accolades, everything she's gained off the backs of Greek myth, feminism, and good faith from an immature audience who doesn't know any better and isn't being given the tools to understand.

Even if she realizes that, that's something she's going to have to live with for the rest of her career.

And it's a fucking tragedy.

#lore olympus critical #anti lore olympus #antiloreolympus

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yeyinde · 3 months

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fever in a shockwave

pt., iii | stagnant on my betterment

“I don't want to lose you,” he's saying, and it's odd because he never really had you to begin with.

WARNINGS: angst, pining, yearning; eventual smut; trauma; grief and the existentialism of moving on; recovery; poor/unhealthy coping methods; codependency; reference to drug use (but it's just weed); reader has a backstory; spoilers for the series

WORD COUNT: 14,7k

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an update; this isn't the final part lmao dangerous words coming from someone like me oops. there's probably going to be three more parts after this.

There is no sense of closure when you watch the jagged pieces of a broken man fall to the floor by your feet. The splintered edges offer no succour, no victory, when they come to rest along the scattered ruins of a delusional love affair: alcohol bottles—Kraken, Captain Morgan—and grease-stained boxes of takeaway, most unfinished in favour of satiating yourselves on flesh, sex.

(Booze, more often than not.)

Seeing him struggle to find meaning in what you say—watching that ethanol-soaked resignation filter through hazy, electric blue—brings a fresh pain instead, taking space in the hollow gaps where you expected vindication and self-worth to bleed through.

You're doing the right thing, after all. Aren't you?

Aren't you? (please, someone, anyone, say yes—)

Uncertainty is an uneasy, nauseating feeling inside your guts. Much like a broken bone, it emanates a visceral sense of perturbation through your body. Every synapse fires in protest; every nerve screaming out. They bellow one thing in unison: something is wrong and not quite right.

You feel their cries deep in your being. Each muscle twitch and frayed thought that passes carries the echo of it.

This pain, it seems, is cracking your ribs apart and exposing the rotting marrow to the open air. Slurping from the putrefying sludge, satiating itself on the sickness eroding you from within.

It's all wrong. It feels wrong.

Bear swallows. You watch the way his throat works around the bitterness that lashes across the cut of his brow; gyres darkening in his eyes. Storms on the horizon.

(You think you'd welcome the squall. Might embrace anything to get out of this place—)

“That's what you want?” He rasps, thick and gritty, and you think about the last time he sounded like that—all torn up, and broken. Words mangled in his throat. Husked out when he told you about Rip, about the boy, his daughter, and—

No. No.

None of this is what you want, and it pains you that he can't see that.

(Such a selfish, broken man.)

Inside the festering slurry of your marrow, an urge wells up. Bubbles in the putrid pools until it's frothing, raging against the walls keeping it trapped until it seeps through the cracks, leaking into your muscles, your tissue, your bloodstream.

This silly little body of yours carries it up to your heart where it sinks talons into your pericardium, subsumes the serous in this terrible essence, this idea, this whim—

(“what?” the scoff he lets out trails on the coattails of what might have been a laugh in another life. if he was another man, maybe. you, more honest with yourself. but you are just two broken people in a run-down bar. humour exists somewhere in the muzzle of a loaded pistol. “got a saviour complex or something?”

or something. or something—)

Because the thing is: you do.

You spend most weekends wandering around antique stores because you're convinced that everything deserves a home. A place of its own. You find the unwanted, the unsellable, and you let it take space in your lonely, cramped apartment.

And why not? No one else will buy it. You're, technically, helping the environment. It's a win-win.

(and more lies you tell yourself.)

These false promises are always made that one day, one of these days, you'll find something to do with it all—maybe you could learn how to make something out of it; stitch all the unuseable parts, the unwanted pieces, and create something that everyone will want—but so far, none of your rescues has ever been finished. Saved. They sit in a corner taking up space. Untouched. Unused. Collecting dust.

That insidious whim curls inside of your heart, and whispers:

it's never too late to try again. maybe this time, it'll work out for you—

It's the same one that lures you in, making you purchase a complete set of ugly-looking dolls because some ladies were recoiling at the sight of their lumpy, antediluvian faces, and you felt bad thinking that they were doomed to end up sitting on the shelf until they were unceremoniously tossed into the bin with all the other things that won't sell.

And the one, now, that stares at the terse set to Bear's shoulders, the lines rucked across his broad, the helplessness etched into ashlar, and considers that maybe all he needs is someone. A friend, maybe.

(And maybe, maybe, that it could be you—)

“Bear—” it would be so easy to swallow the words back down until you choke on them.

You breathe in. Taste nicotine in your throat; the phantom burn of a memory from long ago: one once buried under the rubble of your crumbling foundations, now rearing into this yawning abyss as you waver on the precipice. This vacuum that syphons you dry. Leaves you empty, gaping.

It’s your mum leaning over the railing of a mezzanine as she smokes a cigarette—the eighth in the last three hours, pack near gone—and tries (and fails; always, always, always) to find some temporal kinship with a higher power as you sit on the porch swing and drink in the scraps she tosses your way.

(Today, it’s the way the smoke curls in the periwinkle sky like a naked gospel; grand televangelist to a crowd of one.)

She scrambles within the ruins of her own making to seek answers to compensate for the lack of worth that slips from the cracks. Left behind again. Again, but it’s not her fault. It’s never her fault.

(You should know best, she tells you—you suckled from the shattered parts of herself before you broke away from the cradle of her arms. Genetics leaves you wrecked for company, for permanence.

It’s just not made for us, baby. We’re unloveable only because we love too much—)

An epiphany comes in the middle of her eighth cigarette, and she divines enough wisdom to come to the succinct conclusion that those broken pieces are not the cause of her misery.

(How could they be when they’re a part of her and she’s a part of everything?)

Can't fix a broken man, she murmurs into the midmorning fog, blood-red mouth splitting into a sneer. There was beauty, you thought, to be found in the pale yellow of her teeth against the pastel dusting of dawn. Rapturous, almost. You couldn't look away even as the words snaked through the underdeveloped fibres of your mind. They're like someone who's drowning, you know? They'll grab on to anyone that gets too close and try to pull them under, too. Maybe because they want to save themselves, or maybe because they don't want to die alone. Better to leave them behind.

Can't fix a broken man, (but maybe—)

Your dad tried to fix me, she adds, and it comes in the same cadence of an afterthought, blase; but the thinness in her voice, the reedy pitch of barely veiled urgency, all feigned indifference to the topic, all give her away. She's been waiting for this, you know. Gearing up in steady increments so that the blow lands harder when it's thrown.

Isn't that stupid? And he couldn't even bother to stick around. What a joke… But I guess some people are like that, huh? Couldn't be me, she scoffed, jabbing her finger in your direction. You could see the yellow of her nails beneath the pock marks in her chopped, blue nail polish. And don't let it be you, either. The best thing you could ever do for yourself and someone else is leave. Don't cheat. Don't be the other woman. Just fucking—

The bubble bursts, and in that breaking, a truth is revealed to you in some strange, hangover-induced epiphany brought on by dehydration, malnutrition, and the terrific idea of going home with a man who has never once talked to you while being completely sober. It screams—first and foremost—you are an idiot, but beyond that, you really are your father's child, aren't you?

Lost amid your memory, the emergence of a forgotten fallow, it’s Bear who shakes you awake when he reaches for you after the silence sat for too long. Fingers touching, too tender and too rough at the same time, and the juxtaposition makes you quiver as it ploughs disquiet into your being.

Tears pebble in your lash line, threatening to spill over. You haven't cried in a long time and yet, yet—

His hand folds over your wrist, tight and unrelenting. Shackles against your bones. Grinding them into soft, fine powder.

“C’mon,” he slurs, pleads; tugging you closer as if distance is what makes you say these things to him and not the heavy, overwhelming scent of alcohol wafting off of his numb tongue. “You don't know what you're saying right now—”

His fingers tighten. The midnight scabs on his knuckles tear from the strain, the stretch. Blood wells under the slit that lifts from his broken, battered skin. Pebbles like a tear-drop on the wrinkle of his bruised knuckle, and then sheds itself free. Running down the yellow mess of moulted flesh until it meets the cliff edge of where his palm rests against yours.

“You don’t mean it. You can’t mean that. Stay with me, stay—”

The alcohol makes him sway where he sits, eyes upturned but focused inward, lost to thoughts and feelings and places unreachable to you. Ephemeral lines in jaded, blue sands. It slips, too, from between his fingers. Uncatchable to anyone but the flush under his skin, the slur in his words.

Can’t fix a broken man.

The motion dislodges the droplet and it waterfalls over his palm until his blood kisses the clean, unmarred skin of your hand.

He doesn’t notice the way he bleeds on you (through you, in you; drowns you in it, in him—): outside of a thready determination built on drunk devotion, he doesn’t seem to see much at all. Clouded. Overcast. Those hazy eyes regard you with a thin, untouchable distance. Filmed over and too far gone for you to pull him back—

(and you can’t help but wonder if he even notices you or if, in those unending crevasses, an icy, broken bergschrunds, the misshapen silhouette of you strikes a different chord to him; if these slurred hymnals are just a hollow orison for someone else in your stead.)

—so you stop trying. Let it sit, let it rot. Smell the infection in the air as the wound splits apart. Gangrenous and beyond palliative help.

Something must flicker across your face sharp enough to cut through the fog he drowns himself inside because his eyes widen slightly, and his hand tenses around your wrist. Tight. Unyielding.

As his fingers dig in over your pisiform, deep enough to bruise—to mark you once more with his stain, his touch—you’re struck by the sudden thought of brittleness. It’s not something you’d ever considered yourself as—delicate, fragile—but with the way he holds you now, not at all dissimilar to the way he held on last night, fingers loosely wrapped around your wrist as he used your joints as a stress ball to calm himself down, you feel vulnerable. Swallowed whole, caught.

What once felt like a comfort, a sense of security as you moulded yourself into an anchor point, a lighthouse on the sandy, dark shore, for him to find, to swim for amid the roaring waves dragging him down, now feels like dead weight.

For the first time since you've met him, you taste chlorine in the back of your throat. Feel the pull of the currents dragging you down.

You know all too well what it feels like to drown.

You pull away. He clings tighter.

“Bear, please—”

Please, you think. Please, please, please—

(If you keep stripping yourself bare, you'll be nothing but bones—)

He doesn't even notice. Nothing, it seems, will pull his fixed attention from every minuscule expression that flickers across your face as if the mere notion of weakness, of hesitancy, will give him reason to hold on just that much harder.

“Can't just give up on this—” the words are tangled in his throat, caught on the end of a snarl, and vicious. He tugs on you, pulling you closer. “On us.”

“There's no us, Bear.”

And it isn't a lie. Of course, it isn't.

There's an empty chasm between you both, void of any tangible substance. Whatever he thinks this is, it can't work. Won't. Not in the real world. Not outside of the bottom of a bottle.

You won't be his crutch. His bad habit. His midlife crisis amid a downward spiral.

You can't be.

Won't be.

(you will not be the other woman. you will not be your father's child.)

And it isn't remotely the same, you know. Bear's wife is—

Dead. Gone.

—and yet, this whole situation still makes you feel like a homewrecker even though the home you demand he returns to is empty.

Selfish, you think, but you can't even begin to know who you're referring to in this beautifully devastating moment. Bear, for chasing ghosts, drowning them in alcohol and bad choices and vices that end with bringing strange women back to his lonely hotel room just to feel more than the vicious bite of grief in his chest.

Or you, for pulling away from this drowning man because you're not strong enough to save him and yourself at the same time.

(or—something sneers—you just hate the idea of being like either of your parents, but what can you do when you've stolen all of their bad parts for your own?)

You think of the man in the bar. One hundred dollars to send him back home. Where he belongs.

(...he can't destroy himself like this. You'd know that, though, as his friend.

send him home, alright?)

“Go home,” you say, harsh and severe. All the things that your mother wished she said to him. Regurgitated words spat out by his feet because borrowed doctrines are you've ever known.

A fissure crackles across his expression, cutting through the fog. It's anger, bitterness, pain—some strange, fantastical amalgamation of the three—and it coalesces into broken defiance where it sits, clinging to the glossy grease around his brow, his nose.

It makes your fingers itch with the urge to soothe—to unfurl the wrinkles in his brow, to tuck this grown man close to your chest until the tension in the thick set of his shoulders liquifies in your hands, and he melts into malleable putty.

(Another trinket to collect dust on your mantle.)

You swallow it down—the salt and blood, and the pathetic pulse of your heart, and all. Hurt him, you think. Hurt him deeply. Deeper, still. Push him away and run. Run. Keep running until your legs give out, until your lungs collapse because if you don’t, if you don’t, you know you’ll stay with him until he throws you to wayside, until he wakes up one morning and decides that you are not enough compared to the big, wide world just outside his door; that your walls and your roof are not big enough for him—

“Please. Go home. Go home, Bear—”

Your words land like you knew they would, and he reels back for a moment, as if struck, but the anger, the twisted pain etched in the lines of his unkempt beard, his greasy brow, make stand firm. Unmoving.

You catch the acrid scent of gasoline on his skin when he leans forward, forcing himself back into your space with his chin dipped low, eyes blazing with a defiant inferno. His scarred, battle-battered hands drop to his splayed knees, gripping tight. Holding firm.

(Or holding himself back—)

His voice is a matchstick when he speaks. Smouldering embers sparking to life. Renewed with a sense of purpose you can't make sense of. What set him off? What made him flip—

(You're not worth it. You're not worth it—)

“M’not giving up on this.”

His jaw is slack. Laxed. The words slip out slow, languid. Curling with a touch of humid derision, mordant humour, at the idea that after all of this, everything (nothing, you think—nothing, nothing, nothing), you could just walk away unscathed.

If I burn, the crackle in his throat says, promises: then you're burning with me.

“Bear—”

“I'm not giving up on us.”

He leaves, and takes another part of you with him.

(You sever a part of yourself and leave it in the mouldering hotel room that still reeks of stale sweat, cheap whisky, and sex.)

The aftermath goes like this:

A tsunami of regret and indecision dredges up terrible, awful things—phantom memories and stains in the shape of fingerprints that pollute the inside of your psyche—ones that should have been left to rot at the bottom of your buried trenches. It makes leaving harder than it should have been considering the abrupt nature of this—whatever it is.

(Untitled. Unnameable. Unknowable.)

There's betting on losing dogs, and then there's this:

Pacing all your cards, all your coins, on one that wasn't even in the race.

One foot in, one foot out doesn't apply when Bear has never even stepped over the threshold. That notion roots itself in the scorched fibres of your chest, knotweed in your alveoli, as you scent liquor on his breath when he speaks. A cavernous distance grows between want and reality.

You thought you knew him. Learned and memorised all his hard lines, his soft valleys, the thick thatches of hair that dust his body like the dark depths of a riverbed; a nebula of loosely connected scar tissue—Orion's belt made of fine, silvery lines—and pock marks from blemishes and bumps born from the rich, enigmatic tapestry of his life beyond the mere sliver of you. Crows' feet in the corner of his eyes, but only when they're crested in pleasure, twisted in that tender sort of humour only comfort brings.

It takes you a weekend to map out the burly topography of a man, and only seconds to realise you know nothing about him outside of this rapacious intimacy.

And even though you want to feel like this was the right choice—because it is, it was—you can't seem to stem the sheer brutality in which regret tears through you as you stand alone in a desolate parking lot under the waning sun. A whimpering ending to a desolate beginning.

Was it loneliness that brought you here, or just the mundanity of fearing failure? It's these unanswerable questions, these skewed thoughts, that tumble over themselves, struggling to stay buoyant in the molasses of your sicky grey matter.

(Let them sink. Let them drown.)

These distant sentiments barely echo in the gaping vacuum of that is your mind. Untethered, whispering by as you stare, transfixed, at the broad strokes of pretty pastels in periwinkle, tangerine, and bluebonnet are rapidly consumed by the darkening sky that opens like a chasm above your head. The sight of it a little too close to the colours that danced in the aether when you both broke, finally, meeting somewhere in the middle, tangled webs. Broken people coming together in a cataclysm that was always, always, headed down a single path to devastation.

(The perfect conclusion to a story without a beginning.)

It's something you shouldn't think about. Let them sink. Let them drown—

This looping, knotted thread is a dangerous one to follow—the agony of watching Bear storm off (even after asking, demanding, that you let him drive you home; an offer you quickly refused) is still raw and gaping; a pulsating wound in the back of your throat—but you're brittle enough to want it to hurt, maybe. Chasing that unequivocal high only self-flagellation brings.

Masochism in failure. In heartbreak by your own design.

And it should hurt, right? This lonely climax (not with a bang, but a fizzle) should devastate you. Cut you to the core. Leave false starts on your bones. Scars on your ribcage. A meteor shower in milky white. Something tangible. Permanent.

But instead, it feels unfinished. More of a sudden paroxysm than a defining choice you've made. Concretely. Absolutely. It's a hollow win for your bruised ego. Your battered pride. It slinks, somewhere, in the depths of this renewed pain, and licks at the tender wound made when you pierced your chest and ripped your heart cleanout.

Threw it at the floor by his feet.

Quid pro quo, maybe. Or a desperate bid to rid yourself of the Bear-shaped hole now taking residence inside.

(It's fine, though. That pesky thing, all wrapped up tight in thick layers of duct tape, has never really felt like it belonged to you, anyway—)

It's all such a beautifully horrific panoply, you find. Paradoxical. Oxymoronic. Smothering and somehow claustrophobic at the same time. Being burnt alive and dying from hypothermia.

The cudgel of pain to your chest is white-hot and vicious, but there's a seismic polynya in the lavascape of sadness that drapes through the topography of your being like a sluice, and in that little island of ice sits the unrelenting sense of flat resignation.

You left Bear of your own free will, but in the jaded fibres of your being, you know it was all—

Inevitable.

And fuck—

(fuck, fuck, fuck—)

Was it? Was it all inexorable or are you just making up flimsy excuses for yourself?

Yes, you think. And then: no. Maybe. Maybe.

(you are your father's child—

and your mother's broken daughter.)

You want to cry, and scream, and break the pain against something willing to fight back, to cut you just as deeply as you hack at it, but all you have are fragmented memories swarming you in this vacant parking lot on the wrong side of Virginia Beach, and—

(don't let it in, don't—)

—you chase it, lure it all in as you compare the blue in the sleepy gloam to the colour of his eyes, and then—

Your back against a brick wall, his knuckles sticky with blood closing around the nape of your neck, pulling you closer. Closer. The wide expanse of his palm swallowing your wrist as he led you to his truck; then, heavy on your thigh the entire—ill-advised—drive to the Motel 6 down the road where you stand now, fragile, raw, and all alone.

When this all started, when you finally had the cobbled remains of Bear’s lucidity in your arms, the flat press of his attention against your jugular, you considered it to be a victory—

(a victory in amber)

—but hindsight is a cruel, mocking laugh in the back of your head. Twisting the knife deeper, severing the fraying threads that anchor you to yourself. With a sadistic glee it tells you that while you might have won the battle over the bottle, you lost the war (—abysmally, and without even the haze of a fever in your veins to numb the hollowness of your loss).

You just can’t fix a broken man, and you certainly can’t keep him afloat all on your own when you’re too busy trying not to drown yourself.

It's just that the weight of your shared brokenness was incompatible and insurmountable to the grief in Bear’s heart, but really. You just wonder if it was inevitable that everything you offered would be passed over in favour of numbed indifference at the bottom of a bottle. For someone, something, else. And while you might have been the one to leave first, but somewhere in the misplaced hurt inside of your chest threatening to collapse in on itself, folding into a black hole that devours all of your messy, ugly parts, you know that Bear was never really there, anyway.

That thought stings more than it should because you know, you know—

It’s just not made for us, baby.

—and maybe it’s all your fault for forgetting that inevitability in the first place.

(shame on me—)

The thread you warned yourself not to chase gets tangled around your throat, choking you with the very same line you should have stayed far away from. It feels like hollow cyclicity—a gluttonous ouroboros gorging on itself—when it all, eventually, leads back to the beginning.

Your fault, again, for trusting broken guidelines in the dark. For betting on losing dogs. For picking up another stray who already had a home. Another trinket to gawk at that ended up being chock full of arsenic, killing you with every touch.

But He's gone, now, despite the fire that raged in his eyes, he still left you here to burn on your own.

(inevitable—)

You should learn when to let go, you suppose, and fight the urge to bite your nails down to the wick just to taste blood in your mouth that isn't his.

For the most part, though, you’re fine.

You’ve always been a good liar (“terrible, actually,” Bear snorts, and it’s the closest you’ve ever come to seeing him roll his eyes. “Jesus, never play poker if I'm not around—”), and especially to yourself, so after a moment of self-reflection in the form of a scalding bath and a purging cry in your car as you shoddily cut the Joe Graves-shaped cancer from your aching heart before it can metastasise and infect you further, you come out of it all standing, somehow.

It might be the pastiche of indifference you slip into; a facsimile of the one, jaded and so bone achingly tired, that fell over you when you stumbled out of the bathroom, ready for something more only to find a man half-gone already to a bottle in the span of a few moments alone with his thoughts.

Regardless of what it is, it works (—in shades, and only as long as you cling so tightly to anger that your fingers bleed and your joints ache—), and you let the familiarity of your unpractised trot to some gnarled finish line lead you forward.

A clean break, you think (—hope: plead, bargain; wishing so hard on every eyelash that falls, every eleven you come across so that something, someone, listening might cradle the delicate splinters in their arms and nurse this whim, this want, into fruition), and you'll be fine. Fine.

You have to be.

But the thing is this:

Despite your best efforts to put some sense of distance between you and the heartache that must be, at least a little bit, on par with being gutted, a clean break is never clean, is it?

Case in point—

Thinking about him makes you bleed, and you think about him constantly.

(Regret, then, is a wellspring in which the pain drinks and you didn't know a body could thirst this much.)

And it's made even worse when you realise just how bullish a man like Joe Graves can be.

