#p open ended the only requirement is to walk into his shop

[etiennemarais]

𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐍: the 24th of maccius 𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄: terre noire 𝐖𝐇𝐎: open    

          𝐈𝐓 𝐃𝐈𝐃 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐓𝐀𝐊𝐄 𝐀𝐍 𝐀𝐋𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐌𝐈𝐒𝐓 𝐓𝐎 𝐊𝐍𝐎𝐖 a person's efforts were best dedicated to something aligned with their strengths, something, Nella, Etienne’s only employee at Terra Noire, assured him several days ago, but that did not change her decision to take the week off, and leave him to run the shop, and most dreadfully, interact with customers. A bonus, nor a raise would sway her either, though Nella still welcomed the idea of either in the near future, she’d assured him. Perhaps this was when having multiple employees would have come in handy— but he knew the odds of stumbling across another person he could tolerate long term were slim to nothing.

          Every moment spent above the surface meant another moment spent away from the lab, and Etienne progressively grew more irritable in its absence, busying himself with straightening several enchanting fragrances displayed on the shop counter and opting not to look up at whoever entered the store. He could only hope his performance of obliviousness was convincing enough. Only several moments pass before he decides identifying the customer would be in his best interest, perchance he fell victim to another assassination attempt. “Have you come here with a purchase in mind, or are you just browsing, as they say?” Etienne asks point blankly, for this would determine the remainder of their interaction. “If you are here to browse, consider arriving more prepared next time. There are only so many options to be had with a perpetually unchanging inventory.” Every customer meant a new opportunity to break the record for least amount of time spent with him in the store.

#faimstarter #( location | terre noire. ) #( date | 24th of maccius. ) #( act one — scene two. ) #pls what a grouch #p open ended the only requirement is to walk into his shop #or float. ur decision \ #just amke an entrance

[creepswrites]

Drummer Boy (Michael x Reader)

In memory of this post I made where I talked about Michael playing drums, a lot of you seemed to get a kick out of that so I decided to write something for it in celebration of 100 Followers!! Thank you all so much for supporting my content, it means a lot!

Michael Myers x gn!Reader (they/them)

Summary: Michael surprised you as the corners of his mouth stretched into an almost feral grin. His eyes were wide as he began banging the drums again, the loud noises echoing throughout your garage. You laughed in surprise at his genuine joy and stayed to watch him play.

Cutting Michael Myers' hair had not been on your to-do list for the weekend.

Despite the Boogeyman's best efforts, he grew to trust you enough to be comfortable with you seeing him maskless. At first he'd assumed you'd infected him somehow, made him soft. Michael couldn't afford softness, never could. Growing up in the institution had done permanent damage to him, socially and mentally, and you knew this. It wasn't normal for Michael to take a step back whenever you approached him too fast nor was it normal for him to barely sleep a few hours every night simply because he was scared of being experimented on somehow.

While the police had given up looking for the Shape of Haddonfield, you knew Dr Loomis was still looking. And a dark part of you hoped he found you solely because you wanted to beat his stupid face in.

You'd never tell Michael that. A part of you believed he already knew.

With the police no longer looking and wanted posters no longer spreading around the town, it was easier for you to take Michael places. You'd take him shopping, to parks on walks, anywhere with minimal requirement for human socializing. You smiled to yourself while you cut his hair as you recalled a memory of Michael getting annoyed with another customer while out and about and how he'd knocked over an entire jug of milk next to their cart, effectively framing them for the crime.

Your big cat of a man sat completely still while you gave his ends attention.

You'd noticed how long his hair had gotten when he stepped out of the shower this morning, the wet droplets covering his shoulders and running down his back and chest. For a moment that had distracted you but you remained diligent. So, you'd waited for his hair to dry and took him out to the garage to cut his hair.

The sky was overcast and there was a light rain falling that you could see from within the garage. Michael had opened the garage door in order to watch while you cut his hair and seemed content to let you do whatever to his head. It had taken awhile to get him to trust you around him and even longer for sharp objects to be introduced.

Brushing off his bare chest and back, you smiled at your handiwork. "Looking sharp Mikey," you complimented with a smile, "I think this'll make wearing your mask a bit more comfortable. Less itchy too." You watched Michael run his hands through his hair and seemed content. No one was better at reading his micro-expressions than you. He liked it.

As Michael pulled his black tshirt back on, you began brushing the hair with a sweeper and dustpan into a garbage bag. It hadn't been a lot – Michael only had so much tolerance of annoying things – but it still took you a minute to do. You weren't even paying attention to your Boogeyman snooping around the garage until you heard a cymbal make a sound.

You lifted you head and found Michael had removed the cloth covering your old drum set and was investigating it, giving you a tilt of his head. "Oh, I forgot that was out here!" You stepped over some storage boxes as you made your way towards the drums. "The sticks should be around here somewhere," you hummed before digging around the space. Sure enough, you found the two sticks wrapped up nearby. "You know how to play drums?" Michael gave his head a slight shake no.

Sitting in the leather seat, you banged on a few of the drums and showed Michael how they worked. His eyes widened at the loud sounds as you played. "I never learnt anything professional," you told him as you just banged around a bit, "it was just nice to let energy out." You gave the cymbals a hard smash and grinned up at the taller man next to you. "Wanna try?"

Surprisingly, Michael took the sticks and sat down. With a few bangs that seemed exploratory and getting the hang of pressing his foot to make a lower noise, he seemed to catch on pretty quick. You listened as Michael banged the drums, slowly getting more confident as he did so.

Plus you weren't going to pretend he wasn't hot while he did it.

A loud bang signified the end of his "song" and he stared at you with wide eyes, panting heavily. "Fun, right?" You smiled at him. "If you like em, you're free to play. I sure as hell don't use them anymore so they're all yours!"

Michael surprised you as the corners of his mouth stretched into an almost feral grin. His eyes were wide as he began banging the drums again, the loud noises echoing throughout your garage. You laughed in surprise at his genuine joy and stayed to watch him play.

Over the next few days, Michael continued sneaking – literally sneaking, like he'd be in trouble if you spotted him – into the garage to play the drums. His disorganized, chaotic banging was slowly starting to take form. Organized chaos, you smiled to yourself. The loud sounds and movements gave Michael a chance to express himself with noise and not just making his masks. You also found it exceptionally cute when he'd go play and come back inside hours later with his wild brown curls disheveled and a crazed grin on his face.

So you made a mixtape for him that focused on drum sounds, steady but loud beats the way he liked. At first he didn't seem too interested in music but you'd caught him listening to it a few times, eyes closed and posture relaxed. Music wasn't something Michael had a lot of exposure too so you had fun introducing him to bands and musicians. He seemed to like metal music the best so you tried to go for sounds in that area.

Watching Michael drum on things in your home and hum along to songs he liked made your heart swell. He was genuinely having fun with it and you felt joy that he trusted you so much to let his guard down, to let himself be more human.

It had been unsettling at first seeing him smile the way he did but now it just made you equally happy.

He hadn't even been out to kill in a few weeks now, instead using the drums as an outlet for whatever thoughts and feelings he had. Some days he'd let you sit and watch him, appreciating the way you never asked him questions or bothered him while he played, while other days he just needed to be alone. You respected that.

One night you were sitting on the couch with Michael's head in your lap while cartoons played on the tv. You were enthralled in your book and not paying attention but the tv was more for him than you. A thought came to you and you moved your book aside to stare at the pretty boy in your lap. "Hey Michael," you spoke softly as your hand came up to brush your fingers through his hair, "do you want to take drumming lessons? Learn some new sounds and maybe learn to play songs you like?"

He turned his head and blinked up at you, curious. "You don't have to give an answer right now but I know you have fun playing," his slow blink was stupidly cute, "so if you want to learn to play like the drummers in the songs, we can make that happen."

The silence was not rejection, you'd learnt that while living with Michael. He turned his head back to the tv and you knew he would think about your offer.

A few days passed of Michael banging away in the garage before he came to you one night before bed and set the drumsticks in your lap before looking at you expectantly. You tilted your head and gave him a smile. "Alright, I'll find a teacher for you." He gave you a curt nod before climbing into bed after you. Smiling, you placed the drumsticks on your bedside table before curling up with Michael to sleep.

Finding a teacher that would be willing to do private 1-on-1 teaching wasn't too difficult. The hard part was convincing Michael of your cover story. "So you and I eloped once I graduated," you explained while tossing Michael various clothes to wear for his first lesson, "and we share the same last name so don't write Myers on anything. I've only paid for three lessons so you can make sure you like this guy and he knows you don't talk. If he asks, you got in a car accident a few years ago and lost your eye and haven't spoken since." You felt Michael's eyes on you and could feel the amusement radiating off of him.

You turned to look him over. Black jeans and boots, a plain white tshirt, and you'd styled his hair nice. "You're so pretty," the words fell out of your mouth before you could stop them. You felt your face heat up as Michael observed you curiously. "I mean it Michael. You're so pretty and I love... seeing you happy like this." Deciding to just bite the bullet, you let it all spill out. With some modifications.

Michael blinked at you before stepping closer, calculated and steady. Once the two of you were chest to chest, he leaned down as you leant up, the two of you kissing sweetly before he pulled back slowly. Blinking up at him with a heavy blush, you ran the backs of your fingers over his equally warm cheek. Clearing your throat, you took his hand and led him to the door. "Lets go, don't want you to be late."

You pretended like you didn't see the incredibly soft smile he gave you.

#🔪 creeps writes #slasher x reader #slasher x s/o #michael myers x reader #michael myers #halloween 1978 #slasher fanfiction #drummer michael myers #play those drums man go off

[ddaengtae]

see you around || jjk

pairing: jeon jungkook x reader

genre: college, strangers (idiots) to lovers, fitness instructor! jungkook, fluff, smut

word count: 13.9k

summary: you know those beautiful strangers that you admire from afar and obsess over with your friends, but know there’s about a one percent chance they’ll ever talk to you or even know who you are?  that’s precisely what jeon jungkook was to you; a piece of delicious eye candy that you could daydream about all you wanted, but had to accept that it was too unrealistic to ever happen.  or so you thought.  after an embarrassing accident at the gym that makes your worlds collide, maybe you had been wrong about your chances all along.

a/n: when i came up with this idea in my head, i guessed it would be around 5k words.  guess my hands slipped.  this is only my second bts fic, but after getting good feedback for my first one, i decided to give it another try and this is what happened.  i tried to edit closely, but there may be a few types so i’m sorry!  thanks for reading & pls lmk what you think. :)

Another week, another million reasons to be stressed.  It really seemed like that was the never-ending pattern of the college lifestyle.  The weekend was never long enough to truly allow yourself to unwind.  Sure, those two days were great, but how was two days enough to destress from the agony of multiple all-nighters to keep up with the shitload of work that all of your professors always deemed it acceptable to assign?  There was no way for you to prove it, but you believed in a conspiracy theory that all of the professors would meet up at the beginning of each semester and choose to make all of their huge assignments due on the same days just to fuck all of their students over.  There could be no other explanation for the hell that was midterms season.

While during your first two years of college you would barely be hanging on by a thread during the busiest weeks of the semester, you were now a junior and had at last adopted a regime that helped you burn off some steam when the tension became all too much.  Somewhere along the way, you started to realize that inhaling mozzarella sticks and Red Bull at two in the morning the night before an exam did very little to make you feel better and that it would probably be a better idea to take up a healthy lifestyle and better time management skills sooner rather than later.  In the process of getting your life together, one Tuesday evening in the spring of your sophomore year, one of your roommates had convinced you to accompany her to a group fitness class at the gym on campus.  To your surprise, you fell in love with it and the feeling of adrenaline and accomplishment that came along with making it through the hour.  From that day on, you vowed to yourself to make it to the gym most days of the week.

There was something about group fitness classes that made you feel much more comfortable than going to the gym and working out on your own.  Perhaps most glaringly, the classes were dominated with like-minded girls who just wanted some peace of mind for an hour.  Most of the instructors were girls too, except for a few guys who seemed to understand why a lot of women chose to avoid the rest of the gym.  It was quite unsettling to work out by yourself on the main floor and be surrounded by conceited guys who always seemed to either be undressing you with their eyes or judging you because, god forbid, you couldn’t squat three-hundred pounds like they could.  The whole place just always reeked of toxic masculinity, or so that was what you had thought until you found out about the group fitness classes that the facility also held.  They seemed to be a sort of heavenly escape from the rest of the place that resembled a fraternity initiation ceremony.

That was precisely where you found yourself this Monday evening.  In dire need of a break from studying, you found yourself sitting on the floor of the group classroom surrounded by your equipment and waiting for your favorite instructor to arrive.  The concept of a high-intensity circuit training class had initially terrified you when you first decided to try it out last semester, but it had quickly become your favorite class and one that you attended every week without fail.  It was incredibly satisfying to track your progress and watch your body evolve as you adapted to be able to lift heavier weights and make it through the cardio outbreaks without feeling like you were going to drop dead every second.

Taking a long sip of your water, your eyes remained down on your phone as you heard the door of the room open and close again.  As it was still ten minutes before class, you didn’t think much of it and assumed it was probably just more people piling into the room and rushing to get their equipment ready.

“Uh, hi guys!  The usual instructor for the class is unfortunately sick so I’m filling in for her tonight,” an unfamiliar-- but yet also eerily recognizable-- male voice echoed through the room.  “I was just recently certified so this is actually the first class I’ll be teaching here.  I promise I’ll try to live up to her hype.”  The unknown source let out an awkward laugh, which was met with relative silence from the rest of the room.

The moment your eyes moved up to fall upon the new instructor, your breath hitched in your throat, causing the water you had been attempting to drink to flow down the wrong pipe.  This wasn’t just any unmemorable college boy filling in to instruct the class.  There at the front of the room stood none other than Jeon Jungkook.  The breathtaking Jeon Jungkook was going to be leading the class and you were supposed to be able perform-- let alone breathe-- properly?  Oh no.

You and Jungkook were not friends by any means.  Hell, it was highly likely that the boy didn’t even know who you were.  You know those beautiful strangers that you admire from afar, yet know there’s about a one percent chance that they will ever know who you are or ever speak to you?  The ones you tell all of your friends about and you go out of your way to use your FBI-level stalking skills to find their social media in hopes of finding out more about them so you can daydream about your nonexistent, fantasy future together?  The ones you’re always hoping you’ll cross paths with while walking to class because even a glance of them will make your day a little more exciting and give you something to talk about with your friends?  That was what Jungkook was to you.

Jungkook had become known as ‘hot coffee shop boy’ amongst your friend group after you had noticed him studying in the same coffee shop as you one day in the fall of your sophomore year.  As you always chose to study at the least favorite and therefore least populated coffee shop on campus, it was shocking the first time someone as beautiful as Jungkook sat down at one of the tables across from yours and settled in to do his homework as well.  His presence offered you a paradox; while seeing him looking like a model wearing his oversized clothes and sighing at his laptop screen was certainly a distraction at times, it also served as a form of motivation to force you to focus because you didn’t want him thinking you were slacking off.  He seemed to enjoy the quiet ambience of the specific shop because after that first day, he began to frequent it almost as often as you, always sitting at the same table by the third window.  On some occasions, one of his friends who always seemed to be changing hair colors would accompany him.  After some research completed by your enamored friend Jennie who sometimes accompanied you, she discovered his name was Park Jimin.  He quickly became known as ‘iced chai’ after that seemed to be his regular coffee order.

It was an exciting day amongst your friends on the first day of classes in the spring of your sophomore year when Jungkook happened to enroll in the same Earth Science lecture as you to satisfy the science gen-ed requirement at your university.  Rocks and rivers weren’t exactly interesting, but the back of Jungkook’s head from the row in front of you certainly was.  The group chat really blew up the day he spun around in his chair and asked you if he could borrow a pen.  They were right that it would’ve been easier for him to just ask one of the people next to him, but you were smart enough to not think into it too much.  Maybe you just seemed like the type of person to carry around an abundance of stationery materials (you weren’t, and you ended up not taking any notes that day after giving him the only pen you had).

So here you were, practically choking on your water as Jungkook started to set up his own equipment at the front of the room.  How dare he invade your safe space?  You suddenly felt as if you barely remembered how to do a jumping jack, let alone have the facilities to pick up a weight.  

After organizing his weights at the front of the room, Jungkook’s eyes began to scan the participants in the room, likely counting how many people had shown up.  The moment his eyes met yours, your whole body froze in place.  Oddly enough, his seemed to do the same.  His doe eyes became wide and his mouth fell into an ‘o’ as he looked at you for a few seconds too long, and you swore there was an expression of recognition on his face.  Before you could convince yourself that anything of the sort had truly happened, Jungkook was blinking rapidly and shaking his head at himself before his eyes darted away to scan and count the rest of the room.

“Alright everyone, we’re going to get started in a minute here,” Jungkook announced a minute later, looking down at his phone as he connected his music and began blasting it through the speakers.  “Just remember to follow my lead and please don’t hesitate to wave me over if you have any questions or are struggling with form.  I’ll try to keep an eye on all of you and come over to help you out anyway.”  His eyes crinkled into crescent moons as he offered the class a big bunny smile.  Oh god, you were going to pass out.  “We’re going to be starting with a pretty intense cardio circuit here to bring those heart rates right up and set the tone for the rest of class.”  Great.  Your heart rate was already accelerating through the roof just at the sight of him.  “Try to keep up, but if you need to grab some water or take a break at any point, please don’t hesitate to do so.  We’re going to get started in 3… 2… 1… Go!”

To your surprise, you were able to make it through the first couple of circuits without too much trouble.  You made it your mission to zone in on each of the exercises you were doing, and that every time you were forced to face forward you would fixate your gaze on the back of the girl in front of you.  It was shockingly easy to forget about the beautiful man in front of the room while you were gasping for breath after numerous rounds of burpees and mountain climbers.  The goal was to look calm and fit without calling attention to yourself.  Outside of your heavy breathing that was likely being drowned out by Jungkook’s loud music, you could say you were succeeding.

About twenty minutes into the class, Jungkook signaled a transition into an upper body circuit.  While you were delighted to get a break from cardio and to allow your heart rate to calm down for a bit, following the exercises now required you to face forward and watch for his cues.  This would be fine as long as you didn’t focus on his gorgeous face that was currently glistening with sweat in the most pleasing way possible, right?

“Alright, we’re going to start off here with some overhead shoulder presses for the first minute.  I’d recommend something on the lighter side, but make sure you’re challenging yourself.”  With a slight nod of his head, Jungkook picked up his own weights and counted down the class to begin the first exercise of the circuit.

Shoulder presses weren’t bad.  You could do this.  Inhaling a deep breath, you made an attempt to wipe your sweaty palms off on your leggings before picking up your dumbbells and getting in position to begin your shoulder presses.  After the first few reps, you quickly fell into a rhythm that was both comfortable yet challenging, feeling that delicious burn in your shoulder muscles.  At the halfway mark through the minute, your eyes had remained glued to the same girl in front of you.  You finally felt a sense of peace.  One look at Jungkook couldn’t hurt, right?

Wrong.  

Against your better judgement, you decided to shift your eyes to the front of the room and take a good luck at a combination of both Jungkook’s back and the reflection of the front of his body through the mirror before him.  

The string of events that occurred immediately after that moment was a blur.  As Jungkook pressed his set of dumbbells above his head, his baggy shirt slid up his body, exposing his sweaty, toned abs that looked as though they were sculpted by the gods themselves.  What was likely an audible gasp escaped from your lips as your eyes remained frozen on the sight in front of you.  It was unclear if it was your mesmerized state, your sweaty hands, or a combination of both, but seconds later, the dumbbell in your right hand slipped out of your grasp and quickly went crashing downward.

“Oh my... Fuck!” 

There was a moment of dissociation before you realized that the loud cry had, in fact, come out of your mouth, and that the dumbbell that had glided out of your hand had, in fact, come crashing down onto the big toe of your right foot.  Your head was spinning as you began to process the throbbing feeling radiating throughout your entire foot, as well as the weight of what had just occurred.  Within moments, the eyes of all of the participants were on you, as well as the eyes of the one person whose attention you really did not want in such an embarrassing moment.  No, no, no.

“Oh my god, are you okay?” Jungkook’s panicked voice echoed throughout the room as he spoke into his headset and he quickly dropped his weights on the ground.  “Um, okay, the rest of you can keep going!  I’m going to get someone else to come in within a few minutes so I can help her.”  Within moments, he was shoving his way through the room until he was right in front of you and pulling the microphone away from his mouth so the rest of the class wouldn’t hear your interaction.  “Are you alright?  Oh my god, you shouldn’t be putting pressure on it.  Let’s get you out of here and get some ice.”

You genuinely thought you were going to pass out.  It had little to do with your toe, and a whole lot to do with Jungkook’s sudden closeness.  His concerned face was just inches away from yours as his eyes scanned yours for any sort of explanation for what had just unfolded.  His presence was intoxicating.  You could smell the combination of his cologne and sweat, and you had yet to tear the image of his gleaming six-pack out of your mind.  Oh my god.  That had really just happened.  The first impression you made on Jungkook, AKA hot coffee shop boy, was you making an absolute fool out of yourself and possibly breaking your toe while doing a simple exercise.  You were never going to live this one down.  You were going to throw up.

When you hadn’t responded to Jungkook within a few seconds, he took it upon himself to drape an arm over your shoulders and pull your body against his side.  “Here, lean against me so you’re not putting weight on it.  I’m going to bring you to the first-aid room and get you some ice…  At the very least.”

It was quite possible that your brain had chosen it was better to black out the memory as Jungkook began to pull you out of the room, yelling to one of the workers at the front desk to quickly find someone else to take over the class.  Your legs felt like jelly as they moved beside his, only functioning out of muscle memory rather than true volition.  Here you were, body pressed against that of the guy you had admired from afar for over a year.  In any other circumstance, this would have been like a dream come true.  Instead, you wished the ground would swallow you up and put you out of your misery.

It wasn’t long until you were pulled into what was likely the first-aid room and instructed to sit on top of the counter by a very stressed Jungkook.  The more you thought about it, the more horrible you felt.  Not only was this the Jeon Jungkook of your fantasies, but it was also the Jeon Jungkook who had informed the class before it had started that this was the first class he had ever led.  You had quite literally ruined his first class, and had set an appalling example of what he would expect going forward.  If your toe hadn’t been throbbing, you would have seriously considered running right out the door.

“Okay, if you don’t mind, just take off your shoe and sock while I try to find an ice pack,” Jungkook commanded as he nervously raked a hand through his already-messy hair, frantically rifling through the cabinets.  Your eyes watched his back as you followed his instructions, guilt filling your entire body.  He seemed stressed.  Nervous, even.  It made sense, if you thought about it.  Your foolish accident had just become his responsibility, and he was a new employee.  You would be nervous too.

“Found one,” he breathed out, hitting it against the counter a couple of times to activate the coldness.  As he turned around to face you, his eyes wandered down to your exposed toe.  “Oh no, that looks pretty swollen.  Does it hurt really badly?  Are you okay?”

“It doesn’t feel great, but I’m okay.”  No, no you were not okay, but you needed this to be over.  Meeting his eyes, you realized those were the first words you had spoken to him since this whole debacle had unraveled.  He probably thought you were crazy.  Taking the ice pack from him, you chewed on your lower lip.  “I’m… I’m really sorry.”

Jungkook furrowed his brow as he looked up from your foot to meet your gaze, tilting his head to the side.  “Huh?  You have no reason to be sorry.  Accidents happen.  I get it… I’m pretty clumsy too sometimes and have hurt myself much worse than this for much stupider reasons.  Really, don’t worry.”  He was rambling, and if you hadn’t been so distraught, you would have perhaps realized just how nervous he really seemed.  Offering you a shy smile, his eyes averted away from yours as his cheeks flushed a shade of bright red.  Redder than they should have been from just working out.

Looking down at your foot, you placed the ice pack on top of it and shook your head.  It was difficult to form words with him so close, but you knew you had to if you wanted to redeem yourself at all.  You already had created a mental plan to avoid him at all costs and hide from him whenever that wasn’t possible, but this was the least you could do.  “No, I’m really sorry.  You said at the beginning that this was your first class and I… I kind of ruined it for you.  I’m sure you were really excited about it.”

Jungkook remained occupied with your toe as he moved the ice pack to the side, feeling around the bones and moving it gently in various directions to see how bad the pain was.  “I don’t think it’s broken.  Definitely pretty swollen, but not broken.  However, I’m clearly not a doctor so you might want to get a second opinion.”  Standing up straight, he offered you a warm smile.  “But seriously, don’t worry about it.  There’s always going to be more classes for me to teach and I wasn’t just going to let you suffer there.  I’m happy to help.”

God, not only was he gorgeous, but he was also this friendly?  It was possible that he was just being nice to keep you calm and keep his job, but regardless, he just seemed so perfect.  So perfect that you feared being so close to him, for your endless flaws felt as if though they were being magnified.  Clearing your throat, you forced yourself to return the smile.  “Thanks.  I really appreciate it, but I’ll be fine.”  You needed to escape.  You needed to get out of there so you could cry to your friends about just how mortified you were and how you now really never stood a chance with hot coffee shop boy.  “I should probably get going.  Don’t want to hold you up any longer.”

“You’re not holding me up at all, I promise,” Jungkook responded a bit too quickly, but yet again, you were too focused on your own embarrassment to notice.  Crossing his arms over his chest, the tall man tilted his head to the side.  “How are you going to get back to your dorm?  Do you have a ride?  You definitely shouldn’t be walking on your toe.”

Fuck.  He had a good point.  Regardless of the pain flowing through your foot, you were willing to walk on it just to escape this situation.  However, you knew you couldn’t tell him that.  “I, uh, one of my roommates has a car and I was going to call her to pick me up.”

“I have my car here.  I could drive you.”

Wait, what?  Had he really just offered you a ride?  If you had met his gaze, you would’ve seen that he looked just as surprised that such an offer had slipped out of his lips so casually.  Instead, you stared down at your lap as you attempted to process his suggestion.  If the situation had been even slightly less humiliating, a car ride with the Jeon Jungkook would have sounded like one of your fantasies come to life.  However, at the current moment all you could imagine was the intense awkward silence that would likely fill the car as you contemplated how to successfully fling yourself out of the window.  That would not do right now.  You were not in the right headspace to muster up any coherent form of small talk.  The offer was likely just extended out of pity anyway.  He was a good guy and deemed that that would be the righteous thing to do.  No need to burden him and actually make him follow through with it.

“No, no.  I wouldn’t make you do that.  I’m going to text my friend right now,” you assured him, weakly smiling as you moved the ice pack to the side to retrieve your removed sock and shoe.  “You have a workout to finish anyway.

“It wouldn’t be any trouble,” Jungkook insisted, watching intently as you carefully put your sneaker back on and tied it up at lightning speed.  When he realized you had no plans of speaking again, a defeated sigh pressed through his lips.  Why was he so set on helping you?  “Okay, okay.  As long as your friend is coming soon, that’ll work.  I can walk you to the lobby though.”

Realizing he wasn’t going to let you just run out of the room alone, you forced yourself to nod your head in agreement.  You were being dramatic.  You could handle one more minute in his presence before you imploded.  “Sure, thanks.”  The response came off a bit snappier than you had intended, but did that really matter at this point?  You weren’t going to be able to show your face around him ever again to begin with.

Once you pushed yourself off of the counter, Jungkook encouraged you to lean most of your weight against him as he led you out the door.  As you were already on the first floor of the facility, the walk to the lobby luckily didn’t take too long.  Upon arrival, you plopped down in one of the plush chairs by the door, fishing your phone out of the pocket of your hoodie and pretending to draft a text.  In all honesty, the moment Jungkook disappeared, you intended to wobble your way back to your dorm by twisting your foot to the side to avoid putting pressure on the big toe.  You were well aware that you were going to look ridiculous, but nothing could be more mortifying than what you had already experienced.

Jungkook stood over your chair, rubbing the back of his neck as he rocked from side to side on his feet.  Something about him just exuded nervous energy, and it was making you feel even more on edge.  “You’re sure your friend is able to come soon, right?”

Nodding your head in response, you lifted your hand into a thumbs-up that you regretted the second your hand formed it.  God, you might as well have hit him with some finger guns.  Could you be any cringier?  “Yes, don’t worry.  She’s on her way.  Really, thank you though.”

Shoving his hands into the pockets of his athletic shorts, Jungkook’s eyes scanned your face one last time.  It was almost as if he was searching for any hint of a lie, but if he had been, he wasn’t able to find it.  “Okay, okay… If you insist.  I’m sorry this had to happen to you.  I hope it heals quickly.”  His lips stretched into that signature bunny smile you had witnessed so many times while seeing him with his friends in public, but it almost looked a little more… Bashful.  “I’ll see you around, okay?”

No, no he would not.  You weren’t even sure that he had recognized you from being at the same coffee shop so often, but regardless, you had already planned to avoid the location at all costs.  You couldn’t stand the thought of him possibly approaching you out of pity to check and see if you were okay.

Instead of expressing any of these concerns, you twisted your lips into a small smile and nodded your head at him.  “Mhmm.  See you around.”

After lifting his hand in a wave, Jungkook smiled at you once more before turning on his heel and slowly starting to make his way back toward the main area of the gym.  You watched as he began to disappear, as you planned on rushing out the door the moment he was out of sight.  Right before he rounded the corner, his body twisted to face you once more.  If you hadn’t been so fixated on your own embarrassment, maybe you would’ve noticed the way his cheeks flushed a deep shade of red before he nervously laughed to himself and rounded the corner quickly so he was out of your line of vision.

The moment he disappeared, you gathered your belongings and rose to your feet a bit too quickly, immediately noticing how you forgot to avoid putting pressure on your toe.  Fighting through the pain and fighting to maintain any sense of pride you had left, you began your walk-- or rather, wobble-- home.

God, you needed some wine.

The rest of the week passed by without much trouble, but maybe that was due to your advanced avoiding skills.  Due to having three midterms throughout the week, most of your time was spent holed up alone studying.  While you usually would do most of your studying in your favorite quiet coffee shop, you made it a point to steer clear of it at all costs.  You were well aware that Jungkook also spent a lot of his time in that specific location, and you weren’t ready to show your face to him if it could be prevented.  He had been right; your toe wasn’t broken, but instead just badly bruised.  While your toe may have been fine, your ego certainly wasn’t.  After stumbling home after the incident on that Monday evening, your roommates had a laughing fest at your expense over a few too many bottles of wine.  They attempted to convince you that what had happened really wasn’t that embarrassing, that Jungkook seemed to be really sweet about it, and that such a chaotic event would be ‘the most epic story to tell people about the start of your relationship at your wedding.’  Although you indulged in their pipe dreams for the time being, you were going to stick to your plan: avoid Jungkook at all times possible until enough time had passed that he likely forgot about your humiliating catastrophe.

After a week of cramming for exams and perfecting your evading abilities, you were beyond ready to take a night to unwind and destress. That was precisely why you found yourself out at one of popular college bars by your campus with your friend Jennie on Friday night.  The pair of you weren’t exactly the type to go out and let loose very often as you tried your best to prioritize your studies, but once you allowed yourself to get dressed up and had a few vodka-crans running through your veins, you understood why a lot of college students went out so often and remembered why you used to so much during your freshman year.  The sensation of being tipsy and laughing with your friends was truly therapeutic and a much-needed antidote to counteract the toxic environment of never-ending stress.

Having been at the bar for over an hour, it started to get quite crowded.  As you twirled your straw around in your half-empty drink, you watched as Jennie began to look around at all of the new faces in the bar before freezing and pursing her lips. “Okay, not to make you freak out or anything… But hot coffee shop boy AKA sexy fitness instructor boy AKA Jeon Jungkook is here,” she whisper-yelled at you as she leaned toward your ear.  “He seems drunk… Like really drunk.”

Blinking rapidly as you tried to process this new information, you pulled back from her and began to shake your head.  This certainly was not what you needed to hear right now, but the alcohol in your system calmed you down at least a little bit so you didn’t immediately book it out of the place.  “So what you’re telling me is that I need to hide in the bathroom for the rest of the night?”  Despite your fears, you really wanted to get a glance of him.  Although the bar was quite large, you told yourself it would be too risky.  If experience had taught you anything, it was that even one glance at him could be fatal for you.

“Stop being ridiculous,” Jennie scoffed, shoving your shoulder before taking a long sip of her drink.  Her gaze remained set on the area of the crowded bar that you refused to look toward.  “He’s…” She paused for a moment before her eyes widened.  “Okay, I might be a little drunk, but I’m almost positive he keeps looking over here.”

“Maybe because you’re staring at him and drawing attention to us,” you scolded, narrowing your eyes at her.  “Please stop before I jump over the actual bar and hide behind it.”

Jennie laughed at your dramatic suggestion, eyeing your nervous persona up and down.  “Relax, relax.”  She looked over your shoulder yet again.  “Oh, wait.  He’s on the move now so I don’t think you have to worry.”

Letting out a sigh of relief, you took an extra long sip of your drink.  “Thank god.  I don’t need to relive my earlier trauma on a night out.”

“Wait, fuck.  I think--”

“Ah, is that toe girl?!”

Your whole body froze as you heard the close proximity of a very familiar male voice behind you.  You wanted to believe that your initial guess of what was occurring wasn’t true, but the mixture of shock and amusement on Jennie’s face as she looked over your shoulder at the sight behind you confirmed that your worst nightmare was, in fact, true.

Sucking in a deep breath and downing the rest of your drink before placing it down on the bar, you gave yourself a mental pep talk before slowly turning on your heel to face the source of the voice.  If there hadn’t been a decent amount of alcohol in your system, you were quite certain that you would’ve passed out right then and there.

There before you stood Jungkook with a cheeky grin spread across his lips and arms crossed over his chest as he stared down at, unfortunately, you.  He was sporting a pair of tight, ripped black jeans and a matching black t-shirt.  The clasping of a beer bottle in one hand and the way his arms were folded made his bicep muscles protrude in a manner that had you ready to start drooling.  Jennie had been right; his face was glowing a bright shade of red, likely due to a great deal of alcohol consumption.

Clearing your throat, you forced your lips into a shy smile as you folded your hands together in front of you.  You wished you hadn’t finished your drink so you had something more natural to do with your hands.  It felt as if though your heart was going to explode through your chest, but he was here now and there was no escaping.  “God, is that really what I’m known as now?”

“I mean, kind of.”  Jungkook let out a loud laugh, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he did so.  How was he so fucking gorgeous?  And why the fuck was this beautiful man going out of his way to talk to you on a night out?  “But I won’t call you that anymore.  It’s Y/N, right?”

Your brow furrowed as your mouth opened in surprise.  Wait, what?  Jungkook knew your name?  It felt like your mind was moving at a million miles a minute trying to process just how that could be possible.

A hand reached out from behind you to squeeze your shoulder, Jennie stepping forward and revealing herself after you had forgotten about her existence for a minute.  Her lips were twisted upward into a mischievous smile.  “I see a couple of my friends from one of my classes.  Gonna go say hi to them.  I’ll meet up with you later.”  After not-so-discreetly wiggling her eyebrows at you, she mouthed what appeared to be “good luck” before sauntering off.

“Looks like you’re stuck with me now.”  Jungkook chuckled quietly as he watched Jennie walk away before setting his eyes back on you and smiling warmly.  You were convinced that his smile was going to be the death of you.  “Hopefully you won’t try to run off as quickly as you did the other day.”

“I did not run off!” you scoffed immediately, crossing your own arms over your chest as you feigned offense.  Once again, thank god for alcohol, for you were well aware that this conversation would not be happening without it.  He was right, but you hadn’t realized he had noticed your urgency in escaping that day.  ‘I… I wasn’t even aware that you knew my name.”

“Suuure you didn’t.  You couldn’t get away from me fast enough,” Jungkook teased, leaning forward a bit to nudge his shoulder against yours.  The area of skin he touched immediately felt like it was on fire, as did your cheeks.  “But of course I know your name.  We had Earth Science together last year and you’re always studying at the same coffee shop by North campus that I do.  You’re kind of hard to miss.”

You?  Hard to miss?  Not to mention, the Earth Science class was a lecture with over one hundred students in it, and the professor hardly ever took any form of attendance.  Sure you could say the same thing about you knowing his name, but that was only because you had gone out of your way to find out who he was after becoming captivated by him upon seeing him at the coffee shop.  This didn’t make any sense.  Were you dreaming?  Hallucinating?

Raising an eyebrow at him, you decided to keep your response simple.  “You’ve never talked to me, though…”

“I know, I know.”  Jungkook unfolded his arms and clasped both of his hands around his beer bottle, staring down at his fingers as he tapped them against the glass.  Maybe it was the dim lighting in the bar, but you could’ve sworn his cheeks darkened as he avoided your eyes.  The aroma of cologne and beer coming off of him at the close proximity had you feeling light-headed.  “I’ve always wanted to.  Planned to talk to you at the coffee shop this week, but you were nowhere to be seen.  You just… I… You’re really pretty and you’re always smiling and I kind of freaked out when I saw you taking that class on Monday.  I’m pretty shy and not exactly the most confident person so I have no idea why I’m saying this right now… Definitely all of the beer I’ve drank… But I probably shouldn’t be overstepping or saying any of this anyway since I’m starting to realize that you’ve probably been avoiding me or think I’m weird or something.  Sorry for offering to drive you home the other day… I realized after that that probably seemed creepy coming from a total stranger.”  He looked to the side as he began to nervously tap his foot against the floor.  Something that sounded like a nervous laugh pressed through his lips.  “Fuck.  This is why I barely ever drink.”

Your body remained frozen as you stared at the side of his face, fully aware of the fact that your jaw had dropped and you were visibly gaping at him.  No.  There was absolutely no way that those words came out of his mouth and he meant them.  It had to be the excessive amount of alcohol in his system, right?  Or maybe he was just sweet talking you to try to get laid.  That had to be it, right?  You weren’t sure if you were going to throw up, pass out, or do both at the same time.  The vodka taking over your own system was preventing you from being able to form any sort of coherent thought.  Still, he deserved a response.

“What?  I don’t think you’re weird at all,” you reassured, chewing on your lower lip as you tried to read the expression on his face.  God, you really could have come up with something better than that.

Jungkook’s doe eyes at last met yours again, a disbelieving look in his eyes.  “Then why’d you lie and say your friend was picking you up and end up walking home on a possibly broken toe instead of letting me drive you home?”

Oh my god, he had seen you do that?  You were certain he was completely out of sight when you had dragged yourself out of the building.  To be fair, you hadn’t taken into account the fact that the place was covered with windows that would have given anyone access to see outside the front of the building, but why would he have been looking anyway?  Just as you thought that day couldn’t have gotten any more embarrassing, it did.  

The mix of alcohol in your system and your heart pounding in your chest was quickly becoming too much to handle and making you lose control over your faculties.  Maybe that was why you blurted out, “I-I don't know… You make me nervous.”

“You make me nervous too!”

Before you could even begin to comprehend the weight of his words, another male figure popped up beside Jungkook and draped an arm over his shoulders.  His bright pink hair made him easily identifiable.  It was iced chai, also known as Park Jimin.  If Jennie had noticed he was there, she certainly would have been freaking out.

“There you are!  I’ve been looking for you.  You just disappeared on me,” Jimin informed Jungkook, his gaze quickly moving to set on your distraught form.  If you hadn’t been so out of sorts, perhaps you would’ve noticed the look of recognition in his eyes as they set on you.  “I’m sorry, is he bothering you?  He never usually goes out with us and gets drunk like this, so I’m sorry if he’s a little chaotic.”

Shaking your head at Jimin, you offered him a comforting smiling.  You could feel Jungkook’s concerned eyes burning a hole into the side of your face.  “No, no.  He’s not bothering me at all, don’t worry.”

“Oh, thank god.  I was worried he might do something stupid.”  Jimin let out a sigh of relief, looking between the pair of you.  Could that ‘something stupid’ be what had just occurred?  At last, he gave Jungkook a firm pat on the shoulder.  “We have to get going right now.  Hoseok thought it’d be a good idea to down five tequila shots in a row after all of the beer we drank back at the dorm.  He has his head down on the bar with his eyes closed and I want to get him out of here before he starts puking everywhere.  Afraid you might end up in the same state if you keep drinking at this pace too, dude.”

“I’m fiiine,” Jungkook snapped back at him, rolling his eyes as he shrugged Jimin’s arm off of his shoulder.  He peered at you for a quick second before his eyes averted downward, the nerves that had been there before refusing to go away.  After taking a few moments to ponder what his friend had just told him, he let out a defeated sigh.  “Fine.  We can go.  Only because it’s Hoseok though.”

“I’ve already requested the Uber so we should head outside now,” Jimin urged, glancing over toward where Hoseok likely was sitting at the bar.

“Um.” Jungkook at last forced himself to look at you, his lips curving upward into the slightest smile.  It seemed forced though, and you knew it was because you didn’t have the opportunity to elaborate on and finish the conversation you were having before Jimin butted in.  You also felt as if though you were about to self-implode and needed some time to comprehend what had just unfolded.  “Sorry.  I have to get going, I guess.  I’ll see you around though, okay?”

Nodding your head in agreement, you allowed yourself to return a reassuring smile.  “Okay.  I’ll see you around.”  This time, it was possible that you meant it.

After he gave you one last anxious look, he turned on his heel and followed Jimin’s lead, disappearing out of your sight.

Where the fuck was Jennie?

After scoping out Jennie in the corner of the bar, you had convinced her that it was absolutely necessary to immediately take an Uber home to debrief on what had occurred.  Within half an hour, you had managed to arrive back safely to your dorm and had replaced your uncomfortable clothes with pajamas and your vodka crans with a bottle of wine.  Although your mind felt quite foggy from trying to piece together everything that Jungkook had said, you were able to provide Jennie with at least the majority of the details.

“Wait, hold on.  Let me think about this.”  Jennie threw herself back against your bed, staring up at the ceiling after her head hit the pillows.  “So basically what you’re telling me is that you are to Jungkook what Jungkook is to you?  Like he pretty much admitted to admiring you from afar and being too afraid to talk to you all of this time?” she questioned, eyes wide in amazement.  “God damn, why can’t shit like this happen to me?  This is like some fairytale shit.  You’re so fucking lucky.”

Taking a big swig directly out of the bottle of cheap rosé, you let out an exasperated sigh.  “I don’t know.  It seems too good to be true.  Like, what if he was just really drunk and didn’t know what he was saying?  You even said he seemed really drunk.  Or like, what if he was just being nice because he was trying to get laid?”

“Y/N, don’t be ridiculous.  I know this all seems so unreal because we never thought something like this was possible, but the things he said to you were way too specific to just be a fluke.” Jennie sat up straight again and pulled the bottle of wine out of your hands, taking a sip herself.  “Besides, I was watching you guys from across the bar.  He looked absolutely smitten with you and ridiculously nervous, drunk or not.”

“Fuck, I’m so much better at just daydreaming about guys than actually knowing how to talk to them and attempting to form actual relationships,” you groaned out, closing your eyes and resting your head on Jennie’s shoulder.  “What am I supposed to do?”

“I hate to break it to you since I know this is very out of character for you, but you’re going to have to make the next move.  He laid his cards on the table, and now the ball is in your court.”  Jennie allowed her head to fall on top of yours and passed the bottle of wine back to you.  “Based on what you explained to me, you didn’t really provide him with a whole lot of reassurance that the feeling was mutual and he’s probably feeling super embarrassed right now… Like, definitely more embarrassed than you felt after the whole gym incident.  You have to let him know that you’re interested in him too.”

Letting out a huff, you tapped your fingers against the glass of the bottle of wine.  Jennie did have a valid point, as much as you hated to admit it.  Regardless of Jungkook’s intentions and just how drunk he may have been, he had seemed incredibly flustered after rambling on and exposing what he had to you.  As much as there was still a part of you that was convinced that he hadn’t meant what he said, there was a bigger part of you that was excited about what this could possibly lead to if you followed through with it.  You would have to throw away your nerves and muster up the tiny bit of confidence you had if this was ever going to happen.

“Okay, so what’s the game plan?”

The plan you and Jennie had concocted ended up being a lot more difficult to follow through with than you had initially imagined.  The original scheme involved you approaching him at the coffee shop you both always studied at, but despite the numerous occasions you dropped by and spent hours studying there over the next week, he was nowhere to be found.  It was almost as if he had adopted the same avoiding technique you had the week prior after being embarrassed at what unfolded at the gym.  You weren’t exactly surprised, but it was making this whole thing a lot more complicated for you.  Furthermore, the longer it dragged out, the more anxious you got that maybe this was all a bad idea and that you had misunderstood what he said at the bar.

After a week with no luck, Jennie had convinced you that maybe it would be a better idea to try to track him down at the gym.  Despite going almost every day and keeping your eyes peeled for him, he was nowhere to be seen.  It wasn’t until a few days later that it dawned on you that the group fitness class schedule was posted online, and that it was possible that he now had some classes that were officially assigned to him.  Sure enough, upon checking the recreation website, you quickly discovered that he did have a couple classes that he was set to teach.  While this information certainly was helpful, it was quite unfortunate that every class he led happened to be at the ass-crack of dawn.  God, were you really interested in the type of guy who gets up extra early to work out?  Apparently so.

So that was precisely how you found yourself rolling up to the gym at 6:45am on a Tuesday morning, eyes heavy with exhaustion as you searched for the room the class was being held in.  Your heart was pounding and your palm was sweaty against your water bottle, but you were too dedicated to turn around at this point.  You had spent over a week trying to track him down, and you at last had.

When you entered the room, Jungkook had not arrived yet.  There were already quite a few girls in the room setting up their equipment, so you followed suit.  As most participants were often too intimidated to take the spots up front and center in front of where the instructor stood, you took it upon yourself to do the honors.  Of course you knew this would make Jungkook want to run the other way, but the thrill of making him as nervous as you were that last time was too exciting to turn down.

The door of the room opened and closed once more, and you didn’t even have to look up to feel his presence.  Here we go.  “Hi, everyone!  Welcome to class.  My name is Jungkook and I’ll be your instructor toda--” His voice cut off at the end of his statement, and when you finally allowed your eyes to set on him, he was already looking at you with wide eyes and tinted cheeks.  Within a millisecond, his eyes found the ground and he apprehensively took his spot directly in front of you.  The poor guy didn’t have a choice.  “U-Um, if you guys have any questions before we get started, please don’t hesitate to wave me over!”  You had a very strong feeling he was praying you wouldn’t wave him over.

The plan you had created before arriving was to wait until after class was over to ask him if he could talk for a few minutes.  You knew it wouldn’t be fair to put him on the spot before class, and you didn’t exactly feel comfortable confessing your feelings for him in front of twenty other girls who were probably drooling over him as well either.  

You managed to follow through with the plan, not communicating with Jungkook at all before and throughout the class except for a few soft smiles and some attempted eye contact.  The eye contact thing didn’t go over so well though, for whenever you did manage to get Jungkook to lock eyes with you, he’d immediately turn bright red and force himself to look everywhere but at you.  His nervous stammering through the microphone when giving instructions was almost too cute to handle.

When the class finally did come to an end and you were a sweaty mess, you sucked in a deep breath as you watched the rest of the participants start to put away their equipment.  Setting your eyes on Jungkook, you smiled slightly.  “Hey, can we talk?”

Jungkook looked up from his phone, eyes wide and clearly panicked.  He scanned your face carefully, almost as if he was trying to guess what your intentions were.  At last, he swallowed the lump in his throat and shoved his phone into his pocket.  “U-Um, sure, I guess.  Let’s just wait until everyone clears out.”

Nodding in agreement, you sat back and watched as the rest of the participants put their materials back in the closet and slowly began to file out of the room.  With each person that left, you could sense Jungkook getting more and more anxious.  He seemed to be mindlessly checking things around the room, his eyes darting back and forth between the door and any part of you that wasn’t your eyes.  By the time the last girl exited, your heart was pounding in your chest as well.

Clearing your throat, you watched as Jungkook walked to the front of the room to shut the door, seeming to take as long as humanly possible to pull it closed.  Just as you were about to speak the pitch you had practiced in your head and to Jennie numerous times over the past week, he opened his mouth.

“Look, I’m not sure exactly what’s going on here and I know that I might have been a bit overbearing when I was drunk last week, but if you’re just here to make me nervous and make fun of me and my awkward self for having a crush on you, you can just leave.”  He at last whipped around to face you, a sad expression taking over his features as he began to pace back and forth, running a hand through his sweaty hair.  He resembled something like a wounded puppy, and the longer you stared at him, the more you noticed just how exhausted and agitated he looked.

That definitely was not what you had expected and you felt awful that he had spent over a week thinking that you were probably teasing him with your friends for what he had said to you at the bar.  Furrowing your brow, you pushed yourself up to your feet and crossed your arms over your chest.  The planned speech was not going to do in these circumstances.  You would have to cut straight to point.

“I dropped that weight on my foot because I’ve been ridiculously attracted to you for over a year and got embarrassingly flustered at the sight of your shirt riding up during class.”

Jungkook stopped dead in his tracks, clasping both of his hands behind his head as he at last allowed himself to look at you.  His eyes were wide in shock, his head tilted just slightly to the left.  “Wait, what?”