Maybe it's the thought of everything that had built up between you shattering into pieces that awakens this sense of urgency within him. Clinging, perhaps, to the only form of comfort he knows. The only one who toughed it out—in part, due to your employment obligation; the rest? an unresolved saviour complex when it comes to the people even a contrarian wouldn't place a bet on. Maybe.

(Probably. Undoubtedly.

You stopped trying to find the reason why you kept picking up the strays who always bite you in the end.)

Whatever the reason, Bear is persistent. Relentless.

He makes it Wednesday (you'd left him behind Sunday evening—day of the Sabbath, you learn; how fucking ironic) before his campaign starts.

It's forty-six missed calls, half a dozen texts (because he doesn't like texting—he likes talking. Face to face. No fallacies, no bullshit), and thirty voicemails (twenty-seven of which are drunken ramblings you don't even bother to listen to, and the rest—

Pick up. We need to talk.

Listen, I—

I fucked up. I fucked everything up—

Delete. Delete. Delete.

What are you supposed to do with any of that, anyway?)

The crux of the issue that Bear seems to miss swims in ethanol and leaves behind a five-minute voicemail filled with slurred I miss you's amid a background chorus of a rowdy bar. Then, a woman's voice—a woman who isn’t you—urging him back for more shots.

You can imagine how the rest of that night unfolded.

(You wonder if the word meant for you—I miss you—was still on his tongue when he followed her back.)

It's your fault (again; always) in the end because while you don't answer him—neither text, nor call; all voicemails deleted—you can't bring yourself to block him, either.

You let it sit somewhere in the murky middle. Untouched but looked at. Longed for.

It would be so easy to just give in. To let Bear back into your life—properly this time, maybe—and to take him up on those slurred promises made at two in the morning about coffee shops on the boardwalk, and breakfast at the Gulfstream, and movies and dinner, and talking until three in the morning, fucking in the back seat of his pick-up truck—

But that's the thing about yearning, isn't it?

Everything seems sweeter when you want it bad enough.

So, you drown yourself in him. Stand as close to the fire as you can without burning alive.

Dousing yourself in the scent of ethanol cleaner. Clinging to broken pinky promises. Thinking about peanut butter and bacon staining your fingers. Prying information from rotting timber, and keeping the saprophyte that falls off the wood in your pocket for safekeeping. Filling space on a drumroll because you talk too much, anyone ever tell you that?

(ad infinitum.)

Taping the ugliest bible verses to the back of your eyelids just to get closer, to feel closer, only to come to the realisation that you have no stake in religion to care about the deeper meaning behind it all. Metaphors and imagery are hollow when they mean nothing at all.

There's no comfort, no succour, to be found in the thin pages.

(You roll them up and smoke them instead. Easier to digest that way, you find.

Bear would probably hate it, and that alone balms the hurt some. Marginally, infinitesimally, because nothing can cauterise this gaping hole in your chest so you might as well fill it up with paper mache instead. Origami cranes with how much you hate him miss him need him want him written on the inside.)

You ache. Moulder. But you let it all rot inside of you until it's a congealed mess of putrefying memories and the moulted remains of the yearning you kept locked in shackles; the one that keeps biting, gnawing at the limbs of its cage to free.

It's easier to let it all decay together in a controlled space so that you can bisect the necrosed mass in a single go. Sever the limb to save the body. It's a mantra you repeat as you call in sick to work over and over again.

The flu, you say, and if the sniffle you give is from crying, and the cough from the weed you've been smoking all morning (blue dream, the shaggy-haired kid tells you with a nod; adds: the good shit), well. No one—especially your shitty boss and his shitty work ethic—has to know. You balm the hurt in a way that makes you feel good, smoothing it all over with trashy reality television (though, the Japanese dating show you end up dozing off to is pretty good, admittedly), and junk food.

Moving on—even some sad, pathetic facsimile of it—helps. Routines forged in wilful avoidance take the edge off of the livewires inside of your body, nerves overstimulated and burning up with a fever much too hot, too vicious, for you to palliate with home remedies.

And so, you throw yourself into it. Become a human battering ram against the ghosts in your head.

Things quickly become more of a coping mechanism than a potential, but that's fine. It's all fine. It'll work in the long run until the bruises that line your flesh fade along with the want and the hope, and the terrible memories, too.

(Terrible, in the way only a desperate, all-consuming one-sided love can be.)

All of it up in flames, in smoke.

You burn through an ounce in retaliation while watching his name flicker across your screen, and then spend an hour googling whether or not weed is really addictive (it isn't, but the routine, the habit, can be), before deciding that this whole affair is stupid, anyway.

It's a carousel of self-pity, spite, and masochism that feels like it might never end. Your efforts to palliate the sickness amount to a week of paid sick time spent watching a slew of old romantic dramas on repeat, and ignoring the string of texts that pour through (talk to me, let me fix this, let me—). All voicemails are immediately deleted before you can even hear the hitch in his voice.

It's duct tape over a gaping wound. Drifting aimlessly along Lethe, careless and indifferent, but all the while, desperately reaching down and cupping water into your palm for a sip that never seems to quench the thirst in the back of your throat.

You think you could drink until you're just standing in a dry riverbed and still feel parched. Effloresced by your own hand.

(as usual. as always—)

But this wound is still raw, still tender, even beneath the tape.

Ignore it. Ignore it—

(—before the edges begin to tear. Cloved down the middle.)

Another buffer is born when you get a text message from your boss—u comin in tmrrw?—and realise you can't avoid it, work, forever.

The prospect of going back on Friday evening—tomorrow, you suppose (the days have been slipping like molasses through your spread fingers)—makes you nervous.

You're not ready to see Bear.

But more than that (deeper than it, too), you’re not ready to see Bear unaffected by all of this. Sitting in his usual spot, in their chair he barely fits in, ordering the same drink over and over and over again.

Moving on, too—in his own way. Meeting someone else.

(His horoscope holds no punches when it tells you a past relationship may re-enter your life, which may open your eyes to a world of new experiences—)

It isn't as if he usually pairs celibacy with his whisky, and with the plethora of ignored messages (read receipt turned off), unanswered phone calls, and deleted voicemails, you know it's inevitable for him to give up. To get the hint—whatever that might be. Move on, maybe?

(get your shit together and chase this properly, Bear, jesus christ—)

You consider calling in again, but without any paid sick days left at your disposal, you know you can't afford to. So, you swallow it.

(And if it takes a little longer than usual to get ready for work, then so be it.)

Even with all of the false bravado you can scrape together come Friday, your nerves are frayed. Raw. The anxiety rolls off of you in waves, noticeable enough that even the regulars loitering outside (the ones who usually try and bum smokes off of any passersby, yourself included) offer you a cigarette.

(Politely turned down, but fuck—fuck—you wish you took it.)

The first hour into your shift is spent trying to pretend you're not aware of the way your roaming eyes skirt to the door in thirty-second intervals. Traitors. Or the involuntary flinch each time the door opens.

It would be easier to get lost in the familiarity of this desolate dive bar on the fringes of town, and so, you do.

(Try to, anyway.)

Immersing yourself in the routine of it all—the motions of pouring drinks, sizing the newcomers up (profiling their personage down to a drink and a random idiosyncrasy); the astringent scent of alcohol, the mild barley and hops; the noise of hushed conversations lulling between the static rumble of the television (sports, per usual).

The clock ticks down the seconds, the minutes, hours. You pour drinks. Clock the local gossip. Listen to the patter of condensation dripping into the tin bucket beneath the hole in the roof. In between the threadbare stirrings of routine, you find yourself waiting with dread gnawing at your insides until they're shredded and raw, pulsing ligaments burning with the fever of infection.

But it's moot. All of it.

He doesn't come back to the bar.

Where you expect to see his broad shoulders slouched over the counter, head hanging low over his steady accumulation of shot glasses (a drinking challenge with only one participant; his demons the spectators), the seat he usually occupies remains empty.

And maybe you're idealistic and stupid and wet behind the ears, but a part of you expected him to. To wander up to the counter with roses and chocolate and sobriety etched into the Neptune blue glow of his eyes, and to pick you, to choose you, but—

A fairytale.

The box on the counter—complaints—$5—is picked up by some wayward frat boy, and the mocking laughter that follows makes you think of cobalt blue, and peanut butter and bacon burgers in the empty parking lot near the beach, watching the endless midnight black ocean rock against the sandy shore. Talking. Talking. Talking.

Everything. Nothing. All the things in between.

You told him about college—failed the first semester, and then my dad… well. Anyway, had to drop out for a bit. But. I went back. Stupid, I know, and it doesn't matter but—

His hand falls on your arm, fingers a little greasy from the sweet potato fries, the ones he kept sneaking from your pile when he thinks you aren't looking, and he says:

It matters to you.

And it did, but only because it was something your dad mentioned a long time ago—I'd be proud if you followed in my footsteps—and despite everything he'd ever done, his attention, his affection, was all you'd ever wanted.

Yeah, you'd said, and stared out at the vat of blue until your eyes burned. Yeah, I guess so.

Well, he had peanut butter staining the corner of his mouth when you blinked the sting from your eyes, and turned to him. What do you wanna do?

Nothing. Everything.

Your dad once picked you up from practice, hands tight around the steering wheel. He filled you in about his day (stupid fuckin' guy from upstate came down and bought all the houses we were fixing to sell), complained about your mother (god, you know, that woman didn't even tell me what school to pick you up from? Said I should know where my daughter goes to school, as if I'm not working all damn day to keep you fed, and—), and gave you the biggest piece of advice you'd ever get:

"Look, no job is better than real estate. All that crap you think you want to do? Not important. All you need is four walls and a roof, and that's it. The rest is secondary."

(If that was true, why weren't you enough for him? Why weren't your four walls and roof enough to keep him?)

A shrug. I don't know. I've never been good at anything. You think of bruised knees. Scraped skin. Chasing a car, a dream, that never once slowed down. Can't even run right, it seems.

I can teach you. He clears his throat when you look at him, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand twice but somehow misses the dollop of peanut butter tangled in his beard. M’used to training men, I'm sure I can whip you into shape. Teach you how to run. Put you through the wringer until you come out sprinting on the other side.

"Teach me how to swim instead."

The bark of laughter he let out was cut off when you held your pinky up.

His brows bounced, incredulous. "Really?"

"A Taurus always keeps their promise."

"Christ's sake," he shakes his head, and you count the lines on his forehead when he turns, and rubs his fingers against his temple so hard, you wonder if he's trying to chisel through his skull to get at where it hurts the most. "I might not even be a Taurus."

"When were you born?"

His tongue pokes out from between his teeth, chin dropping to his chest when he huffs. You watch the way his shoulders shake, the flesh softening around his neck when he dips it low, and wonder if this is what it was like to yearn.

His eyes spark, Neptune blue, when he looks up. He says nothing, but holds his pinky up to yours, the digit swallowing yours whole.

It's a promise. He squeezes your hand in three pulses. One. Two. Three. You think you might get lost in the canyons that keep dividing inside of his eyes.

"Bet you were born in April."

"Not even close." He grins, all teeth, and drops your hand. Motions to the fries spilling over your console with his chin. "Finish up."

"Oh, did you even leave any for me? Thought you ate them all."

"Watch it."

Your stomach churns at thoughts, the memories. Plagued by him, it seems. So tantalisingly out of reach, and yet—your phone vibrates in your pocket; another voicemail left for you to listen to in your car and pretend that this whole thing is fine—so close.

He's everywhere, it seems. The scent of this place makes you think of him, and the stench of sickness—

Every square inch brings back some reminder of him.

When he got too trashed the first few visits and stumbled into the washroom. His bulk falls into the cheap door frame, and sends the ugly photo of what might have been the boardwalk crashing the floor. His call of: take it outta my tab when it shattered into pieces.

(You didn't. You hated that picture, anyway.)

When he knocked over his shot of tequila when you told him you thought he'd look really handsome in a beanie—a touch too bold, high off of the ethanol that leaked from his pores—and the rubescent smear over the bridge of his nose that followed. The ruddy stain on the counter—nail polish, you think, from that time a group of bridesmaids stumbled in after a wedding on the beach, and used the washroom to freshen up—matches the shade of his blush.

You spend an hour before closing scrubbing the counter down until your fingers are cracked and dry and burning from the chemicals you douse on the cheap, aged wood. It doesn't come out. Nothing you do will ever make the table unsticky. It's too far gone.

Like him. Like—

"Whisky," a man barks, slapping a dollar bill down on the stain. "Two shots."

Four walls and a roof, right? Right. Right. Right.

The walls here bleed condensation from the humidity outside, and the roof leaks when it rains. Always. It's patched up with duct tape and pipe dreams.

(Like you—)

The box on the counter catches his attention, rheumy eyes skimming the words. He scoffs. "Funny. Make me a drink worth a tip, and maybe I'll—"

"You know what?" You snap, throwing the wet cloth down with a splat that sends droplets pelting across his abdomen. There's a vindictiveness in seeing the splatter on his smooth, unwrinkled shirt.

Your eyes sting from the bleach, the lemon cleaner. Pebbled tears in your lash line threaten to spill over, but you swallow it all down. You won't cry. Not now. Not anymore.

Your hands twitch, an aborted motion to scour the wetness from your lashes, but you stop it in time. Curl your fingers into fists instead.

(And stupidly, nonsensically, you have the sudden, passing regret over washing your hands of the blood he'd spilled on your skin.)

"I don't work here."

"Since when?"

"Now. Get your own whisky, and take your shitty tip, and shove it up your ass—"

Quitting your only source of income certainly isn't the wisest decision you've ever made—but you've never been wont to make good ones, anyway, and so, you think it's all perfectly fine, considering.

Considering.

If anything, it's better than waiting around for the inevitable collapse of this shaky, patchwork foundation of paper-mache you cobbled together (reinforced with pipe dreams) to come crumbling down around you when Bear wandered in.

(If he ever would—

Fuck. You hope he does. Hope he doesn't.

Get better. Come back—)

You sit in your car at the end of your shift—the very last one after several odd years of growing roots down into the worn floorboards, and keeping more secrets about the occupants in this town than you care to admit—and just—

Breathe.

Sort of.

It's twisted in a way that makes you entirely too aware of what everyone would think if they knew about it. So, you cup this little secret between the palms of your hands, and cradle it to your chest, only exposing it to the outside world when things become too much. It's easier to say you count to ten—in, out, in, out—than to admit that your methods of self-soothing, of quelling the visceral sense of anxiety from pinballing around inside your guts like a marble, is to lean back, close your eyes, and pretend that you're back in the deep end of the swimming at the local chapter of a YMCA.

Drowning, of course.

Or some fictive version of it.

It comes to life in smeared yellow against hazy blue. A cacophony of muted sounds in the background—exultant shrieks of children, splashes in the distance, the low chatter of garbled conversation—is all you can hear in your underwater sanctuary, but only just. Noise is distorted and strange. A warbled mimicry of noise.

Your world is pressed into a cerulean marble, untouchable and inescapable. You linger in the centre, floating aimlessly in stagnation.

Down here, nothing matters. Everything is dissolved in the heavy chlorine that saturates the cold waters, and whatever resilient pieces remain sink low to the pool floor, scattered around the yellow goggles just within arm's reach.

You sink with them. Your thoughts become liquid; mercury slinking around your head. Intangible. Nonsensical. And above all else—silent.

Or they're supposed to be.

But even down here where nothing can touch you, where no one noticed you haven't surfaced in ages, your thoughts are carried by the lulling currents. Saved from your murky grey matter, from the sap that traps them in the mouth of a pitcher plant, they buoy to the surface, unmoored now. Free to scream at you in whispers.

You think of Bear.

Or rather, you think about not thinking about Bear.

About other things. And nothing—forced white noise. Static. What you're going to do now that you don't have a job. The scabs on his bloodied knuckles. No. Work, maybe. Finishing up that degree you promised yourself you'd get, if only to fill some absent void in your chest—or a futile obligation to a man who forgot your birthdays. Who spelled your name wrong on holiday cards—on the rare occasions he ever bothered to send them.

Other things. Other things—your faucet is leaking. You'll need to call the property manager to fix it. You need to get gas, too. Groceries.

Faintly, you catch the musk of his cologne still clinging to your passenger seat when you breathe in. Hold it, count to ten. It makes you remember the warmth of his humid breath on your cheek when he leaned in close, tapping your console as he pointed out your CHECK ENGINE light was on. Had been, you confessed sheepishly, for a few weeks up to that point.

Stupid pothole, you grumbled around the electricity running down your spine when his arm brushed yours as he leaned back with a derisive snort.

You caught the headiness of white oak, musk, when he turned his face to you, decidedly unamused by your answer, and flatly told you that you were driving around in a death trap.

Things not even on its last leg—it's in the damn grave.

Whatever, you shrugged. I'll just hit another pothole on the way home and it'll turn off.

Jesus Christ—

He didn't smell terrible. Faded cologne from a few days ago. Something woodsy. Cedar, maybe. Leather, smoke, pine. Sweat from the unrelenting humidity. Loam clinging to his skin. Spiced rum around his collar when he spilled his drink down his chin (you, eagerly, hungrily watching the amber droplet roll down the length of his neck—). He always seems to smell like he had been working in a thick, taiga forest in the dead of winter. Cindersap. Evergreen. Sweat-soaked leather. Chopped wood.

It congeals in your senses. Glueing to soft tissue, embedding itself in your skin. Permanent, unshakeable.

Unwashed sheets shouldn't be appealing. Motel shampoo. Cheap soap. The muted smell of old, stale cigarettes.

And yet, in this marbleised world, you think of it.

Of his skin, and the way it feels against yours. The slight sheen of grease along his nose when it nudges the soft slope of your neck. The rough drag of his beard over your pulse. Wry curls that end up on your tongue after he'd kiss you.

Any plans on shaving?

He dragged his cheek over your collarbones, eyes lidded, heavy. None at all. That a deal breaker?

You hold your breath until your lungs start to quiver, to ache; until you're dangling precariously on the verge of hypoxia with ink blots splashing across your vision in a garish Rorschach (they're all butterflies. with knives. what does that say about me, doc?). Phosphenes scatter in a nebula of colour. Your throat constricts around nothing, empty. Empty. The urge to swallow follows on the coattails of a pitifully fleeting euphoria. Temporal and untouchable, but you still reach out, grabbing and grasping with straining fingers because you'll hate yourself forever if you don't try. Scrambling, desperately, to catch cosmic dust on the tips of your fingers. To imbue your disjointed cracks with the chemical makeup of a Magellanic cloud until your broken parts burn incandescent. Kintsugi in cuts, scraps, of Andromeda.

But for as much as you want to shatter your lungs into infinitesimal pieces, and scatter them across the universe, your body has a failsafe against stupidity.

It forces you to gasp, gulping down thin, crisp air until you feel the burn in your chest from overexertion.

You open your eyes, and wish the world around you was still draped in teal and hazy yellow. That you could taste chlorine in the back of your throat. It's a brutal awakening to find a gossamer of silken midnight draped over the parking lot in the back of the dive bar. Empty, barren, save for yourself and the chef. A man you guess you'll never see again.

Soft, crushed ochre smears a hazy ring in the east. The dawning sun of a new day.

Leaning against the old leather of your car, your eyes cut to the console briefly. The CHECK ENGINE light is off. You made Bear groan, out loud, when you hit a pothole on the freeway and it flicked off, like you knew it was. Problem solved. More duct tape over what is probably something wrong with your engine (probably dented the filter in your catalytic converter, Bear grumbled, and you nodded along, pretending like you knew what that meant).

A light catches your eye. Your phone buzzes on the dashboard, screen illuminated in the reflective surface of your window.

You could pretend you were getting a call from RAEB if you tried hard enough. Answered it, maybe, and feigned ignorance while you chatted away to him like nothing happened. Like you sometimes don't try to drown yourself on land.

You reach for it, fingers tingling at the last vibrations before the screen cuts out, and bring it close.

It takes a second, but the voicemail icon pops up in the notification bar beside a text from your friend sent hours earlier begging you to come out next weekend (haven't seen you in forever okay?? come out w us!!).

You don't know why he keeps trying. Why he's so persistent over something that is, quite decidedly, nothing.

The icon taunts you. You hate seeing it—always have. It can't be swiped away. Can't be hidden. It irks you somewhat, seeing this little symbol.

Make it go away—

You shouldn't. Not when your insides are this raw, this fractured. Broken. But you turn your phone over in your hands for a moment, mood mulish and itching for something. A fight, maybe. Something to be angry about, justifiably. To vent your frustrations.

You tap it before you really think things through, watching as it dials VOICEMAIL and the automated message pops up after a ring.

Please enter your password—

You have one new message. To play your messages, press one—

It starts shaky—like he's moving. You can hear the shuffle of his body, the rasp of his shirt. A door slams. He huffs.

Look, uh. I'm not… I'm not good at this kind of thing. I was hoping—hoping we could talk… but. I guess I, uh. Anyway—

It goes quiet. You reach up to hit SEVEN on the keypad, delete the message like all the others, but a noise stops you. The screen hums under your finger.

I've been thinking lately. About a lot of things. The team, myself. You. I made—some bad calls. Got some good men…uh, into some trouble. The kind of trouble you… don't walk away from.

It made me think about Rip. I told you about him, right? In the—the motel. Rip is—Rip was… important to me. To us. Saved my life. In Iraq. Mosul. Bullet nearly hit me but somehow, he pulled me back just in time, took the bullet instead. Right in his stomach. And you know, he, uh—he huffs. It sounds like a laugh, but one he's choking on. He got right back up and took the bastard out. Just—wasted him. I owe him my life. Always have. It's muffled, as if he has his hand pressed to his mouth, keeping the words in. Should have saved him, but I couldn't. Couldn't do a damn thing to help him. I let him get that bad and I knew. I fucking—I knew. I saw it. Watched him spiral. And now—shit. Now I'm—uh, talking to your voicemail at four in the morning—

You think you catch what am I doing before the line cuts out.

Fog settles in the midmorning dawn. You lean against the headrest, clutching your phone, and try not to think at all.

(wash, rinse, repeat)

The hole in your chest, filled in with clay and papier-mache, crumbles under the seaspray.

What am I doing. It stays with you.

These flimsy excuses become a house of cards.

It doesn't surprise you much at all when they wobble, falling on top of you.