“I didn’t want you to drive me home because I was already so embarrassed and was so nervous that I would’ve only embarrassed myself more trying to talk to you without making a complete fool out of myself.”

As you spoke again, Jungkook hesitantly took a couple of steps in your direction.  It seemed as if though his expression was slowly softening, and what almost appeared to be a small smile was fighting to form on the corners of his lips.  “I asked you to borrow a pen that one time in Earth Science with plans to work up the nerve to talk to you at the end of class when I had to give it back, but instead I just kept it and ran out of the room because I got too nervous.”

Unable to hide your own smile now, you allowed yourself to take a step toward him.  The closer you got to each other, the more the tension in the room built.  “I lied and said that I had an extra pen that day, but really I gave you my only one and just didn’t take notes that whole class.”

At last, that familiar bunny smile stretched across Jungkook’s whole face, his chest bubbling in laughter as he threw his head back.  “I once tried to ‘accidentally’ drop a book near you at the coffee shop in hopes that you’d pick it up and talk to me, but instead I just dropped it and tripped over it.”  Another step forward.

Giggling quietly, you chewed on your lower lip as you advanced forward.  “My friends and I have collectively referred to you by the code name ‘hot coffee shop boy’ ever since the first time I saw you there.  Also, ‘sexy gym instructor boy’ since last week.”

Jungkook’s eyes were boring into yours at this point, his body inching forward just slightly as his toes finally bumped against yours.  The tension-- not just from what was happening at the moment, but also from a year of pining after each other-- was so close to bubbling over.  “My friends and I know you as ‘hot coffee shop girl.’  Also, ‘toe girl’ since last week.”  The warm smile on his lips had twisted into a sort of mischievous smirk.

Leaning your head forward the slightest bit, your breath hitched in your throat as you could feel the warmth of his breath against your lips.  “If I haven’t made it clear yet, I’m extremely into you.”

Jungkook’s eyes-- which had darkened quite a bit over the last minute-- flickered down to your lips, his own head leaning forward an inch.  With this movement, the tip of his nose brushed against yours.  “And if I haven’t made it obvious yet, I’m extremely into you too.”

Before you could utter another word, Jungkook closed the minimal space remaining between the two of you by crashing his plump lips into yours.  His hands moved up to cup your cheeks, one moving along the back of your head to tangle into your hair.  Your own hands gripped to the front of his shirt as you stumbled back a bit due to the impact, your back bumping against the mirror in the front of the room.  The tension that had previously been building had popped the moment his lips met yours, but as his fingers tugged on your hair and his tongue found its way between your lips, you felt it resurfacing, this time between your legs.  You felt a bit flustered getting turned on this quickly by him, but when you put it into perspective, you had been waiting for this moment to unravel for over a year.  As your hands slid up the front of his shirt to rest on his defined core, you were certain you could feel his length getting hard against your thigh.

Pulling away after a minute, Jungkook rested his forehead against yours and stared deeply into your eyes as he breathed heavily.  There was a playful smirk on his lips as he dropped the hand from your face and rested it on your hip.  It was nice to see that he had finally let his guard down.  “So, I have to ask.  Are you more for sex first or a fancy date first?  I’m happily offering both, but we’re both kind of coming off a bit impatient here.”

Biting your tongue to hold in your laughter, you couldn’t ignore the way that the heat in the pit of your stomach was quickly sinking down lower between your legs.  “You know, if you hadn’t been so difficult to track down this past week, I may have taken you up on that fancy date first.”  You ghosted your fingers over his stomach, eliciting a surprised jolt out of him.  “But after you made me wait so long, I think you just might have to fuck me first.”

Jungkook’s eyes widened in surprise at your lewd words before he smirked and pressed his body against yours a bit harder, leaning forward to kiss a trail of wet kisses down your jawline.  “I’m happy to be at your service, but we’re kind of out in the open here.  I could drive us back to my room, that is if you’ll actually get in the car with me this time.”

Rolling your eyes at his teasing comment, you shoved at his chest.  Regardless, you couldn’t deny the fact that you were feeling incredibly impatient and weren’t sure you would be able to handle the wait while he transported you across campus.  Chewing on your lower lip, your eyes scanned the room.  “Equipment closet.  It’s spacious enough, it locks, and there’s no windows.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jungkook muttered under his breath, eyes searching your face for any hint of a lie.  When he didn’t find any, he smirked and pulled back, grabbing your hand in his.  “You know, I had planned on doing a lot of things today, but fucking in an equipment closet at the ripe hour of eight in the morning certainly wasn’t one of them.”

“Get used to it, hot coffee shop boy.”  Smirking to yourself, you allowed him to drag you towards the closet, pressing your back against the door after he closed and locked it behind you.  “Are you complaining?”

Rapidly shaking his head, Jungkook leaned forward and peppered kisses along your neck and collarbone, only pulling back to tug your shirt and sports bra over your head.  “No, no.  Just concerned you’re going to be the death of me before I even get started with you.”  Taking a step back, he pulled his own shirt over his head before allowing his eyes to rake up and down your body.  A combination of lust and admiration filled his eyes as he stepped toward you again.  “God, you really are so beautiful.”

Despite the fact that you had both been completely open with each other and the current situation being far from romantic, you felt your cheeks heating up at his compliment.  Shaking your head, you poked him in the stomach.  “Speak for yourself.  That’s the reason why I almost broke my toe.”

Throwing back his head in laughter, Jungkook stepped forward and wrapped his arms around your waist, lifting your body up and placing you down on top of a few stacked crates full of equipment.  “Mmm, I can make it up to you right now.”

Leaning forward, you pressed a few kisses along the corners of his lips and his jaw.  “And how are you going to do that?”

“Shhh, patience.”  Jungkook grinned as he bent down, slowly kissing a trail down your neck and collarbones.  When he reached your breasts, he slowed down his pace, carefully taking one of your nipples between his lips and softly sucking at the skin.  Once he established a rhythm that he was satisfied with, he lifted a hand and latched it around your other breast, kneading the skin between his fingers.

Letting out a soft moan, you threw your head back in pleasure and closed your eyes.  Your hands fastened around his neck, gently tugging at the hair on the back of his head.  The longer his lips and hands worked at your breasts, the more the heat between your legs throbbed.  “How am I supposed to be patient when I’ve waited so long for this?”

Jungkook’s eyes flickered up to meet yours, his lips making a popping noise as he removed them from your breast.  “You make a fair point.”  Kissing down your stomach, he urged you to lift your hips as he tugged your leggings and panties down your legs and allowed them to fall into a pile on the floor.  Kneeling down on the floor, his lips trailed their way up the inside of your thigh.  “Mmm, so wet already and I’ve barely even touched you.”

Whimpering softly at the feeling of his lips so close to where you needed them, you bucked your hips upward in an attempt to feel any sort of friction.  “P-Please.”

Chuckling quietly, Jungkook’s dark eyes remained on yours as he ghosted his lips over your dripping pussy.  The shy, insecure boy that he claimed to be earlier was nowhere to be found.  Instead, he was now indulging in the power he held over you.  “Who made you this wet?  Tell me.”

“You, J-Jungkook.  You did,” you whined out, attempting to push down on the back of his head.

Jungkook flashed you a satisfied smirk, nodding his head.  “That’s all I needed to hear, babe.”  Without another word, he gripped his hands around your thighs roughly and lifted your legs to drape over his shoulders.  Leaning forward, he closed the remaining space and attached his lips to your pussy.  Rather than making you wait any longer to have the tension relieved, he immediately went to work on your throbbing clit, gently sucking at the sensitive bundle of nerves.  Once he was pleased by the moans leaving your lips and the clenching of your thighs, he pulled his lips off and replaced it with his tongue.  Expertly circling his tongue on your clit, he reached one hand down and, without warning, began to pump one of his fingers in and out of your pussy.

“F-Fuck, oh my god, Jungkook,” you moaned out loudly, pulling harshly at his hair with one hand and reaching the other up to pinch at one of your nipples.  “R-Right there.”

“Mmm, need to get you stretched out and ready for my cock,” he murmured against your heat, quickly inserting another finger and curving them at the perfect angle to hit your g-spot with every pulse.  After circling your clit with his tongue a few more times, he encircled the bud with his lips yet again, this time humming against it to add an extra feeling of friction.

The sensation of his tongue and fingers working on your pussy and the sight of his glistening face was quickly becoming too much to handle.  With every movement, the bundle of nerves in your core was getting closer and closer to snapping and sending you into that blissful state you so longed for.  Biting down on your lower lip roughly, you closed your eyes tightly.  “I-I’m close.”

“Open your eyes.  I want you looking at me while you cum all over my tongue,” he rasped out after pulling back slightly, only leaning back down once you obeyed his command.  After a moment, he wet two of his fingers on his tongue before quickly beginning to circle them on your clit, moving his tongue in and out of your cunt at the same speed.

“F-Fuck, Jungkook!” you yelled out, forcing your eyes to remain open and fixed on his as you were quickly sent over the edge and into a state of ecstasy.  Your walls spasmed around his tongue as your vision became blurry and filled with stars.  The feeling was only prolonged as Jungkook kept moving his tongue until you couldn’t take it anymore and reached forward to push his head back slightly, left completely breathless as you stared at him.

Getting off his knees and onto his feet, Jungkook stared down at you in awe, leaning forward to press his forehead against yours.  The sight of your release on his lips that he refused to wipe off had your core already begging for more.  “God, that was so fucking hot.  You’re so fucking beautiful.”  Letting out a deep breath, he pecked your lips a couple times.

“How are you so fucking good at that?” you muttered against his lips, blindly reaching forward in search of the tie on his sweatpants.  Once you found it, you tugged roughly at it, sitting up straighter to urge both his pants and boxers down his thighs.

Chuckling to himself, Jungkook assisted you and pulled the articles of clothing down the length of his legs, stepping out of them once they reached the floor.  “I’d like to think that I’m a gentleman in the streets and a freak in the sheets…” His eyes wandered around the room for a moment.  “Or in the gym equipment room, apparently.”  

Rolling your eyes and giggling at his joke, you pulled him forward again to peck his lips.  “You know, if you moved to the side and let me get up, I’d happily return the favor.”  Your eyes wandered down the front of his body until they set on his hardened cock resting against his stomach, the sight of it causing you to clench your thighs together.

Shaking his head in response, Jungkook flashed you a shy smile.  God, how could he be so sexual yet so cute at the same time?  “As enticing as that sounds and as much as I would never turn that down on any other occasion, I’m afraid I’m not going to last if I don’t fuck you right now.”  Stepping forward, he looked down before cursing under his breath.  “Fuck, I don’t have a condom on me.  We don’t have fuck to if you’re not comfortable.”

“Wow, you didn’t bring a condom with you to your 7am fitness class?  How irresponsible of you,” you joked, shoving his shoulder before pulling him closer to you.  “I’m on the pill and I’m clean, so as long as you’re clean it’s fine with me.”

“You know, you’re going to regret teasing me,” he warned, laughing softly as he nudged his nose against yours.  “But yes, I’m clean too.”

Wrapping your arms around his neck, you raised a mocking eyebrow at him.  “Oh yeah?  And why am I going to regret it?”

Without another word, Jungkook reached down and grabbed his cock with one of his hands.  Rather than pushing it right inside of you, he instead slowly started to rub its angry red tip up and down your folds.  His eyes remained on yours, a teasing smirk tugging at the edges of his lips.

Biting on your tongue to suppress your whimpers, your eyes wandered down to the area between your thighs.  “W-What are you doing?”

Pressing his lips against your jawline, he let out an amused chuckle.  “Nothing until you tell me what you need.  Use your words, sweetheart.”

Reaching around him, you dug your nails into the skin on his upper back.  It wasn’t in your character to beg during sex, but the sight of the tip of his cock glistening in your juices from your first orgasm was enough to make you give in.  “P-Please fuck me, Jungkook.”  You forced yourself to lock eyes with him, hoping that the desperation you were exuding would be enough to make him cave.

Grinning in amusement against the skin of your neck, he nodded his head.  “Good girl.”  Sliding his cock down your folds one last time, he slowly slid it inside of your entrance once he reached it, a loud groan escaping his lips as he pushed all the way inside of you.  “F-Fuck, you’re so tight.”

Moaning out in pleasure at the feeling of fullness, you whimpered as you watched the sight of his cock disappearing inside of you.  The spectacle alone was enough to make the heat in your core reemerge, and your body was pleading for him to do more.  “M-Move.  F-Faster, please.”

Grabbing one of your legs, he extended it upward and propped it over his shoulder.  After getting a good grip on it, he quickly began to thrust in and out of you.  “Yeah?  You like that, babe?” he breathed out, his eyes screwing shut in pleasure before he buried his face into your neck again.

Dragging your nails down his sweaty back, you were sure you were going to leave some marks behind.  It only took a few moments for the feeling of overstimulation to wash away, and a new, deeper pleasure to replace it.  With your leg hanging over his shoulder, his cock managed to hit you at just the right angle with every thrust.  Using your grip on his back to press your body closer to his, you took the opportunity to wrap your free leg tightly around his waist.  The new position made it so his cock brushed against your clit every time he pulled it out of you, the feeling nearly having your eyes rolling to the back of your head.  “O-Oh my god, right there.”

Jungkook’s half-lidded eyes remained fixed on yours as he lifted one hand off of your thigh, pressing his index and middle finger together and moving them toward your mouth.  “Open.”  Once you complied, he inserted his fingers into your mouth.  His teeth dug into his lower lip as he watched the way you closed your lips, swirling your tongue around his digits a couple of times before sliding your lips back up and releasing them with a loud ‘pop.’  There was a mesmerized look in Jungkook’s eyes as his thrusts slowed for a moment.  “J-Jesus fuck, that was hot.”

A cocky smirk initially tried to spread across your lips, but it was washed away the moment he began to circle his lubricated fingers over your clit, his cock pounding in and out of your pussy at a pace that had you ready to unravel at any second.  “I-I’m close.”

Letting out what sounded like a combination of a groan and a whimper, Jungkook leaned forward and brushed his lips over yours.  “Cum all over my cock for me, babe.”

“J-Jungkook, f-fuck!” The sound of his raspy command and the feeling of his cock inside of you was all it took to push you over the edge again.  Your second orgasm hit you even harder than the first, a sensation of rapturous bliss overtaking your senses as your toes curled and your thighs were left convulsing around his body.  While your mind went foggy for a few seconds, the strain that was left in the back of your throat suggested that you had yelled out in pleasure quite loudly.  The euphoria was dragged out even longer as Jungkook had yet to reach his own high, his thrusts becoming sloppier as you stared up at him with hazy vision, gasping for breath.

“I-I’m close too,” Jungkook whimpered out, eyes screwing shut as your walls continued to twitch around his cock in the aftershock of your orgasm.  “W-Where do you want me to cum, babe?”

Coming back to your senses, you blinked a few times until your vision returned back to normal.  Finally processing his request, you used quite a bit of your strength to push him back a bit, ignoring the confused look on his face.  Using the space in front of you, you pushed yourself off of the elevated surface before getting down on your knees.  “My mouth.”  Reaching forward, you grasped his shaft in one hand, pumping his length a few times before leaning down and capturing his tip between your lips.  After circling your tongue around it a few times, you hollowed out your cheeks and began to bob your head up and down.

“O-Oh my… F-Fuck, Y/N.” Jungkook quickly adapted to the new sensation, his hands reaching around your head to tangle into your hair and urge your head down his cock further.  He locked eyes with you from above, his legs trembling around your head.  Taking notice of just how close he was, you forced your mouth down further to accommodate the rest of his cock in your mouth, swallowing around his length at the bottom.  The motion and the feeling of the tip of his length hitting the back of your throat was enough to make you gag, and that was all it took to push Jungkook to his climax.

Jungkook was a groaning mess above you as he released his load down your throat, unconsciously thrusting into your mouth further a couple of times to ride out of high.  After a few more spurts of his hot cum filled your mouth, you worked your mouth back up his length.  Once your lips popped off of the tip of his cock, you pulled back and swallowed thickly, the salty taste of his release lingering in your throat.

After taking a few moments to catch his breath, Jungkook reached down and grabbed your hand, pulling you up onto your feet in front of him.  Despite the crude nature of what had just occurred, the smile stretched across his lips seemed so… Innocent.  “Well… That happened.”  He reached up and pushed the sweaty hair that was sticking to his forehead out of his face.

Laughing softly at his words, you bit your lip and crossed your arms over your chest.  “I mean, that’s certainly one way to work out at the gym.”

Jungkook’s whole body shook as he erupted into laughter, leaning down and beginning to grab all of your discarded clothing articles off of the ground.  He sorted through them and handed you back yours, beginning to redress himself after.  Once he was dressed, he grabbed a towel out of one of the crates and made sure the area was clean.  “Don’t forget we worked out before too.  That’s two whole workouts.  We’re going to need to fuel up with some electrolytes or coffee or something.”

Forcing your damp leggings back onto your sweaty body wasn’t exactly the easiest or most enjoyable thing to do, but you managed.  Once your shirt was back on, you looked back over at him and feigned an exaggerated amount of excitement.  “Oh my god, am I going to be able to get coffee with hot coffee shop boy?”

“Only if hot coffee shop girl would be so willing to accompany him,” Jungkook jived, nudging your shoulder with his before unlocking and pulling open the door of the closet.  To your relief, the room was still empty and there seemed to be no one lurking outside of it.  Grabbing his backpack at the front of the room, he slung it over his shoulder.  “It might be a good idea for us to shower first, though.  I have a strong suspicion that we probably smell prettttty bad.”

Grabbing your own bag and water bottle, you laughed in amusement as you followed him out the door of the classroom and into the main area of the gym.  “I have a feeling you’re right.  Should we shower and plan to meet up after?”

Walking through the lobby, Jungkook held open the main door for you before following you outside.  It was much brighter out now than when you had arrived at the facility almost two hours prior.  Time really does fly by when you’re having fun.  “I feel like we can’t really be trusted with the whole ‘see you around’ thing and going our separate ways just yet after the shit we both pulled avoiding each other the past couple weeks.  Plus, I’m not quite done with you just yet.”

Snickering at the reminder of your past dramatic behavior, you nodded your head in agreement.  “So what did you have in mind?”

Stopping in his tracks, Jungkook turned to face you.  “So first, I was thinking you could come back to my place and we could both shower there.  I could provide you with some clothes for the time being, but if you need to change later, I can bring you back to your place.”  The corners of his lips began to twitch upward.  “However, that would require you getting into my car with me, and history suggests that doing so ‘makes you nervous,’ or something like that.”

“Hmm, I’m pretty sure I remember something about me making you nervous too.  I think some weird drunk guy told me that.”  Scoffing at his flirtatious teasing, you playfully shoved his chest.  “Anything else planned?”

“Hey, that ‘weird drunk guy’ is the reason we’re here today,” he scoffed, grabbing one of your hands off of his chest and lacing his fingers with yours.  “Then I was thinking we could go to our favorite coffee shop.  But… And I know this is kind of a wild idea... I’m thinking we sit at the same table for the first time instead of dropping pens and books to try to get each other’s attention from across the room.”

Squeezing his hand, you began to follow him as he led the way to what you assumed was going to be his car.  “A bold suggestion, but I’m into it.  Might have you drop a book at my feet and I’ll stare at you across the room longingly just for old time’s sake.”  When you reached a shiny black SUV, Jungkook unlocked it and walked around the passenger side, opening the door for you.  “So I’m guessing these plans involve us skipping classes today?”

“Well, obviously.”  Jungkook flashed you a bright grin as you climbed into the car, shutting the door gently once you were in the seat.  He ran around the front of it and quickly hopped into the driver’s seat, leaning over to look at you once inside.  “And then once the evening comes, as I suggested earlier, I would still love to take you out to dinner, if you’d let me.”  Despite everything that had just unfolded and all of the confessions you both had shared, there still appeared to be a glimmer of nervousness and hesitation in his eyes.

Leaning to the side, you reached over and placed your hand on top of his.  Your lips formed into a reassuring smile.  “I would love to.”

Jungkook lifted your hand that was over his to his lips and pressed a gentle kiss against your fingers.  “Good.”  Turning to face forward, he started the car and began to back out of the space.  As he looked at the pathway in front of the gym, he directed a mischievous smirk at you.  “Remember that time you walked back to your room on a swollen toe to avoid getting into my car with me?  Good times.”

Letting out a groan, you covered your flushed face with both of your hands.  “If you don’t shut up, I’m about to hit you with a ‘see you around’ and roll right out of the side of your car while it’s moving.”

“Okay, okay.  I’m sorrrry,” Jungkook laughed to himself, grabbing the wrist closest to him to pull your hand off of your face.  “As compensation for your shame, I will make another embarrassing confession.”  He knitted his brow together as he thought for a few moments before chuckling to himself as a memory came to mind.  “I once accidentally liked one of your Instagram pictures that was like… 72 weeks old and almost considered moving to another country and changing my identity.  I unliked it right away and you probably didn’t even notice, but I was stressed.  There.  Does that make you feel better?”

Gnawing on the inside of your cheek to hide your smile, you glanced at the side of his face.  “Mmm, a little bit.  I think I’m going to need you to keep going.”

Jungkook scoffed as he placed your hand that he was holding down on his thigh, shaking his head in disbelief.  “How is that fair?  I think I deserve some form of payment if I’m going to keep exposing myself too.”

“Fine, fine.”  You gently squeezed his thigh, your mind sifting through all of the embarrassing things you had done in the past due to your embarrassing infatuation of the boy who was now sitting beside you.  “I tried to order you, like, a sort of secret admirer coffee on Valentine’s Day, but the barista ended up giving it to the wrong guy and I ended up leaving the shop because I was so mortified.”

“Aw, I’ve always wanted to have a secret admirer,” Jungkook teased, parking the car in front of his building.  “God, we really could go on forever with these embarrassing stories, huh?”

Nodding your head, you reached your hand up and playfully poked at his dimple.  “It sure seems that way.  We’re kind of the worst.”

Unbuckling his seatbelt and hopping out of the car, he met you at the front of it and draped an arm over your shoulders.  “Good.  Just gives me another reason to keep you around longer.”

And while ‘see you around’ hadn’t been a promise that either of you kept before, keeping you around from then on certainly was one that he fulfilled.

#jungkook x reader #jungkook smut #bts smut #jungkook imagines #jungkook fluff #jungkook x you #jungkook fanfic #bts fluff #bts imagines #bts scenarios #jungkook fic #college au #bts college au #jeongguk fic #ddaengtae #shamelesslyimagining

[otakusheep15]

SFW Alphabet - Satan

I had a really hard time trying to get Satan’s character right, so I hope I did a good job with this one

A = Affection (How affectionate are they? How do they show affection?)

He’s not super affectionate, physical, verbal, or otherwise. Really, that’s just a side-effect of him being born from pure wrath. He simply just can’t express emotions very well. You’ll most likely have to initiate any affection if you want it. However, he does also like when you lay your head on his lap and he reads to you since it doesn’t require much. 

B = Best friend (What would they be like as a best friend? How would the friendship start?)

He’s the mom friend for sure. He helps you with anything you may need from studying to pranks. Of course, he does also make sure you both make it out of any trouble unscathed. I also lowkey see him as the type to carry around random snacks to feed strays he comes across, and he’ll give some to you so that you can also feed the strays. 

C = Cuddles (Do they like to cuddle? How would they cuddle?)

Like I said, affection isn’t his strong suit, so cuddling isn’t really his thing. The closest he’ll get to cuddling is either you two sitting next to each other on the bed/couch or with him sitting up and you laying on his lap. He may also pat your head like you’re a cat. There might also be reading involved if he’s awake enough to read out loud to you. 

D = Domestic (Do they want to settle down? How are they at cooking and cleaning?)

He does like the idea of settling down, but he’s unsure if he really can. Yes, he can do basic household chores like cooking and cleaning, but he feels as though he couldn’t handle the more emotional side of settling down. Doing something like that means you truly love the person you’re with and he’s afraid that he might not have the emotional capacity to feel that strongly about someone. Then you came along and destroyed all of that nonsense. Now he wants nothing more than to drag you away and live out a romance just like in his favorite books. 

E = Ending (If they had to break up with their partner, how would they do it?)

There would most likely be a lot of yelling. Also lots of things being thrown around in rage. When he’s mad, he’s mad, and a breakup is a great way to get him mad. If he’s the one initiating it, he’ll try to keep a level head, but that solely depends on how the other person reacts. If they’re also calm, then it’ll be pretty civil and respectful, and they might even stay friends after. However, if the other person starts getting mad, that only makes him worse and it does not get better for that other person. 