It's his name flashing across your screen—just Bear—as you lay in bed days later, pretending not to think about him that starts it all.

(again, again, again)

This is all a cruel sort of timing, you think, and feel the harsh thud of your heart so strongly against your rib cage that you wonder if the silly thing might break through them yet.

You shouldn't answer. Know, without any hint of uncertainty, that Bear has the potential to pull you back in—fish to a pretty, glimmering lure—and that the moment you acquiesce to one thing, others will immediately follow in rapid succession, much too quick for you to keep up with.

There will be no stopping the deluge once it breaks.

And yet—

What did you expect?

The words thrown back into your face echo in the small of your flat as the walls around you wobble, teetering on the edge of collapse.

Like most things when it comes to him.

After the second buzz, one that sends a thrill through your spine that you refuse to give attention to, you hesitantly press your finger against the green answer key and slowly bring the phone up to your face, inches away from your nose, before stopping. Abruptly.

You can handle Bear at a distance, you think, and so, deciding better than to have him murmur directly into your ear, you quickly tap the speaker button, and stammer out a muzzy greeting.

“...Bear?”

There's a sharp inhale that threads through the speaker, and you know, all at once, that he hadn't expected you to pick up. Was, instead, ready to meet and reluctantly embrace the cool, blithe distance of your voicemail.

“You answered,” he hedges, and you wonder if the wariness in his tone means anything deeper. “I didn't think you would.”

Despite his honesty, there are shades of derision tainting the gruff timbre.

“I wasn't going to,” you volley back, matching the fickleness of his misplaced scorn with your own.

“Then why did you?”

“You know why,” you admit quietly.

No one is around to see your boundaries crumble. To watch as the cards you kept so close to your chest dip once, quick enough for him to glimpse them, to see what is tucked in the palm of your hand.

In that loneliness, you find a sense of freedom that you had been missing. One tinged in the bitter coat of nostalgia.

It feels too much like those nights spent arguing about the meaning behind the perfect pour (and why yours would always be trash), and showing him abysmal creations on Instagram in a thinly veiled attempt to make him see that you weren't, objectively, the worst at it.

Back when you held the patchwork remains of your bruised, duct tape heart out over the countertop that never seemed to ever be clean as an offering to a man who bluntly looked down into the nozzle of his bottle instead.

He huffs a little, then. Put-off, maybe, by the distance you pitch when giving in is always just within reach. “I don't see the problem.”

“Well, yeah…” you mutter, shuffling in bed to get comfortable. You drag your knee to your chest, as the other stretches out in the sheets, and lazily wrap your arm around your shin, fingers digging into your flesh. Bruising, biting. It centres you, this fleeting pain. “You wouldn't, but I'll have you know—”

It's comfortable. The thought is a battering ram, one that hits hard, vicious, and dredges up the realisation of just how much you missed this. And just how easy this all is with him, even know when your heart is in tatters and you can hear the slur in his words (though, that might be his usual mumble—the man is hard to understand on a sober day, what with his penchant to grit words out between his teeth, as if he needs to tear them to shreds, to chew on them, before forcing them out), the normalcy in all of this, or as normal as this abnormal situation can get, is a bludgeon to your resolve.

“...what, huh? What'll you have me know?”

You'll get suckered back in again, but this time, all the way to the event horizon. Inescapable.

“You know, Bear.”

It's flimsy when he huffs, and sounds too much like relief when he growls: “Then why fight it?”

“I don't want to talk about this right now.”

The line goes still, but you catch the hitch in his throat all the same. “We should. I can fix this. We can fix this. You can't just decide—”

You can, you think, and drop your forehead to your knee, letting the phone slide down the valley of thigh and stomach where it comes to rest on the clothed crease of your hip bone. A prison. Your body is the cage.

Not being able to see him gives you some sense of power back, and you reach for it. Needing to wield something decisive and distant before the rough timbre of his voice, his desperation, scoured your resolve into thin powder.

“ Just give up, Bear. It's over. There's nothing to fix because there was nothing there to begin with.”

“Nothing there, huh? Is that what you think?”

Overtaking the bitter resignation is anger. A bone-deep fury that simmers to the surface, dredged up from the bottom of the bottle you thought you lost him to. You can hear it in the sharp breath he takes, the little growl he lets out.

“Fuck that,” his viciousness stabs into your defences like a battering ram. Unrelenting, dizzying. You make to step back, but he fights you on it. Keeping you close. Blazing anger so hot, it nearly burns you. “You waltz into my life, chasin’ after me and then, what? You just decide it's too much for you? I warned you. I fucking warned you, didn't I ?”

“I—I know. I just—”

What, you wonder. What? Because was it ever as simple as wanting a hurting man to be a little less lonely in an empty pub?

It's moments like this that make you contend with your self-sabotage, the unmaking of yourself (morality, compassion, kindness) by your own hands. Your complicity in all of this is staggering, and suddenly the idea of a clean break feels vile.

How could you drop a man you spent months pursuing, expecting him to change overnight?

Your faults, and flaws, soften the part of you that wants to run, fleeting into the dark to avoid the consequences of your actions.

It takes two to tango, and the idiom bludgeons through the headache like a battering ram.

“I guess I just wanted to help, at first. To be your friend. You seemed so—” lonely. Sad. One bad day away from slipping too deep into the bottle that he couldn't climb out again.

His laugh is ugly, biting. “What? Pathetic? A sorry fucking drunk—”

“Alone.”

It quiets him, this soft confession.

“Can't save everyone,” is what he says after an agonising beat, and you think of the priest he tore into viciously for uttering the same sentiment. Bruising with his words, his tone, instead of his fists. Creating walls from the craters it left behind.

“Doesn't mean you can't try.”

“Wasted your time, don't you think?”

“No.” The word is immediate. Forceful. “With you? For you? No. But Bear. The thing you don't get, what you don't understand, is that you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped. And maybe it's selfish, and honestly, I know it is, but you always risk your own life whenever you try to save someone from drowning, and I know I'm not enough to help you.”

He's quiet. “Reading up on being a lifeguard?”

“In my spare time.”

A huff. It's barely a ghost of laughter. “Yeah. Yeah. Well. Hope it all works out for you.”

You can imagine the grim twist of mouth as he says it. The downward pitch to his chin, dipping in his misery.

“I hope the same for you.” You whisper, and it feels like finality.

Moments ago, the thought might have brought a sense of bitter relief to you, but now it just feels sickeningly like loss all over again.

“Shit,” Bear grouses suddenly, and then draws a sharp breath once more. “I miss you,” he rasps on the exhale.

You don't know why he would, but you understand, maybe, because you do, too.

(So much, so much, so much—)

“I miss you, too, Bear.”

The tentative words seem to shake him, and all at once, he's commandeering again. Authoritative, in that way only he can be.

“I'm getting better,” he rumbles. “I gotta. For the—for the team—”

It's the wrong thing to say, though, and he seems to realise it midway through. A quick course correction comes with a rushed, and for me, too, that reminds you too much of all the times you heard this same thing from behind the counter as you topped up their third, fourth, fifth glass.

You know better than to believe in this hollow gospel, this midnight epiphany, and for the most part, you don't. It's all empty words. False promises from a prophet, spoken as a defence mechanism against the ugly reality of what happens when people catch on to their bad habits.

But it's Bear.

Out of everyone who murmured the same phrase in that exact tone, you believe in him just a little bit more than the rest.

(Stupid, stupid, stupid—)

It's his intense tenacity. That gritty determination seems ingrained within his very being. Inseparable.

You wonder when you started divining truths from its scripture.

“I don't want to lose you,” he's saying, and it's odd because he never really had you to begin with.

“Bear—” It's late, and your thoughts are just running themselves aground. Turning into a tangled, indecipherable mess. “I need to get some sleep. Can we—can we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? Will you answer?”

It's deserved, of course, but you know that particular knife twist hurts him just as much as it does yourself, and whatever little vindication he finds from it is swallowed, quickly, by regret.

“I just…want to talk to you.”

You imagine that somewhere between the lines, the things unsaid, sits the glaring truth of his sudden devotion, his obsession:

there's no one else.

(never anyone's first choice—)

“Sure. Okay, yeah, we can. We can talk. You're—” you need distance. You need space. A minute, maybe, to sort through the ugly thoughts making webs in the back of your head. “You're my friend, Joe. We're… we can be friends, again.”

“Friends?”

It's not what he wants. That much is clear by the threadiness in his tone, but at two in the morning and with your thoughts liquifying into syrup, it's all you can offer him, all you're willing to give.

Friends. It makes you remember the limbo you sat in before, the murk and heartache of watching him ply himself with overpriced liquor and then stumble out the door, sometimes with company but most often, all alone and with just ten minutes to spare before closing. The yearning. The pining. The want that made you feel sick to your stomach with guilt for some unseen, unknown woman back home.

(“Dead. She's dead—”)

It sickens you even more to think about that. The ring he kept, the sadness that draped over his shoulders in a swath of agony. The one he didn't take off, not even for you. The warning signs were there.

You just ignored them all.

Friends, you murmur again, and wonder where, in all this, you went wrong. The beginning, maybe, when you looked at him and couldn't bring yourself to look away. Friends. We can be friends, Bear.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Best friends,” you echo back, hollow and thin. “With matching bracelets and everything—”

“Thought it was a tattoo?”

“That, too.”

“Okay,” he acquiesces quietly, but you can hear the threads of obstinacy in his voice when he says it. The combativeness, the steadfast refusal to fully submit, rears in the things he doesn't say, pitching bivouacs in his tone. This isn't over, it says. You're not over. “Friends.”

It's scornful, and you hate the way it blisters under your skin. Burning hot, the same feverish delirium that turned you incandescent with just his touch.

Everything about Bear tells you to relent. Submit.

It would be so easy to just give in.

And the thing is:

You want to. Desperately, achingly.

His certainty, his acuity in all of this, has a way of dismantling your sense of reason. Or, at the very least, your rationale for why you're keeping him at a distance. It's not just being diametrically opposed, though; this is the unerring knowledge that your complicity needs to be curbed. That you are, in small parts, responsible for this barren husk of a man. For aiding and abetting in his spiral, sure, but mostly for expecting him to greet you with sobriety when he woke up, as if spending an entire weekend between your thighs was enough to negate all the demons clawing at the walls of his skull. Scarring bone. Chiselling into marrow.

Simply put: you're not enough. You knew this, and yet—

Pursued, persisted. Laughably, even echoed the same words you repeat now to a man on the verge of going nuclear under the pressure of his rage, his grief.

It's impossible to make a levee out of skin and bones, and no matter how much Bear might want to try—maybe has tried with his late wife, with a bottle, with vice, with bloodied, bruised knuckles and a chip on his shoulder deeper than a canyon—it's just not feasible.

Too bad, you think, that this bone-weary epiphany didn't come sooner. That you didn't kick him out when you realised those beautiful valleys in his eyes were really just trenches.

Hindsight, of course.

(How were you supposed to know that the rough growl in his timber wasn't a security blanket against the world but just the aftereffects of inhaling too much artillery fire?)

You should have, though. Your mum was a how-to manual on the things to avoid. She could channel wisdom directly from a man's marrow, and you—made in her spitting (vitriolic) image—seem to have learned nothing at all about divination.

And you—forgotten ilk—can barely tell the difference between a portend and good fortune when you sift through clumps of barley tea at the bottom of your cup.

For all of her stolen wisdom, you make a promise to yourself that you won't tear yourself into pieces just to make a safety net for him out of your flesh. Or set yourself on fire to keep him warm.

(Not anymore, anyway—)

But then, cruelly, viciously, you wonder if you ever really helped him at all, or if this is just a manifestation to assuage your own guilt. Doubtless, you find. What have you done for him that wasn't, in some part, mutually beneficial? All this time, you've been gambling equivalence with a broken man, and then ran the moment those jagged pieces cut you.

And maybe a little bit of this hesitancy is rooted in fear as well. A fickle thing you try to ignore in favour of something that makes you seem more altruistic than you really are, but still lurks in the shadows, in the words you, too, won't say.

Things like:

He's never met you sober. Not completely. And certainly not in a way that counts.

Each interaction is marred with some form of a buffer between you both. Distance shaped in sips of his (fourth, fifth) beer; a shot of whisky.

What if he doesn't like what he finds sober?

You heard enough jokes at the bar about falling in love drunk and then waking up sober. If this is that, you don't know how you'd regain any sense of ground back.

The precipice you clawed your way up to is endlessly steep, treacherous, and yet: you still let yourself fall. Still took the risk in opening your hand just to show him your still-beating heart.

Return to the sender, you think a touch hysterically, deliriously.

In the suffocating silence, his voice rings out. Quiet, rough, as if his vocal cords were made of charred wood, smouldering embers, and not warm, wet tissue. It's just your name, but the sound of it seems to drag you down to yourself, if only in increments.

“You good?” He asks when you hum noncommittally in response.

With your forehead braced against the slope of your knee, it feels like bowing your head in a confessional when you whisper, paper soft, “I'm tired, Bear.”

It sounds like he is chewing on glass when he sighs. Throat torn, raw. The ghost of it whispers across your chin; fingerprints tapping over a tender bruise.

“Haven’t been sleeping much these last few days. Been thinkin’ of us. Of you. And the team. All the people I let down—”

“Bear…”

“And I—I want to see you soon. When you're ready. I'm not going to rush things this time. Not gonna mess it up again—”

He speaks like this is settled. Over. As if you've already climbed into the palm of his hand, and all he has to do is just close you up tight in his fist. A little flower he can carry around in his pocket. Kept safe. Kept close.

It's—

A lot. Overwhelming. He sounds sober enough, and you know that he's not wholly dependent on drinking—it’s palliative; a coping mechanism to numb himself from the reality of everything else that happened to him—but there's a real crutch there that can't be erased by determination alone. But thinking about that—the future—makes your chest feel like it's going to cave in on itself; collapse and become another black hole in the Milky Way, swallowing everything down.

You need to breathe. You need to think—

“You should get some sleep, Bear. And—”

Don't drink. Stop. Get help. Talk to someone.

But the words are empty. Hollow vessels to placate your sense of responsibility. Your own guilt.

Coward. You've always been so good at running—

“Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah,” he rasps. The hushed timbre makes you tremble. “You too. Get some sleep. I'll talk to you in the morning.”

And so, this delicate dance made of putting duct tape over fractured promises and palliating the sickness in patchwork hope begins again, working in pieces.

There's a distance that lingers between the folds of you both, unspoken hurt and distrust—a lingering symptom of letting yourself get swept away by the idea of a man rather than the flesh and bone cut of one—but despite it all, each misgiving that passes your mind when you see Bear’s name flash across the cracked screen of your phone, it works.

Somehow, somehow.

It isn't as deep as missing puzzle pieces, because as much as you and Bear seem to connect on a level beyond sex, and booze, and fleeting highs to numb a phantom ache in the pit of your chest, the idea of soulmates seems to be frangible for your fractured selves; with all of your jagged, sharp edges, something so soft would break into pieces, shatter apart. But it is something.

And that might just be enough. So, you let it root. Let it grow limbs, and leaves, and curl around you like gentle, strangling wisteria until it reaches up to your chest.

This delicate, fragile thing makes a home, again, inside the empty landscape of your heart.

(shame on me, you think, but still pick up his call as this tender, soft thing you're nurturing snakes across your jugular where it's the warmest, leeching heat from the fever that thrums under your skin.)

Despite his bold declaration, though, he seems to waver on a full pursuit. Content, almost, to maintain this idea of closeness without shattering the bubble you've reconstructed.

It's odd, though.

Bear is a man who seeks logic out but always ends up relying on his hunches. Emotional in the sense that he places all confidence in himself beyond the scope of what he might be able to deliver. If his determination can't bring him across the finish line—well, then it was unwinnable from the start.

For a man so tenacious, so driven, his hesitation in all of this surprises you.

But something has to give eventually.

It always does.

Bear isn't terrible at texting, but he prefers phone calls. Something he admits has less to do with his occupation (no, I won't have to kill you for telling you this, you need to stop believing what you see on tv), and is more just a way of gleaning nuances he can't with written word.

Though, not always.

There's a softness when he speaks tonight, a quality you're unfamiliar with, as he confesses on a hushed memory, half musing aloud when the world is dead asleep and the sun is a distant idea in the back of your head, that he used to write letters to his wife whenever they weren't on the phone talking. Or Skyping each other.

“Deployment with a group of guys doesn't leave much room for privacy,” he says, as if he hasn't just unravelled this hidden part of himself at three fifteen on what was meant to be a rather mundane ending to your Thursday. “They're not really, uh, sensitive to that. We're on top of each other for most of it, anyway. Asking a whole room to clear out just so I can talk isn't happening. So, uh, we—uh, me and Lena, we wrote letters.”

There's a stutter in his voice when he relays this to you, and you're struck numb by it all. Lena, you think, putting a name to a concept.

“Oh,” you say, and you're not sure what to think about it. So, you don't. You tuck it aside, where all the other things you've learned about Bear go. The ones revealed to you in shambles. “That sounds— romantic. ”

It makes him scoff, and it's this terrible, broken thing. “Romantic, huh? Is that what you think?”

You hum, taking it in. The grand reveal of his ex-wife (she… we, he corrects and clears his throat like it burns: we decided to separate. See, uh… see other people), and his marital problems, you connect the dots lingering in the foreground.

You're not completely ignorant of his intentions.

It's the first move on a fresh chessboard: a show of his commitment to this—whatever it might be—and how serious he's taking it all. Where you'd been the only one to dare pry open the rusted nails keeping your secrets at bay before, he's taking the initiative to do so now, to meet you somewhere in the middle where the olive branch still grows. Placing his bets before the race. Offering himself, and his secrets, up as collateral in this strange game you found yourself in.

But does he know that you can still hear the slight slur in his voice when he speaks, or notice the way he seems to skirt around the conversation of his drinking habits on the days when it must be hitting him harder? Surely, he must.

And yet, he still calls. Still decides to gamble with your devotion in maintaining a strange facsimile of friendship with whisky on his breath, slurring his words, and gives out the pretence of playing for keeps under the table.

Maybe he knows you'll still give him the chance to keep playing no matter how many times his luck runs dry. It makes sense, considering.

You'd always had a weakness for men like him.

(Stupid—)

Outside of the tipsy phone calls, you've yet to hear him completely gone. A testament to his dedication, maybe, but you know the first week is always the easiest. When the high of the epiphany roars through their bloodstream, and the weight of the world doesn't feel as crushing as it once had, it's easy to make deals you don't have the means of keeping up with. But the debt is insurmountable to those who aren't fully invested, and the collectors are vicious.

Still. Still.

This is as close to sobriety as he's ever been, and you soak up his unbridled attention like you're starving for it.

And in all honesty, you are.

Bear is a strange, complex web of a man. Full of grit, anger. Misery curls in the corners of his eyes, hidden there amongst the powder keg of obsessive devotion just waiting to go off. You scented kerosene on his skin—napalm drenching his pores—when he'd lifted two fingers up and nearly snarled his order from across stained cedar wood.

Having the brunt of his fire listing your way is a character study in restraint, in penance. It taps against the delicate binds holding everything back, and loosens the ties with every piece of him you're given.

It's hard, you think, to stay so far away from someone when you're wobbling on the brink of devotion. Love, in shades of obsession. The taste of which settles in the back of your throat like a sickness, aching each time you swallow.

You're not sure what it is about Bear, about this particular brand of miserable, angry man, but his very existence feels like it was constructed, handspun, to make you hunger for a taste.

And then, you know. It's just that, isn't it? Miserable, angry man.

(saviour complex, maybe. maybe, maybe, maybe—)

It feels deeper than that, though. It might have been the cause for this unravelling, this unmaking between you both, but the rest—the helplessness and the anger and the worry; answering his call even when you swore you wouldn't, leaving him in the motel room like a bad dream smeared across your pillow only to pick him up again, another bad habit in a sea of others—is than just a simple desire to fix problems that are not your own.

(especially when they aren't your own.)

“Never really been the romance type,” he rumbles, shattering this strange, introspective reverie you've fallen into.

“You seem to be doing okay for yourself, though,” you volley back, a touch too cautious compared to how it all was before. When you'd read him his horoscope, and pester him about trying your audacious food combinations he'd complain about, but eat, anyway.

“Is that what you think?”

“It's what I know.”

You expect him to pick up your jab, turning it on you instead. Something caustic, something severe. Something equally mean and mordant in the way only Bear could be. But he doesn't. He lets it fall to the wayside instead, humming under his breath in something that might be acquiescence, or maybe avoidance of the topic entirely, and shifts back into neutral territory.

How was your day? He asks, as if that wasn't one of the first things he'd said to you when you answered the call.

“Fine,” you hedge, breezing the word out between your teeth. “It was okay. Bear—”

“I, uh, have a meeting tomorrow,” he steamrolls through your concern like it's made of paper instead of the broken remnants of your heartache. “Another eval., to see if I'm fit to return to training. Make my way back to being an Officer.”

More secrets are revealed to you in the slow dawn of his unfurling fist. Held out like a beacon, a piece of candy. Good job, it says when you reach for it like the good, obedient dog you are.

Pavlov's finest.

“That sounds…” You're not really sure what it means, in all honesty. Words coming together to form a sentence. The meaning is absent from between the lines. You could infer, but you've never been good at guessing. So, you stagnate. “Good. Um, really good, Bear.”

He huffs, and you take it as a laugh—or as close to one you'll get from him. “Gotta pass the eval first.”

“Should be easy for you.”

“Should be,” he mumbles, and you catch the faint end of a muffled groan. “But I've been slacking. Put on extra weight. Need to burn it all off before I can really get into the old routine. Gonna fall behind worse than a newbie.”

Newbie being growled out in his flat intonation makes you snort.

“You find something funny? ”

“Ha, no—” his words turn over in your head—put on extra weight—and, damningly, you remember what all that extra weight felt like, stretched out beneath you; arched over your body, heavy and suffocating, and—

Fuck.

Bear catches the hitch in your breath, and makes a questioning noise in response. You can't let him ask. Can't let him know that you keep painting a picture of his hairy belly brushing against yours in the forefront of your mind. His biceps. Burly is what you'd thought of him before. Thick. Husky. A heavy man, in more ways than one.