F = Fiance(e) (How do they feel about commitment? How quick would they want to get married?)

Before you? He never even considered the idea. After you? That’s practically all he can think about. You know that one friend we all have that constantly gushes over sappy romance stories and constantly wishes how that could live them out with their partner? Yeah, that’s him. He’ll never admit that out loud though. The only one who actually knows about all of his fantasies are Asmo because he once walked in on him comparing you to this one character from a romance novel he liked (kinda like Levi with his anime). 

G = Gentle (How gentle are they, both physically and emotionally?)

He knows how dangerous he can be. Not only is he a demon, and a powerful at that, but he also the literal embodiment of wrath. Even after years of keeping up his gentlemanly facade, all it takes is the slightest inconvenience to set him off. So he’s extra careful around you. Physically, he tries not to get to close to you, especially when he’s pissed off. Verbally, he tries to watch his language around you because he doesn’t want to hurt you by saying anything mean.  

H = Hugs (Do they like hugs? How often do they do it? What are their hugs like?)

His hugs are extremely rare but surprisingly nice. Since he’s scared he might hurt you by accident, and his lack of need for physical affection, he doesn’t hug you very often. However, they are super relaxing when they do happen. He hugs you just tight enough to keep you pressed to his body, but not so tight that it’s uncomfortable. 

I = I love you (How fast do they say the L-word?)

Out of all the brothers, he one of the last ones to say it. He’s not all the familiar with the concept of love, especially in romantic context. Obviously, he knows how it feels in theory, but he can hardly figure it out in practice. The worst part is that he knows he loves you, but he has no clue how to go about it. When he does finally say it, he seems perfectly calm and collected, but he’s internally screaming the whole time. You’ll never know.

J = Jealousy (How jealous do they get? What do they do when they’re jealous?)

Surprisingly, he’s not one to get jealous easily. One of the benefits of having a poor grasp on emotions maybe? Whatever the case, he always tends to take a more logical approach to things, relationships included. He knows that you’re loyal to him and so he trusts you. If he has any reason to be jealous, then he’ll talk to you and workout any problems or concerns.  

K = Kisses (What are their kisses like? Where do they like to kiss you? Where do they like to be kissed?)

His kisses can go one of two ways. They can 1) be the softest, most romantic kisses you’ve ever felt in your life, or 2) the most heated and passionate kisses you’ve ever felt in your life. Literally no in between. The former will usually happen during softer moments of bliss. Maybe you two were just in his room and relaxing or in the library studying. The latter only ever happens during more ~spicy~ times *wink wink*. 

L = Little ones (How are they around children?)

He hates kids. That’s it. He hates them. They’re such a hassle, they need constant supervision and care, and they never shut up. He is a firm believer in children being the worst creatures in all the three realms. 

M = Morning (How are mornings spent with them?)

He always wakes up first no matter what. He’ll go down to the kitchen and make you a cup of tea, but that’s only when you guys don’t have school. If you do have school, he’ll wake you up as gently as possible and help you get ready. 

N = Night (How are nights spent with them?)

He’ll usually drag you to hs room so that you two can spend the evening reading together. Sometimes you end up sitting next to each other and reading your own books, others you may end up in his lap while he reads to you. You mostly end up falling sleep first, and he’ll follow soon after. 

O = Open (When would they start revealing things about themselves? Do they say everything all at once or wait a while to reveal things slowly?)

This boy is the definition of closed off. It does not matter how close you are to him or how much he trusts you, he will never tell you anything. Okay, he does tell you some things, but only surface level stuff. If you want the real, honest answers he has, you need to pry them out yourself. 

P = Patience (How easily angered are they?)

Lmao what’s patience? Seriously though, he actually has a decent amount of patience. He trained himself really hard in order o control his anger, so he can actually be pretty chill for the most part. Obviously, he still gets mad all the time, especially with Lucifer, but he does try his best. 

Q = Quizzes (How much would they remember about you? Do they remember every little detail you mention in passing, or do they kind of forget everything?)

He’s totally the type to write down facts about you in a secret journal somewhere so that he can reference it later. He has a great memory, but he loves just writing down everything you tell him about yourself just in case he forgets anything. He will never tell you or anyone else about the journal, but if anyone finds out, they will never be heard from again. 

R = Remember (What is their favorite moment in your relationship?)

He isn’t one to have any particular moment in mind, but he absolutely treasures those quiet moments when you two are alone. No brothers to bother you, plenty of books and snacks, and just each others presence. It’s quiet, calm and peaceful. These moments don’t happen very often due to the chaos around you, so when they do happen it’s special. Just being able to spend time with you is his favorite thing in all three worlds. 

S = Security (How protective are they? How would they protect you? How would they like to be protected?)

He is arguably one of the most protective brothers, and that’s saying something. The second someone even hints at hurting you, they’re dead. They just cease to exist. He will not let a single thing harm his precious human, and he’ll do whatever it takes to ensure your safety. He’d even go so far as to get himself in trouble if it means getting you out of it. 

T = Try (How much effort would they put into dates, anniversaries, gifts, everyday tasks?)

He’s much more casual than most of his brothers, so he doesn’t see the need in planning over-the-top dates. Obviously, he wants you to be happy no matter what, but he knows he doesn’t need extravagant dates to make that happen. I mean, if you like things like that he’ll certainly try for you, but it’s just not his style. He prefers causal, lowkey dates. Coffee shop dates, going to bookstores together, sitting in his or your room and reading all day, and going out to play with the stray cats are all ideal dates for him. He just knows that, as long as you two are together, everything is already perfect. 

U = Ugly (What would be some bad habits of theirs?)

Obviously, he has some issues he needs to work out. His anger issues are, of course, the main issue, but that also leads into other problems. For example, his daddy issues hatred for Lucifer is something he needs to get sorted out. He also has a hard time expressing his true feelings for fear of letting his anger out as well. Most of his issues are emotional, so he needs a lot of time to work on them. 

V = Vanity (How concerned are they with their looks?)

He’s not so much concerned with physical appearance so much as social appearance. he is highly concerned about how he looks to the public. If he needs to look physically appealing in order to keep a good social standing, then he’ll do it. He’s not vain like Asmo or Mammon, but he’d be quick to put more into his appearance if it means he gains something out of it socially. 

W = Whole (Would they feel incomplete without you?)

Honestly, he’s felt incomplete since being born, so even with you he doesn’t feel quite complete. You definitely help fill some of that void he has in him, but not even you can fix him completely. If you did leave him, he’d be back at square one, so he needs you to be there in order to make him feel even the slightest bit more whole. 

X = Xtra (A random headcanon for them.)

As I stated before, I think he keeps a journal of all of your interests so that he can remember then, but I think it goes deeper than that. I also think he has one for each of his brothers that he keeps on him. Any time one of his brothers mentions something they like, he’ll write it down to keep it for later. That way, if an occasion (birthday, anniversary, etc.) that would require this information would ever arise, he would already have it written down. No one knows about these, and he’ll take this secret to his grave. 

Y = Yuck (What are some things they wouldn’t like, either in general or in a partner?)

He refuses to even acknowledge someone without even the slightest bit of academic prowess. If he deems you to be stupid, you’ll never even hear from him again. He also cannot stand people who dislike cats. 

Z = Zzz (What is a sleep habits of theirs?)

He has a tendency to move around a lot when he sleeps. No one has any clue as to why, but it’s not really a problem. That is until you two start sleeping together. He either ends up on top of you or kicking you out of the bed. In the morning, he’ll apologize, but it’s not something he can really fix. 

#OBEY ME #shall we date obey me #shall we date satan #sfw alphabet #scenarios #headcanon

[is-nini]

I already require more daddy King Zhongli

Please make it happen ;-; I would be very grateful

Thankyou for requesting ლ(^o^ლ) please enjoy, sorry if there's any mistake or typo and.. I'm sorry if some parts is not to your liking, feel free to point out

What if..

King! Zhongli x reader. (part 2!)

Warning:

Smut, 18+, brat taming, size kink, spanking, pure filth!

Word count:3k worddddd

"This is your cone accompanied by f/f cake with f/f ice cream your highness".

A maid comes towards you as you look at your feet on the garden that seems to be sad alongside you, your tears threating to fall out, the maid looks at you in panic- she tried everything to make you smile, giving you sweets that you like, making your favourite drinks, trying to bring you out to go on a plushie shopping spree but nothing cheer you up.

The cause of your sadness is Zhongli has been so busy, he didn't mean to neglected you but.. he cannot play or spend time with you currently.

Whenever you try and come to his work room the door is always locked and the guards keeps telling you that he is busy.. because you're a good girl you listen to the guard and doesn't come back to his work room as you walked with a gloomy face, even the guards feels bad but- an order is an order.

The castle maids saw your gloomy face and try to cheer you up but.. you ended up with sadness on your face everytime.

The maid wishes that the cakes and sweets will bring you back but- no. The maid sigh and pat your head, trying to make you smile even though it is not proper for a maid to do so.

"Call me if anything happened your highness".

She said and walked away, leaving you in your own sad world without the affection of Zhongli. You eat the cake that seems to taste bland, you sigh and jump out from the chair and walking inside the castle gloomy aura around you.

Three maids is peaking out from behind the wall as you walk with sadness. They can't bear their princess like this.. even though the maids and you have a different status, you never treat them like a slave, you would go around the castle to see what to do- even if they say they don't need help, you're always willing to.. with the smile that can melt the coldest heart.

That's it, they are determined to help you anyway they could! Even if it means going against boundaries and possibly getting to be in jail, they will help you they don't care.

They started to talk on how to make you happy again and it seems there's only one way..

~~~~~~

A knock was heard on the door as Zhongli sigh and rub his temple with a frown on his face.

"Please leave at once- can't you see im busy?".

He asked more like annoyed by the fact that someone is annoying him, the maid behind the door is trembling, after she lose a bet with her friend she now is the one who must talk to Zhongli about you. She gulp as the guard looks at her using a look that said "welp, goodbye".

"I-its u-urgent Y-you're highness".

She stutter out. Zhongli glare a little at the door and sigh loudly as he went back to his paperwork.

"Hurry".

That's all he said as the door opened revealing the maid, he looks at the trembling maid, a little bit annoyed.

"What is so important that it needs to cut my work?".

He asked, she gulp again and play with her finger.

"T-the p-princess".

Just those two word and that's all it took to break Zhongli's hard gaze in to worry and fear.

"What happen? Is she okay?! Is there someone trying to sneak in to her room again?!".

He asked as he cleans up his table and stands up with worry in his eye. The maid shake her head and proceed to explain what has been happening to you.

How you're sad.. how you're aura is filled with despair and so on and so forth.

Zhongli just looks at her unbelievable is swirling in his eye. He completely forgot about how time has passed by since he last take care of you. His work important but you're so much money important, he can always think of something to use as a reason to not finished his work anyway.

He rushed passed the maid to go to your room as the maid sigh in relief and the guard puts a thumbs up for her.

His heart is beating so fast it felt as if he wanted to burst to millions pieces. He can't believe he forgot about you-! He just hope you can forgive him.

You played with your dolls with gloomy face but stopped when you heard a knock on the door.

"P-princess? Open up please".

Zhongli! You wanted to be happy but no. You have your own plan! To be bratty, to not listen to him and make him as sad and guilty as possible that's your revenge. So when you heard his voice you growl abit.

"What do you want?".

You asked, shocking Zhongli at the tone of your voice and the lack of respect. It triggers his inner dom put you in your place, punishing you and torturing you until you're begging but decided to put that aside and stay calm.

"Princess open the door please".

He said as he hold the door knob, waiting for you to open the door dor him just like he always taught you.

"Open it by yourself".

He's shocked he opened the door he does feel guilty for forgetting about you but you need to understand he did it for you and this bratty act if your's is making things worst for yourself.

You don't feel guilty at all, you don't sense the storm coming slowly as Zhongli open the door and went inside your room, you keep looking away from him, distracting yourself with your dolls.

"Princess, that's not how you talk to Master".

He's patients is running low as he locked your bedroom door with you not noticing anything. He uses his Master card thinking that you will get the hint. Buttt no, you will still be a brat for him for revenge.

You scoff and ignore him, whatever he says just go above your head as you scowl.

Suddenly his hand grabs your arms and force you to look at him. When you do look into his eyes, it's clouded with lust and a little bit of anger. The eye that tells you to behave because you're gonna get punished.

You wail and wiggle around as he takes your chin and forces you to look up.

"Who taught you to be bratty hmm?".

His voice drops a couple of octaves and squeeze your chin a little bit harder, you tremble against his stare and touch. You turn your gaze away and squeeze your eyes shut, not daring to look at him straight in the eye.

"I asked you who taught you to be bratty".

He asked (more like state) again with more push on his tone, making you whine.

"N-no one! No one!".

You asked as you felt his hand slowly to your hips, you open your eyes a little and look at his hand on your hips.

"What do you say when you're being bratty to master?".

He asked pulling you upward so now you're standing with him as he hold your waist harder. You wail and wiggle around trying to get out of his grip as your pussy slowly getting wetter and wetter.

Even though your master is scary when he is mad.. you can't deny that the dominating aura makes your knees weak and your pussy wet. You just can't.

Even though you have been a brat but he has trained you to be good for him just by touching and staring at you, he could bring you down to your knee.

"S-sorry!".

You answer his question. He hums in satisfaction, you thought that you're done but the next thing you know you were thrown on the bed.

"Hmnp!".

A sound comes out of you as you're lying on the bed, Zhongli comes up to you and take something from his back. A handcuffs.

"Do you think master will let you go just because you say say sorry? After the stunt you pulled you neeed to be punished princess".

He said as he cuffs the both of your hand behind your back after rolling you over. As you lay on your stomach, you feel your waist being pulled up, ass on the air in front if Zhongli making the skirt rolls upward revealing your panties, you can feel his gaze your pulmp ass, and you tremble as he stroke your butt.

Unconsciously you move around your ass, you moan out as you feel your essence drops down to your thighs, Zhongli stare at your wetness that drips down your thighs as he smirk finding a way to tease you.

"Getting turn on by the punishment? You're such a slut aren't you? A bitch for master, being turned on because of punishment, we haven't even started yet".

He said as he suddenly slap your ass hard, you squeal out as you shake your ass to try and stroke the ass on anything that could makes you comfortable.

"M-MASTER!".

ah.. stupid little girl for him, cute little bitch, your pussy can be seen clenching from your undies. He stroke your ass and then slap it, over and over and over again. At this point you are a whining, whimpering mess, and he haven't even started the main course yet.

"So wet.. so fucking wet for master.. your pussy is clenching around nothing princess. Its so sad isn't it? You wanna be fucked full but because you're a brat, you can't".

You moan at his words and he slap your ass again, makin your body jerk forward a little bit. He laughed and stroke your panties slowly and shove it downward.

You can feel the wind against your wet pussy. You felt his long finger circle around your pussy for a second and then slap your pussy hard.

"M-MASTER HURTS! IT HURTS!".

you said it hurts but your pussy is getting wetter and your master notice this, he growl beside your ear and nibble on it a little.

"You're trying to lie? You said it hurts but you're body clearly enjoy this.. such a slut for master".

Yes, yes you are his stupid little slut. He moved away from you and walk towards the cupboard beside the bed, you stare at him, your red cheeks pressed against the bed and a patch of tears was seen below your cheek.

He takes out something that looks like a vibrator, but because of your tears you're not so sure but when he pressed the vibrator against your pussy, your doubt is melting away.

He pushed the vibrator inside you and put is on highest level, he shove it deep inside you, he opened the cuffs and then flip you so now your laying on your back, you moan at the relief from your hand and moan at the vibrator inside you.

"Don't you DARE touched the vibrator with your hand or play with yourself. This is your punishment so stay there".

He pulled away from you as he watched you writhed and tremble, moaning and squealing a high pitched not out of your mouth. Zhongli smile at the sight, satisfied that you're being a good girl, he takes the sofa near the bed and takes out a newspaper and started reading calmly, your moans and whimpers becomes his music.

"M-MASTER! MASTER! I- I WANNA CUM! WANNA CUM MASTER!".

You shout out, your master looks at you and smile.

"Go ahead and cum baby, do it. Do it for master, come on".

He cooed as you cum hard, body trembling, but the vibration on your pussy didn't stop. It keeps going and going because you're pussy is so god damn wet now the vibrator is slowly slipping out. Unfortunately Zhongli notice this and sigh, he walk towards you and use your underwear that's lying beloe your feet. He helps you wear the undrewear, pushing the underwear upwards along side the vibrator. And now the vibrator is inside you and this time, your underwear is holding the vibrator up your pussy.

He laughed at your sniffling and moans as he put it back in and proceed to go to the sofa and read the newspaper.

You wail and moan, feeling the vibration again and clenching around the vibrator, the feeling of wanting to cum is present.

"MASTER! WANNA CUM! WANNA CUM AGAIN MASTER! WANN- WANNA CUM!!!".

Zhongli just laugh as he saw your hand clenching on the bed sheets below you, he moved closer to you and take your head in his, making you clench his hand so so tightly. But.. Zhongli barely feels the pain as he found a new position to read the newspaper with one hand.

You cum again and again, you're slowly loosing your mind on your 3rd cum you beg him to stop but he ignore you so you pull Zhongli hand and suck on it, nearing your 5th cum, he felt your tounge and squeeze it little by little.

"MASTWE MASTWE MAKE ITH STOPH!".

you beg him to make it stop because you're so overstimulated and you know that you will squirt after this. As you suck on his fingers, his other fingers left the newspaper, he touched his middle finger and just lightly touched your clit it doesn't seem much but for you it's so overwhelming as you squirt hard on the bed and his finger.

You're body jolted upwards as you let put a high pitched moan, you're squirt gets a little bit higher everytime your body jolted upwards.

"Hmm squirting so good baby, so good, good slut for master, such a good fucking slut yeah? Feeling fucking good everytime you jolted upwards, you're little stupid body trembling hmm?".

He cooed at you, his words just fades out as you drown on the pleasure and overstimulation. He takes your now very wet panties down and takes out the vibrator and throw it somewhere around the huge bedroom.

"Now you're ready to take my cock, since you have been such a good girl, squirting everywhere for Master".

No respond comes from your mouth, your jaw is dropping down and your tounge is out, feeling so so overstimulated that now you cannot make any coherent sentence.

"My baby cannot talk? Did the vibrator mess up with her head? Well it's okay, i will fuck you dumb with my cock next".

You can hear the sound of zipper opening. You opened your eyes a little and looked at Zhongli, seeing his pants is already somewhere on the floor and his thick huge cock is out in the open.

"M-master!".

He hums, now that you saw him and know that he is about to fuck you, your head is filled with him and him alone. The king size bed creak at the movement as he grab your leg and slide you to him a swift motion.

"Yes yes, will take care of you Princess".

He said slowly sliding half of his cock inside your wet and warm pussy, his cock is so big- bigger than the vibrator.

"MASTER! MASTER! SO-SO BIGGG AHHNNNGGGG~ MASTER IS TOO BIG! MASTER IS FILLING ME IN! SO FULL! S-SO FULL MASTER~".

You moan out, cumming the 6th time. He grunted and looks at you, eyes full of heart. You're sooo cute, lost in the pleasure just by him pushing his dick in and cumming just by him putting it in.

He then pushed the rest inside you a dent of his cock is on your stomach, you squeal again as your hand fly to his biceps and squeeze it. Zhongli grunt and started to move in and out of you.

"Hah- your pussy is sucking me in Princess, you're soo greedy huh? First you want attention now you want my cock?".

He laughed as he ripped your dress open, your breast is now out in the open. He goes from slow tempo to rough real fast, in the nick of seconds, his eyes is staring at your breast and your face, entrance by the cuteness his little princess show him.

Youe breast is bouncing up and down from his thrust, your face is red and filled with tears, your mouth hangs open and your head is thrown back, your back is arching from pleasure as your upper body turns around a little bit.

His cock is hitting you everywhere, every crevices inside you, occasion grunt comes out his mouth. His hand grab your breast as he bent a little bit, his long soft hair flows down a little bit.

He squeeze your breast and played with your nipple, tweaking and pinching it, his face is slowly getting closer to your breast as you felt him played with your nipple, his tounge is going up and down on your nipple at a fast pace and then he suck it hard, bitting gently.

You're pussy is clenching around his cock and sucking it in. You can feel his dick twitching inside you too, his cock goes in and out, you can feel his bump on your stomach, he then stayed inside for a while and push his cock from your stomach. You squeal out and wail, legs trembling as he hold it while he went in and out.

You're seeing stars and moans is spilling from your lips as well as Zhōngli's grunts.

"S-so good princess, you're so fucking tight, cute little pussy all for Master, his dick is imprinted on your pussy and stomach huh-? Fuck i wanna cum!".

He grunt you just nod, can't even talk the only thing from your mouth isa bunch of giberish, he can only hear you say a bunch of master and Zhongli.

He giggle at your cuteness as you both nearing your high. Your pussy clench on his cock as you both cum at the same time, you squirt the second time all over him as he push all his cum inside you.

"Such a good girl, good girl for master, shhh it's okay master's here".

He shush you and held your body near him as he baby you. Your eyes is hazy and your body is trembling, his cock is still deep inside you, you don't mind you actually enjoyed it.

He brings you koala style with his cock still inside you and brings you towards the big sofa, he pushed one of the button and the sofa turns into a bed that's enough for the both of you.

He sleep beside you after laying you down. He hugs you and keep praising you, shushing you to calm down and just take a deep breath.

"You're good princess, you're amazing okay my good cute little princess".

He said as he peppering your face with kisses as you slowly slip into dream world.

"I..wuv.. zhongli..".

You mutter out, his stroking on your head just froze, hearing the gentleness and the pureness of your word when you say you love him makes him smile and kissed your lips a second too long.

"I love you too... (Y/n)"

#zhongli fanfiction #zhongli x you #zhongli x reader #genshin smut

[boop-le-snoot]

masterpost • main masterlist • taglist & faq

Introductory prologue. The main pairing will be established ironstrange x reader. This story will be rated explicit, have some canon-typical violence and language. The 'fuck' harvest is bountiful this time of the year. Updates - irregular so far, I'm posting it as I go.

No y/n, no "you", no name - nickname only, no reader description - race/age/body type neutral, she/her pronouns. Please leave a comment if you spot a stray 'blushing' or the likes, I write as it flows and sometimes miss those words when I proofread. I try to be inclusive of all my readers.

"Your total is twelve dollars, seventeen cents," I rattled off on autopilot, casting a glance at the cash register and plastering an automatic smile onto my face. The pleasant expression was frozen on it, stuck like glue, despite the news I had received earlier in the day. "Thank you, have a nice day," I doubted the customer actually heard my words.

One of those business-types, wearing a tailored two-piece, with a Bluetooth headset attached to their ear and brain always a mile away, our little coffee shop a mild interruption in their daily routine of making more and more money. "Hello, how can I help you?" I addressed the next customer, my eyes unseeing, gliding over their face and to the storefront where I noticed we were running low on eclairs and carrot cake.

"Hey, Starlight," the woman's voice was familiar, tone soothing, as I snapped my eyes to meet a pair of reddish-brown ones, staring at me with concern. "The usual," our city's very own superhero; Wanda Maximoff stood before me with her head curiously tilted to the side and her brother hovering behind her, examining the assortment of various cakes on display. "Long day?"

"You have no idea," I sighed, sending off the organic, single-use cups with scribbles off to Dave, our barista. Wanda's order was large, usually about ten or twelve coffees and quite a few treats, so I donned on some nitrile gloves to package the treats while Dave handled the drinks with practiced ease. I admired his stoicism. "Might be seeing a bit less of me," the woman's eyebrows rose in displeasure at my admission.

"Tony won't be happy," Wanda mumbled, side-eyeing the backdoor behind which my boss usually resided during the day. "You got fired?" The words attracted the attention of her brother. Pietro was immediately at her side, joining into the concerned staring.

"Nope," I popped the 'p', methodically shoving the food in its packaging. "The café is expanding hours and our shifts are being split now. Jeremy is dead set on me working the graveyard shift, so I'll be here six AM to two PM," I couldn't help the sigh that left my lips.

My boss, Jeremy, had opened his boulangerie little over two years ago, and as he had predicted, it set off almost immediately. The place was located almost in the heart of the dozen corporate sky-rises full of busy, wealthy people who liked their things to be both instant and luxurious. Jeremy had fit right in with the law sharks and business vultures, if you ask me, with his penchant for demanding the impossible.

I was expecting an increase in work hours, I wasn't going to lie - our little cafe was busy nearly all the time it was open - but the fact that he chose to split a day's shift came as a punch to the gut. Like most service staff, I made most of my money from the tips, and they and they only were the only reason I stayed in a place with a shrew for a boss and the worst health insurance in the area. Thankfully, the rich businessmen from local offices didn't count their money and left me more than generous tips.

The coffee machine beeped for the last time as Dave passed me the three cupholders before I carefully bagged them, arranging the treats on top. I saw Wanda lick her lips at the aromas coming from the paper bag before Pietro snatched them out of my grasp. I rattled off the total, catching Wanda's eye as she passed me several twenty dollar bills, waving off my attempt to return the change.

"Penny for your wandering thoughts?" She smiled warmly as I chuckled at the question I've grown to expect with a quiet sort of joy.

The first time she'd wandered in, soaking wet from the rain and looking as lost as a child in a mall, ten minutes before closing time, I was reading my book right at the counter as I waited for the coffee machine to clean itself. I hadn't even noticed the quiet woman until her words startled me out of the book-induced trance and I shamefully had to ask her to repeat herself, hastily shoving my book under the counter. She smiled at me, shyly, and asked me about my reading instead of rattling an order for one of the sickly sweet caffeine concoctions female customers seemed to love. And she returned in a few days, asking the same question after taking a careful look at my face.

"And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about." I took a careful moment to recall a paragraph from the book I was currently reading, Murakami's 'Kafka on the Shore'. It seemed fitting, with all that had been going on in my life recently. I was still caught in the middle of the storm, unsure if I'd make it out but hoping for it nonetheless.

"That's beautiful," Pietro smiled at me, the tips of his silver hair reflecting the lights of the cafe's baroque style chandeliers. I barely managed to smile at him as he was already speeding off, the entrance door banging shut behind a blur of white and blue. Each time he did that, I couldn't help but wonder how he managed to not spill any of the hot beverages.

"Because it's true," Wanda added with a comforting smile. I nodded in agreement, hoping some of her positive attitude would dissipate the sense of doom I'd been lugging around all day. She departed, taking the sense of comfort with her, as I caught the tail end of something shouted in Sokovian - something that sounded exactly in place, coming from one disgruntled sibling to another.

When the residents of the nearby Stark tower began frequenting my workplace, I barely had the composure to stifle my quiet fangirling to socially acceptable levels. Not long after the Scarlet Witch turned a semi-regular, she started bringing her colleagues with her - Hawkeye at first, who was a decent, normal dude; he looked like an exasperated dad and Pietro appeared every thing the rambunctious son, as the younger man peppered the older man with questions about the cakes on our display.

They all had fancy names, but at the bottom of it, a chocolate cake was a chocolate cake. That much I told them, with a snort, earning myself a lopsided grin and a generous tip as I patiently listed off the more commonly used, simplified designations for the twins as the knowledge of them being European immigrants crossed my mind.

After Hawkeye came the Black Widow, and then Captain America with a sunny smile and his moody boyfriend in tow. While Bucky Barnes' expression was generally sour, the man had a wicked sweet tooth, shoveling frosted, glazed treats at the rate of a competitive eater. Both men were extremely polite if not very chatty and tipped well.

Tony Stark himself - well, he was a special one. His sense of humour trailed on the fine line of obscene, oftentimes raising the eyebrows of nearby people standing in line. I wasn't born yesterday, either: years of customer service work left me with little-to-no surprise regarding overzealous men and I could quip back equally as sharply, just slightly south of Tony's own jokes. He never overstepped, however, and with time, I developed a quiet appreciation for our small talks.

Which did brighten up my day, if only a little. "A little birdy told me your boss is being a douchebag. Want me to clean up that muck?" Tony was, as usual, wearing a bespoke suit and sunglasses, which he'd pushed up to his forehead as he frivolously leaned on the counter after placing his order.

I sighed, remembering Wanda's words. I didn't know what to expect from the eccentric billionaire; last of all, I didn't want any handouts. I'd started a search for a second part-time job the very day I got told my pay would be essentially cut in half. "No need, Mr. Stark, I'm gonna be fine and dandy," I replied with a smile that I was sure didn't really reach my eyes. "We'll still be able to resume our nice chit-chat at brunch on Saturdays," I winked, hoping to keep up the usual light atmosphere of our banter.

"I told you to call me Tony!" He exclaimed, like always, shaking his head and glaring at the back door. "Yeah, no," the man had absolutely no chill. "I'll still sic the IRS on him," the last part was said quietly. Mr. Stark often spoke to himself.

I laughed at the rich-kid, spoilt way he was acting. A grown man with an attitude of a teenager and a sweet tooth to match one - except for his coffee. That was always the strongest, blackest one we had on hand. I hadn't even heard of a triple espresso until Mr. Stark had waltzed in, skipping the line and filling the air around him with the smells of cologne that smelled like money, motor oil, iron and soot.

The moment I opened my e-mail at home, I felt my gloomy mood worsen, Mr. Stark's words echoing in my head. I'd sent my resumes to two dozen places and only a handful even bothered to reply - all preemptive rejections, there weren't businesses needing a part-time employee with a useless degree, who could only work evenings. Except bars, but they required some sort of certificate for bartenders and lots and lots of bare skin for waitresses. I tried to steer away from that part of the industry as much as I could, saving it as a last resort option.

It had come down to browsing Craigslist as I ate my way through a carton of cheap take-out, too exhausted to cook and too anxious to go out to the nearby bodega after 9 PM. One more negative side of working late shift - making my way home in the dead of the night in NYC and hoping Spider-Man was hanging out nearby should a thug decide on me to be their next victim. The joys of big city life.

As the column of various ads stared at me with various suspicious offers to make quick money, ads for 'young, sociable women' and I stared back at them in muted disgust. The 'looking for a job' section was much more sensible with the few ads I'd clicked on out of curiosity depicting people seemingly in a similar situation as me - short on money but not desperate enough to surrender their dignity to corporate greed. The decision was momentary - I'd started typing and hit the post button before I was through with my food, slapping my old laptop shut as soon as the as posted.

Hopefully, the creeps will stay away. The next couple of days stretched out slowly as I got up at the crack of dawn to open the shop, served the early birds whilst sipping my own matcha latte and clocked out not a second later than 2PM, taking home half the usual amount of tips. My e-mail remained as silent as ever, only a few suspicious replies to my ad, texts that I didn't even bother replying to. Human trafficking and pyramid schemes, was that all that NYC had to offer?

Apparently, not. Around 6PM, my phone dinged as a notification popped up and I scrambled to read it - all too aware of the upcoming rent day, and was pleasantly surprised with the contents of the e-mail, re-reading it several times to make sure there weren't any hidden stones under the water. I replied with my phone number, not expecting it to ring within minutes of hitting the send button.

"Hello?"

"Hi, we just corresponded," the voice on the other side was feminine but slightly rough, as if it's owner spent days chain-smoking. "I would like to invite you for a small interview, if you wouldn't mind."

I chewed on my lip in contemplation. "Could I ask you some questions first?" The levels of anxiety, I thought, were reasonable in the situation. It mutely gnawed at my chest.

"Sure," the woman agreed amicably. "My name is Odette, by the way," she mentioned off-handedly, the name fitting her voice in a strange way.

"Uh, well," I stammered. "You mentioned it's a herbal medicine shop, you're not selling weed under the counter, are you?" I voiced my worries meekly, hoping for an honest answer.

The woman laughed, a sharp, terse sound. "No, dear, I do not sell or possess anything illegal. I merely offer supplies for the locals that prefer natural, alternative medicine." She sounded jovial.

"Like - um, healing crystals?" I vaguely remembered reading about them on the internet, or seeing them in a YouTube video, perhaps.

"Yes, we sell those, too," her tone grew more joyful at the mention of the shiny rocks. I didn't think that they actually cured anything, to be honest, however I was willing to give it some credit - the placebo effect was a scientific fact. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

"Okay then," I chuckled nervously. "I'm free tomorrow after 3 PM."

"Grand. The shop is open until 10 PM, just say your name at the counter and I'll be right with you."

As soon as I hung up, relief and curiosity and trepidation blossomed within me, imagination unhelpfully supplying images of human trafficking documentaries, basements with chains and other, less horrifying but still unusual things. The pep talk over a wine glass that I had was necessary: it was a herbal shop, for fuck's sake. Worst case, I'm going to work with Karens who think the Earth is flat and quartz cures cancer. I could even get a funny story or two out of those, something to share with Bucky or Wanda in lieu of the usual book quotes I entertain them with.

The day went by smoothly, the café no more and no less busy than usual so after a brief detour back home to put on something that didn't smell like coffee grounds and yeast: comfortable pants and a soft sweater, something that would keep me warm but would not unnecessarily restrict any movement. My good luck charm, a large oval necklace with a shiny gold star in the middle, hung heavily around my neck, providing quiet comfort.

Heart thudding in my chest, I approached the old-style, inconspicuous building, double-checking the address before opening the old, heavy wooden door right at the corner of the building. It was like a movie scene, in a way - the day was overcast, meager sun rays shining through the lead curtain of clouds, the streets were clear and few honks rung out in the far end of block, sending a flock of pigeons into a lazy scatter over the slanted roof. The door creaked softly, the handle cold under my touch, instantly filling my nose with a strong smell of herbs so plentiful, I could not distinguish one from another.

Inside didn't look any less intriguing: the décor was outdated but somehow fitting and homely, high wooden shelves stocked with glass jars and wooden boxes with neatly placed labels on them. The counter was empty - save for a large, golden bell, which I timidly pressed.

The woman who emerged from behind the worn cotton curtains behind the counter most certainly was impressive. Tall and broad, with dark eyebrows and even darker eyes, she critically surveyed me for a moment, making me shiver under her gaze - and then she smiled, revealing rows of pearly white teeth and instantaneously losing the imposing aura around her.

"Um, hi- I'm-" I didn't get to finish my nervous stammering.

She interrupted me with a careless wave of her hand. "Here for the interview. Yes. Welcome, Star," her eyes briefly fell on my necklace while I struggled to swallow the unease.

I hadn't told her my nickname - to be honest, these days, I heard it more often than my given name. People quickly took notice of my love of star-patterned items and teased me relentlessly over it, losing heat only when I calmly went along with it, too used to hearing the same jokes since my early childhood.

Odette motioned me over, parting the curtains to reveal a tiny, but tastefully decorated hall with two doors on each side and a staircase at the far end of it. I followed her into the room on the left, which turned out to be a peculiar sort of office. I thought I noticed an Ouija board in there but wisely kept my mouth shut.

"I live on the floor above the shop so don't go throwing any parties while you're on the job," she remarked playfully, gesturing to a pot of tea. "It's peppermint, does wonders for calming one's demeanor," the gesture was sweet - and very telling.

I wondered if I looked as spooked as I felt. After all, it didn't seem like Odette and her business were fishy in any way, and the décor and atmosphere were quite... Appealing, in a way. Something magical, something belonging in Europe or on a high schooler's Pinterest board. I sipped my tea in-between questions, thinking how maybe, I could actually grow accustomed to this place.

The shopkeeper acted as if I'd already accepted the job and I - well, it's not like I had any other options waiting for me. The pay was more than I expected it to be, for such a small bodega and a part-time shift, and it would help me cover my bills with enough to spare. The customers were said to be mostly regular and undemanding, with a few rare exceptions, and should I need assistance, the owner was always a call and a floor away.

With a considerably lighter heart, I left to pad the damp sidewalk back towards my house. Thankfully, my new workplace was only a short walk away.

The tag list is open until the story is finished. Please use the 'taglist' Google form to request (top of the fic, clickable link).

@mikariell95 @letsby @sleep-i-ness @toomanyrobins @mostly-marvel-musings @persephonehemingway @schemefrenzy @lillsxd @bluecrazedandbeautiful @slothspaghettiwrites

#bun writes #practical alchemy #ironstrange x reader #tony stark x reader x stephen strange #tony stark x reader #stephen strange x reader #tony stark fanfiction #stephen strange fanfiction

[touyota]

Hoe Hoe Hoe

☁️ Summary: Satoru Gojo *cough* *cough* I mean Santa Claus jingles your bells on Christmas Eve.

A/N: y’all this fic whooped my ass literally, but i think it came out pretty good. i think my smut is getting better, so hopefully i keep the momentum going for all my future fics. (also ik i’m late for the holidays but better late than never!)

☁️ Pairing: Gojo Satoru x Elf Reader

☁️ Warnings: Size kink, bulging, slight breeding kink, gojo’s massive 🐓

The holidays were always an overwhelming time at the workshop. You and your fellow elves worked overtime to fulfill the yearly abundance of Christmas lists that were received, and to be quite frank; you were due for a fucking break. As a head elf, you spent your days monitoring the shop floor and managing quality control. Everything and anything went through you, especially before it got to Santa.

You were handling a crisis on the floor, something about a particular video game console shortage, when you received a message from the big man himself.

“I swear... if I hear another word about how we are out of stock, I will personally shove a candy cane up your ass. We’re fucking elves, just go make some more.“ You shooed the elf off before taking a deep breath. You wanted to tear your hair out, every minor inconvenience didn’t require your assistance, yet they always found a way to you. In a last-ditch effort to keep your composure, you began to practice a method you learned in your weekly anger management meetings.