The softness around his waist belied the hard muscles below. You could feel it pressing firm against your palm when he rolled under you, bracing your hands over his chest as he let you ride him.

That's it, sweetheart. Just like that—

“No,” you swallow around the desire welling up inside of your throat. “Nothing.”

He hums, and it's tainted in disbelief. Like he knows, somehow, what you were thinking of. What you keep thinking of—especially after these phone calls, his voicemails, when you're lying in bed with your fingers whispering between your thighs—and you almost expect him to call you out on it. To demand an answer.

Instead, he offers a tender truth that nudges against the soft pulse in your throat.

“...Not drinking as much helps.”

You almost want to call him out on the as much he tacts on to the end of his confession, to question the logistics behind those two words. To quantify it in a number, in tangible data. Something concrete you can plinth your hope on. But the answer scares you.

Too much and you'll fall all over again. Too little and you'll have no choice but to run.

So, you retreat in the face of his truth. A coward.

“That's—It's good. That's good, Bear—” and it is. Of course, it is. Great, even. He isn't even yours and this silly notion of pride staples itself to the front of your chest for the world to see. “I'm, um. I'm proud of you.”

It sounds hollow, pyrrhic, coming from you—repentant enabler—but the airiness in his voice strikes something deep inside. Pulses against a dormant place that comes alive, fecund with the bittersweet stirrings of hope germinating in the fibres.

Skingraft over the wound.

“Proud, huh?”

And the sound of his voice cuts that thread as soon as it forms.

His voice is pitched low, throaty. He draws the syllables out as he says, at length, “I, uh, keep thinking about you.”

You should warn him away. Tap the impish fingers sneaking to the cookie jar—a thorough chastisement to keep wandering hands in check. Bad dog, is the passing thought, and you try to swallow down the hysterical giggle that bubbles in the back of your throat.

You should.

But you don't.

It comes out breathier than you intended when you say his name, and it sounds much too malleable in the face of this tactile man.

“Been thinkin’ about you a lot.”

“Yeah,” you whisper. Too much. Too much. “Same. Uh, me too.”

“What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Going out with some friends. Probably going to get dinner. Watch that new movie that just came out. And, um, have a few drinks after.”

“How're you getting home?”

“Taxi, most likely.”

He hums low, throaty. The sound seems to reverberate through the phone and tremble deliciously down the length of your spine. “That so?”

“I'm not going to be drinking much.” You weigh the ethics of discussing your intentions to drink, to get completely wasted, and maybe go home with someone who isn't Bear, who doesn't even so much as look like him, before waving the thought away before it can take shape. “It's just—social. Getting caught up. Haven't seen them in a while because of school and stuff.”

And because you've invested so much of your free time spinning in circles around a man who didn't even really seem to look at you (who insisted on calling you kid to force distance and indifference between you) until a few months ago, letting your social life dawdle on the wayside.

Not that there was ever much one. It's easier, sometimes, to push people away than to explain the inner workings of your borrowed scar tissue.

He hums again—and he really needs to fucking stop doing that before you do something stupid, something reckless, like remember the way he sounded when he lifted his head up after coming deep inside of you, panting in your ear from exertion, and groaned just like that when he shifted forward, inching his softening cock further you, seemingly content to stay like that as you melted into the mattress that reeked of stale sweat and sex.

“I'll drive you.”

Your breath catches. “You don't have to.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, but it's decidedly noncommittal and comes completely undone when you catch the crackle of iron in his mulish tone as he adds: “but I want to.”

And he will, is the underlying promise that brims to the surface, wrapped up neatly in a way that brokers no real room for a counterargument. Not that he'll give you the chance to make one.

Still. You try, if only to snatch at some modicum of control that slips, gossamer thin, between your fingers.

“It's fine. Making you go out all that way is kinda…”

“Don't worry about it. Beats paying for a cab, anyway.”

“Bear…”

It's firm when he says: “let me drive you home. Make sure you get there safely.” Final. But to soften the blow, he adds, voice tender like a bruise: “Just let me do this for you.”

And how are you supposed to stay no to that?

“Okay, Bear.”

(Answer: you don't.)

#joe graves x reader #joe graves x you #bear graves x reader #joe bear graves x reader #joe bear graves #barry sloane #joe graves #six (2017)#seal team six #history six #bear x reader #bear graves x you

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lavendertales · 2 years

Text

Hands to myself || Din Djarin x f!reader**

summary: you confess to Din that you like his hands, and he wants to see exactly how much.

word count: 3k

WARNINGS: hand kink obvs, dry humping, male masturbation, vaginal fingering, a dash of praise kink, cockwarming, sub!Din.

A/N: I’ve been meaning to post this for almost two weeks lmao so here we are. feedback is more than welcome 💕hope you enjoy, lovebugs!

AGELESS/EMPTY BLOGS & MINORS WILL BE BLOCKED!

gif: @themandaloriandaily

read on AO3

Throughout the months you’ve spent traveling with Din, many things have remained a mystery, such as his face and his upbringing. Yet you can say with absolute certainty that you knew each other way more intimately than those things.

You don’t need to hold all that information. You know what truly matters the most. You know him, as he is, the man behind the beskar; you know him as kind, sweet, a protector in times of need—and a damn good lover.

It could be argued that Din is easily the best lover you’ve ever had. The months you’ve spent on the ship alongside him carried no shortage of passion. An initial shy attraction blossomed into a near-fatal carnal desire, threatening to overpower you both. You learned in time his likes and dislikes; you knew how he felt and what sounds he’d make before you even touched him. Once he got more comfortable exploring your body in the dim light of the Crest, you studied each scar on his body, every navel and ridge, everything that was worth knowing.

Din himself was worth knowing.

So while you may not know his face or backstory—all curtesy of the Mandalorians’ beloved Creed—you shared an intimacy that stretched beyond definitions.

But there were still things left to discover between you two, things that you had yet to share.

Now, you’ve seen Din in various postures: hunting, carrying bounties back to the ship, expertly driving the Crest through outer space and even handling you in ways that made your head spin. It would’ve been impossible to witness all of that and not develop some sort of bizarre fondness for his hands. You’ve seen his hands ungloved hundreds of times, but you’ve never actually told him how appealing they are to you, how they exude tenderness and power, much like Din himself.

Instead, you resort to watching him carry the toolbox to the outer side of the Crest and mend its metallic wounds. He grabs each item with confidence and expertise, maneuvering them like they’re nothing. You remain in the background, once in a while gulping as your eyes focus on Din’s gloved hands. He’s too attentive to the task at hand to remark you studying him curiously in the background – and a little parched, too.

Even covered, his hands seem to be doing a little magic of their own; their movement, while concise and harsh in order to be able to fulfill the task, is undeniably enticing. Swiftly, your mind transports you elsewhere entirely, picturing those hands—free from the gloves’ leather confinements or not—moving up your body, fondling you and bringing you to pleasure that you’ve only ever experienced with him.

The sudden callout of your name makes your cheeks burn crimson. You’re slightly ashamed of having been daydreaming right next to him.

“Sorry,” you apologize in advance with a brief shake of your head.

“Are you okay?”

Uh-oh. His velvet, raspy voice paired with your prior wishful thinking isn’t aiding you much. You swallow harshly, the blob of saliva feeling like sand on paper.

Damn, what is it with you today? Down, girl.

“Mhm,” you murmur. “Just a little distracted.”

“By what?”

You falter. You figure you should at least let the man finish his job before starting the next one. You know that if you ask nicely enough, Din will help you out without hesitation.

And that thought makes you squirm with excitement, so much so that you feel heat pooling down below.

“A lot of thoughts,” you settle to respond. “Did you need anything?”

“Can you hand me the hammer, please?”

You comply, walking over to give him exactly what he wants. Then, you keep your eyes on his lucrative figure as he starts hammering a screw.

Good Gods, why am I torturing myself like this?

Once he’s done, Din slouches down, grabbing with both hands two loose chunks of metal and parts them. Your eyes widen, breaths a little shallower.

He has to be doing this on purpose. There’s just no way.

You keep watching him though; you keep watching him gently put all the chunks back and causing fast trepidations of your heart, completely unsuspecting and innocent. He catches your eyes eventually, and you sport a cute smile. You like to think he reciprocates. That’s Din: giving and caring. At least with you.

“That should hold us for a while,” he announces.

“Oh, good.”

Your voice dies down, and it’s only when Din stands back up in all of his broad beskar glory that you truly feel the effect of—well, him. You’ve become quite transparent to him, so there’s not much you can hide. You know that eventually he’ll put two and two together and figure out the reason behind your restless aura.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he checks, approaching you.

“Mhm.”

“You seem nervous.”

You keep on smiling, hoping to somehow disguise your nervousness. But you don’t really want to; you want everything that Din is willing to give to you, each taste he’ll allow you to have.

“Do I?” you ask, realizing you might be teasing him subconsciously.

He shrugs, tilting his helmet to the side, and something goes off inside you. That’s one of the few gestures that get you going on the spot; an additional touch to the right spot and you’ll be a wet bundle of nerves.

He doesn’t ask you anything. He usually doesn’t need to unless he’s making sure what he’s doing is appropriate, and in this moment, he can tell by the way you’re basically forcing your legs together that you’re in need of something else that sparks his interest as well.

“Tell me,” he coos. “What’s on your mind?”

You inhale, heart thrumming in your ears.

“I hope this won’t sound too weird, but… I was watching you work and it’s very—you’re very good at fixing things, and—”

Maker, you’re babbling. Get it together.

“Bottom line is,” you try to laugh it off, “I… like your hands.”

Din feels utterly taken aback. He’s never paid any attention to his physical traits, barely so since you came into his life. He often wonders if you wouldn’t prefer a younger body, one that’s not scarred or bruised or tired. But when he’s inside you, when he hears your sweet moans, when he hastily kneads the warm flesh of your body, there’s no more doubt in his mind that you want him just as he is. And that he wants you.

But hearing that you like his hands in particular is quite surprising. Especially since he spends all day covering them with those worn-out leathery gloves. The only time he takes them off is when he sleeps—or when they’re on you.

“My hands?” he asks, still bewildered at your confession.

You nod shyly.

“I’m sweaty from working, probably should wash off before—”

“I don’t mind. I like it dirty.”

“Hm.”

His hum is soft and husky, just like he is, and you quiver just thinking about him, vulnerable before you yet again. Everything about Din’s presence is intoxicating, and you wish you could put those words that cross your mind in coherent sentences so that he’ll know it, too.

He inches closer to your figure, and you just know his keen eyes scan you from head to toe through his visor. You don’t move; your body already aches and burns and itches in forbidden places that only he gets to see, and you want to enjoy every second of the thrilling moment.

��Go back inside,” he instructs.

And you obey without fault.

Your legs are guided solely by nervousness, an anticipation that allows you no rest. You nearly sprint back on the Crest, and decide to remain in the cockpit. The little cot Din sleeps in wouldn’t provide much space for… whatever it is that’s about to happen. You could use the mattress Din bought from one of the planets you’ve been on, since you’ve both been sleeping and fucking on it since its appearance aboard, but it was a bit unstable after the last time you used it.

You giggle to yourself reminiscing that night, how randy you both were and how rough and speedy things had gotten.

Din’s presence looms over you, a dark, yet shiny figure that somehow always seems to be watching over you. Heart in your throat, you stare at him with those big, doe eyes that drive him insane. You watch him rest in his usual seat, legs mildly spread; he proceeds to remove the beskar plates from his thighs, cocking his head to the side.

“Sit down, cyar’ika,” he coos.

Gods, you’re getting wetter with each passing second and you swear he could hear it with every step you take towards him. But you don’t falter: you spread your own legs and sit on his left thigh, suppressing a moan when your clothed core unconsciously grinds on him.

“Why did you want me to—?” you begin.

“I need you nice and wet before I give you my fingers.”

You gulp, completely blown away by how insanely attractive that sentence was. Din nods, thus encouraging you to move forward with what you need, and you anchor yourself to his broad shoulders, past the pauldrons. You pull him close as you start rubbing your clothed core on his leg, breaths already hitched in your chest. It’s already electric and it gets you tingly all over, and you wonder how long Din intends to keep playing this game.

The friction is good—too good. It’s debilitating in its simplicity, and you find yourself staring into what you presume are Din’s eyes. You see past the helmet’s visor, past everything else that might stand in between the two of you, and you like to think Din cannot keep his eyes away from you.

It’s absolutely true. It’s even more than that: everything that you do or say runs deeper for Din, much deeper than he could ever explain to you. Each drag of your clothed cunt along his thigh is sending him into a spiral of pleasure, clouding his better judgment and freezing him in this particular moment in time. There is nothing else but you, what you want, and how he can get you there.

He swears he feels your pulse throbbing in your core, and it makes him hard. Painfully hard. He’s truly at your mercy, a victim of your saccharine movements which show no mercy.

And then he remembers your flustered confession, and he grabs your hips to cease your grinding. You’re upset—you’ve been building towards something great, something explosive in your belly waiting to be detonated, and he stops it.

But, as you shift your eyes from his helmet to his lap, you notice the protruding erection in his pants, and the removal of his gloves. You hold your breath.

It should not be this attractive. It shouldn’t be—but it is. It’s simply erotic in its basic motions: Din pulls on the glove, one finger at a time, and frees his left hand. He repeats the gesture with his right hand, and now you gasp. Those calloused hands, the same ones that hold you close to his chest at night and knead your flesh in between them with unbridled passion, hold so much more power than Din himself is aware of.

Right under his cautious eyes and his irregular breaths, Din watches you strip down the clothes from your lower half; he feels his cheeks burn crimson with nervousness, an almost shocking realization that you want him so much. It is reciprocated by far: he gets so hard just thinking about you, it feels downright cruel.

Gods, he wishes he could kiss you right now.

More so, when you pull away from him and sit in the passenger’s seat with your legs semi-open, Din gulps, wishing he could quench his thirst by drinking straight from you. He wonders how you taste, what sounds you’d make should he bury his head in between your legs.

You’d be embarrassed at how wet you are just by looking at his hands and rubbing yourself on his thigh for a few minutes, but this is Din. This is no fling, no regular man.

With slightly wobbly legs, he makes his way to you, down on his knees before you. His fingers find your clit with ease, drawing circles as the other hand presses on your lower belly. You instantly throw your head back, a soft moan escaping past your lips.

“Din—”

“Is this what you wanted?”

“Mhm—”

All coherent words flee from your mind when one of his fingers pushes carefully past your soaked lips. He pushes slowly, testing you, but when you spread your legs further and try to move your hips so that they meet with more of his hand, Din nearly crumbles on the spot.

“You’re so warm,” he says in awe.

You can only moan, thankful when he adds a second finger and truly thrusts them inside you. You grab onto the seat, holding onto it till your knuckles turn white. The pleasure that runs through you is sapping, unbearable. Din’s fingers pump hastily in and out of you as the man behind the beskar watches your every facial expression, listens to your every sound.

His pants are strangling him by this point, and he’s not sure how much longer can he pretend like it doesn’t ache just to think about how hard this is making him.

“Oh, fuck,” you hear him whisper.

You look at him in a frenzy, mouth ajar, and see him fumble with his pants. The thrust of his fingers gets a little sloppy as he works with his other hand to free his cock from its confinement. You nearly gasp when you see how hard he is, the tip leaking with precum already. Din grunts as his hand wraps around his cock, resuming his ministration on your cunt.

“You’re so good,” you tell him. “You’re so good, Din—”

“Yeah?”

“Yes—yes, you are—”

The sounds filling the Crest are a concoction of his grunts and your moans, a delicious blend that has you both in shambles.

You catch a glimpse of him stroking himself, and you finally feel it. You feel that burn in your stomach, that much needed tingle leading to inevitable bliss. He sounds so fucking hot, and the idea that he can get so hard when pleasing you is the highest form of flattery.

He’s losing the string of thought with each stroke on his cock. He needs to feel your walls around him, he needs to feel you.

You gasp once Din ceases all motions on both of you. You’re about to complain, audibly so, but then he brings you back on your feet as he resumes his seat, having you straddle his lap. There’s no need for instructions or additional talk; you know exactly what to do. You’ve learned to recognize his neediness some time ago. And when he grabs your ass to move you closer to his weeping cock, you stand up a little, one hand around his cock as you guide it inside you. You moan brokenly, and so does Din. The feeling of his hardness in your warmth remains unmatched.

You anchor yourself to his shoulders once again and start moving up and down, rocking your hips to the best of your abilities. You’re so sensitive from the previous treatment that you doubt you’ll last long.

And somehow, you doubt Din will last long, either.

“Maker, you feel so—f-fucking good,” he grunts.

To that you smile, flattered and turned on alike.

“You’re so warm and—and tight and—fuck – I don’t think I can last, cyar’ika—”

“That’s okay. You’re doing so good.”

The praise gets to him—like, really gets to him. He loses himself in your scent and loses control of the rhythm, doing his best to thrust upwards and fuck you fast while you’re still riding him.

“That’s it—“ you barely breathe, feeling your climax fast approach for the second time. “That’s it, you’re so fucking good—right there, just like that—”

“I’m gonna come—fuck, fuck—”

“Din, please—”

The breathy enunciation of his name breaks him completely. In the spur of the moment, he yanks your hair and pulls you to his chest, burying himself to the hilt inside you. His breaths are harsher, his hands rigid around your torso and his cock softening inside after shooting his warm load.

You could stay like this forever if you could.

Neither says anything. You take your time to settle down and recover from the force of your orgasms, smiling down on him. You like the feeling of him inside of you so much, you dread the moment when he’ll pull out.

And then, you see him reach for his helmet as your heart settles in your throat, waiting, nearly giving out on you. He lifts it up in the slightest, revealing his jaw and, much to your shock, his mouth. You notice a hint of stubble and full lips, and you swear your heart stops altogether. But the shock doesn’t stop there: he takes the two fingers that had been inside you to take them to his mouth and he licks them clean right under your blown-out pupils.

“I knew you’d taste fucking good,” he says.

You blush, breaths shallower yet again. This time around, you know he is staring back at you. You feel his gaze burning through the visor and right through you, and you’re almost tempted to get him hard again just so he can fuck you angrily. Almost.

Maybe someday he’ll get a taste right from the source.

2K notes · View notes

zeltqz · 2 years

Text

𝐌𝐈𝐍𝐃 𝐆𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐒 — 𝐫𝐚𝐧 𝐡𝐚𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐢

୨⎯ fem!reader. smut. minors do not interact. reader catches ran in the middle of it... and gets nervous. kissing, flirting. you don't give ran your name and hes annoyed lmao

I need to pee.

You think, looking around the crowded room for any entrance to the bathroom. The only thing in your field of vision are horny couples sloppily making out with each other; or drunk strangers using alcohol as a gateway for their problems.

It’s a horrible sight, and you really need to fucking pee. Your friend is outside by the pool, currently cradling her crush, Shion Madarame—an idiot, you think. He’s clueless, talks way too much for someone who can’t even back up what he’s saying half the time.

You find a lone staircase and decide to walk upstairs, praying that there’s a goddamn bathroom there. This party stinks. The only reason you’re here is because you wanted to try something new and your friend needed backup in case things went south with Shion.

There’s a couple signs that you shouldn’t have gone inside that bathroom. For one; you tripped on the staircase up, successfully snapping the leg on one of your heels.

Annoyed, you take off both heels and hold them in your hand, walking the rest of the distance up the stairs.

As if that sign wasn’t enough, the fucking moans echoing throughout the hallway managed to not reach your ears. Either you were too irritated to care, or you genuinely didn’t notice.

It didn’t matter. Because you opened the door anyway.

The sight was something.

Something you’d only see in porn.

A girl with brown hair, currently bent over the sink; obnoxiously loud moans as a man ploughs her from behind. Your eyes land on her nails, scratching against the counter, veins popping out from just how hard she’s gripping it for all she’s worth—like it’s the last bit of control she has.

Her mouth is wide open, eyes rolling back as she screams the name ‘ Ran ‘. So you put two and two together, the dude's name is Ran.

Ran is fucking her at a lazy pace, he doesn’t seem to be putting much work in his thrusts, but they sounded just as powerful regardless. The sounds of skin on skin fills your ears and the room as if her moans weren’t enough.

He’s got an iron grip on her hips, holding her down to make sure she takes his entire length every time he shoves it back inside her.

This is so wrong. Why are you watching this? You don’t know how long you’ve been standing here—but due to the fact that they haven’t noticed your presence yet, means it couldn’t have been too long.

As if the odds were against you, the girl notices the music blasting from downstairs had suddenly gotten louder. She tilts her face towards the door, only to gasp loudly when she sees you there, holding your broken heels in your hands and you watch the lewd display in front of you with wide eyes.

Eyes are even wider now that you’ve been caught.

“R-ran—slow down!” The girl uses all her energy to lift her hand up and grabs his hand, long white acrylic nails digging into his wrists to get him to stop.

Ran thrusts a couple more times before coming to a stop. “What?” He pants, out of breath, removing a hand from her hips to fix his dishevelled hair in the mirror. It’s only then, that he notices there’s an uninvited guest in the room.

The moment you meet his eyes in the mirror, your fight and flight then begins to kick into gear, frantically apologising to the both of them before slamming the door shut.

“What the fuck?!” You can hear the girl shout from the bathroom, clearly embarrassed to be caught in such an embarrassing position. You don’t blame her, you would feel that exact same way if that was you in her shoes. “How long was she there for?”

“Don’t know, don’t really care.” He’s not lying, he would’ve continue fucking her even if you were watching. Maybe he just discovered a new kink.

Either way, his hands are spreading her asscheeks apart again, sliding his cock up and down her slit before slipping it back inside with a low groan.

The moans picked up again as you waited outside the bathroom, awkwardly shuffling in place while digging your toes into the carpet.

How long are they going to take?

Just looking at the build of the boy—you’d forgotten his name already; brain automatically wiping out anything from the last 4 minutes—you could just tell he had stamina for days.

You then decide to ask a passerby, tugging on his sleeve to grab his attention. He looks down at you with a raised brow.