“One….two….three….four….five” You exhaled, opening your eyes to see a particular pink-haired headache, elf approaching waving and skipping towards you. You started counting faster; hopefully, he’d be gone at the end of your count.

“One..two..three..four..five”

“Boss! Oh, boss! I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” Fuck he was getting closer. You braced yourself, hoping he was referring to another supervisor standing near you.

“Onetwothreefourfiveonetwothreefourfiveonetwothreefourfive”

“What’s with the counting boss? You must be counting down the hours before we give everyone the best Christmas ever!” Yuji cheesed, barely able to contain his giddiness. Oh, bless his heart, Yuji was somewhat new to the shop and was a hard worker, but a few screws were missing upstairs.

“I have a bomb ticking inside my head.” you deadpanned, hoping to spook him off so you could go hide in your office.

“Oh…..Oh no, boss, you need to get checked out immediately, we need to call the police, the ambulance, the bomb squad, we might have to cancel Christmas. If we cancel Christmas, they won’t get their presents, and they’ll all be upset an-“ It was truly endearing. You could almost see the steam pouring from his ears as he panicked about you and your well-being. You pinched his lips shut before he managed to alert the rest of the workshop.

“Yuji, I was lying…what do you need?” The panic drained from his face, a relieved smile taking its place.

“The big man wants to see you, something about squashing a few last-minute details. He trailed off, focusing his attention on someone in the distance. “Nobara, stop drinking my eggnog, and don't touch my cookies!” Yuji ran off, thankfully abandoning your conversation.

You began your trek to the big man’s office, the big man being Satoru Gojo, direct descendant of Kris Kringle and newly appointed Santa Claus. Gojo was indeed an enigma, barely leaving his office only for special occasions such as Christmas Eve and Christmas itself. The only way you could speak to him was if he requested you directly.

The walk to the office required dragging yourself up to three flights of stairs before you reached the red door decorated with brightly colored green tinsel and oversized candy canes.

You made sure to knock, you weren’t completely devoid of manners, and you wanted to keep your job. A sultry voice sounded through the door.

“Come on in.” You gently open the door, almost tip-toeing in before slowly closing the door.

“You don’t have to walk on eggshells around me. I don't bite unless you want me to.” You scurried towards the desk, not wanting to waste any more of his limited time.

“......Sorry, Mr. Claus, I came as soon as Yuji told me he said something about a few last-minute details.”

“He was right; come sit right here.” As inviting as he looked, patting his lap, you took several hesitant steps before perching yourself on his lap. “Get comfortable; we have a few things to discuss, nothing outrageous, just a few... things.” You played the velvet fabric of your skirt as he droned off about the minor details that could’ve been dealt with by any other elf. You grunted in response to the open-ended questions asked. “I think that’s it. Did you get all that?” He skimmed through his never-ending checklist to confirm.

“Oh...um, yes, I did, in fact, I’ll go deal with that right now.” You dust your lap off and lean forward to push up off of the oversized chair. Only to find that you haven’t moved an inch. “Um…...Mr. Claus…I can’t move, and I need to….” you trailed off, disrupted by a gloved hand tilting your chin, forcing you to look directly into those soft blue eyes.

“Tsk tsk tsk, I knew you weren’t paying attention, puddin’.” He faked a face of hurt before using the arm that wasn’t wrapped around your waist to swipe his cluttered desk clear. “I said that-” Pausing to slam your form down unto the oversized desk. “I said that all I want for Christmas is to fuck you until this desk breaks.” He whispered, pressing several gentle kisses along the column of your neck. The room temperature had increased tremendously, and the red wool suit pressed against you made it no better.

“Uh...wow...um, it’s getting kinda hot in here, don’t you think?” You pulled at your collar, hoping to put some kind of separation between you two. You were in no way trying to reject his advances. You were just entirely ambushed by how fast things were moving. Another urgent concern was the sheer size of “Santa.” You were already genetically disadvantaged in the height category as an elf, but this behemoth of a man towered over you. It left you to believe that he was more than proportionate in the nether regions.

“I think you’re right. See, that’s exactly why you’re my right-hand puddin’.” Before you could blink, you were almost instantly rid of your gown, leaving you in your unfortunately modest black undergarments. You pouted, wishing you were given some kind of warning in advance. “Poor baby, next time I’ll let you get all dolled up for me, maybe I’ll wrap you up with a bow and leave you under my tree.” You couldn’t contain your whimper at the thought, roping your legs around his waist, mimicking the same motion with your arms around his neck.

A loud horn sounded off, signaling Santa’s departure was nearing. “As much as I’d love to sit and ravish you till dawn, duty calls.” You were drawn into several more gentle kisses before Gojo deepened the kiss, nearly smothering you. You were on the brink of suffocation when he finally eased up, allowing you to catch your breath. when you felt your panties tugged to the side. “You have such a pretty pussy puddin’. I could sit here and play with it all day long.” Two callused fingers daintily drew circles around your clit, stopping to pull at the sensitive nub causing you to whine at each tug.

“Ah- p-please...Santa” You couldn’t wait anymore. Each stroke brought you closer and closer to your peak.

“Please, what pretty girl? I won’t know until you tell me.” Purposely speeding up his ministrations.

“Please...please...please...fuck me.” You cried out, you could barely contain yourself, and he wasn’t making it any better.

The air knocked out of your chest as the blunt tip of his cock breached your entrance. There was a brief pause before Gojo’s hips slammed forward, setting a brutal pace. You couldn’t form any thought, only incoherent mumbles, and whimpers leaving your mouth. The desk was rocking with each thrust, nearly throwing you off.

“Y-you feel so fucking good, ugh...this sweet little pussy sucking me in. You like that, huh? Using you like a little fuck toy? Y-yeah, you’re Santa’s little fuck toy, you just lay there and look pretty, and I’ll fuck you full of my kids. I’ll make you Mrs. Claus, and you won’t have to work in that shitty little workshop anymore. How does that sound?” Gojo’s cock pounding away at your cervix, blurring the lines of pain and pleasure.

You could almost cry because it all sounded fucking amazing. You were floating on a cloud each stroke. The rhythm was slowing to deep, deliberate thrusts when you felt an oversized hand rest on your belly.

…….Holy shit.

You nearly fainted seeing the outline of his massive cock bulge through your belly. You could tell Gojo was close, skin slapping as his thrusts sped up again. The final press of his palm forcing you over, and Gojo the same with his final thrust. Both of you were murmuring and moaning as he nudged into another breath-taking kiss. The desk finally loses its bearing and falls apart, leaving you both as panting messes on the ground.

You had wood chips in places that they shouldn’t be, and the chuckling giant next to you wasn’t helping. Your quirked an eyebrow up and questioned him. “What’s so funny?”

“I think I need to add a new desk to my Christmas list.”

#satoru gojo x reader #jjk x reader #jjk x y/n #jjk smut #gojo x reader #jjk imagines #tw: size kink #tw: bulging #tw: breeding #satoru gojo

[gukyi]

four weeks | kth

summary: four weeks. that’s how long you’re trapped on campus after missing your flight home because of a grossly overtime final. and as you’re walking around your empty campus, thinking that you could sink no lower, you find yourself alone in the art building with a certain freshman-year-dorm-neighbor from hell, and he’s got an offer that you don’t think you can refuse: he’s staying on campus this winter break as well, and he’s happy to let you live with him.

or, four weeks is all it takes to fall in love.

{enemies to lovers!au, roommates!au, college!au}

pairing: art and chemistry double major kim taehyung x female reader genre: fluff, angst, comedy, the whole nine!! word count: 20k warnings: alcohol consumption (be safe!), unwanted sexual advances (not between main characters and not at all explicit), and a ton of college tomfoolery. a/n: i’m finally finished with my very first semester of college! it was a lot, but finishing this fic was a treat after my damn finals, which were very stressful. this is part of the stranded for christmas collab, and i’m so honored to be doing this with such amazing, talented writers! please give them and their fics lots of love, and enjoy this super fun train wreck of a fic!

Admittedly, Global Politics in the Twentieth Century has never treated you particularly well. 

Your lecturer is about as interesting as grass growing, the readings are low quality scans of book pages with the tiniest font and absolutely no line spacing, and any friends you had in that class in the beginning of the semester dropped out of it by the time mid-September rolled around, leaving you trapped due to societal pressures and a History and Politics general education requirement you still have yet to finish. 

But, of all the things you could imagine Global Politics in the Twentieth Century doing to you, like charging you an exorbitant $200 dollars for a textbook you would never open anyway, burning your house down, or even straight up just murdering you, this is by far the worst. 

It’s bad enough that your final for Global Politics in the Twentieth Century is on the last possible day for finals at the latest possible time, but when the clock strikes 8:00PM and you have just about fucking had it with this semester, you realize that no one else is standing up. 

This panic intensifies as you begin thinking of all of the terrible things that could be the reasoning behind this: you’re just the dumbass who finished their final first and got all of the questions wrong, the clocks have yet to adjust to daylight savings and you think that it’s 8:00PM when really it’s 7:00PM, or, worst of all, your final is running overtime. 

You have only ever heard of horror stories about overtime finals. Things like having to cram the next three-hour final into one hour, or having to reschedule the final to some other time that is equally as conflicting. Stuff that is, to a normal human being, a minor to moderate inconvenience at best (and to an overdramatic college student—pure, unadulterated hell), but when this is the last final on the last day at the latest time, there are no other finals to be had. No other school-related scheduling conflicts barreling into you. 

It’s just your luck, really, that on the last day of the semester, at the latest time you are allowed to be here, Global Politics in the Twentieth Century would come back to bite you in the ass one last time. As if all the times you dozed off in class (or just plain skipped), forgot to turn in your reading analyses, and showed up late to your recitation are finally catching up to you. Like the very worst kind of karma that could ever befall you. 

Well, to be fair, it’s not as if the rest of the day has treated you any better. The entire time you’ve been awake on this fine December day has been an absolute trash can of a day. 

This is how the beginning of your very last day of the semester played out:

Your alarm went off at 8:00AM sharp, purposefully set that early so you could wake up and have a productive day studying before your final at 6:00PM.

You hit snooze and ended up waking up around 11:33AM.

You scrambled out of bed very inelegantly and attempted to get your life together before noon so you could at least have six hours worth of a productive study day before your final. 

You remembered that you hadn’t packed yet, so you spent the next hour frantically stuffing your belongings into the singular carry-on sized suitcase meant to last you through your month-long winter break. 

You also realized that you hadn’t done your laundry for the week (well, week and 6 days…), and you obviously want to bring clean clothes back home so you spend the next two hours doing your laundry and finishing up your packing.

By the time you finally managed to get the time to study, the panic had fully nestled itself into your bones, so you could not focus and spent the next three hours staring at your study guide and praying that osmosis would kick in so you could actually retain information. 

You left to go to your final five minutes later than you should have and then ran across campus (with absolutely no dignity left) in order to get there on time. 

You arrived at your final just in time, only for there to be technical difficulties with printing the exam because your professor is a procrastinator, just like you are.

The next thirty minutes were then spent contacting the IT department, attempting to fix the printer, having to go print in another building, and then coming back with the final exam to a room of aggravated students who thought that they would be thirty-minutes into the exam by now. 

You are taking the final exam. It’s stupid difficult and you’re absolutely going to tank it. 

You are watching as the final runs overtime for about half an hour.

You are watching as the final runs overtime for about an hour. 

You are watching as the final runs overtime for about an hour and a half.

And on your very last day of the fall semester, your final runs overtime by two whole hours because of some mystic force determined to ruin your life, and your flight heading back home took off fifteen minutes ago. 

You know, it could be worse. You could have failed all of your classes. Instead, you paid an exorbitant $500 to miss your flight, fail your Global Politics in the Twentieth Century final, and end up trapped on campus for all of winter break because you don’t have the money to buy another plane ticket at such late notice (or at all). 

So, it could be worse. 

You trudge out of your final exam and try not to burst into tears on your way back to your dormitory. Barely anybody is left on campus now that finals are officially over, but you still want to save that last shred of dignity. As you’re walking down the pathway, you begin to feel wet splotches on your face. For a moment, you think that they are fat tears rolling down your face, but you look at the cobblestone beneath your feet and realize that instead, it’s raining. 

The perfect weather to match your mood, if you’re being honest. 

Not wanting to get caught in a downpour, you end up taking refuge in the coffee shop connected to the art building on campus. It’s a genius business design, if you say so yourself, because there is no one more dependent on caffeine than sleep-deprived, eyebag-laden art students. Surprisingly enough, there are still people behind the counter bustling around, so you use the last of your university dollars to order a peppermint hot chocolate to warm your insides (but not your cold, dead soul). 

From there, you take a quick detour to explore the art building, a building you have, admittedly, never really taken much of a look at. It must be empty now, with everyone off campus—except you, of course—which gives you the perfect opportunity to wallow in peace while admiring art. 

Walking inside, you stare at your reflection in the enormous glass walls. Look at your tired eyes, slouched shoulders, lips pressed thin, and hands warmed only by the heat of your cardboard coffee cup. Count each acne mark and hair out of place. It’s almost like you’re watching yourself as you look in the mirror, a third person standing in the background. The audience. Like the person who’s looking back at you isn’t you at all. 

It's quite artistic, actually. Ironically enough.

But no matter how picturesque, how cinematic this particular moment of your life is, nothing can really soothe you after missing your flight, failing your final, and pretty much having the worst day of your entire life.

Just then, you hear footsteps echoing down the halls.

You assume that it must just be a professor leaving their office, or even maybe one of the hardworking security guards, but as you watch the glass walls to catch a glimpse of who's passing by, you realize that it's not a professor, or a security guard, or even a very large mouse scurrying across the floor.

"I thought I would be the last one in here," Kim Taehyung says when he spots you, stopping in his tracks with a canvas about half the size of him underneath his arm.

"So did I," you muse in response, not really wanting to turn around to save yourself the trouble of talking to him.

Still, Kim Taehyung has always been one hell of an observant guy, so by the time he's stopped behind you, he's already peering into the reflection of the glass windows to look at who he's talking to.

"Y/N?" He asks, walking up to you with his eyebrow raised. He comes over, standing next to you as you look at each other's reflections in the glass. "Never thought I'd see you in here."

"Me neither, to be honest," you say. Seeing as you aren't a visual studies major, you never really considered the art building to be a location of top priority. Until now, that is.

The last time you spoke to Kim Taehyung was the last day of your freshman year, when everybody was getting ready to move out, packing up their belongings and removing the fifteen thousand Command hooks stuck to their walls. You and him made eye contact as you placed the last of your boxes for the semester into those enormous Residential Services carts, glaring at each other from your adjacent rooms. 

“First year flew by, didn’t it?” Taehyung asks, smirk lacing his features. 

“Thank God it’s over,” you tell him. 

“Not gonna miss me, huh?” Taehyung winks, and it makes you want to take this cardboard box filled with all of the notebooks and lined paper and folders you used throughout the year and chuck it at his head. 

“Miss you?” You ask with a scoff. With the final box finally out of your room, you can officially lock the door behind you, closing the chapter on your very first year at university. “Please. Nothing makes me happier than the fact that I don’t have to live next to you anymore.”

“Why are you still here?” Taehyung asks, tapping his fingers on the side of the canvas underneath his arm. “Thought you’d be off campus by now.”

“I had a late final,” you say, pretending that your life and every aspect of it is fine when it is, in fact, not fine at all. The best case scenario is that Taehyung accepts your bullshit answer for what it is and heads off to do whatever it is that he does, leaving you alone so you can wallow in pity and ponder the meaning of life. The worst case scenario is that Taehyung stays. 

And Taehyung has always been very good at picking the latter. 

“Ah, sucks, for what class?” Taehyung asks. You can’t tell if he’s genuinely curious or just wants to interrupt your personal self-wallow time for as long as possible. 

“Global Politics in the Twentieth Century,” you tell him with a sigh. You don’t want to have to hear, say, read, or write that name ever again. 

“Oh, really? I took that class last semester,” Taehyung says with an eyebrow raised, surprised. “I thought it was super interesting.”

As if you needed any more proof that you and Kim Taehyung are exact opposites in every way. You are hardly surprised that Kim Taehyung enjoyed Global Politics in the Twentieth Century—not when the two of them have so much in common, like inconveniencing you, being annoying, and sort of always having it out for you. It’s like they were meant to be together. 

“I can’t say I thought the same,” you say pointedly, lips pursed into a tight line. 

“Ah, well, I never did peg you for a history buff,” Taehyung says with a shrug of his shoulders. 

“Why are you still on campus? I thought art students had to turn in their final projects on the first day of exams,” you ask, turning the focus onto him. It’s obvious that he has no intention of leaving you alone, so your next best option is to interrogate him until the tension between the two of you is so suffocating, so thick and heavy, that he wants to leave. 

“I had a couple of chem finals after I finished up my art classes,” Taehyung says. Right. You forgot he was doing a double major. “And, my parents are actually travelling this winter break, so I was planning on staying on campus. Didn’t really want to go back to an empty house, you know?”

After the day you’ve had, you can think of nothing better than opening the door to your home, knowing that you have the entire place to yourself and can spend the night in your bedroom, watching Netflix. 

“You’re staying on campus?” You ask. Great. The only two people who will be on campus this winter recess are you and Kim Taehyung. Fantastic. 

“Yeah,” Taehyung says, clearly unaffected. He seems particularly unbothered by the fact that he can’t go home, almost like he’s been looking forward to having the entire university to himself. “You’re about to head home, then, aren’t you? Just taking a quick break in the art building?”

Well, almost to himself. 

The chances of running into Taehyung this winter break, despite being probably the only two people on campus, is still slim. It’s a big campus, and there are people who are not part of the university that walk on campus all the time. 

And still, you don’t know what you’ll do if you lie to Taehyung and tell him you’re about to fly home, and then bump into him at the local coffee shop. You might just perish. That might be what happens. 

So, for once in your life, you suck it up and tell the truth. For once. 

“Actually, I missed my flight because of my final running overtime, so I’m sort of stuck here,” you tell him, and as the words leave your lips it feels like your whole body gets weighed down, like you’re cemented to the floor.

It’s only then that Taehyung actually turns to face you, so you aren’t standing shoulder to shoulder and staring at the rain pattering on the pavement outside. You look at him, meeting his eyes and to your surprise, they aren’t filled with mirth. He hasn’t got this pleased grin on his face. He’s not milking this situation for what it could be milked for at all. He could be standing here, bathing in the satisfaction of your timely demise, and he’s not. 

He actually looks quite sad. 

“Really?” He asks, genuine. 

“Yeah,” you say, and it’s then that you accept your fate, resign yourself to the fact that you’re trapped on campus with no way (and no money) to get home, and try to look for the silver lining. “So, I’ve actually got to get going, grab my stuff and everything.”

“Oh, do you live off campus?” Taehyung asks. “We should get together sometime this break. Who else are we gonna talk to, right?” 

Spending time with Taehyung on your lonely-ass winter break sounds like the absolute worst thing in the entire world. It’s been two years since the last time you were forced to be within fifty feet of each other, so even having this conversation is taking you by surprise.

“No, I’m still staying on campus. But my dorm is closing for the winter break, so I need to go and find an Airbnb or something to stay somewhere,” you say, feeling your heart break at the notion of spending even more money this winter break after having watched your $500 dollar airplane ticket get flushed down the toilet. 

Taehyung stays silent, eyes gazing at the lines between the linoleum tiles on the floor. He’s stopped tapping on the side of his canvas, a painting which you still haven’t fully gotten a glimpse of. In the quiet of the art building, the dust settles, and you wait for Taehyung to say something. Anything. 

After a few more seconds, you decide that the two of you have been standing in awkward silence for long enough. 

“Well, I’ll see you around, I guess,” you say nervously, letting out an unnatural and forced laugh as you turn on your feet and begin to head towards the exit. You have no idea where you’re going to go or what you’re going to do, but what you do know is that you have to be out of your building by noon tomorrow, so you’ve got less than a day to figure it out. 

And then, Taehyung says the worst thing he could possibly say at this given moment:

“Do you wanna stay with me?”

You stop dead in your tracks. 

“What?”

“You don’t have to say yes,” Taehyung immediately clarifies, as if that makes the offer any less sudden. “But I live in an off-campus apartment year round, so you could always stay with me if you’d like. You wouldn’t have to book an Airbnb or anything. But you don’t have to.”

You close your eyes, feeling your chest rise and sink as you inhale and exhale. You can’t believe you’re actually considering his offer. You can’t believe that Taehyung would willingly offer up his personal abode, his private apartment to you, the freshman year next-door neighbor who knocked on his door every six hours to tell him to shut the fuck up. You cannot believe that you are on the verge of accepting. 

“Are you sure?” You ask, both eyebrows raised. Yes, the idea of free lodging and no-hassle appeals greatly to you, but you’re not so certain that Taehyung or you actually want this. After all, you spent all of freshman year hating on each other’s living habits as personal hobbies of yours. “You don’t have to offer just because I don’t have a place to stay. Seriously.”

“No,” Taehyung says, taking a step towards you. It’s barely a foot, but it feels like he’s a thousand miles closer to you than he was before. “I mean it. If you want to stay with me, you’re welcome to. I have a futon in my living room that you can sleep on. I’m being serious.”

You cannot believe that he’s asking this. 

You cannot believe you’re considering this. 

You cannot believe you’re about to say yes to this. 

“You really mean it?” You ask one more time, just so you can be certain. You’d hardly be surprised if this whole thing was just a mindfuck. 

“I do,” Taehyung says. “No matter what, I don’t think anybody should be alone for the holidays.”

“Then yes,” you say, letting Taehyung catch up to you as you begin to walk towards the exit, step by step. “I’d really appreciate it.” You turn to look at him, your eyes meeting his own chocolate brown ones, nearly ink black in the dark. You can’t offer much, certainly not anything to top this gracious proposal, but you smile, and he smiles back, and you think that’s enough. 

Your first order of business is trekking back to your dormitory and grabbing your fully-packed suitcase. At least spending an hour shoving as many of your belongings as possible into a tiny carry-on has its benefits despite you not setting foot in the airport. 

“Been a long time since we’ve done this,” Taehyung comments mindlessly as you walk through campus, following the cobblestone path as a shortcut to his apartment. 

“Done what?” You ask snarkily. “Hung out with each other?” You scoff. You and Taehyung spent all of freshman year skirting around each other, desperately trying to avoid contact while also banging on each other’s doors every ten minutes. It was essentially two semesters worth of shouting at each other through walls and sneering when you actually locked eyes. 

“Talked,” Taehyung simplifies, because he’s right. 

“Isn’t that what we were aiming for?” You ask with a raised eyebrow, turning to look at him as your suitcase wheel skips on a stone out of place. “I thought we had reached that consensus already.” It’s been a year and a half since you last spoke to each other. You were almost confident that, without any overlapping classes, you would be able to keep that streak going long after graduation. 

As it turns out, things change. 

“I don’t know if we ever actually agreed on that,” Taehyung says, thinking back. “Almost like it went…” he pauses, and you can’t be sure if it’s for dramatic effect or because he actually doesn’t know what to say. “Unspoken.”

The irony is not lost on you. In fact, it hits you smack dab in the forehead as you watch Taehyung’s curious expression morph into the sleazy frat boy one he wore so much back then. He looks very pleased with his pun. It makes you want to sock him in the face. 

And as it turns out, some things never change. 

You resist the urge to punch him in the shoulder because he offered you a place to stay for this break and you sort of (actually, really) owe him big time right now. But that doesn’t mean you can’t send a disapproving frown, which seems to do the trick. 

“I distinctly remember how you were so excited to never have to live next to me again when we moved out,” Taehyung says like he’s remembering a fun trip to the zoo. Almost like he looks upon the last time you ever interacted with each other fondly. 

You mentally sigh. If only freshman year you knew what was going to happen in the middle of your junior year. If only your final hadn’t run overtime by two hours. If only you had booked a later flight. 

If only. 

“I don’t remember that at all,” you lie like a liar, saying the words as the picture of you snarkily spitting them at Taehyung at the end of your freshman year plays in your brain on repeat. 

“You sure about that, Y/N?” Taehyung says, turning to look you up and down. He’s always been such a people reader, and you’ve always felt so helplessly transparent in front of him. Even back then. Even now. “Because I don’t really think that your memory is that bad.”

“Nope, no, I don’t,” you say quickly, trying to get Taehyung to stop eyeing you like you’re a question on an exam that he thinks is suspiciously easy. 

“Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter then, does it?” Taehyung muses as you round the street corner and his apartment complex comes into view. “Since we’ll be living together, anyway.”

“Miss you? Please. Nothing makes me happier than the fact that I don’t have to live next to you anymore.”

Before you can wheel your cart down the hallway and kiss your freshman year goodbye, Taehyung opens his mouth and says one more thing. You almost don’t hear him, too busy reminding yourself that you’ll never have to see him again, but then he says, “One day, Y/N, you’re going to realize that we’re closer than you think.”

When you walk into Taehyung’s apartment, your eyes zero in on these three things: the navy blue futon pushed up against the wall by his television and the fact that it doesn’t look like the kind of used furniture from off of the street that most college kids typically resort to, the little wooden kitchen table that looks straight out of a family-owned Italian restaurant (looks like the two of you will be eating dinner together), and the paintings on the walls. 

“Did you paint these?” Is the first thing you ask once you’re inside, putting your suitcase up against the wall as Taehyung takes off his coat. 

“Those? Yeah, I did them early last year. My walls looked so damn plain without anything on them.”

In freshman year, Taehyung seemed like the kind of artsy hipster who shopped at Urban Outfitters and put vinyl records on his wall with Command Strips but never actually listened to them. 

But the pieces on his walls aren’t vinyls of bands like Arctic Monkeys and Modern Baseball. They’re paintings, oil and acrylics and even a bit of charcoal. Still life and portraits and shadows. 

You had never seen one of his paintings before. You never imagined you’d ever want to, or even get the chance to. And now, you’re standing in the middle of his apartment, and you’re surrounded by them. 

“They’re…” You trail off, eyes bouncing from wall to wall as you take all of them in. There’s at least ten, one, if not two on each wall in sight. His bedroom is probably filled with them. His apartment’s not enormous, rather small since it’s only got one bedroom, but the paintings make the whole place bigger. Make it feel full of life. 

“They’re alright,” Taehyung finishes. He’s already grabbing extra blankets from the storage closet in the side of the wall. “They were assignments we had during the semester so I figured that they’d be put to good use on my wall.”

“It’s very impressive,” you admit. “Kind of a flex, but an impressive flex.” There is something so perfectly Taehyung about the fact that he’s got art all over his walls, but they’re his very own pieces that he has framed and hanging, on display for the entire world to see if they’d like. 

“They’d collect dust otherwise,” he says with a shrug. He tosses two blankets and a pillow your way, letting them plop onto the futon. “Are those enough blankets? It can get fucking cold in here, so I don’t want you to freeze to death or anything.”

And for a moment, you think that Taehyung has actually outgrown his asshole-y freshman days, maturing into someone with an actual moral backbone.

“How considerate,” you say sarcastically, “but I think I’ll be alright. I’m a big, strong girl.”

“Just don’t come crawling into my bed if you want a taste of that weighted-blanket life,” Taehyung says, pretending to flip his hair. “Though, I wouldn’t blame you if you did want to sleep with me.”

With a pillow right at your disposal, you waste no time grabbing it and chucking it straight at Taehyung’s face. He easily dodges, having spotted the move from a mile away, and chuckles. 

“Come on, Y/N, you can do better than that,” he says disapprovingly, shaking his head as he makes his way to the kitchen. “Your arm was much stronger back in freshman year.”

Scowling, you watch as he puts on the kettle to boil, letting the water begin to bubble as he goes about his business like he doesn’t have a guest in his living room that absolutely can’t stand him. 

And you realize that maybe Taehyung’s a couple of years older, a couple of years wiser, but that doesn’t make him a couple of years any less unbearable.