“Are there any spare bathrooms here?”

He shrugs and continues walking.

Well that was a waste of time. Just talking to that stranger took so much energy out of you, that same energy could’ve been used for something more productive.

Your only option is to:

Pee yourself and further give your brain more humiliation to cry over later in your bed.

Wait god knows how long for those two to stop fucking each other.

Go pee in a bush outside.

Option C) didn’t seem so bad, after all, there’s most definitely someone puking out there. But no, you stuck with the safe option B), and only hope they finish quick enough.

Around five minutes later, the door finally opened and the girl walks out, passing you without even acknowledging your existence. Maybe her brain did the same as yours, wiping out the event from her brain to avoid humiliation—or she doesn’t care enough about you to remember you.

Either way, you didn’t care. The less people talk about it the better.

You turn, ready to enter the bathroom, only to crash straight into the chest of him—the boy whose name you’d forgotten.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” You awkwardly smile up at him, ready to dip inside the bathroom, but he holds an arm out, physically stopping you from entering.

“Were you waiting here the whole time?”

“Uh,yeah? I need to p—use the bathroom.”

Ran looks like he’s about to say something, but one look down and he can see how desperate you are to pee from the way you're awkwardly shuffling about. Zipping his mouth shut, he steps aside and watches you run inside the bathroom, locking it shut.

He says no more and heads back downstairs to join the rest of the people.

By the time you come back out, you can see your friend playfully splashing about with Shion inside the pool. The water is changing colours from purple to pink with the LEDS and you can’t help but think how beautiful it is.

You’d definitely hop inside if it weren’t for the fact you has no swimsuit, and the fact there’s like a million people in this house.

If it’s one thing you hated the most, it was crowds of people. Why you were even here tonight is a surprise in itself. Maybe call it character development, trying to sneak out of your comfort zone. So far, things were going well—you hadn’t had a panic attack yet, or freaked out.

“[Nickname], over here!!”

You spoke too soon. You can feel every single pair of eyes land on you when your friend screams your nickname, waving you over from the doorway to come further into the back yard.

Now everyone knows your presence, and your nickname.

Including Ran, who doesn’t take his eyes off you the entire time you pad your bare feet along the fake grass, heading over to the closest part of the pool where your friend was.

“Meet Shion, he’s the guy I was telling you about.” She has her arms around his shoulders, keeping herself upright in the pool with him as her support.

You know who he is. You just don’t care about him. “Hi.” You say, pressing your lips into an awkward smile.

“Yo. [Nickname], right?” No shit. You take a moment, shoving your irritation down your throat before nodding your head. “Cool.” He says that, then pulls your friend further into the pool.

Some water splashes on your clothes and you can’t help but groan, annoyed.

“Oh! I wanted to tell you that we’re staying a bit longer.” Your friend swims back to the end of the pool, over to where you’re standing and holds herself upright as she wipes the water from her face.

“But—” I want to go home.

Your friend can hear your thoughts and frowns. “Pleaseeee, I’ll make this up to you. I’ll go see that shitty movie you like next weekend.”

“It’s not shitty, you just have horrible taste.”

“Yeah, whatever. But please, just a little longer.” She pouts up at you, those stupid puppy dog eyes that domt even work, but you accept her offer anyway.

“Fine.”

“Yay! I love you!” She squeals when Shion comes up from behind her, dragging her back inside the pool.

More water splashes on you, you’re currently counting in your head all 10 ways you can kill Shion in this party without being caught. Once the pool clears, you could drown him, you could crush up apple seeds and sprinkle them inside his cup—a life hack you saw on WikiHow the other day; you could push him down the stairs—

A voice coming from next to you interrupts your train of thought. “It’s rude to glare at people, y’know?” It’s deep, smooth, and sultry; with a whimsical tone to completly catch you offguard.

“I’m not glaring,” You frown as you glare daggers in Shion’s direction, currently sucking your best friend's face in a heated makeout session.

Ran follows your trail of vision, meeting Shion in the middle of the pool, his hands hoisting your friend up as her legs wrap around his waist, her hands cupping his cheeks as she moans into his mouth.

Have some decorum. You think, not even realising what your face is doing, how your face is scrunched up in disgust as you watch those two go at it. “I never understood the concept of PDA.” You say to the man next to you, not even knowing who you’re talking to because all your attention is on them inside the pool.

Ran, at first glance, didn’t think you had the guts to speak to him one-on-one. The way you choked up inside that bathroom and left the second he even met your gaze had him intrigued. So, it’s quite obvious, to him, that you have no clue that he’s even next to you—otherwise he’s certain there’s a 90% chance this conversation wouldn’t be happening.

So, he decides to entertain the situation. “Yeah? You don’t like PDA?”

“Nope. I find it disgusting.”

“Why’s that?” Ran asks, dropping to a squat to feel the temperature of the water, wondering if it’s cold enough for him to enter.

You shrug, your eyes haven’t left the two of them the entire time. “For someone who hates PDA, you sure are staring hard, what, you got a kink for voyeurism, or somethin’?”

Voyeuri—Oh, god, no. You look down to where the stranger's voice was coming from, meeting the same eyes of the man from earlier inside the bathroom. A stupidly charamistic, yet annoying, smile on his face as he realises you finally notice who you’d been mindlessly talking to the entire time.

“I—uh—no?” You give him that same awkward smile and you’re so ready to bolt back inside, go anywhere where he’s not there. But before you even had the chance, he grabs your wrist, tugging you back to him so fast you almost fall into the pool.

But you don’t.

“Why’re you nervous? You were talking with me just fine a moment ago.” Ran states, taking his eyes off you to see the happy couple getting up and leaving the pool a bit too eagerly. Yeah, they’re definitely going upstairs to fuck. The poolside is completely empty now, with the both of you being the only exception. The lights outside, brightening up the garden start to dim.

“Yeah, I guess I was.” You start to shuffle awkwardly again, unsure of what to say, what to do, under his intense gaze. He takes his eyes off you and looks ahead, examining the pretty garden. From the fences outside, he can see people start to drive off.

The party has ended.

“Come sit [Nickname].” Ran pats the spot on the ground next to him and you can’t deny him. Dropping to the floor and joining him with just your legs inside the pool.

“Ugh, please don’t call me that. It’s embarrassing.” You groan and cover your face with your eyes.

“Ain’t that your name, though?”

“Nope, just a stupid nickname my friend made.” You slump your shoulders and paddle your feet into the pool.

“So….., what’s your name?”

“Don’t worry about it.” You wrinkle your nose as you stare into the depths of the now purple coloured pool. Ran looks at you from the corner of his eye, wondering why your guard is so up around him. He doesn’t even know you. Maybe it stemmed from the awkwardness of catching him balls deep inside a girl not even an hour ago, or maybe he was just naturally intimidating.

“You go school here?” He questions.

“Yeah.”

“How old are you?”

“20.”

“So, I know your age, and you go to my school, yet you can’t even give me your name?”

You finally look at him, fiddling with your heels in your hand, nodding your head. “Yup.” You watch the corners of his mouth twitch up into a smile before a breezy chuckle leaves his lips, and you can’t help but notice how pretty he is. His hair is braided neatly, dropping down past his shoulders and as you follow the line of his braid, you come into contact with his bare chest—just now realising he’s shirtless.

The confidence you had just a second ago when you looked at him, now depetled down to a minus zero, unable to even look him in the face. He notices this and quickly uses a hand to cup your jaw to push your gaze back to his own. “Never seen a shirtless guy before?”

“No—well, yeah, but no—” Fuck, you’re stuttering again. You close your eyes to take deep breaths, in and out, around five times, before you face him again. “Can I go back inside now?”

“No.” He lets go of your face and leans back onto his hands. “Can you swim?”

“Yes—is this a questionnaire or something?”

He laughs again. “No, just tryna get you more comfortable, s’all.”

“I don’t need to get comfortable. I want to go home—”

“Tell me why you don’t like PDA. You’re genuinely like, the first person I met that doesn’t like it.” You blink up at him, a bit offended he cut you off before you could finish your sentence, but you get to thinking. Why don’t you like it? You simply think it’s unnecessary, doing sexual things like that in public. And you tell him just that.

“It’s fun, though. Don’t judge it till you try it.” When Ran closes his eyes, he pictures all the times he’s kissed girls in public spaces, remembers the sneaky handjob he’d gotten by a girl in the back of class, remembers the time he’d fuck a girl inside this very same pool—

Wait, a moment.

“I can show you what it's like—” You can feel him shift closer to you, just a little bit, his thigh brushing against your own.

“I don’t really wanna try it.” You shove the heat between your legs away, throw it somewhere it’s not needed because the last thing you want to do, is fuck him inside this pool—or that’s what you think he’s insinuating.

“Scared you’re gonna get caught?” He teases and you shake your head so fast.

“No! I dont—” Yeah, you are scared, but he doesn’t have to know that. “I’m not scared.”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

Ran doesn’t need to say anything, instead, he taps his lips with his index finger. Just a single tap that tells you everything he’s thinking. You pause for a moment, before leaning to peck him on the lips, pulling away just as fast as you leaned in.

“What was that?”

“A kiss.”

Ran clicks his tongue before sliding into the pool. His height amazes you—his feet reaching the floor of the pool making it easy for him to stand up. You let him stand between your legs as he leans in closer, placing his hands on the ground next to you and tilts his head to softly press his lips against yours.

The kiss was so gentle and you felt your fingers digging into your heels when he pulled away. “How was that?” He asks, looking into your eyes for the answer since your lips seemed frozen on the spot.

“It was…fine.” You refuse to give him the satisfaction of knowing that the simple press of his lips against yours already had you mind blown, the fact if you thought hard enough, you could still feel his lips on yours.

“Just fine?” He leans in closer, and you lean back. “Are you telling me the full truth?”

“Yeah?”

You’re not. You both know it.

Then, his lips are back on yours. Soft gentle presses but he subtly deepens it, tenderly sucking on your bottom lip. It has you closing your eyes and allowing him to kiss you further, though your lips are barely moving, just allowing him to kiss you as he pleases. Your fingers dig into the fabric of your heels, clutching them tight when you feel something long and wet graze your bottom lip.

Ran removes his hands from the ground, one hand landing on your waist, the other gripping your chin lightly to lift your face higher. You could feel the stray hairs on his forehead brushing against your skin, tickling you. It makes you let out a breathy giggle and the second your mouth opens, his tongue follows suit, licking the inside of your mouth sensually.

You make a strangled noise and drop your heels into the water to grab at his hand on your face. The wet splash from your heels hitting the water makes you both break away to look down. Ran retrieves the heels and is about to put it on the ground next to you before he notices the broken heel.

“Why wear heels if you can’t walk in them?” He laughs when you scowl at him and try to grab them from him, but he’s faster, lifting a hand up too high for you to reach while sitting down.

“I can walk, dumbass. I just tripped.” You try to grab them from him, catching him off guard as you hold the other end of the heel. His grip is strong when you try to forcefully rip it from his hands, but he tugs it towards him with 0 effort but it was strong enough to have you falling forward, straight into the pool.

Ran laughs when you emerge from the water, coughing and spluttering with water all over your clothes. “What the fuck, Ran!”

“Oh! She swears.” He grins when you push at his chest with what he thinks is supposed to be a punch, but he never even felt it.

“You’re so annoying, dragging me into the pool like that. What if I couldn’t swim?”

Although Ran knows you’re being serious, he can’t take you seriously with that cute annoyed look on your face. “I know mouth to mouth.” He states shrugging his shoulders and you scoff.

You choose to forget about your heel in his hand and begin to head towards the ledge of the pool to jump out, but his hands are faster, dropping the heel into the water before he’s wrapping an arm around your waist, tugging you back inside.

“Where you think you’re going? We were having fun.”

“You were having fun. I was getting bullied. Now lemme go!” You try to wriggle out from his grip, the uncomfortable feeling of your wet shirt and pants digging into your skin. Gross.

“No, we were having fun.” He states and you finally stop squirming around, allowing more water to splash on your clothes. “Are these uncomfortable?” He’s pinching at your wet shirt, tugging it a couple times to get your attention.

You wipe the water from your face before you look down at your arm where he’s tugging and nod your head. A part of you feels like you shouldn’t have said that, because the smirk that grew on his face makes you scream danger.

“Can I take it off you then?”

No, of course you can’t. You want to say, but the way his arms slide down from your waist to grip onto your hips + lower back has you shivering. One hand slides up to your jaw, forcing you to crane your neck up to look into his purple eyes.

“Well?”

“O-okay.” You watch as he doesn’t break eye contact with you as he reaches the hem of your shirt, tugging it lighty before he’s lifting the wet shirt over your body.

“Arms up, baby.”

You obey, lifting your arms up and allowing him to slip them through, before he’s tossing the cloth on the ledge of the pool. You cringe as you watch him barely make the shot, the sleeve of your shirt still touching the pool water.

“Ran, you—” Before you can even complain, he’s moving your face away from your clothes and pressing his lips down to yours. You hum when he groans against your lips, moving your arms to his shoulders for better placement.

He breaks the kiss to change angles, shifting your face to the other direction with his nose before he’s kissing you again, allowing his lips to suck on your bottom one. His hands run down your sides, holding your waist as he licks away the waterdroplets from your lips.

You hold him so close to you as you feel his hands squeeze at your hips, tugging you so your chest is touching his own, not even an ounce of space between you two.

This is so unlike you. You’re never one to be half naked inside a pool, kissing a guy you don’t even know the last name of. But it made you feel so good, the way he kisses you like he’s wanted you for years, the way he runs his hands down your body like he’s appreciating you, the way he grips your asscheeks through your wet soiled leggings like he owns you.

He breaks the kiss to look down at you, his forehead pressed against your own and you can’t help but keep staring at his lips, desperate for his attention once more. “How was that?” He asks.

“Good.”

“Yeah? Just good.” When you don’t stop staring at his lips, he lifts a finger to your chin, forcing you to look up into his eyes. “I think it was more than just good.”

Oh this cocky shit. The smirk on his face is practically waiting for you to drown him in praise. Not gonna happen.

“I think it was just good.”

He sighs, moving towards to sit on the ledge of the pool. “You’re a tough one to crack. Most girls fall in love with me instantly after I kiss them like that.”

“You’re so fucking cocky.” Despite your words, you find yourself moving closer to him, resting your arms beside him on the ledge of the pool, not really ready to jump out of the pool yet.

“You like it though.”

You can’t help the eyeroll you give him as you hear him laugh spitefully. “You’re so ridiculous, I don’t even know why I’m entertaining you.” You brace your arms up to jump out but as if he could sense your next move, he’s dragging you towards him before you even get the chance to.

He pulls you between his legs where he’s sat and locks you in so you can’t escape. He scans over your face with his eyes, like he’s forcing his brain to remember every detail of your face, every curve of your eyelash to shove into the back of his mind for later. He drops his voice even lower before he repeats, “But you like it though.”

And fuck—he’s so right. Despite the longing urge you crave deep down to stuff his face underwater till he drowns, you find yourself gravitating towards his strangely odd addictive personality, wanting to get to know him better. That’s why you decide to throw away your morals, gripping the back of his neck before you’re pulling his head down to meet your lips in another kiss.

Ran’s surprised at first, not expecting you to be the one initiating anything. He will admit at first he was interested in you, wanting to see where your head was at with things, the thought of fucking you not even on his mind. But the more you spoke, the more he found himself wanting to get rid of that shy awkward side of you, wanting to see you more comfortable around him.

And boy, was that fast.

You tap on his thigh with your spare hand, urging him to come further inside the pool. He understood the memo, sliding down from the ledge till he’s standing tall above you. The new angle has you straining your neck just to deepen the kiss, a soft groan leaving your lips when you feel him pull your leggings down, exposing your ass to the cold-now-cool water now that your body has adapted to the temperature.

From across the pool, just sitting by the ledge of the pool, your phone vibrates.

You open an eye and peek over at your phone screen flashing on and off with each notification, then pull away from the kiss.

Ran’s about to grab you, his hand just missing your own as you make your way over to the ledge, drying your hands on your half soaked shirt before turning on your phone and reading your messages.

You flinch when you feel two strong hands on your shoulders and you don’t need to look behind you to know who it is. “What’s wrong?” He asks, lips brushing against the skin of your shoulder blade as he presses kisses on your skin.

“Just my friend. She said she’s leaving.” You say and with a click of a button you’re turning your phone back off. “Well, this was fun….what’s your name again?”

The look he gives you makes you laugh before you jump outta the pool, bending to pick up your shirt to wringe it. “You really forgot my name?”

“Yup!” Once enough water has left your shirt semi-dry but comfortable enough to wear, you put it on. “I’ll maybe see you around.” No promises, you think, ashamed of your behaviour tonight.

“Wait, I don’t even have your name—” His plea goes through deaf ears as you’re already sprinting towards the door and disappearing through the house.

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lovelybunn · 2 years

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south park post covid main 4 w/ you in a revealing bikini ! 🍹˚ ༘

warning(s): uses of prns she/her, fem!reader, lowkey a crack post, swearing, suggestive themes

author's note: i'm pretty late to the party (and this was just stuck in my drafts) so i decided to post it now, hope you enjoy!

stan marsh

his swimming trunks don't ever fit him, either they're squeezing his balls off or they're so loose that he will almost flash some poor innocent family

"alcohol-free" by twice but with the alcohol

i mean, stan's like wasted on like five margaritas before he sees you, and when he does... oh, HOOCHIE MAMA!!

ok but fr, the moment this pot belly man sees you in that cute ass swimsuit, he is ALL OVER you.

he's gon grab you from behind and give you all kinds of sloppy neck kisses

"you're so sexy baby. i love you~"

did i forget to add that's he's an ass man?

"🎶 take that, rewind it back, usher got the voice to make your booty go– SMACK!"

ㅤ

kyle broflovski

leanly built kyle broflovski me thinks...

the only one who actually reacted like a normal grown individual out of the four of them 😐

if you have any body dysmorphia, this man will make sure you love your body just as much as he does.

don't get me wrong, he did show you off, but that was more of him making a declaration of "that's all mine, and you wish she was yours."

his hands most definitely will be glued to your hips/waist (his favorite part of your body)

anytime someone would look at you in a flirtatious way/quite literally flirt with you, he would instantly give that signature "i'm tired of your shit.™" kyle broflovski look.

forehead kisses and CONSTANT compliments

trust me, he loves the way that fabric hugs all your yummy curves 😋

ㅤ

eric cartman

this cutie patootie was shocked to see you in that. (calling cartman of all ppl that makes me want to vomit)

he tried his so very hardest to cover you up, with towels, a cover-up, his own swim-shirt, but you took it all off bc ofc you did.

istg he almost cussed a mf out for cat-calling you, he was fighting the urge to keep the true eric theodore cartman deep inside

he would hold your hand the whole time like if he let go you would vanish out of thin air lmao XD

weird headcanon, but i think eric loves seeing your hair down and wet, like all that water dripping down your body really turns him on

sunbathing is his fav past-time when going to the beach/pool

LIKE IF Y'ALL ARE TANNING TOGETHER, LAY ON HIS BIG OL TUMMY, IT'S WORTH IT ISTG, ITS LIKE A PILLOW

also cartman can't swim for shit so he stays in the shallowest part of the water at ALL TIMES. (come on, you don't wanna see his old ass drown, do you?)

ㅤ

kenny mccormick

kenny man bun, kenny man bun, KENNY MAN BUN (but fr, he doesn't like getting his hair wet so he puts it up every time y'all go to the beach/pool)

you just had to pick out a bikini that would show the most amount of cleavage, didn't you?

my man's eyes must've POPPED out of their damn sockets like a cartoon character when he saw that shit

"ah that's hot, that's hot."

every chance this dude gets he's gon come up to you like "madam, your breasts look awfully heavy, shall i hold them for you?"

but enough about kenny's obsession with boobs, i honestly feel like he'd be all kinds of lovey-dovey the whole time

hugging you, kissing you, feeling you all over,I'm pretty sure you'll have to literally bitch-slap kenny cuz this man will be attached to your hip like a tumor

also, you know that hawaiian shirt he always wears (that probably hasn't been washed in 6 months)? yeah, that thing will stay on his body the whole time unless he's in the water. but it's unbuttoned ofc, he isn't trying to die of heat stroke bruv 😕

#south park #south park post covid #south park headcanons #south park x reader #stan marsh #stan marsh x reader #kyle broflovski #kyle broflovski x reader #eric cartman #eric cartman x reader #kenny mccormick #kenny mccormick x reader #crack post #crack fic #honestly idk wtf im doing #lmao #please ignore this

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lowkeyrobin · 2 months

Text

FOURTHGRADE ; dating hcs

warnings ; language, talk of substances, talk of like makeout stuff (not in great detail or anything but yk)

genre ; fluff

requested by ; @th0tblckgrl

masterlist

guys, he isn't dumb, he just lacks common sense I swear

he excells in tech classes and art stuff

math and science will be his downfall (real tbh)

always films you doing tricks and shit

has a whole vhs worth of film of raw, unedited footage of you two skating together (mostly you) and stupid cute shit he's caught on camera

he titles it "y/n/n <3" with a red sharpie too.

dyeing his hair w him

he never switches out that bleach & pink istg

it makes for good hangouts and stuff tho

you watch his gecko for hours while he's doing homework and shit

she's just so adorable omg

he likes you on top when you're making out and shit

he loves being straddled and being able to hold you by the waist and shit

he's not super clingy or anything but he loves his hand holding and cuddles

he has acne, and if you do too, oh my lord match made in heaven

he loves tracing your scars with his infamous red sharpie and it stains your face for almost a day lmao

he likes picking at your bacne just through impulsive thoughts

"ow! Jesus christ!"

"sorry! it was ready to pop, I swear"

dude Ray loves you two together sm

he's your biggest shipper <3

fuckshit constantly teases you two

I personally hc that fourthgrade is asexual so here's context for the next one

since he's ase (and even if you are two! me too twin) you guys don't take it all that sexual, and gets a little icked when the guys make jokes about you two fucking sometimes

most the time he laughs it off but other days he's just eughhh

and you instantly turn to whoever made the joke and silently shake your head and do the 'you're dead sign' with a respectful face iykwim

he likes staring in your eyes sometimes and getting lost in them

when he's writing movie scripts for fun, he uses you as a faceclaim (along with the other boys tbh) for whatever lead there is or the leads love intrest/best friend. everytime without fail

basically just fanfiction about you two

again like fuckshit, friendship before relationship

matching belts or band shirts

if you also dye your hair fun colors, he dyes it for you

movie nights every night I swear

getting high with him in the dead of night on a friday/saturday night >>>>

hugging him from behind too 💔💔💔

I'm not like trying to infantilize him, he's just a softie for u

stealing shopping carts and bringing them back to skate locations is just a tradition

a lot of times Ray and Fuckshit are busy and they leave ruben and stevie with you so you guys are basically a little family doing fun shit

skating around town, going to the public pool, chilling inside gas stations, renting movies, trauma dumping etc

you're literally just ruben and stevies parents

the ultimate comedy group too 💀

shit, you, fourth, fuckshit and ray are actually way too funny when you're super drunk/high at parties

like you'll be in your own corner watching over ruben and stevie playing uno and start talking about testicul bombs and radioactive cum??? (based on a true story)

alr that's all I got I hope u enjoyed LOL

#lowkeyrobin #mid90s oneshot #mid90s x reader #mid90s imagine #mid90s #fourthgrade x reader #fourthgrade mid90s #fuckshit x reader #ray x reader #ryder mclaughlin #ryder mclaughlin x reader #skater #90s aesthetic #90s

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tbyfandoms · 1 year

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Against All Odds | Jake Pearson x Reader

Pairing: jake pearson x f!reader

Word Count: 14.6k

Summary: while on vacation with her best friends’ family, y/n gets a lot more than she bargained for when she encounters both love and…aliens!? (requested)

Warnings: descriptions of violence

Masterlist/Request Form | Ask/Tell/Request

A/N: dude someone tell me why this fic is SO LONG??? I knew it would be a little lengthy since I basically copied and then rewrote the whole aliens in the attic movie but ohmygod lmao?! anyways, even though this is apparently my longest fic to date, it was also one of the most fun ones I've written! although cheesy and mildly unrealistic, I love this movie so much and appreciate getting a request for austin's character, jake. I hope you all (especially the person who requested this) enjoy! as always lmk what you think! :)

The sunlight shines brightly on your face as you step out of the car. Your hand goes up instinctively to shield your eyes, and with what little shade it provides for you you’re able to take in the house before you.

It’s gorgeous to say the least. The Pearsons’ rented holiday house is unlike anything you’ve seen before, especially in person. There seems to be about a million different rooms from what you can tell, and if the house looks this good on the outside, you can’t wait to see what it’s like inside.

Bethany told you what the house would be like, but actually seeing it for yourself totally puts it into perspective. The lake looks like it’s sparkling and all you can see for miles is green trees upon green trees. The air smells crisp, fresh. This place is everything and more that you could want for a week long getaway.

Wow.

“Quite the place, huh?” Tom steps besides you and mirrors you in looking up at the house. “Too bad it’s in the middle of nowhere.”

You can see the agitation taking over the brunette’s face. It’s no secret he’d rather be anywhere else but here. Things have been tense with Tom and his parents lately, what with everything going on at school. It hurts you to see him like this, but you also wish he would just let loose and stop being so lost in his head for once.

“C’mon, Tommy, it’s not that bad. There are worse places you could be than at a beautiful lake house with your family and best friend.” You grin at him and feel a tiny sense of relief when you see his own smile start to crack through his facade.

The boy rolls his eyes before shaking his head and adjusting the strap of the bag on his shoulder. “Sure, whatever you say. Let’s go inside so I can pick the best room before my cousins get here.”

Laughing, you nod before going to get your own bags from the car. Mr. and Mrs. Pearson smile warmly at you as they hand you your stuff. They’ve always been the sweetest to you and you’re so grateful to them for letting you come on their little family vacation. The Pearsons are like your second family and you wouldn’t trade them for the world.

“Bethany, are you coming with me to go pick out our room?” You turn around to try and locate your best friend, and when you do it seems she’s already set her mind on heading straight to the pool.

“You go on ahead, I’ll be up in a bit! Just wanna get started on my…summer tan.” She winks at you before hurrying off towards the pool. You wish she was actually that excited about kickstarting her sun bath, but in reality she just wants to be out here when her new boyfriend, Ricky, shows up.

Bethany told you all about her plan to essentially sneak Ricky in on the family vacation. The guy gives you the total creeps and he isn’t worth half the trouble he and Bethany get up to, but if he makes your best friend happy then so be it.

You thought about telling Tom what Bethany was up to, but you figured it wasn’t worth the trouble. Mr. and Mrs. Pearson love Ricky and clearly can’t see how much of a tool he really is, so they wouldn’t believe anything Tom would say anyways. And besides, you don’t feel like it’s your place to convince them otherwise even if you are like family to them.

Whatever’s gonna happen will happen, and you just hope it won’t cause too much drama. You’re all here to relax, have fun, eat some good food, and make lifelong memories—so that’s all you plan on doing. Hopefully.

Catching up with Tom, you both make your way inside and take in the expansive foyer. The place is definitely dated and fitting for a house in the middle of Nowhere, Michigan, but it’s still nice nonetheless.

“Ugh, so lame,” Tom winces from beside you, and you turn to see him pointing at one (of countless) fish hung up on the wall. It’s huge and definitely does not do anything to tie the room together, but what else could you expect from a place like this?

Laughing, you steer your brunette companion towards the staircase. “Forget the fish, let’s go find our rooms!”

“Alright, alright! Y’know I don’t know why you’re so excited about this. All we get to do out here is go fishing or bake ourselves outside by the pool.”

“I don’t know why you’re not so excited about this. I know things have been tense with your parents lately, but maybe this vacation can be a good thing! Maybe you and your parents will find some common ground?”

Tom glances at you briefly out of the corners of his eyes as you make your way up the stairs, trying to decide if you’re being serious. You of all people know there’s a minuscule chance of that happening. He grumbles out, “Not likely.”

Not wanting to press him any further, you let it go. For now. Leaving Tom at the top of the stairs, you go off to find a good room for you and Bethany to share. You know she isn’t picky and most likely won’t even be sleeping there if her plan with Ricky works out. The thought makes you shudder so you pick a random room, throw your bags down, and quickly find Tom before your brain can make up any more assumptions.

Once you do find him, you can tell just by the look on his face that him being able to pick his room first didn’t help much. You’re not sure how Mr. and Mrs. Pearson found this place, but it’s extremely obvious it’s supposed to be for families with younger kids, much younger.

There are toys and little sports knickknacks all around the room, perfect for a boy, but definitely not one Tom’s age or even Tom in general. You fight your smile as he turns to you and groans weakly.

The pity party doesn’t last long though as suddenly loud music can be heard along with tires screeching. You and Tom make your way to the window to see who’s acting as if the roundabout driveway is a racetrack. Tom already knows, but you’re completely clueless. Even though you’ve been Tom and Bethany’s best friend for as long as you can remember, you’ve somehow never met any of their extended family. The only time Bethany and Tom ever really see them is during family vacations, and so since you’ve never tagged along before this will be your first encounter with them.

“Who is that?” You question as you watch a guy around Mr. Pearson’s age hop out of the front seat. There’s someone else that was in the passenger seat, but he moves too quickly to the trunk so you can’t make him out.

“That would be my Uncle Nate,” he says and then continues when an older woman gets out of the back seat. “And my Nana. The twins are probably still in the car glued to their Nintendos and my cousin Jake, well, he’s right there.”

You tear your eyes away from Nana as you watch her give Hannah some sort of candy. The sight makes you smile. Moving towards Tom more you notice instantly who he’s talking about. Jake, as Tom said, is tall and from what you can tell, decently tan. His hair looks like a mop of honey sand (if that’s even a thing) and the energy he gives off is palpable.

Something inside of you pulls towards him, interests you. But before Tom can catch on you pull away from the window, making yourself busy with helping him unpack.

The distraction only works for so long before suddenly you hear multiple sets of footsteps coming up the stairs. Your eyes jolt to the door and are instantly met with the blonde boy you were staring at just a few moments ago.

He’s saying something to the twins but instantly stops in his tracks as he takes in your presence. The way his blue, incredibly blue, eyes quickly trail up and down your body leave your cheeks feeling warm.

“Hi, I’m Jake,” he says, flashing you a smile as he rocks back and forth on his heels, hands nestled deep in his shorts pockets.

“Hi, I’m Y/N. I’m one of Tom and Bethany’s best friends. It’s nice to meet you!” You give a little wave and then instantly curse yourself for doing so. What was that Tom said earlier? So lame.

“You as well,” Jake says as his eyes flick from you to Tom and then back again. He can’t wrap his mind around how his cousins have kept you from him all this time. He’d definitely need to get more intel once you left.

“Don’t be modest, Y/N. You’re our only best friend,” Tom teases as he wraps an arm around your shoulder. You roll your eyes and nudge him lightly in the side with your elbow.

Your phone buzzes in your pocket, a message from Bethany popping up on the screen asking you to meet her by the pool. Thank God for that girl, even without knowing it she has impeccable timing. Now you don’t have to worry about being any more awkward around Jake. You’re sure there will be other opportunities later, but for now you have an out.

“Speaking of, Bethany’s waiting for me by the pool. I’ll catch up with you in a bit,” you say to Tom before walking towards and around his cousins. You smile at the twins and glance at Jake before quickly saying, “See you guys later.”

Once you’re out of earshot, Jake jumps into action, picking up right where he left off when he came in and more importantly getting information on you.

“Twins, get these out of here,” he says as he points towards Tom’s luggage.

“Woah woah woah, wait a minute. Why do you get the best room? I was here first!” Tom protests.

“Never mind that!” Jake urges, waving his hand as if Tom getting kicked out is nothing. “Dude, why have I never met Y/N before, and why have you never thought to tell me about her?!” The blonde races to the window, trying to get a glimpse of you as you walk out the front door.

Tom rears his head back in confusion, not understanding his cousin’s sudden interest in his best friend. The two of you spoke for a minute, not even. It’s not exactly a match made in heaven.

Meeting up with Jake by the window, Tom decides to answer his burning questions anyways. “Well, she’s never come with us on family vacation before. Every time we invited her she had other commitments or didn’t want to overstep. My mom and dad finally convinced her to come this year since she’s practically family, so here she is.” Tom spots you as you walk over to Bethany by the pool. Just from the looks of it his sister is losing her mind over something. He’s had a feeling she’s been planning some scheme but Tom still can’t figure out what it is. He shakes it off and continues. “And besides, why would I tell you about her? It’s not like you go to school with us or anything.”

“Unfortunately,” Jake mumbles as he locks his eyes on you. Tom looks from his cousin to you and catches on to what he’s so intent on watching. You’re pulling your shirt off to soak up the sun with Bethany by the pool, and the way Jake is ogling you is definitely something he didn’t need to witness. “Hey is she single by chance?”

“Ok first of all, ew, and second of all, never gonna happen! Nice try, though.”

“Oh, c’mon, Tom! What’s the big deal! She’s insanely gorgeous and she’s got this cute awkward thing about her,” Jake grins, peeling his eyes away from the window to give his cousin his full attention.

“The big deal is she’s my and Bethany’s best friend! She’s not some random girl you can just try to get with. Sorry, Jake, but it’s not gonna happen.”

Before the blonde gets a chance to reply, Tom’s dad calls from the foyer for him to come down and help unload. Tom shoots Jake a knowing look before heading out of the room.

“We’ll see about that,” Jake whispers to himself, intent on at least getting to know you better.

*****

To say you’re less than thrilled when Ricky pulls up in the driveway would be an understatement. What makes it even worse is the way Bethany quite literally throws herself at him. When Ricky tells her to “give papa some sugar” that’s what really throws you over the edge. You’re glad Tom says something before you ultimately had to.

Why, oh why couldn’t she have just gone out with the nice guy from calculus class you recommended!?

Witnessing his interaction between Bethany and Tom’s parents was unnerving and when Ricky brought up having car trouble, you knew it was all just part of the plan. You caught Tom’s eye for a second and the look he had on his face just further confirmed it. You knew immediately he’d caught on to what Bethany’s been up to.

When Mr. Pearson leads you all outside so he can try and fix Ricky’s car, your heart swells at his kindness even though you know the man has no clue what he’s doing, but on the other hand your brain starts sounding off alarms that make you wanna shake your best friends’ father until he snaps out of his usual parent obliviousness.

The only good thing that comes out of standing outside by Ricky’s precious car is that you’ve somehow ended up next to Jake. The close proximity of the blonde and you sends goosebumps shooting up your arm. It’s like tiny zaps of electricity are bouncing between the minimal space between your arms and for some reason you’d do anything to know what it’d feel like to actually be touching him.

You can feel Jake sneaking little glances at you while everyone else watches Mr. Pearson fiddle with things under the car hood. In a moment of boldness, you meet his eyes and smile at the redness that blooms on the apples of his cheeks.

Time goes too fast because in a flash Mr. Pearson is done being dumbfounded by the car and you’re being whisked away with Bethany and her boyfriend while Jake trails after Tom back into the house. You both look back at precisely the same time to spot each other and the moment leaves you feeling giddy all the way back to the pool.

While Bethany and Ricky settle into two of the lounge chairs, you decide instantly to move yours over as far as possible while still being by the pool. When Bethany questions it you assure her it’s just to give the two of them space so they can connect and she calls you sweet for it. In reality you don’t want to be anywhere near that infuriating man and would rather not have to listen in on their inevitable cutesy talk. Gag.

After a while you begin to contemplate just going back inside to meet up with Tom or maybe play a game with Hannah, but out of nowhere you catch movement in the grass not far off to the side of you.

You sit up and squint to get a better look, and when you finally realize what and who it is, you’re too late to do any questioning. Pops start to go off and you do your best to try and figure out what’s being shot, but you don’t have to wonder long because Bethany and Ricky both begin screaming. When you spot the orange splatters covering the both of them, the dots begin to connect themselves.

Bethany gets up and you don’t even think about interfering with her. When she’s pissed, she’s pissed. You watch as she goes over and rips the paintball gun out of Tom’s grasp and rips him a new one. Wincing at the sight of it all, you grab your stuff as well as Bethany’s and follow her and Ricky inside where you’re sure a spectacle is about to occur.

*****

To say Tom’s dad is livid would be selling it short. The lecture started practically as soon as he and Jake walked through the front door. You had to restrain yourself from laughing as you took in the sight of Jake. He looked like a literal shrub! Tom’s dad gave them both a few minutes to clean up before forcing them to sit at the dining room table. He played it off as giving them time to think about what they did before being reprimanded, but you know it’s because he wouldn’t be able to be in full lecture mode with Jake looking like that. You know you wouldn’t either.

As you stand off to the side, not wanting to insert yourself too much, you watch as Mr. Pearson goes in on them. He has some points, but if he knew what Ricky’s really like, he probably wouldn’t be as upset. It takes all you’ve got to not point out the fact Ricky is mocking him behind his back. Once again, that guy is such a tool.

All of a sudden, Nana is banging her cane against the TV and complaining about it being broken. She’s the sweetest but obviously you don’t mess with her and her TV.

Of course Ricky’s the first to jump in and offer to help which leads to Tom being hassled into joining him on the roof. It doesn’t seem like a good combination, especially after everything that just happened, but off he goes. As he passes you, you reach out and squeeze his arm lightly, whispering a “good luck”. He smiles at you halfheartedly, clearly already feeling defeated and it hasn’t even been a full day. It’s not long before Jake rushes after him (but not before catching your eye and nearly running into you as he passes, which leaves you feeling lightheaded in the best way possible). Hopefully with the both of them Ricky won’t be too much of a problem.

With nothing else to do while Bethany complains to her dad about Tom, you wander over to where Tom and Bethany’s younger cousins and sister are. The twins, Art and Lee, are playing some sort of video game that seems cool so you watch them play for a bit while also keeping an eye on Hannah. She’s playing with her toys and it astounds you how immersed she can become in her own little world. Oh how you wish you could go back to that time.

The twins’ game starts getting intense and you find yourself locked in on their skills. You know being addicted to video games isn’t the best for them in the grand scheme of things, but at least it looks cool.

When you turn towards Hannah you’re startled to see she’s disappeared. She was right there just a second ago, but now she’s gone. Her toys being the only things left behind.

Loud banging starts to come from upstairs and you watch as even the twins seem interested as to what’s going on up there. They pause their game and look at you before it’s all silently agreed upon that the three of you should check it out.

By the time you get up to the attic you can hear screaming and even more banging around. You’re the last to reach the top, and you become confused as you notice Hannah seems frozen in place by the window and that Art and Lee are looking at each other as if they’re bickering about something.

You rush over to them and your heart rate picks up rapidly as you notice Jake banging on the window, begging for someone to open it. Reaching out, you unclasp the lock and step back as both Jake and Tom stumble inside.

You’re completely lost on what’s going on, confused as to why Tom is yelling at everyone to get downstairs when suddenly something is crashing its way through the window, shattered glass flying everywhere.

The room is dead silent as four small things stand before you all. The air seems to completely leave your lungs as you gasp at the sight. What are those things?

“Creepy crawlies,” Hannah squeaks out, obviously terrified over these newfound intruders. You reach for her, guiding her back towards you and away from whatever those creatures are. One of them starts to mimic Hannah and once they begin to advance, you all fly down the attic steps.

You get the twins and Hannah out first, you following closely behind. Tom and Jake are right behind you and as you go to help the twins bring up the ladder to try and stop the invaders from following you, you’re eyes go wide as you watch both the brunette and the blonde tumble down the steps, the two of them falling flat on their faces.

“Are you guys ok?” You rush out as you go to kneel by them, wanting to make sure they didn’t get knocked out. They turn around and seem okay but for some reason Jake grasps Tom by his collar and pins him down, demanding him to prove he’s not a zombie, whatever that means.

“You wet the bed until you were ten! A zombie wouldn’t know that!” Jake goes rigid and looks sheepishly at you before turning back towards Tom.

“Thanks a lot, man.” You giggle before your head snaps back towards the entrance to the attic, the door flying open again as the little gremlins try to make their way out.

Instantly, you, Tom, and Jake are up on your feet doing all you can to stop them from coming down. The twins and Hannah are freaking out and you feel bad for Art as he screams that he's been scratched.

With Jake’s help you’re able to slam the door shut, chopping off the nails of one of the martians in the process. Tom latches the rope tightly and for now it works, but something tells you it won’t last long.

Your best friend yells out that you all have to call the police and that’s exactly what you have in mind as you go racing to the boys’ shared room.

As soon as you get there you’re all checking your phones, but none of them work. The signal’s dead and the thought of not being able to call for help makes your heart sink.

You look to Tom in hopes he has something in mind, but the uncertainty doesn’t last long thankfully as Hannah finds a phone on the desk and says it’s working. Art hurries over to it but complains there’s no buttons.

“That’s a rotary phone, there are no buttons, you have to spin it,” you explain as you go over there to dial it for him. The phone begins to ring and you hand it over to Tom so he can explain exactly what’s going on to the police.

The call seems to be going okay from what you can tell, but then Tom starts saying “Hello?” over and over again into the phone and with that you know the line’s gone dead.

“We have to tell our parents,” he says as he hangs up the now useless phone. Everybody nods and heads towards the door when out of nowhere there’s banging on one of the windows.

Slowly, everyone advances towards the window. You watch as Jake reaches out and snatches open the curtain. You all jump back as Ricky’s face appears. He’s upside down and swinging side to side. As Jake opens the window and pokes him with one of Hannah’s toys, Ricky begins saying something, but it becomes clear he’s not talking to you guys. It’s the aliens and they’re arguing with each other and it’s all being relayed to you through him. Weird.

Tom explains to everyone that what’s happening with Ricky is like a bluetooth device. The guy’s a human speaker at this point. The aliens go on and on until Ricky’s body becomes too heavy for the rope he’s attached to to hold him up anymore. He goes flying down the side of the house and it does not sound pretty when he hits the ground.

Per usual Tom starts piecing things together. You’ve always loved how his brain could work like that, God knows it always helped you, him, and Bethany when you needed a good plan to get out of trouble. It seems he hasn’t lost his touch unlike how he’s been pretending he has.

Good news is apparently the mind control device the aliens are using won’t work on any of you since you’re all still considered kids. Bad news is, Tom’s parents, his uncle, and Nana are all at risk of being controlled. Also apparently Ricky’s a senior in college which is why the chip worked on him. Wonderful.

The twins want to go tell the adults what’s going on, and part of you agrees but also realizes it won’t help the situation at all. If anything it’ll make it worse because as soon as those aliens lock eyes on them, they’re done for.

Jake starts going on about practically bringing in the national guard which blows your mind on how someone can come up with an even worse plan. Imagine having armed alien zombies. At least he’s pretty, you think.

Tom takes command and starts telling everyone that you can’t tell any adults about what’s going on. It’s up to you guys to fix this and send these aliens back to where they came from. Everyone seems to understand but when you all look towards Hannah to make sure she’s got it, she’s gone.

Crap.

*****

After finding Hannah and narrowly convincing Mr. and Mrs. Pearson, as well as Nate, that everything was okay, you all regrouped and started to brainstorm. Jake took charge and essentially turned on his commander mode which was a little funny but also pretty impressive.

You’ll definitely decide on which one it is after you see the outcome of this plan he’s enacted. Jake’s brought you all outside to the side of the house and it’s apparent that he plans on climbing the vines and seeing what’s going on with the aliens in the attic.

You’re honestly just hoping he makes it there and back in one piece at this point.

Once Jake starts climbing, Tom decides he’s going up there with him. It’s hard watching Jake climb up there, but now watching the both of them? You squeak out to Hannah to tell you when it’s over, and she nods while calling after Tom to be careful.

They seem to be doing alright. The rickety wooden structure they’re clinging to is making you nervous but it should be fine, right?

Wrong, Jake loses his balance and both boys come plummeting to the ground. You swear you can hear a bone snap as they hit the grass. The three younger kids “ooo” and “ahh” over the harsh landing, while you fly over to them to make sure they’re alive.