If you were a sleep-deprived engineering student three cans of Monster deep who, in their 4AM haze, invented a time machine to go back to freshman year, and you told your eighteen-year-old self that you would be living under the same damn roof as Kim Taehyung in two years time, freshman year you would probably sock you in the face. And ask you if you changed majors. Which, you did.

It’s not a far reach to wonder why. By the time October rolled around, the two of you had already established yourselves as archenemies until the end of time. 

It was a natural progression, really. Two tiny dorm rooms right next to each other, two beds pressed up against opposite sides of the same paper-thin wall, and two disgruntled freshmen trying their hardest not to die of alcohol poisoning. 

Now, you don’t have a track record for going to sleep at a reasonable hour. In fact, you don’t think you’ve gone to bed before 11PM since middle school. But is it really that irrational of you to want to get some well-deserved shuteye at two in the morning after a long day of procrastination and a long night of doing the studying you should have done during the day? Your roommate is fast asleep across from you, having gone to sleep at midnight like a regular college student who has her life together, which means that she’s immune to the fact that right next door, you can hear nothing but pounding drums making the very linoleum floor of your dormitory shake. 

Scowling, you scramble out of bed, sliding on your shoes to go give a certain Kim Taehyung a bit of a reprimanding. 

Why the fuck does he listen to heavy drums at two in the morning? What the fuck is he doing? Does he not own headphones, or anything that might restrict the sound to his own two ears and nothing else? Does he not have any respect for the people next door to him that might also have to listen to the sound of a thumping bass while they’re trying to go to sleep?

Some of you have 9AM’s tomorrow morning. And by some of you, you mean you. 

You quietly shut the door behind you so as not to wake your roommate, dead-bolting it so you don’t get locked out and have to trudge down to the Help Desk looking like a tired piece of non-recyclable garbage, and immediately bang on Kim Taehyung’s door. He hasn’t got a roommate, and you know he’s awake, which means that if he doesn’t respond, you’ll know why. 

Surprisingly enough, he does, opening the door and immediately grinning once he sees who’s on the other side, like he can’t get enough of the fact that his mere existence bothers you. 

“It’s 2AM,” you tell him, in lieu of a greeting. 

He checks his watch. “That it is.”

“Would you mind turning down the music? I’m trying to go to sleep.”

“This late, Y/N?” Taehyung asks, an eyebrow raised. “No wonder you’re always so cranky.”

“Maybe it’s because my next-door neighbor plays loud fucking music when I’m trying to go to sleep!” You say, already beginning to raise your voice like a loser who can’t control her emotions.

Which is exactly what you are, actually. So this is very on brand for you. 

“Hmm, never thought about it that way,” Taehyung says innocently. He’s got a gleam in his eye that says otherwise. 

“I’m being very nice to you right now, Kim Taehyung. Please turn your music down. Because it’s loud and you’re probably bothering other people as well,” you say, restraining yourself. If you were any more sleep-deprived you’d storm into his room and pound in his face like it was the fucking drums he’s listening to. 

“But you’re my only neighbor,” Taehyung says, a bitter reminder that you were unlucky enough to be the second-to-last room in the corridor, and he, the very last one. 

You inhale, trying to not lose your cool despite having probably already lost it. Kim Taehyung makes you want to tear your eyeballs out. Or buy heavy-duty earplugs off of Amazon Prime. The thing is, one of those options costs you money, and one is entirely free. So, it’s not difficult to see which one you’re leaning towards. 

“Taehyung, please turn your music down, or so help me God. I’m asking nicely,” you can feel the carbon dioxide paths coming from your nose as you breathe, in and out and in and out. 

“Just for you, Y/N,” Taehyung says with a grin. God. You could just straight sock him in the face right now. “It helps me focus, but so does getting to see you.”

“Perish immediately,” you tell him sharply before pulling the door shut, marching back off to your room. 

True to his word, Kim Taehyung does turn off his music. Or puts in headphones. At least he’s conceded.

That is, until you wake up to a crash of glass later that morning at 7AM, coming from only one direction. 

The fact of the matter is, everything you and Taehyung did that year bothered the other so immensely that hatred, pure, unadulterated dislike, was really the only thing that could have come out of it. 

“You still listening to loud ass drums in the middle of the night?” You ask, eyeing the speakers by Taehyung’s television as you sit on his couch (as far apart from each other as possible) and eat some leftover spaghetti. 

“I invested in some AirPods as a treat to myself last year, so yes, but don’t worry,” Taehyung says. He’s mindlessly flicking through the available Hulu options on his TV, severely unimpressed by every one of them. 

“Wow, AirPods, sounds like you’re moving up in the world,” you say callously. “At least I don’t have to listen to it with you anymore.”

“I wasn’t kidding when I said it helped me focus,” Taehyung says, all matter-of-fact about it. “It was from a Spotify playlist of modern orchestral music. You should give it a listen, it really gets you into the zone.”

“My relationship with classical music has, unfortunately, been tainted by a certain someone,” you remind him, taking the time to shoot him a glare just in case he doesn’t already know who exactly is at fault. 

“What a shame, you might actually like it,” Taehyung says sadly, shaking his head. 

“So what are the speakers for, then? If not for your fuckin’ drums,” you ask, motioning to them again as you slurp up the last of your spaghetti. It’s not as if you’ve got some sort of sacred reputation to protect in front of him. He’s seen you at your best (the first day of freshman year, when there was still light in your eyes), and at your worst (2AM, coming out of a drunken stupor, and bedhead-ridden). Like an ex-boyfriend, or something. 

“My friends really like singing karaoke,” Taehyung says. He points to the bluetooth microphones underneath the television as extra proof. 

“Why does that not surprise me,” you muse to yourself. Taehyung always struck you as someone that needs people not to calm him down, but to elevate his already boisterous personality. Friends who are equally as unabashed as he is. 

“Since you’re here for a whole month, we should try it some time,” Taehyung suggests, taking the empty bowl from your hands and heading back to the sink to wash up. 

“You need help with that?” You ask, immediately getting up because even if Taehyung has a tendency to drive you up the wall, you’re still going to be a good guest.

“No, don’t sweat it,” Taehyung says with a shrug. “You know, I have karaoke for All I Want For Christmas Is You. Super seasonal, right?” 

You dust off your hands from where you’re standing, loitering in that weird halfway point between his kitchen and his living room. Checking the clock underneath his television, you realize that it’s already past ten. And while you haven’t gone to sleep this early in a while, being in Taehyung’s apartment makes you feel all sorts of strange. Subdued and exhausted, too grateful to be your normal aggressive and witty self. And after such a long goddamn day, passing out on his navy blue futon seems like absolute heaven. 

“Not right now,” you say, shaking your head. Karaoke is something that friends do with other friends. And despite currently living under the same roof, you and Kim Taehyung are not friends. 

(But perhaps you will be. And that’s the scary part.)

You sigh, absolutely tanked. It’s been a stupidly long day. “Maybe later.”

Living with Taehyung is a sort of strange limbo you never, in a million years, pictured yourself in. You aren’t close enough to be friends but you’ve matured out of being the true enemies you had both envisioned the yourselves as in freshman year. The both of you walk around his apartment like you’re afraid to talk to the other, waiting patiently for the bathroom when the other person’s inside, trying to keep yourself busy with nonexistent work (it is winter break, after all) and the apps on your phones. 

This is the sort of thing you dreamed of when you were a freshman. A Kim Taehyung that you could co-exist with peacefully. Someone who didn’t spend every waking moment of his life making every waking moment of yours unbearable. You used to find excuses to sleep overnight in the library (it was open 24/7, after all) just so you wouldn’t have to go back to your dorm and see his stupid face. Now, the two of you sit on opposite ends of the couch minding your own goddamn business and doing two totally unrelated activities. In silence. The only noises being his refrigerator/freezer combo when it starts making ice and the sounds of your fingers hitting the keyboards on your laptops. Maybe he’s playing a video game on the Playstation 4 he keeps out in the living room, but he has headphones on and isn’t saying a word. 

It’s a very strange sort of limbo indeed, because no opportunities arise for you to become friends nor do any arise for you to become enemies. At this rate, you’ll live together for the month-long winter break and when it ends, you’ll go back to never speaking to each other again. 

And that, strangely enough, makes you sad. Makes you want to reach out to him, try and build up a relationship that last ended in absolute chaos so that when you leave this place, it won’t have been for naught. You will have gained something from it, no matter how small. 

But just like usual, Taehyung beats you to it. 

“Hey,” he says one day, walking into the living room and already pulling on his overcoat. “You free right now?”

“Yeah, why?” You ask, shutting your laptop as you turn to him. He’s all dressed up and you’ve been wearing the same hoodie for the past forty-eight hours. 

“Let’s get hotpot. I’m freezing and I want some hot soup and meat.”

So, you go and get hotpot. 

Like any normal university with more than approximately three East Asians enrolled, there’s a hotpot place right off campus that many a college student frequent. You have, admittedly, not been since freshman year, but this winter break you seem to be reaching back into all of those memories anyway, like a can of worms. Memory worms. 

“I’m starving,” Taehyung says as the two of you sit down. He’s already opening the menu, eyeing all of the different ingredients he can order for a simple All-You-Can-Eat fare. “Plus, I’ve been craving hotpot for weeks now.”

As if on cue, his stomach grumbles and you can hear it from across the booth.

“Even my tummy knows,” Taehyung says, placing a palm to his belly to soothe it. “Have you gotten hotpot before?”

“Yeah, but it was a while ago. I just never had the time to go for a whole two hours and pig out on food,” you say with a sigh. It’s been so long that you barely remember what it tastes like. 

“Then we’ll spend every minute that we’re allowed to here, eating as much food as we want and gaining a few pounds while we’re at it,” Taehyung says, determined. The waiter comes by to pour you both some water and he already begins to order, pointing to about fifteen different things on the menu before the waiter whizzes off. 

“I don’t think I heard a single word you told that guy,” you say candidly. Taehyung listed everything off so quickly that it went right over your head. 

“I just ordered a lot of food, so be prepared,” Taehyung says like it’s a promise. He’s got this glint in his eye, one that tells you that you should be glad you came on a fairly-empty stomach because it’s about to be filled to the brim. 

And prepared you are. Within five minutes of Taehyung ordering, there are plates and dishes and boards of food in front of you and a steaming pot of broth in the middle. There’s so much on the table that you can hardly see the marble table top underneath. 

Taehyung dives right in, clearly an experienced hotpot eater. He grabs two bowls filled with various sauces and pops a couple of the vegetables into his mouth as he waits for the broth to boil. And when it begins to bubble, he immediately begins dumping everything in sight into it, from meat to noodles to vegetables. It all looks ridiculously appetizing. 

When the first round of hotpot is over and done with, you already feel yourself starting to get sleepy just from the consumption overload. Taehyung, on the other hand, has apparently no limit and is already ordering more, pointing to another fifteen things on the menu. 

“Never thought we’d be doing this, did you?” Taehyung asks, and you can hear the knowing tone in his voice. Like he already knows how you’re going to answer him. 

“I have to admit that I never did,” you say. It must the food that’s softened you up. No wonder Taehyung invited you to a place where you can literally eat as much as you want in a two-hour timeframe. 

“This is nice, though, isn’t it?” He asks. 

And for once in your life, you agree. It is nice. Not just the food (though the food is very nice) but being with someone on a winter break that would otherwise be overwhelmingly lonely. Eating out with someone, even if it’s someone with whom your relationship isn’t all that strong, isn’t that sturdy. It’s nice. Because it means that, somewhere along the way, you both wanted something to change for the better. 

“It is.” You nod. “Way better than all the times we fought during freshman year.”

“Remind me why we never went to our RA to resolve things like we should have?” Taehyung says, but he doesn’t make it sound like you both made a mistake. He asks because he’s curious, and because the past is the past. 

“I think we were both too fucking prideful for our own good,” you say, shaking your head. You now would disapprove of you in freshman year so strongly. “We thought that we could either resolve it ourselves or spend the rest of our lives hating each other.”

“Isn’t that crazy?” Taehyung asks, holding up his water like it’s a glass of vintage red wine from the 1800’s. “That we thought that we could just spend the rest of our lives hating each other?”

“I was prepared to do it,” you say, taking another piece of meat from the hotpot in front of you, letting the steam waft from it like a tiny campfire. “With how big this school is, I was convinced that you and I would never have to see each other again. Never have the opportunity to change how we felt about each other.”

“But that’s not how life works, Y/N,” Taehyung tells you, looking into your eyes like he’s trying to reach into your soul, pick apart the memories of freshman year and watch as your relationship deteriorated as each day went by. “It doesn’t matter if we see each other every day for the rest of our lives or if, after this, we never say another word to each other. You will always have the opportunity to change how you feel about someone, even if you aren’t with them. Even if you aren’t seeing them at all.” He takes a deep breath, and reaches over the steaming pot of soup to nudge your shoulder with his finger, ever so slightly. It makes you look up at him, meet his dark brown eyes with your own, foggy from the steam. “That’s what makes us human, Y/N. We’re human because we can change.”

Your heart, still and silent, begins to thump. 

“Do you wanna go to New York?”

“Today?”

It’s early in the morning on Christmas Eve, and the two of you are wide awake after Taehyung’s neighbors a floor below him called the fire department as an early wake-up call for the entire complex. You’ve always been a light sleeper—Taehyung made sure of that in freshman year—but even he woke up as the fire trucks pulled up to the fire lane next to the apartment building. He came stumbling out of his room in nothing but a t-shirt two sizes too big and sweatpants hanging low on his hips, locks of his hair sticking every which way, face illuminated by the blue, red, and orange lights of the emergency vehicles beneath the window. 

And he stayed like that, even as the noise died down and the sun rose. He marched around looking like he had just rolled out of bed, barely sparing himself a second glance in the reflection of his refrigerator. 

“Yeah,” Taehyung responds like it’s obvious. “If we hopped on a bus now we could make it there by nine and spend the day there. How about it?”

“You mean, right now?” You ask, just as clarification. College and its many features have forced you to grow used to spontaneity, but it usually came in the form of “I’m hungry, so I am going to eat an entire bag of Hot Cheetos at this exact moment” or “Yes, my bank account is crying but these pants are very cute,” and not, “Do you wanna go to New York?”

“In a bit. Buses leave from here every hour to go to New York, especially since it’s the holiday season. Tickets are ten dollars. We could do it, if you’d like,” Taehyung says casually, like he’s suggesting that the two of you go grocery shopping or something else equally mundane. 

“Just for the day?” You ask, a girl of both many questions and a shocked expression. 

“Sure,” Taehyung says with a shrug, biting into a tomato as if it were a goddamn apple. “We can go to a museum or two, eat a nice lunch or dinner, and go ice skating at Rockefeller. See the tree, too. It’ll get us in the holiday spirit, don’t you think?”

And normally an outing to New York would have you planning weeks in advance, organizing reservations and buying tickets for entry into exhibits, but it’s winter break and you’ve got more free time than you know what to do with. 

And maybe you’d hate to admit it, but you need someone like Taehyung to get you off of your ass and out of the house, do something fun and spontaneous like college students do in the movies. 

Taehyung is practically a movie portrayal of a college student in real life. He’s spontaneous, secretive, sage. He’s artsy and worldly, paints but is also extremely smart and well-educated. He lives in a quaint off-campus apartment by himself and spends his days making friends and keeping busy. He loves to tease you, and has that sort of lopsided smirk that all casanovas do. And he is, as much as you’d hate to admit it, always been something of a looker. He’s got the same sort of handsome, classic look that young European men in paintings from the eighteenth century have, a portrait of them in the prime of their lives. One wink and he’d send every preteen girl in the audience to their knees.

And you? Well, you suppose you’re the tragically unlucky female lead who has to live with him until classes resume. 

Taehyung’s standing in the kitchen, leaning on the counter island as he scrolls for bus tickets on his phone. “There’s a bus leaving from the station in thirty minutes. Think we can make it?”

It might be the fact that you’ve been holed up in Taehyung’s apartment for the past forty-eight hours that makes you say yes. Or it’s the desperation to do something, anything, literally anything, to keep yourself busy this break. 

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s that little voice in the back of your chest, one buried in the depths of your heart, that makes you go. Because there is something so wonderfully exhilarating about being spontaneous.  And there is something even more exciting about it being with someone you know. 

You grin. “Let’s do it.”

Two hours later, the two of you are standing outside Penn Station in New York City, staring at the road signs to try and orient yourself. It’s chilly and a little windy, but the sun beats down regardless, shadows of skyscrapers cast along the streets. 

You pull out your phone to pull up the Maps app, looking up directions, but Taehyung just begins to walk down 7th Avenue, not a care in the world. 

“Where are you going?” You say quickly, scrambling to catch up to him. This early in the morning, your breath still turns to fog as you jog towards him to meet his abnormally long strides.

“Do you want to go to the Met, MOMA, or Guggenheim?” Taehyung asks simply, like he’s trying to decide which type of Doritos to get in the chips aisle. 

“Uh…” you are, admittedly, not that particular to the art that you’ll see. Art does not have as much of an immediate relevance to you as other things in your life, like your bank account, or your final semester grades. “Why don’t you pick the museum, and I’ll pick the restaurant we go to?”

“Deal,” Taehyung says, that same devilish gleam in his eyes, a trick (or two) up his sleeves. Only this time, you aren’t afraid of what he’s got in store. 

You find that you are very much looking forward to it. 

Twenty minutes later sees the both of you standing outside the gigantic glass doors of the MOMA, surrounded by a pitch black exterior about as edgy and contemporary as the pieces of art inside. 

“You never struck me as a modern art kind of guy,” you tell Taehyung as the both of you walk inside, glass windows and ceilings on every side of you and a bustling crowd right in front of you. Modern art seems rather stuffy. And perhaps, two years ago, you would have equated Taehyung to such, but now, stuffiness couldn’t be the furthest adjective to describe him. He may be a little obnoxious and overwhelmingly charismatic, but he is certainly not stuffy. 

“I prefer Impressionism and the subsequent periods,” Taehyung tells you, another fact you never knew but happily stow away. “But I am, admittedly, a bitch for modern art, no matter how goddamn stupid it is.”

“Good to know we’re spending our money on a museum that will definitely be worth our while,” you say dryly, taking the two tickets from the woman behind the desk. You pick up a map while you’re at it, almost certain to get lost in this maze of a museum, but Taehyung is already zooming off, forcing you to scurry through the herds of people just to keep up his pace. 

“Do you know where we’re going?” You ask, entirely serious. You fumble to open up the map and suddenly you’ve got a piece of shiny paper larger than your backpack in your hands, overwhelmed. 

Taehyung stops, the two of you standing right by the middle of a doorway, blocking everybody’s path. And he places his hands on top of yours, lowering the map as you gaze up at him, wondering why the heck you haven’t moved to the side so you aren’t inconveniencing the thousands of people roaming the museum. His brows are soft, a little furrowed, like someone began to knit them together but then forgot halfway through. Like he’s thinking. Like he wants to tell you something. 

“No,” Taehyung says softly, large hands enveloping yours as he begins to fold the map back up, “I don’t know where we’re going.”

You open your mouth, about to prove your point, but Taehyung continues. 

“But I don’t need to. Because we’re supposed to get lost,” he tells you, honest, candid, and true. “That’s the whole point. It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.”

You scoff, heart a little warm on the inside but wit still sharp. “You sound like an infomercial for a cruise.”

Taehyung laughs, tilting his head back in the way that says that he means it. “I’m serious, Y/N. Please. We don’t need a map. We can guide each other. All we need is faith, trust…” He pauses, leaning in and waiting for you to finish his sentence. 

Begrudgingly, you give in, mostly because he’s too naturally charming not to. “And pixie dust.”

Taehyung grins, satisfied, before he catches you by surprise, takes your hand in his, and pulls you into the elevator. 

Much like the corrupt businesses whose main offices are only a few minutes walk away, you go from the top down. Taehyung says that it is like a very, very long slide. You say that it’s an extremely slow walk. 

He’s an art student. You don’t really know what else you were expecting. He stares at each piece until it bores into his eyes, fills up another cup in his soul, overflowing with color, with light and meaning and everything in between. Every now and then, he and you stop at the same one, inspecting each and every detail, and Taehyung will lean to the side and whisper in your ear. 

He will tell you what he thinks of the medium, what he thinks of this piece and what he thinks of the positioning of that specific object. He tells you not how he interprets it in the eyes of the artist, but what it means to him, and how he perceives it. And, as the hours pass, you realize that, while you have been in museums before, you had never felt like you were truly there. And here you are, standing in front of priceless pieces of art with a boy in love with art beside you, and he holds your hand as he takes you through what brings him more joy than anything else. 

(Well, besides perhaps, chemistry.)

When you reach the first painting and sculpture floor, Taehyung lets out an audible gasp. 

You round the corner and before you know it, you’re standing in front of what could very well be the most famous painting of the nineteenth century. 

“I forgot it was here,” Taehyung says distantly, like he’s forgotten who he’s talking to. In the ink black of his pupils, you can see the oil painting reflected, the thick blue and yellow brushstrokes, each and every line on the canvas. 

“Now, this piece I’m familiar with,” you say, standing next to him and staring up at The Starry Night, an artistic feat, worth more than probably a hundred times your tuition, and a legacy. The legacy that The Starry Night left behind is one that you see still reflected today. You see it in all of the other people in this little room, clambering over one another just so they can get a glimpse. You see it in the little children who draw self-portraits in art class, Sharpies and markers and crayons littering the page. 

And you see it in the boy next to you, who loved something so much he knew that he would be doing it for the rest of his life. He would be following a legacy, forever, until he forged one of his own. You look not at the art but as Kim Taehyung gazes at it, memorizing each and every stroke and imprinting it onto his brain. And you finally realize what art means: passion. It means that it fills you up, flows through your blood and into your heart, consumes you. And it means that the only thing you can do to prevent it from eating you alive is to spread it, and let others get a taste of the madness. 

“It really is beautiful, isn’t it,” you muse. You don’t know much about art but when there is something so mesmerizing, so stunning, in front of you, it’s difficult not to notice. 

You feel Taehyung turn his head, letting the gaze of his piercing brown eyes rest upon your figure for a split second before he turns back. “It is,” he says. 

The way that the two of you go through art museums, by the time you emerge, it’s already dark and the streets are beginning to empty as tourists and cityfolk alike find places to eat, walking into every bar, restaurant, cafe, and house on the hunt for a good meal, whether homemade or curated. You had spent nearly an hour in the gift shop alone, laughing at the overpriced t-shirts and kitschy pillows. 

“Where to next, m’lady?” Taehyung asks as you push open the glass doors and let the biting cold hit your noses. 

“You know, we were so busy in there that I didn’t even have time to find a nice place to eat tonight,” you admit sheepishly. 

“That’s alright,” Taehyung says with a shrug. “I like surprises. Spontaneity is my thing.”

“You don’t say,” you comment sagely, making Taehyung roll his eyes. 

Knowing that it’s nearly impossible to get a reservation now, you and Taehyung make your way south, following the flow of traffic heading towards Times Square and keeping an eye open for any places that look relatively nice and busy, but not too busy, the perfect sign of both a delicious and available restaurant. 

After walking for a few blogs, cuddling together (in a totally platonic way) to preserve as much body heat as possible in the now freezing weather, air no longer warmed by the sun’s rays, you stumble upon a tiny hole in the wall Mediterranean place. You can’t really see anything inside due to the fog on the window, forming from the combination of cold air and hot, but Taehyung does a quick google search and says that it’s a modern Mediterranean restaurant that specializes in pizza. Google says it has two dollar signs. You hear the word pizza, and everything pretty much goes out of the window. 

“Hi,” Taehyung says as you squeeze through the little hallway to get to the host, voice warm and silky. “Table for two?”

“Your last name, sir?” The man asks. 

“Oh, we don’t have a reservation,” Taehyung says with a shake of his head. You two are college students. It’s not like you plan ahead anyway. 

“That’s okay, we still ask for every customer’s name for a more personalized experience,” the host says. He leans forward, eyes wide, waiting for Taehyung to respond. 

“Kim,” Taehyung says simply as the host gathers two menus and a wine list. 

“Right this way, Mr. and Mrs. Kim,” the host says, and you open your mouth to correct him (Because you are not married. You’re not. You’re not even dating. This is not a date. It’s not a date, right?), but Taehyung puts a finger to his lips and tells you to zip it. It’s almost like he’s enjoying this. 

For the rest of the evening, the wait staff all address you and Taehyung as Mr. and Mrs. Kim, which is absolutely outrageous for multiple reasons: you are college students, you both look like college students, you’re not dating, you don’t act like you’re dating (other than the hand-holding and cuddling which was purely out of survival and nothing else), and most importantly, you’re not interested in each other like that. That part is obvious. Isn’t it?

When you order a glass of champagne each they call you Mr. and Mrs. Kim. When Taehyung has a question about one of the ingredients on one of the pizzas they call you Mr. and Mrs. Kim. When you order your food they call you Mr. and Mrs. Kim. When they come by to clarify Taehyung’s request of no anchovies they call you Mr. and Mrs. Kim. When they bring these massive pizzas and place them down on your table, wishing you a pleasant meal they call you Mr. and Mrs. Kim. 

Mr. and Mrs. Kim, they call you. 

“Everything alright, Mr. and Mrs. Kim?” Your waiter asks as you’re plowing through your individual pizzas very inelegantly. 

“Yes,” Taehyung grins cheesily. “Thank you very much.”

He’s positively beaming. 

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?” You ask, a single eyebrow raised. 

“This pizza is really good,” Taehyung tells you. 

“Not that,” you say with a roll of your eyes. You know that Taehyung knows exactly what you’re referring to, he’s just being annoying about it, as per usual. “The whole ‘we’re married’ thing. You like it, don’t you?”

“The “Mr. and Mrs. Kim’ thing?” Taehyung says with a smile. He’s relishing in the feeling, especially when it’s obvious that you’re not as keen on the collective nickname. “I fucking love it. You don’t?”

“We’re college students,” you remind him. 

“So? That means that they think that we look old enough to not be college students. I consider that a win, especially because Jimin always says I look twelve,” Taehyung says with a shrug. 

“We’re not married,” you add. It’s the truth. 

“You’re right, we’re not, but Mr. and Mrs. Kim has such a nice ring to it, don’t you think? I love the way that it sounds,” Taehyung says. He basks in it. 

“We’re not even dating, Taehyung,” you say with a sigh, exasperated. Doesn’t he get it? It’s weird, being Mr. and Mrs. Kim, because you never have been. There never was a Mr. and Mrs. Kim. And quite frankly, there never will be. “We’re not even interested in it.”

“Who says?” Taehyung asks, and the path he’s directing this conversation down is not one you’d like to take. It’s rocky and bumpy and unclear, hazy with fog. You don’t do fog. You like when things are clear cut and visible. 

“I do,” you say with a frown. “Are you interested in dating me, Taehyung? Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to date you right now. Or, like, at all.”

Taehyung pauses. His brows are furrowed again, but all the way this time. He stares down at his pizza, and he contemplates. You sit there and watch him, feeling the weight of every second as it passes by. Were you too harsh? Maybe you were. But it was the truth, and he deserves something honest, even if it’s brutal. 

“Oh,” Taehyung says, like he wasn’t expecting those words to come out of your mouth. What you said has been lingering between you like smoke, refusing to dissipate. “Well, I—I guess that makes two of us.” It’s obvious that there’s something else there, just underneath the water, but you don’t press further. It sounds like he’d rather keep it hidden. 

When you leave, the waitstaff bid you goodbye exactly as you had predicted. 

“Enjoy your evening, Mr. and Mrs. Kim,” they say cordially as you and Taehyung pull on your coats and hats and gloves and head out the door. 

“You too,” Taehyung says softly after a few seconds, like he was waiting for the words to fade away before speaking. “Thank you.”

Your bus leaves from Penn Station at 9:30 that night, and it’s barely seven. Plenty of time for you to continue exploring, see Times Square all lit up like it’s New Year’s Eve, go up to the top of the Empire State Building, or even take a peek into Central Park at nighttime, when the moon is high and the lanterns are lit. 

“How about we go ice skating?” Taehyung suggests as the two of you walk along the pavement, side by side. Your hands are buried deep into the pockets of your coat. 

“At Rockefeller?”

“Sure, why not?” Taehyung says. That sentence pretty much sums up your trip to New York thus far. “I’ve always wanted to go skating and see the tree during Christmastime. When else will we get the chance?”