“I knew this was a bad idea! Are you guys okay!?” You once again find yourself kneeling beside both boys. Tom shoots up from the ground but Jake seems to be taking his time so you lean into him, placing your hand lightly on his shoulder. “Jake, are you hurt?”

He looks up at you with clear blue eyes and a smile on his face that lets you know him being hurt is definitely not the reason he’s still laying on the ground. “I’m fine now that you’re here.”

You find yourself at a loss for words as a smile breaks out on your face. He’s so cheesy but man is it endearing. Tom scoffs from the side of you and you look up at him timidly.

“I’m fine, Y/N, thanks for asking!” He huffs while brushing off bits of leaves from his shirt.

“Hey I asked if you were alright! You shot up so fast I figured you must be happy and healthy considering you had all that speed! Besides, Jake was still laying on the ground, there could’ve been something wrong with him.”

Tom chuckles and nods his head. “Oh there’s something wrong with him alright!” Jake glares at him and you can tell there’s something between them you don’t know about, but before you can question it and before Jake can retaliate Tom is ushering everyone to get a move on. “We’ve got to get to the basement!”

Before any more bickering can ensue, you’re all rushing back to the house but get stopped short as Bethany rounds the corner asking if you’ve seen Ricky.

Your eyes dart quickly to his body that’s still laying on the side of the house from when he fell earlier, and you rack your brain trying to come up with a good excuse.

“I think he said he was gonna go sit by the lake to work on his tan!” You rush out as Bethany starts to turn towards Ricky’s body. “He told us he wanted you to meet him there so I’d definitely head on over, it looked like he wanted to talk!”

Bethany looks at everyone skeptically, finding it odd you’ve seemed to create this group when she never would’ve guessed for all her siblings and cousins to find common ground, especially with her best friend. But she appears to accept it as she shrugs and thanks you before marching off towards the lake. You all let out a collective breath before dashing into the house and heading down to the basement.

*****

Looking through all of these random items in the basement has you feeling a little squeamish. You swear some of the laundry that’s in these baskets has been down here for half a decade.

Moving a few tarnished boxes aside, you jump a little when you feel someone come up next to you. You turn and realize it’s just Jake and let out a small laugh, trying to settle your nerves.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says, smiling sheepishly. You shake your head to let him know it’s ok and you watch as he starts to mindlessly look through boxes around you. “So, how long have you known Tom and Bethany?”

“Oh practically my whole life! I met Tom in Kindergarten and I met Bethany after he invited me over to hang out.” You smile as you think back on the memory. “I’ve been inseparable from them ever since.”

“That’s really nice, they seem to care a lot about you,” Jake replies. The blonde seems to lose his usual cocky attitude for a moment as he continues, “I’m glad you came along with them.”

Your eyes meet and even in the shadowy darkness of the basement, you can still see all the sea blue hues his contain. “Me too,” you whisper.

Jake moves one of his hands at the same time you do to search through more of the boxes and it causes them to collide. Somehow neither of you jump back from the contact, instead you bask in it. Jake practically has his pinky wrapped around yours, warmth traveling every which way in your guys’ hands.

The feeling is incredibly comforting. You don’t know what it is that draws you to Jake, or why you feel it in the first place, you just know it feels good, right.

For a minute you feel like you could stay like this forever, but then Tom’s voice rings out through the basement.

“I’m telling you, their map led down here.”

You and Jake break apart, he grins at you before turning towards his cousin. “You sure about that?”

“Ssh,” Hannah says. “You hear that? Rice Krispies.”

Everyone moves towards the center of the basement and is dead quiet. You strain your ears to try and see what Hannah’s talking about and after a second you can hear it. Some sort of static.

Art pulls out his Nintendo DS and hands it to Tom. You peak over his shoulder and notice the screen is completely messed up. It’s like some other-worldly message has taken over both screens. Tom immediately confirms it’s the aliens.

The group disperses and you start to search again with Tom as Jake hurries towards a bucket of gardening tools. “Well whatever it is, we can’t let them get to it! Everyone, gear up. We move on my command.”

You and Tom exchange a glance before moving back towards Jake. Tom starts to talk about needing a plan, that just going after them with random junk will do nothing good. You hate to say it considering your feelings for Jake, but you agree with him. It’s too dangerous to go up there with nothing but a whim.

Jake argues with the brunette, set on heading straight for the aliens with what they’ve got. He motions for the twins and you notice they’re immediately on board with their brother.

“Y/N, are you coming?” Jake looks to you in solidarity, but you unfortunately can’t give it to him.

“I’m sorry, Jake. I’m with Tom on this one.” The look that flashes in the boy’s eyes, disappointment, makes you frown. But you won’t change your mind, having a plan is the best option in this case. Jake nods at you before racing up the stairs with the twins, leaving you with Tom and Hannah.

“Guess it’s up to us, guys,” you say, grinning softly at Hannah and Tom. Your best friend smirks at the two of you, a plan no doubt already forming.

“Hannah,” Tom says. “Hand me that tape.”

*****

It’s impressive how quickly Tom was able to come up with a…weapon? You wouldn’t necessarily call it a weapon considering what it is, but at least it’s something and you’re sure it’ll help in some capacity.

As you rush up the stairs to get to the attic, you already begin to hear yelling coming from the other boys. Tom looks at you and Hannah before suggesting you stay behind him.

Tom goes to open the door and as soon as he does the yelling intensifies. You can’t make out what the others are saying but the moment you step foot in the room, you get the idea.

Immediately you’re lifted off the floor, a weightless feeling settling over your body. In an instant you find yourself practically attached to the ceiling along with everyone else. You’ve never felt anything like this before and under any other circumstances you’d think it was cool.

Looking towards the attic you notice two of the aliens hop down easily to the floor. One of the twins yells out something about anti-gravity boots and in this moment you wish with everything you’ve got that you had a pair of those boots right about now.

Jake calls for Tom to use his weapon but before he even sets it off you know it’ll be useless in this situation. As soon as Tom pushes the trigger, the potato slowly flies through the air like everything else in the room and does nothing to stop the aliens. Yikes.

“Hurry, Tommy!” Hannah yells and you look around the room to find anything that might help.

You find your answer right next to your best friend. “Tom! Use the fire extinguisher, it’s right there!”

The brunette looks to his side and finds exactly what he needs. As quick as he can he unlatches it and sets it off, sending him flying across the room. Tom reaches the door, closes and locks it, before spraying the aliens with what’s left in the container. You cheer at the small victory.

“Jake, get the grenade!” Tom calls out and in no time his cousin is doing exactly that. In an impressive set of moves Jake is able to use the lack of gravity to his advantage and dive to the floor to get the device causing everyone to float. He throws it towards Tom and as if it was a baseball bat Tom uses the extinguisher to smash the anti-gravity device to pieces.

Immediately you find yourself falling to the ground, meeting a not so soft landing. You groan and turn to the side, finding Jake lying next to you. He sits up quickly and reaches his hand out towards you. Graciously accepting it he pulls you up and you stumble into him, finding yourself mere inches from his face.

“Thanks for the help,” you let out airily, suddenly finding it hard to breathe as you look in his eyes and feel his cool breath on your lips.

“Anytime.”

Hearing a commotion by the door, you notice Tom has started using the fire extinguisher for something else, this time to beat the aliens back. In no time they come to realize there’s no where else for them to go so they’re scurrying back into the attic. Before the attic door closes something falls from one of the aliens’ grip and clatters to the floor. You help Jake secure the door before going to investigate whatever it is.

The twins have a hold of it and are going back and forth on who gets to see it first. Something tells you that their tug of war with the device is doing more harm than good, but who knows?

Jake marches over and halts their bickering instantly, warning them it’s not a toy and that what’s happening is very much real. You look over and see Tom’s discovered something outside the window, so you walk over to see what’s caught his attention.

“Ricky?” You question, taking in the fact that controller must but what they were using to control him earlier. Tom smirks and nods his head. “Well this should be fun.”

“Get him before somebody finds him. I’ll stand on alien watch,” Jake says before handing the controller back to his brothers.

Tom and the twins make their way out the door, but you stay behind with Jake and Hannah. “Need a helping hand?”

Jake looks at you and smiles, lightly shrugging one of his shoulders before saying, “From you? Always.”

You try to hide the way he so easily makes you smile by busying yourself. “Let’s move this couch over, we can use it as cover incase the aliens try anything.”

The blonde moves to help you push the couch and as you set it into place he says, “I like the way you think.”

Softly biting the inside of your cheek, you look away so you don’t melt right here on the floor. When you turn, you’re met with Hannah’s mischievous grin. She holds her sock monkey close and gives you a look that lets you know she’s so onto you and her cousin.

The little girl doesn’t even have to say anything because she knows, as do you, that you’re falling for a certain lanky blonde and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

*****

As you stand guard with Hannah and Jake, you take in the fact it’s been really quiet for a while. You guess it’s better than the aliens actively trying to attack, but it’s definitely suspicious.

You and Jake haven’t spoken since you moved the couch, wanting to be on high alert, but even without talking he’s still distracting you. There have been countless moments since the three of you took cover behind the couch where Jake would accidentally bump into you or brush his shoulder against yours. Each time it sent a strike of electricity through you, and each time he wouldn’t make a move to scoot over. Neither would you.

It’s like a game of cat and mouse and even though there are clearly bigger things to deal with and stay focused on, it excites you and makes you feel giddy. Although the circumstances are less than ideal, you’re so happy to be sharing this time with Jake. He’s chaotic and a little unhinged at times, but you can tell he’s a softie underneath it all and is just trying to look after his family.

Turning to look at the boy on your mind, he feels your stare and moves to make contact, but before he gets the chance Tom and the twins are making their way up the stairs and into the room with you guys. You move over some and instantly feel the lack of Jake’s presence.

The blonde starts filling in his cousin and brothers and gets info on Ricky when all of a sudden you hear movement in the vents. Jake questions it and Tom rushes out that the aliens are using their map to try and get to the basement. All they need is the vents and they’ll end up right where they want to be. Oh God.

*****

“So you’re sure this is gonna work?” You question as Tom turns up the heat on the thermostat. It seems like a solid plan, but from what you’ve seen so far these aliens can handle pretty much anything.

“Let’s find out shall we?”

Hustling back up the stairs the twins inform you all that the aliens seem pretty mad. As you head back into the room with the attic door you can hear the intruders rushing back to where they were hiding out. It worked!

Everyone celebrates the victory but it doesn’t last long as Mr. Pearson calls for everyone to go downstairs.

He questions why the heat is on and you all try to convince him it’s freezing in the house but he doesn’t seem to believe it. Tom fights him on it and tries to come up with more excuses, but you can tell things are starting to get escalated.

Mr. Pearson starts bringing up Tom’s misbehaviors that have happened since you all arrived, but what really snaps the chord is when he brings up Tom’s failing grades. What Tom says next shocks you.

“I failed them on purpose! Yeah I tanked my grades, okay? I’m tired of getting picked on because I’m a brainiac!” The comment makes your heart ache. You knew Tom had been struggling lately, you saw what went on at school but never knew he would resort to this. Everyone around you is silent, their own thoughts on this confession coursing through their heads.

Tom’s dad speaks up first. “I was a brainiac. It worked for me.”

“I don’t wanna be like you. I wanna be cool!” If you thought the room was quiet before, it’s nothing compared to now. Even Mr. Pearson’s gone silent and you can see the hurt on his face clear as day.

“Don’t touch the thermostat,” he says before turning to walk away. The younger kids start to go back upstairs and you, Jake, and Tom go to do the same.

“Is that true?” Jake asks. “You really fail on purpose?”

“Nobody likes a mathlete,” Tom sighs, and before he can get any farther up the stairs you stop him in his tracks, wrapping your arms around his neck and holding him close to you.

“Your intelligence is one of the most special and unique parts of you. Never let anyone make you feel less just because they don’t understand that, okay?” You say into his ear, and the way he squeezes you in return lets you know he appreciates the sentiment. Letting go of him you continue up the stairs and say, “Now, what do we do? We can’t fight these things with your guys’ parents around.”

“We can’t just make them leave,” Jake replies, a stumped look on his face. This whole situation is hard to deal with and with only you guys to figure out a plan, it makes it even more challenging.

“Maybe we can,” Tom says looking between the both of you. “Here’s what I want you to do.”

*****

It blows your mind, even to this day, how Tom’s able to come up with the craziest and yet most genius plans. He takes Art to go track down Ricky because he’s going to somehow use him to get all the parents to leave the house. Meanwhile you, Jake, Hannah, and Lee create a type of spy camera out of some old Barbie toys. You connect everything and are able to see exactly what the car sees on a laptop, it’s perfect.

As you watch the screen, so far there’s nothing around. There’s a small part of you that hopes the aliens retreated and are giving up but there’s another part of you that knows there’s a slim chance of that happening.

Your thoughts are further confirmed as the camera gets flipped over and a squashed looking face pops up on the screen. Before you know it the lavender Barbie car is flying out of the open vent and smashing into pieces on the floor. Well, so much for that.

“C’mon, I have an idea,” Jake says as he rushes out of the room. You look at Hannah and Lee and you all shrug your shoulders before heading after the blonde. You and Hannah go straight for her cousin while Lee goes off to continue his part of the plan.

When you get to the hallway, you find Jake kneeling in front of the vent on the stairs, he has it open and appears to be throwing something inside of it. You get closer and realize he has some firecrackers. Must be more reinforcements he brought with him on vacation. You know, to go along with the paintball gun.

“Hey, not to question your plan or anything, but you’re not gonna set the house on fire, right?” You’re mostly joking…mostly. You kneel next to him and he laughs before throwing in another.

“Of course not! I just wanna wish those little space maggots a happy Fourth of July!” Jake smirks before taking out another firecracker from his pocket, this one looking a bit bigger than the last.

You just sit and hope Mr. and Mrs. Pearson have insurance…

Next thing you know Tom comes up the stairs with the twins and lets everyone know the coast is clear, the parents are gone. Jake revels in this and tosses in the larger firecracker he took out. The sound is loud and from the screams and fast footsteps you hear in the vents, you can tell it works to draw away the aliens.

Tom urges you and Hannah to go hide and although you can handle yourself, you agree to go along with the girl so she won’t be alone. Who knows what else these invaders have up their sleeves.

As soon as you and Hannah reach the room she’s staying in, you usher her under the bed, you sliding in after her. It’s not the best hiding spot but at least it’s something.

You can hear the aliens running through the vents and more firecrackers going off. It goes quiet for a second but then you hear some sort of clatter and feel something drop on the bed above you.

Both you and Hannah slowly slide out from under the bed a bit to try and see what it is. You’re met with a green face popping up from the top of the bed and it leads you and Hannah to start screaming. What’s weird though is that the alien starts screaming back!

He falls off the bed and lands right in a slinky that’s laying on the ground, he gets wrapped up in it and if you’re being honest the way he struggles with it and is mumbling to himself is kind of adorable.

The two of you feel bad for the little guy so you and Hannah each take an end of the slinky and begin to untangle him. The way he cowers and whispers that he comes in peace lets you know he’s completely harmless. As you remove the last ring of slinky, Hannah notices he has a cut and bandages him up.

It’s adorable in a crazy, weird type of way. So be it, though!

Once he’s all fixed up, the alien takes in his surroundings. He notices the toy instruments scattered on the floor and begins to play around with them a bit. Before you know it he’s a complete one man band and has a whole show going! It amazes you and Hannah and ends up with the two of you laughing and dancing around.

After he’s done Hannah begins to show him a bunch of her toys and even tells him about her bubble gun that’s been broken for a while. What stumped Hannah’s dad on what to fix is no problem for the alien and he has it fixed in practically seconds. It’s incredible.

While Hannah and the alien begin to talk about it, you see the boys rush into the room, immediately going into attack mode.

“Enemy armed! Enemy armed!” Jake starts to yell as he looks around for something to defend himself with.

“Hannah! Y/N! Step away from the alien!” Tom approaches the two of you while Jake grabs a bat, and Hannah instantly goes into defense mode at the sight of it.

“No! Leave him alone! He’s our friend!” She demands as she holds her arms out, doing what she can to stop the guys from advancing.

“He was just holding a ray gun to your head!” Art calls out and to prove him wrong Hannah picks up her bubble blower.

“It’s my bubble blower. He fixed it for me.” She holds up the gun for them to see and continues. “He’s not like the others.”

The four boys look to you for confirmation and you nod your head. “She’s telling the truth. He’s harmless and actually pretty sweet. Look!”

You motion for everyone to look under the bed where the little guy has retreated in fear. The moment you all lay on the ground, you can tell he’s unsure what to do. The alien cowers back towards the wall and looks more stressed than you during exams and that’s saying something.

“First sign of aggression I’m taking him out. With extreme prejudice,” Jake says, holding the bat he picked up close to him.

“Jake! I’m telling you, it’s fine, he’s fine! He’s not gonna hurt us. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.” The boy looks at you and it’s obvious he trusts what you’re saying. He gives you a tightlipped smile and a nod but you can tell he’s still on guard. That’s fair, at least he’s backed off a little.

“It’s okay, Mr. Snuggle Lump,” Hannah coos from beside you. The name isn’t the best and you advised her not to name him considering he is an alien and definitely not a pet, but she insisted.

The boys question the name and Tom reiterates the fact she shouldn’t name him. The alien introduces himself amidst all his anxiety (his name is Sparks) and Hannah waves at him. Sparks returns her wave but immediately pulls his hand back, still unsure of his safety.

“Awh,” Jake smiles and you nudge him in a “See?” manner. He blushes and nudges you back, trying to recover by saying “I mean, ugh!” You just roll your eyes in response, smirking.

Tom asses Sparks’ tools and demeanor and suggests that you guys are right. He definitely doesn’t seem or appear like the others. He and Hannah coerce him out from under the bed and Sparks humors everyone by using some sort of static device to make Hannah’s hair stand up. It sends you all into a laughing fit.

Before long Tom and Jake want to jump into interrogation mode. They pull up a chair and a bright light and shine it on Sparks as if they’re in an episode of Law & Order. It’s a bit much but considering you’re all trying to save the world, you let it slide.

Tom and Jake shoot a million different questions at Sparks and he gets a little overwhelmed, but after a while he figures out the best way to explain it to everyone is by showing it. Tom gives him some paper and crayons and in no time Sparks has drawn a full diagram of the house and the objective they’re looking for.

What they’re after isn’t in the basement, it’s under it!

As Sparks continues to build diagrams out of Legos of what they’re after, Jake continues with quips about him. He goes on about how they can’t trust him and that Sparks is a freak. Hannah’s getting pretty upset about it all and honestly so are you.

Tom tries to convince Jake that Sparks is different from the others, but he’s still not having any of it. Tired of the back and forth, you pull Jake aside while Sparks continues to talk to everyone else.

“Look, blondie, you’re cute when you’re sarcastic but the straight up mean jabs towards Sparks is getting to be a little much! Hannah’s clearly upset about it and even though I know it’s insane to think we should trust this alien, I’m telling you we should! I mean even Tom, the brains, thinks we can trust him so I’m gonna need you to as well at least just a little bit!”

Jake peers down at you and that smirk you saw earlier returns to his pretty pink lips. “So you think I’m cute?”

You scoff as heat rises to your cheeks, the confidence you had a few seconds ago faltering a little as you look into the boy’s sparkling eyes. “That’s seriously all you got out of that?!”

The blonde shrugs and leans in a little closer to you. “Yeah, pretty much.”

Taking a daring step closer to Jake, you place your pointer finger on his chest, poking at it to annunciate your words. “All I’m saying is, if you’re not gonna trust Sparks at least trust me and your cousins. And stop throwing out insults to the alien! You’re hurting Hannah’s feelings.”

“Alright, I will.” Jake’s comedic tone disappears, a look of genuine understanding and trust passing through his eyes. The next second he’s back to his usual self. “You know, it’s kinda cute when you’re snappy.”

Humming, you tilt you head up towards the boy, finding yourself closer to him than you’ve ever been before. “You’re something else, Jake Pearson, you know that?”

“I get that a lot,” he cheekily replies. You roll your eyes and laugh before pushing him away from you lightly and walking back towards the rest of the group.

*****

“Woah!” You awe at Sparks’ work as Tom holds up his new and improved potato gun. You don’t know how he did it, the little guy works so fast, but he took something so simple and turned it into something amazing! You’d definitely want him as your electronic repairman—er, repairalien?

Everyone’s heads shoot up as beeping can be heard from outside. You and Jake hurry to the window and the first thing you see is a brown squad car. Great.

“It’s the po-po, be cool,” Jake urges and you stifle your laugh at his weird sayings. As if it couldn’t get any worse, though, someone starts banging on the bedroom door.

You listen in and realize it’s their grandma. You guess they weren’t able to get rid of everyone.

“Crap! We forgot about Nana!” Jake moves away from the window and goes to stand by Tom. From the look on your best friend’s face, you can tell he’s not convinced it’s his beloved grandmother. From the way she’s talking, you aren’t either.

“I may not know her extremely well, but I’d bet money that isn’t your Nana,” you say, jumping back a little when she knocks particularly loudly.

“Are you sure?” Jake questions. Not a second later and the door is flying forward, completely off it’s hinges. Nana growls at you all and if you weren’t one hundred percent sure before, you are now!

“Yeah, I’m sure!” You cry out. All of you start to take several steps back as Nana makes her way forward. She heads straight for Hannah and Sparks, so you, Tom, and Jake do all you can to prevent her from reaching them.

Nana throws Tom off to the side and then once she gets to Jake she’s sinking her teeth into his arm, leaving her dentures hanging on his arm as she pulls away. Gross! The horrified look on Jake’s face says it all.

Before Nana can reach Hannah, you plant yourself in front of her, doing your best to try and guide her away without hurting her, but it’s no use as she easily tosses you aside just like with Tom. You land on the floor with a thud.

“Do something, Tom!” Jake calls out as he tries to recover from the Nana-sized bite on his arm.

Thinking fast, Tom pushes a skateboard out in front of Nana and it sends her flying back. One of the aliens pops out from under her and lands on her chest. It’s doesn’t take him long to recover though and in a second he’s got Nana back up on her feet.

You try to think of something to stop him, but you don’t even need to as Hannah’s way ahead of you. She blasts the alien with her bubble gun and it sends him in a frenzy. Art gets ahold of Nana’s controller and in the chaos Tom’s able to trap the little thing in a fishing net.

Jumping to open a chest near the bed, you urge Tom to put him in there. You leave Jake to lock it and head over towards Hannah and her suitcase where she’s hidden Sparks. It’s obvious the aliens know he’s in there, so you have to do something to throw them off.

You help Hannah unzip the pink suitcase quickly, and lead Sparks to a mountain of pillows on the bed where he blends in perfectly. You do it not a moment too soon because when you turn around, the other aliens are running into the room looking to retrieve Sparks.

One of them gets their hands on Jake’s paintball gun and suddenly you’re all being shot at. You hit the deck along with everyone else and just like you thought they would, the aliens get away with the suitcase.

Tom turns towards you and Hannah, feeling disappointed in the loss of Sparks. “I’m sorry, guys. I’m sorry they got him.”

You and Hannah glance at each other, smiling, before you step forward and take the top pillows off the mountain you hid Sparks under. The two of you high five in excitement at outsmarting the aliens.

Per usual, every victory is met with a new challenge. The “po-po” as Jake likes to call them, starts speaking into his megaphone demanding for someone to open the door. It’s pretty doomed from what you can tell but you’re sure Tom will come up with something.

“You guys get rid of the cop. I’m going after the aliens,” Jake says as he starts to back out of the room. Immediately you’re not having any of it. No way he’s going alone.

“Wait!” You call after Jake and he stops in the doorway. You turn towards Tom before following the blonde. “You got this? He shouldn’t go alone.”

He nods his head. In the back of his mind he takes in the worried look on your face, the obvious signs his best friend is starting to care for his rambunctious cousin. He doesn’t fully love it, more-so because of Jake and his antics, but he accepts it. “Yeah, you go, I’ll handle it, don’t worry.” With that, you trail after Jake, stepping out into the hallway with him.

“Did you really think I was just gonna let you go after them on your own?” You look up at the boy and tilt you head, giving him a look of coy disbelief.

“I should’ve known better. My apologies,” he grins.

“I’ll accept it just this once. As long as you know we’re in this together. It’s you and me.”

“I wouldn’t want it any other way.” Surprising you, Jake intertwines one of his hands with yours, a flurry of butterflies erupting in your stomach instantly. “Let’s do this.”

And with that, the two of you race up the stairs, heading straight into whatever comes next.

*****

“Jake! He’s over there! He’s about to shoot someone!” Carefully stepping higher on the roof, you point off to the right, showing Jake exactly where the alien is.

“Not on my watch!” In a flash Jake throws a rake he found up on the roof. It successfully knocks the alien on his side, making him miss his shot.

The martian’s back on his feet in no time and you and Jake rush after him. He begins to repeat everything the boy says and it irritates the crap out of you. You really need to get these things out of here, now!

Leading you both back to the window to get inside, Jake’s the first to reach it and as he leans in, his body is instantly thrown back.

“Jake!” You race towards him and take in the paint splatters all over his face and chest. He’s almost completely knocked out. The boy reaches a hand out and tries to hold on to you, but it’s too late. As you turn back towards the window, you’re met with the male and female aliens, who strike you with the paintball gun, knocking you out cold.

*****

When you come to you almost get knocked out yet again. For some reason your head keeps getting thumped against something over and over and it feels as if you’re heading down a hill.

Opening your eyes fully and trying to get your bearings you realize you’re being dragged down the stairs. Each time you get pulled forward your head flies back onto the steps, causing an unbearable ache to start to bloom there.

You go to open your mouth to say something, but panic fills you as you realize you can’t. Your mouth has been stuffed with cloth and taped over, and the panic only intensifies when you go to move your arms and legs and note you can’t move them either. It’s as if your whole body has been bound together, leaving you no room to try and escape.

Heartbeat pounding in your ears, you find yourself unable to concentrate on anything, feeling as if you’re underwater and everything is being drowned out.

Your head lolls to the side and in doing so you come face to face with Jake’s head. You take in the fact he looks like he’s trying to say something to you, but you can’t make out any of it as he’s in the same situation you’re in. Tears fill your eyes as the feeling of being trapped sinks in. The ropes around your body start to rub as you become more awake and the feeling makes you feel like you’re on fire.

For such small aliens it takes them practically no time to drag you and Jake down to the basement. The trip down there is no easier than the one down the main stairs and you’re sure you’ll have splinters all over if and when you get out of here.

The thought of maybe not even surviving this whole thing only heightens your current emotions. Your breath becomes more ragged and you find it hard to even keep your eyes open as the aliens begin to dig in the ground and throw dirt towards you and Jake.

Noticing your obvious stress and wanting to do anything he can to try and help, Jake inches himself closer to you. He takes in your tear stained cheeks and rapid rise and fall of your chest as he turns his body and immediately feels an ache in his chest at the sight of it. He’s terrified, but the fact you have to go through this too makes it even worse. Part of him wishes he would’ve urged you to stay with the others so you wouldn’t be in this mess.

“Hey, Y/N, look at me!” Jake tries to grab your attention, but his voice comes out muffled due to the tape and cloth. The boy tries again, doing his best to try and talk to you.

Amidst your racing heartbeat and choke-backed sobs, you notice the movement beside you and can hear Jake’s muffled voice. You tilt your head and are met with his dirt-caked face. Even with all the mud, paint, and dim lighting coming from the alien’s tools, his eyes shine bright. The familiarity of them soothes you a bit but not enough as more dirt gets thrown your way and the aliens’ delighted voices reach your ears. It’s clear they’re getting closer to what they’re looking for.

You drop your head back to the ground, feeling defeated and so tired. The ache at the back of your head is starting to dull but it’s still throbbing, making you miserable and feeling like you can’t concentrate on Jake.

“No, c’mon, Y/N, keep your head up! Look at me, it’s okay!” Jake wishes with everything he’s got that he could somehow rip off the tape and cloth wrapped around his mouth. He’d give anything to just be able to talk to you clearly and try to ground you during this crazy experience.

Moving your head up and struggling to get closer to Jake, you do your best to try and stay focused on him. You can see the desperation on his face, his concern and empathy. It makes your heart swell that he cares so much about you and your well being when he’s going through the same exact thing.

The blonde tilts his head down and leans his forehead gently against yours. The warmth and light pressure of it allows you to focus on him and him alone. “It’s okay, I’m right here. I’m right here.” Jake’s muffled encouragement is hard to understand, but the intention is clear. You push back softly against his forehead, doing what you can to let him know that he’s helping you more than he could ever realize, that you’re here for him just as much as he’s here for you.

A bright light begins shinning from the ground and excited cheers follow. The aliens found what they were looking for. It’s actually happening, more aliens are going to invade planet earth.

As the aliens start grabbing what they need, it becomes clear they have no use for you and Jake. Before they leave to begin their invasion, they shove the two of you into the hole they created in the ground and that’s the last thing you see before everything goes dark.

*****

When you wake up it’s to the feeling of a decent sized weight being dropped on you. Dirt and rubble fly everywhere and you push yourself backwards, wanting to distance yourself from whatever it is.

A light flashes across your face and you’re sure it’s the aliens before suddenly everything comes into focus and your met with your best friends, Hannah, and the twins. Relief floods your body and you nearly burst into happy tears at the sight.

The group lifts you and Jake out of the rubble and you’ve never felt more grateful than you do in this moment, especially once Bethany and Hannah get the tape and ropes off of you. As soon as you’re able to move freely, you wrap your arms around them both, holding them close and thanking all your stars that you made it out of that situation alive. There’s still much to do, but in this moment you’re safe.

After getting intel from Jake, Tom comes over and hugs you as well, telling you he’s glad you’re okay. Once letting go of him, it’s no brainer that you lunge towards Jake, wrapping your arms around him and holding him as close as possible, taking in his warmth and tight grasp.

The blonde nuzzles his face into your neck, trying to get his brain to understand you’re both safe, you both made it, that it’s okay now. He rubs his hands up and down your back soothingly, almost using it as a technique to convince himself you’re here and in his arms.

“Thank you,” you whisper into the side of his head. Those two words holding a meaning so much more than anyone could ever understand.

“-your stupid brother and your dumb little cousins!” The snarky tone and comment has you shocked and causes you to turn out of Jake’s arms. It’s no question who the voice belongs to and when you see it’s being directed at your best friend, anger bubbles under the surface of your skin.

“Don’t talk about my family like that,” Bethany retorts

“Well you don’t have to worry about it anymore cause we’re done. I knew I should’ve stayed home and hooked up with Annie Filkins, she’s smokin’ hot and she doesn’t like talking about feelings all the time! I’m going straight to Annie’s.” Ricky starts to retreat back upstairs but you’re done with his crap. No one gets to talk to one of your best friends like that and get away with it. Especially not after the day you’re having.

“Hey, dirt bag!” You call out, stopping Ricky in his tracks. He turns towards you, a bored look on his face, and it takes everything in you not to smack it right off of him. Walking over to him you continue, “I don’t know what your problems is—actually I can think of about a million, but no one treats my best friend and her family like that and gets to walk away!”

Ricky scoffs at you and rolls his eyes, clearly not caring for anything you have to say. This only makes you more defensive of your friends. “Bethany is the greatest girl you ever had and ever will have! There’s absolutely no one out there who will ever put up with you the way she has, and I know for a fact she deserves a thousand times better than a guy like you! You’ve got some nerve acting all high and mighty when you’re nothing but a selfish jerk that likes to pick up girls half a decade younger than him. And honestly, Ricky, that’s all you ever will be.”

Ricky’s face heats up at this, not feeling as cocky as he was a second ago. “You know what? I don’t have to take this from you! I’m out of here!”

The guy turns around, starting to head back upstairs, but not before you can get one final jab in. “Have a nice trip!” Leaning forward, you kick your foot against the old wooden steps, causing Ricky to trip over his own feet. Unfortunately it doesn’t trip him up too bad, but the stumble you get out of him is enough to satisfy you for now.

When you turn away from the stairs, you’re met with Bethany’s tear-rimmed eyes and bright smile. Before you can even get a word out she has you wrapped in her arms. “You’re my best friend in the whole world, you know that?”

“Forever and always,” you say as you squeeze her in return. “I’m sorry things turned out like this between you.”

“I’m also really sorry,” Tom says as he comes up to the both of you.

“Don’t be, you guys were right all along,” Bethany says, a defeated tone evident in her voice. The sound breaks your heart.

“If it’s any consolation,” Tom says pulling something out of his pocket. “He’s not going straight to Annie’s or anywhere for a while.”

Looking closer at what the brunette has in his hand, you smirk as you realize what it is. A piece from Ricky’s car. It won’t start without it. Good job, Tom!

“Wow!” Bethany exclaims, clearly impressed with her brothers skills, for once.

“Guys, enough with the bonding, we’re at DEFCON one here!” Jake says as he comes over and ushers you all towards the back window.

Once you get a look outside, you know things are only going to get harder from here. The aliens have their whole set up going and you can tell it’s only a matter of time before their whole fleet of other aliens arrive.

“This is so bad,” you mutter, backing up from the window along with everyone else.

Bethany starts questioning things and Tom seems at a loss for answers, as are the rest of you. The boy urges everyone that you all have to stop them before it gets any worse and Hannah demands that Snuggle Lump (Sparks) be rescued. You honestly can’t blame the girl, from what you could see from the window, Sparks is getting treated even worse after his “alliance” with the humans. You worry about what they might do to him.

Lee helps Bethany understand what in the world a Snuggle Lump is and how he’s actually a good guy and once that’s settled, Tom insists everyone gets outside. Before anyone can get far, Jake’s calling out for you all to wait.

“Not so fast, I have a plan.” The look everyone gives him makes it obvious they’re already not so sure about this, Jake picks up on it immediately. “Work with me here! Did Nana give anyone mentos?”

Confused glances travel around the group and you catch Jake’s eye for a second, raising an eyebrow, before Tom asks, “Why?”

“Hand ‘em over!” The blonde rushes out, holding open his hands for everyone to drop their mints into. Without questioning it you all begin to empty your pockets, having enough pieces each to last all week. Nana sure does love to give out her mentos.

“What? We’re gonna throw candy at them?” Bethany questions, not understanding what kind of plan her cousin could possibly have in mind.

“No,” Jake says before looking over at you and from the look on his face you can tell he’s got something good up his sleeve. “My own little science project.”

The blonde moves fast, getting all of his supplies and setting them up in record time. At first you don’t understand what he’s up to, but once you get a good look at everything he’s grabbed, you get the idea, and you’d be lying if you were to say it isn’t incredible.

“Mentos bombs,” you whisper beside him, excitement starting to course through your veins over how this plan might actually work. “You’re a genius!”

It’s like an instinct the way you so easily jump into Jake’s arms. He spins you around, feeling his own sense of pride over his work, and when he puts you down you don’t miss the suspicious glance from Bethany. It completely slipped your mind the fact she essentially missed the whole day with you guys, having been totally oblivious to what was going on until just a little bit ago. She has no clue as to how quickly you and Jake have become close, but from the teasing smirk on her face you can tell she’s more amused than angry. She’d definitely be asking you details later. A part of you can’t wait until then.

Grabbing all of the bombs and any items you can use as weapons, the eight of you take your places. If this works you might only have a small window to do what you need before the soda bombs fizzle out but hopefully it’ll be enough. It has to be.

Before anyone even has a chance to second guess the plan, the bombs are being thrown. Soda goes everywhere and from what you can tell, they’re working!

The aliens get disorientated and before they can regroup you and everyone else rush out into the backyard, the boys going one way and you, Hannah, and Bethany going another. You and Bethany cut off the female alien as Hannah meets up with Sparks. Bethany latches the bin you used to catch the alien and when she’s done you head over to Hannah and her alien companion, wanting to make sure they’re both okay.

An enormous flash of light surrounds the yard and you turn around to see one of the aliens being zapped by their own machine. Everyone starts cheering as he gets flung into the air, but from the look on Sparks’ face you can tell this isn’t anything good.

He tries to get the attention of the others but they’re so wrapped up in their presumed victory that they don’t hear him. You and Hannah rush over, trying to get them to listen to Sparks’ anxious ramblings, but it’s only when the giant alien smashes his way through the trees do they understand.

Oh my God.

The alien starts talking to everyone, clearly convinced he’s won. You find yourself clinging to Jake’s side in fear and you don’t miss the fact he holds his arm out in front of you, acting as some sort of shield. The action makes your heart soar, even under the circumstances.

As the enlarged alien starts to walk away, everyone begins to freak out. Hannah starts questioning Bethany about what’s gonna happen to their parents, the twins look towards their big brother for answers, and Tom stalks forward towards the machinery, no doubt trying to think of something to do.

“Everyone, listen! We don’t have much time,” Tom says as he rejoins the group. “Sparks, can anything go on that machine?”

“Theoretically,” Sparks replies, and the satisfied look on Tom’s face tells you all you need to know. He has a plan and knowing him it’s a good one.

“Art, Lee, I’m gonna need a controller, Bethany and Y/N, I need you to keep the other aliens on lockdown.” You and Bethany look at each other, nodding, ready to take on anything together.

“Okay,” you both tell Tom and after that he’s moving to grab something from the grass.

“Jake, c’mon, this battle’s not over yet!” You’re not sure what Tom’s plan is, but you know it’s definitely not gonna be anything easy, or safe for that matter. As Jake starts to follow Tom towards the machine, you lightly grab onto his wrist, pulling him back.

He turns and looks at you a little confused, but you waste no time in letting him know why you stopped him. Reaching up, you quickly kiss Jake on the cheek, reveling in the warmth you feel there as your lips make contact. “Be safe out there,” you say, taking in his bright smile before rushing off back to Bethany, ready to take on some aliens.

*****

It’s no small feat taking down aliens, even if in fact they are…small.

You and Bethany tussle hard with the female alien and successfully knock her out after she escapes from the bin you trapped her in earlier. Of course there are a few words exchanged and some nails broken, but you and Bethany come out practically unscathed and feel pretty awesome in doing so.

The feeling is fleeting though as you realize the other male alien has become bigger as well. You hurry over to Hannah and Sparks, wanting to do what you can to make sure they’re protected. They seem fearful but thankfully it appears that Tom and Jake have successfully enacted their plan and have gained control of the alien in charge!

The two aliens battle it out, the twins controlling the commander. They seem to be doing a pretty good job, but it’s unclear how long they’ll be able to hold the other one back, especially at his size.

“Sparks!” Tom cries out while running towards you guys. “Reverse the machine!”

In a flash you, Sparks, and Hannah race over to the glowing otherworldly device. Sparks immediately gets to work on reversing the effects of the machine and his hands move so fast you can’t even keep track of what it is he’s doing exactly to complete it. You just sit with Hannah and hope for the best.

In no time Sparks finishes what he’s doing and gives you and Hannah the thumbs up. “Reversed!” Yes!

“Tom! He’s done!” You call out towards your best friend, and with a nod of understanding he uses the controller to push both of the aliens into the improved machine.

Taking several steps back with Hannah and Sparks, the three of you take cover as you watch the aliens’ machine collapse. The female alien narrowly saves her partner but leaves the commander behind. In a flash the whole thing explodes and it’s almost as if it was never there.

Feeling a rush of relief, the three of you get up off the grass and hurry over to the others. You reconnect with Bethany first and then meet up with the boys. You all breathe out words of praise and sighs of relief at seeing everyone’s okay and that the plan worked.

You go to move towards Jake, but Bethany’s worried voice cuts through, causing you to turn around.

“Tom? What about the others? There’s so many.” Looking up at the sky you feel your heart sink at the sight. Dozens of spaceships take up the night sky, no doubt hundreds of aliens aboard them and ready to invade. You’re too late, they’re already here.

“Retreat! Retreat! The machine is destroyed! We have been outsmarted by the hu-mans! The invasion has failed! Retreat to Zirkon right away! Retreat! Retreat!” Sparks’ voice rings out across the backyard and just as soon as they appeared, the spaceships are gone.

“It’s gone. It’s over, it’s all over. We won!” Tom says as he takes it all in. You all move forward, meeting up with Sparks. The smoke is still clearing but the evident relief and happiness on not only your guys’ faces but Sparks’ as well is refreshing. “Thanks, Snuggs, for everything.”

“You’re alright for a space maggot.” Jake tells Sparks and you nudge him softly in his side for it, rolling your eyes at him teasingly as he smiles down at you. “I’m gonna miss you.”

“Miss him? He’s staying here, with us!” Hannah exclaims as she goes to crouch down in front of her newfound friend. “Please don’t go, you can be part of our family.”

The sight warms you heart and you find it cute how Hannah’s taken such a liking to him. Honestly who wouldn’t? Sure he’s an alien, but he’s so kind and he protected people of another species he hardly even knew. You have a feeling there aren’t many other aliens who would do the same.

Sparks pulls something out of one of his pockets, and when he hands it to Hannah you can see exactly what it is. It’s a photo of Sparks and three other aliens, a female and a little boy and girl. It’s his family! Sparks is a father!

“Han,” you say lightly, kneeling down next to the younger girl. “I think he’s already got a family.”

*****

It’s a sad sight, all of you saying goodbye to Sparks on the roof. You nearly lose it as Hannah hands him her sock monkey and the two of them hug.

After a final goodbye, Sparks is off, back to his home planet. The air is still and the only thing you can hear are the crickets and cicadas in the trees surrounding you. Another moment passes before you all look at each other, grins breaking out on your faces leading everyone to erupt into cheers.

The twins are high-fiving each other, Bethany and Tom are hugging Hannah, and you turn towards Jake. When you do, you’re taken by surprise as he rushes towards you, nearly knocking you off your feet as he connects his lips to yours.

The action is sudden and slightly startles you as you weren’t expecting it. Feeling your stiffness and apparent shock, Jake breaks apart from you and takes several steps back.

“I-I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have done that! I just got excited I wasn’t-!” Cutting him off you take back the distance he made between you, grab onto his shirt, and pull him down towards you, connecting your lips once more.

This time he’s shocked, but Jake quickly recovers and takes your face between his hands, moving his lips perfectly in sync with yours. Even after being piled on with dirt and grime, somehow his pink lips are still soft to the touch and you don’t ever want to know what it’s like to not be able to kiss them.

Needing a second to catch your breath, you reluctantly break apart from the blonde, giggling as he quickly sneaks another peck in. You look up into his blue orbs and smile as you say, “It’s you and me, remember?”

“Ugh, get a room!” Looking over Jake’s shoulder you laugh as you see the “disgusted” look on Tom’s face. He smirks at the both of you before saying, “I should’ve known Jake wouldn’t give up on you.”

Looking over his shoulder, Jake laughs and retorts, “That’s on you, cuz! There was no way I was giving up that easily on this girl. Not even with your threatening best friend warning.”

“Tom!” You cry out, mock disbelief spreading across your face over this revelation. Of course he’d try and block his cousin from getting to you, he’s so protective.

“I think it’s cute!” Bethany coos and you smile at her in return.

“Yeah well just make sure you don’t continue to make out in front of everyone for the rest of the trip. I for one would like to get through the week without throwing up. Plus, there’s children present.” Tom glances towards Hannah and you laugh at her obvious look of irritation, clearly feeling insulted.

“Hey!” Hannah interjects, crossing her arms. The little girl starts to go in on her older brother over the clear level of maturity she has and the sight makes you smile. You’d never get tired of the Pearson family.

Chuckling and shaking his head, Jake turns his attention back to you. He leaves one hand cupping your face as the other grabs onto your waist, gently bringing you in closer to him.

“Anyways, you and me, huh?” He questions, referring back to your comment. He uses one hand to point up at the sky, referencing the aliens, and then points back at his difficult cousin. With a smile on his face he asks, “Against all odds?”

“Against all odds.”

#jake pearson x reader #austin butler x reader #jake pearson #austin butler #austin butler fanfic #austin butler imagine #austin butler x y/n #austin butler x you #aliens in the attic #requested

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