Five minutes later you’ve paid for rental skates, a locker for your shoes, and a ticket to the rink. Visible right next to you is the enormous tree, the lights twinkling and cameras flashing as everyone scrambles to get their Instagram picture to prove that they actually went to the tree at Rockefeller Center in New York City. 

When the zamboni is finished and the employees have skated over the ice enough to increase the level of friction, Taehyung and you balance on your skates as you walk towards the entrance. Slowly, everybody begins to glide on, wobbling at first before eventually getting the hang of it. There are a couple of small children holding onto those little penguin skate assistants, laughing as their older brothers and sisters guide them along the ice. 

“I’ve never skated before,” you admit nervously, about two seconds before you’re about to enter the rink. 

Taehyung’s mouth drops open. “Never?”

“No,” you reiterate, even more nervous than before. “I have no idea what I’m doing, I just said yes because like you said we’re in New York and it’s nearly Christmas and we should just seize every opportunity that we have and—”

“Y/N,” Taehyung says, calming you down as he ushers you away from the entrance so you aren’t blocking other people’s paths. “It’s okay. You don’t have to worry,” he tells you, holding onto your wrists to make you look up at him. “I can show you how to. It’s easier than it looks, I swear. I won’t let you fall. You just have to trust me, alright?” He shakes your wrists to catch your attention, make sure that you heard him. “Alright?”

Deep breath. Inhale, exhale. 

“Alright.”

Everything is, in fact, not alright. No matter what Taehyung says, ice skating is way more fucking difficult than it looks. Taehyung steps onto the ice and it turns into second nature for him, gliding around a small circle to get warmed up as you cling onto the side railing like an idiot. You have no idea how to move, you have no idea where to go, you just shuffle along the railing with the rest of the children who are far younger than you, also trying to skate for the first time. 

This is embarrassing. 

“You’re a liar,” you tell Taehyung pointedly as he circles around, coming up to rest next to you. You’d point at his chest for emphasis, but you’re afraid you’ll fall without both hands on the railing at all times. “This is—” you pause, remembering that there are children present, “—very difficult.”

Taehyung just chuckles. “You have to be brave, Y/N, come on,” Taehyung implores. He holds out his hand, motioning for you to let go of the wall and take a leap of faith. 

“No, I will not be brave. Please let me be weak,” you beg, scared for your life. One wrong move and you’d go splat in the middle of the rink and embarrass yourself in front of all of New York City. 

“Come on, Y/N,” Taehyung says, holding his hand closer. “You said you trusted me. I told you, I won’t let you fall. Come on. Be brave.” And then he adds, leaning in to meet your eyes, “for me?”

He’s always been too charming for your own good. 

Tentatively, second by second by painstaking second, you remove your hands from the railing, first the left and then the right, as Taehyung pulls you right next to him, holding on tight. 

“See?” He asks as you begin to move on your own, Taehyung’s short glides pulling you along the ice. “Look, it’s not that bad.”

“I am scared for my life right now.” You blink. 

“Focus on me, okay,” Taehyung says, making you meet his eyes once more. “Eyes on me, alright. You’re doing fine. You’re skating, isn’t this fun?”

“I am terrified that I am going to perish on this very rink,” you repeat for emphasis. 

“Look, Y/N, look! You’re skating!” Taehyung tells you, and finally you glance down at your feet and realize that they’re beginning to move on the ice, all on their own. 

“Oh my God! I’m skating! What the—heck!” You say, eyes widening in excitement. 

“I knew you could do it,” Taehyung says, hands gripping on tight. You can feel the warmth from his palms seep into your own, feel the back of your hand burning from the touch. “You just had to trust me.”

“This is so cool,” you say, immediately very pleased with yourself. “I’m such a pro, I can do anything. Who said skating was scary?”

Taehyung opens his mouth to respond, but you shoot him a warning glare and he zips his lips. 

“Watch this, I can even do it on my own. You’re gonna be very impressed, Kim Taehyung, just watch me!”

Within the next moment, you’re letting go of his hand and pushing yourself away from him, gliding along the ice ever-so-slightly as you begin to balance on your own. 

But power is short-lived, and much like every leading male in Greek tragedies, your hubris gets the best of you, and you face the ultimate demise. 

The moment you attempt to pick up your left foot, your right toe pick gets caught in a dip of the ice and you go toppling over, collapsing onto the ice in a cold, bruised ball. 

Luckily, your coat takes most of the hit, its length preventing your knees from hurting into the next century, but that doesn’t make it any less embarrassing. Ashamed of yourself and even more mortified to have to face Taehyung after boasting about how amazing you are, you slowly push yourself off of the ice, wobbling like a baby deer. 

“What was that, Y/N?” Taehyung says with a raised eyebrow as he skates over. He’s clearly just recovered from a laughing fit. 

“Fuck off,” you mutter, and you don’t even care if children hear you. “I got excited.”

“Clearly,” Taehyung notes, eyes wide and knowing. He holds out a hand, and before you even have time to think of a snarky retort your palm is reaching out for it, letting him pull you up off of the rink. “Here. Come on.”

One hour and two fairly bruised knees later, you and Taehyung are taking off your skates and relishing in the feeling of your feet, flat on the ground like feet should be. 

“You alright?” Taehyung asks. You didn’t have any massive falls following the first spectacle, but you admittedly, still cannot ice skate very well. You’ll have to figure out a way to learn. 

You round out the night by going to look at the Christmas Tree. Now that it’s fairly late, the massive families with young children have all gone home, leaving only the young adults left to bask in the glory of the peak of Christmas decorations. 

“It seemed bigger in photos, didn’t it?” Taehyung asks as the both of you crane your necks to look at the tree in all of its glory. “Like it was the size of a small tower.”

“Yeah,” you agree. It looks somewhat disappointingly small, now that you’re here in front of it. “Today was a lot of fun, Taehyung. Your spontaneity paid off.”

“When does it not?” Taehyung asks, proud of himself. He even has enough of an ego to do a little hair flip, making you shake your head disapprovingly. “But I’m glad you enjoyed yourself. I certainly did.”

“What was your favorite part?” You ask. 

“Definitely when you were in your prime for one moment and a puddle on the ice the next,” Taehyung says, and for that, he earns a punch to the shoulder. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. But I did really enjoy ice skating.”

“Yeah, because you can actually do it,” you remind him. 

“What about you?”

You think. This day has been so long, from getting woken up by Taehyung’s irresponsible neighbors and the entire city’s fire department outside your window, to hopping on a bus to New York, to museums and restaurants and ice skating and the city, you feel like you’ve lived three days in one. 

“The museum,” you finally decide. “I’m not really an art person, but I thought it was lovely. Nice and heated, too.”

“Yes, the best part about the Museum of Modern Art was its modern, state-of-the-art central heating,” Taehyung repeats, making you laugh. “I’m glad you liked the museum. I was worried you’d think it was too stuffy.”

You had thought that too. And then you watched someone fall in love with each and every piece, right in front of you, and you realized that there’s more to art than putting a price tag on it and critiquing it. It’s passion, materialized. It’s real.  

It’s Taehyung. 

“No,” you say with a shake of your head. “I thought it was beautiful.”

On Christmas Eve, it snows. 

Correction: On Christmas Eve, it snows a lot. 

Correction for the correction: On Christmas Eve, it blizzards. 

When you listened to “White Christmas” last night, this isn’t exactly what you had in mind, if you were being honest. Maybe an inch or two. Maybe even just a flurry. But certainly not nearly two feet worth of snow, effectively trapping you inside of Taehyung’s apartment complex until the next day because not even the snow plows are allowed to go out on the roads. Not until the snow stops. 

“Good thing we don’t live on the first floor, right?” Taehyung asks with a laugh that late afternoon, taking a peek out of the window to stare down at the white expanse below you. “I’d hate to be those guys.”

“It must be so cold,” you say sadly. You’ve spent the better part of today huddled up in as many blankets as Taehyung owns in his apartment and you have no intention of shedding even one of them. Not even as you sweat right through your pajama shirt from high school. 

“We can just make dinner here, tonight,” Taehyung says, fishing around in his kitchen to see what the options are. It’s already beginning to get dark even though it’s not even five o’clock. God, you hate winter. 

“What are we making?”

Taehyung fumbles through the cabinets and his fridge, hunting for anything that might make a good meal. Eventually, he pulls out two cartons of Trader Joe’s vegetable broth and every vegetable in his fridge. 

“Wanna make soup?”

Soup is very easy to make. You set the broth to simmer, chop up vegetables, and dump them in the pot. 

But the idea of you and Taehyung sharing his tiny kitchen space, both with knives in your hands is, well, a recipe for disaster.

Luckily no knife mishaps occur, but, like the children at heart that you are, you eventually end with pelting uncooked lima beans at each other in the most adult version of a food fight you have ever had in your life. No fuss, no mess, no tomatoes or key lime pies or spaghetti doused in sauce getting chucked across the kitchen floor, the dinner table. 

No, your little food fight ends with you and Taehyung kneeling down on the tile as you pick up each little lima bean, gathering them in your palms. 

You make to toss it out but Taehyung stops you. 

“Wait,” Taehyung says, a hand on top of yours as it hovers over the trash can, “don’t toss them out.”

“Huh?” You ask. 

“I’ll feed them to the birds,” he says, taking the pile from your hands and placing all of the lima beans, along with his own, in a Ziploc bag. 

“You have a porch out here?” You ask, looking around. You’ve never seen it. 

“No.” Taehyung shakes his head. “They land on my bedroom window sill so I feed them.”

When you were in freshman year, you remember how Taehyung always left his window open. You know this because even though yours was always closed, anytime a police car, fire truck, ambulance, or particularly loud motorist drove by, the sound was always loudest on the wall of your room that bordered Taehyung’s. You hated how he always left his windows open, even in the winter. Wasn’t he goddamn cold?

And now, even though it’s Christmas Eve and there’s a blanket of snow outside nearly two feet deep, Taehyung will go and open his bedroom window again and feed the birds lima beans like a fucking Disney prince, and it makes your heart flutter, ever so slightly. 

You end the night sitting on Taehyung’s couch, only a foot or so of space in between your bodies as he multitasks, channel surfing and gulping down your homemade soup. 

“I haven’t made soup in a while, but damn, this is good,” Taehyung says, drinking the rest of it before getting up to help himself to seconds. He sticks a hand out to take your bowl as well, and wordlessly you hand it to him. 

“It’s my magic touch,” you tease. It was not. Taehyung did most of the work. You don’t have much of an affinity for cooking.

“It’s my chemistry brain,” Taehyung corrects. “Chem is basically like making soup.”

“But it can kill you,” you tack on.

“But it can kill you,” he agrees, returning to the couch. This time, when he sits down, he plops right down next to you, your sides touching as you sit in front of his television, slurping up homemade vegetable soup. “How’s your major? What is it, again?”

“English with a minor in Psych,” you say over a mouthful of carrot. 

“Sounds like too much reading for me,” Taehyung comments. “I’d only like picture books.”

“Yeah, wonder why,” you tell him sarcastically. “But it’s going well. I’m thinking of maybe adding Consumer Psych as another minor since there’s a lot of overlap, but I’m not sure. I’ll think about it.”

“Sounds busy,” Taehyung comments. 

“Almost as busy as visual studies and chem,” you remind him. “Seriously, do you ever sleep?”

“Inspiration is a fickle mistress and the will to do my chem problem sets, even more fickle,” Taehyung muses like the two subjects aren’t the absolute bane of his existence. “But yeah, I mean, I made it this far.”

“Our majors are so different,” you comment. They are. Encompassing all sides of the college major spectrum, from STEM to art to humanities. The only thing you’re missing is a business minor. But only snakes would ever be interested in something like that. 

“It’s nice,” Taehyung decides. “Because this is forcing us to talk with someone with whom we don’t already share all of the same classes with.”

“I couldn’t imagine taking the same class as you,” you say, not because you’d hate having to be in the same room as Kim Taehyung or dread the potential to be paired up for group work, but because your tastes are so different. They’ve always been different. Art, English, chemistry, psychology. Headphones or speakers. Closed windows or open. It’s always been opposites with the two of you. 

“Maybe I’ll take a psych class so that way we can,” Taehyung says. 

“Maybe I’ll take an art history course,” you retort.

“You’d really take an art history course? They’re awfully boring, and I’m an art major,” Taehyung says, in disbelief. 

You ponder it for a moment, but then nod. Yes, you would. Even if it sent you to sleep. Because it looks genuinely interesting. “After today, I wouldn’t mind it. You showed me a lot about art, Kim Taehyung. More than I thought I would ever learn in my lifetime.”

Taehyung sighs, shutting the television off. You guys weren’t watching it anyway. You hardly realized it was on. He looks down at his empty soup bowl, and then at you. He always does that—always looks somewhere else before looking at you, like he has to muster up the courage by first staring at an inanimate object. And then he says, “You’ll never stop learning about art. Neither will I. It’s a constant cycle, learning and relearning and changing your mind and revisiting old pieces. Because art is all around us.”

He looks at you, like he’s trying to say something else but doesn’t have the words. “You just have to look for it.”

New Year’s Eve is often a time of reflecting on the year that’s passed, making a list of goals to achieve once the clock strikes twelve. Thanking your friends and family, your loved ones, for being there for you this year, and promising to be there for them as well next year. 

To you and Taehyung, it’s literally your last chance to get piss drunk this year without repercussions. You’ve never stayed here, at your university in the city, for New Year’s Eve (obviously). You’d be interested in getting all dressed up to go out. Taehyung would also be interested. 

And so, after a day of slouching around and making half-assed resolutions you know you won’t keep (like managing your time better. As a college student? Impossible.), you and Taehyung decide to get dressed up and go out, pulling out the winter jackets you don’t care if you lose, or if they get trashed, or if they stain with vodka. All you want is to lose your goddamn mind in a tiny club with a bunch of other wasted young adults who don’t want to stay at home on the last night of the year. 

You are, unsurprisingly, a self-proclaimed not-a-going-out person, but tonight is something of an exception. It’s your last night to do this this year, and honestly, you can’t really think of a better way to end the year. There’s been plenty of ups (that A+ on your paper on the ethics of Beowulf, yay!) and plenty of downs (Global Politics in the Twentieth Century, yikes), and no better way to say goodbye to them all than with alcohol in your system. But even if, during the regular college season, you’re something of a stick in the mud, you remembered to pack a nice party dress just in case, so you tug on a little black velvet mini-dress that sparkles rainbow in the light, covered with tiny glitters that get stuck in your hair and never come out. 

As you’re fishing around for some tights that you don’t care about so your legs don’t freeze off in the cold, the door to Taehyung’s bedroom opens. 

Out he walks in all of his New Year’s Eve glory, a full black ensemble complete with structured belt and a leather jacket. You turn around to look at him and he stops dead in his tracks, eyes blinking like he doesn’t know where to look. It gives you a clear view of him and his simple yet extremely flattering outfit. He looks like Danny Zuko. He looks like a boy you would avoid in high school. 

Funnily enough, seeing him now draws you closer to him.

“Wow, hot stuff, you clean up nicely,” You comment, tugging on some black tights with a hole in the back that no one’s going to notice. 

“I could say the same thing about you,” he adds on, a hand coming up to rub at the nape of his neck. “I didn’t even know you had this.”

“I packed it just in case,” you say with a shrug. 

“Came in handy, didn’t it?” He asks. He comes up to stand by you, holding his arm out for you to wrap yours around, two people on a mission to not remember most things about this night. “You ready to go?” 

Stuffing your phone and wallet into your purse, you quickly link arms with him as you walk to the door, your black boots clopping on the floor like the obnoxious high-heel owner you are. 

“Yeah, you ready?” You ask, doing a quick double check. You’ve got everything. 

“Let’s fuck some shit up.”

And fuck some shit up you do. By the time you reach the club that Taehyung had found online, you can already hear the bass pounding through the walls, feel the ground shake from the speakers alone. Go big or go home, you suppose. 

As you expected, the club is already packed with bodies. Every young adult within a twenty-mile radius is out tonight, eager to spend the last night of the year doing what young adults in the primes of their lives do best: drink. And you and Taehyung are no exception. 

Like everybody else entering the club at the same time as you, you make a beeline for the bar, already itching to get something into your system. You don’t love being drunk, and you like the taste of alcohol even less, so you just order a simple cocktail that should keep you occupied for a while. 

Taehyung, on the other hand, well. He seems to harbor the go big or go home mentality quite firmly. It’s obvious that he’s here to do one thing and one thing only, which is not remember what he did when he wakes up tomorrow. You watch, a little impressed and a lot nervous about what exactly he’s trying to achieve, as he downs several shots in a row, pays the bartender, and immediately pulls you into the crowd of people dancing in the center of the room. 

“The more I move, the faster my body can process the alcohol,” Taehyung tells you as your cocktail sloshes around in the glass in your hand. It’s an alright cocktail. A little too sweet for you, but you suppose that that’s your fault. 

“Wow, when you said you wanted to fuck shit up, you meant it,” you comment as Taehyung dances, jumping and swaying to the beat of whatever Top 40 pop song is blaring from the speakers. You can barely hear the music over the volume of the rest of the club, people shouting to speak to each other, the sound of feet hitting the floor. 

Within approximately fifteen minutes, Taehyung is already fairly tipsy and eager to keep going, bubbling over with excitement. 

You convince him to dance a little longer before he goes back to get more, trying to make sure at least a bit of the alcohol he had at the beginning of the night goes through his body. The song changes to something much sultrier, like honey dripping from the speakers themselves, and suddenly, the entire club’s atmosphere changes. 

“I love this song,” Taehyung says, and it must be the lack of control that causes him to place a hand on your waist and pull you in close to him, making you gasp. 

“Wow, okay,” you comment, blinking. Taehyung rests his chin on your shoulder, leaning down as he holds you tight, your bodies swaying in tandem. 

“You don’t mind this?” Taehyung asks. 

“Not if you don’t,” you respond. He’s practically drunk, and you’re even a little buzzed. There are worse things you could be doing. 

“This is nice, isn’t it?” He inquires aloud. It’s a good thing that you can’t see his face, can’t watch the haze in his eyes, otherwise you might lose your footing and collapse. 

“What is?”

“This,” Taehyung repeats unhelpfully. 

The next three minutes are some of the most confusing ones of your life as Taehyung rests a hand on your waist, palm rubbing up and down as the two of you dance together like it means something to the both of you. 

But it doesn’t, does it? You chalk it up to both of your minds not being as sharp with some alcohol in your systems. That must be it.

When the song ends, the mood disappears as well, and Taehyung’s back to his bouncy, tipsy self. He’s practically stumbling over himself once he determines that it’s time for more shots, and you’ve never seen Taehyung drunk before but you can tell that he’s nearly there. You’ll probably put a hard stop on the drinks after this round, since Taehyung is the one most familiar with the way back to his apartment and you wouldn’t mind going home and sleeping after this.

“Come with?” Taehyung asks as he eyes the bartender like he’s the love of his life. 

“No, it’s alright, Tae,” you say.

“You never call me Tae,” Taehyung comments mindlessly. Even when he’s nearly drunk, he still picks up on the little things. 

“I guess the alcohol is making me soft,” you admit. “You go. I’m gonna find the bathroom and hope that nobody’s having sex in it.”

“Okay,” Taehyung singsongs as you pull away from him, looking for a dingy hallway to go down. “Be safe.”

“You too, I’ll be back soon,” you promise him, and that’s when you go rushing down the hallway.

Things are certainly weird down here. It must be the feeling of the new year looming over your heads. Like this is the last night to do everything wrong without regretting it in the morning. The bathroom is, luckily enough, empty, so you rush in and splash your face with some water, not caring about if your makeup runs. You’d sweat it off, regardless. You stare at yourself in the mirror, and this feels so stupidly like a goddamn romantic comedy that it makes you want to laugh at the irony. 

Beautiful male art student lead gets drunk, confuses hardheaded and impenetrable female lead who doesn’t believe in love and supposedly hates beautiful male art student’s guts. Tension ensues. 

Your life may as well already have a shitty Rotten Tomatoes rating stamped on top of it. 

After collecting your thoughts and praying that that white stain on the wall isn’t what you think it is, you leave the bathroom and scurry down the hallway, eager to find Taehyung and make sure he isn’t bouncing off the walls after a second round of shots. 

He’s not. 

Instead, he’s still standing by the bar as a beautiful young woman speaks to him, long dark hair resting against her shoulders and a model-esque smile on her face. She’s leaning in with a suggestive look in her eyes, a hand coming up to rub at the side of his arm. 

You furrow your brows as you watch them from afar, a little hurt by the fact that beautiful male art student lead is confusing hardheaded and impenetrable female lead even more, but then you notice Taehyung’s hesitance. The way he backs up a little when she gets closer. How he stiffens when she touches him. 

And, well, fuck that. 

 “Tae,” you say, rushing up to him faster than you’d like to admit. “There you are, I was looking for you.” 

The girl next to him frowns at the sight of you, and it’s clear she feels no shame to hide the immediately dislike. Sure, you don’t have model proportions or a smile whiter than snow, but you have morals. 

“Who’s this?” You ask, trying to be nice. 

“Nobody,” Taehyung tells you, and his hand immediately interlocks with yours. Standing next to him, you can feel as the tension fades from his body, his whole demeanor relaxing now that you’re by his side. “She just wanted to talk.”

“Are you a friend?” She asks, because she knows. 

“I’m a special type of friend,” you say. There’s no way she’ll leave Taehyung alone otherwise. And this is definitely on the cocktail you drank (and nothing else, you swear!), but you even reach up to plop a kiss on his cheek for proof. Taehyung’s eyes widen as you do, but he plays it off as catching him off guard and grins, wrapping an arm around you to pull you even closer. “Can we help you?”

The girl is absolutely pissed, which means that you did your job. 

“No, it’s alright,” she hisses through gritted teeth before turning her sights on someone else. Someone without a friend to protect them. 

“Thanks,” Taehyung whispers once she’s gone. Even though she’s probably not coming back, Taehyung keeps you close, a hand on you at all times like you’ll fly away if he doesn’t hold on tight. 

“Of course,” you tell him. “You’d do the same for me.”

“She scared me,” Taehyung says, and if his red face is anything to go by, it’s clear that he’s pretty much reached his alcohol intake limit. “I’m glad you came.”

“I could tell you didn’t want to talk to her,” you say. 

“Because I wanted to talk to you,” Taehyung says, and it’s definitely the alcohol that’s erased his filter. “I was waiting for you to come out of the bathroom and she just came up to me and started flirting with me. I think she wanted to get in my pants. I didn’t want her to get into my pants.”

“I know.”

“I’d much rather be with you than with her. Than with anybody else. I would always want to be with you, instead.” He tells you, keeping your hands firmly intertwined as you lean against the bartender counter. 

And well, huh. That’s different. Taehyung’s aforementioned lack of a filter means that any thoughts that run through his mind immediately turn into spoken words, but you weren’t expecting those words. You never thought you;d hear them, not in a million goddamn years.

“Okay, Tae,” you say, patting him assuringly. He’s just drunk. That’s all. 

“I’m serious, Y/N,” Taehyung tells you firmly, pushing your comforting hand off of his shoulder and turning to face you directly. “I mean it.”

“I know, Tae.” you reassure him. It’s easier than trying to fight him, especially when he’s this hammered. You check the time on your phone. Maybe it’s time to leave. If you go now, you’ll be able to make it back by midnight. “Let’s go home, okay? I’m ready to go home.”

Wordlessly, Taehyung nods, and the two of you leave the club before people are even thinking about ringing in the New Year. 

When you reach Taehyung’s apartment, he takes off his leather jacket to hang on the coat rack and turns the television on. Only three minutes to midnight. 

“I had fun,” you say, trying to lighten the conversation. The way back was silent, the only noises the sounds of New Year’s Eve parties on every block you turned onto. Taehyung kept his face forward and his eyes ahead, even as you tried to huddle close to him to conserve the warmth. 

“It was sort of fun,” Taehyung halfheartedly agrees. 

“Did you drink too much?” You ask. His face is still beet red. 

“I don’t think I drank enough.”

Two minutes to midnight. 

You frown, brows furrowing. Why on Earth would Taehyung want to drink more? What would change if he had another shot, a can of beer or a little cocktail?

Slowly, you begin to peel off your own layers, resting your coat on the back of the couch and slipping off your boots. The both of you stand in his living room as the TV begins to buzz with excitement, the broadcast of Times Square lighting up the otherwise silent, tense atmosphere. He’s only a couple of feet away but it feels like he couldn’t be farther from you. 

One minute to midnight. Everybody begins to count down, and you feel yourself holding your breath. 

“Will you be alright going to sleep?” You ask. Even if Taehyung’s still drunk, he’s far less bouncy than he was at the club. 

“I’ll be fine. Goodnight, Y/N,” he says, beginning to walk past. 

Three. 

“Okay.”

Two.

“Okay.”

One. 

Something overtakes Taehyung, something quick and brief. He stops right next to you and flinches, like he wants to lean in and do something, anything, goddamnit, but stops himself before he goes through with it. Everyone on television is cheering, but this apartment couldn’t be less festive even if you tried. 

Taehyung sends you a small smile as the world rings in the new year, dashing off to his bedroom and slamming the door behind him. 

And you stand there, in the middle of his living room like the goddamn fool you are. Turning to the television, you watch over and over as every couple in Times Square kisses, clip after clip after clip, and like a goddamn idiot, you wish that Taehyung had done the same. 

The end of winter break approaches faster than you’d like it, just like it does every year. Before you know it, there’s less than a week left before classes resume and you go back to the daily college life. Less than a week left before you can go back to your dorm and pretend like this year’s winter break mishap never happened. 

Less than a week before you and Taehyung go back to never seeing each other. 

You’re sitting at his kitchen table, clearing out your backpack and recycling every paper, every syllabus and assignment and study guide from last semester, doing a deep cleanse of your life (because holy shit, you need it), when you come across the purchase you had made at the MOMA. 

“Taehyung,” you call out before you can stop yourself. 

“Yeah?” He asks from where he’s sitting on the couch, reading a James Joyce book. You love that novel. It was one of the very few you read for fun last year. 

You take the small paper bag in your hands, walking over to the couch. “I almost forgot about this, but since winter break’s starting to wind down, I just wanted to give you this as a thanks. For everything.”

“You got me a belated Christmas gift, Y/N?” Taehyung asks as you hold out the gift, clearly something thin like a posterboard or an art print.

“If it means I don’t have to buy you two things, then sure, consider this a belated Christmas gift,” you say with a laugh, sitting down a foot away from him as he slowly opens up the packet. “It’s sort of cheesy and very basic, but I just wanted to get you something nice as a thank you.”

Out Taehyung pulls is a print of van Gogh’s The Starry Night, big enough to fill up the empty spaces on his walls, so every inch of his apartment, of his life and his home, is filled with art. 

“Oh my God,” Taehyung says, mouth agape. “This is…”

“It’s basic, I know. But I know how much you loved seeing it in person, so I thought that a memory of that would be nice,” you say, trying to ease the nervousness that has bubbled up inside of you. 

“It’s wonderful,” Taehyung says, and you swear you’ve never seen him so happy, other than perhaps when you saw the real thing. “This is so fucking thoughtful of you.”

“I just—you told me a lot about the art we saw that day, but when we reached this painting, you were speechless. And I sort of knew, then, that it was your favorite piece. Because you didn’t have to explain it with words,” you tell him. “I could just tell. It was like your whole body warmed up the moment it came into view.”

“I’m touched, Y/N.” Taehyung beams. “This is all an art student could ever want, really. To be able to know that their love for art meant something to someone else.”

“I just wanted to say thank you for everything. Taking me in, cooking me food, being really nice me despite me entrenching on your living situation.” You smile. 

“I was happy to do all that stuff,” Taehyung tells you honestly. “I’ve had a lot of fun this winter break, even if we’re still trapped on campus.”

You loved getting to go home for winter break your freshman and sophomore years. You loved being able to escape from the college mindset and just relax, no deadlines, no assignments, no worries. 

But looking back on it, you think that you’ve had the most fun this winter break, stuck at school, a five-hundred-dollar plane ticket short, with your dorm neighbor-slash-nemesis from freshman year. Never have you done so much in so little time. 

“Yeah, me too,” you say, thinking back fondly. It feels like this winter break has lasted for years, but also as though it went by in the blink of an eye, 

“I have something for you as well,” Taehyung says, scrambling up to dash into his room. “Consider it just a Christmas gift, because I don’t really have to thank you for letting you stay at my apartment for free for a month.”

“Roast me, why don’t you,” you muse jokingly, rolling your eyes as Taehyung fumbles around in his bedroom before he emerges with an equally flat, similarly-sized gift wrapped up in some spare tissue paper. 

“I don’t recall you buying anything at the MOMA,” you tease as Taehyung hands you the gift, settling back down on the couch to watch as you open it. 

Slowly, you peel back the tissue paper, and when you reveal what he’s wrapped up for you, it drops to your lap. 

It’s a portrait of you, done entirely in pencil. It’s you smiling, with your eyes closed, lashes fluttering. He’s memorized your entire face, drawn it neatly onto this piece of sketch paper, like he was just passing the time and suddenly he had a picture of you on his hands. He’s even remembered where your freckles go. 

“What’s this, Tae?” You ask, like you don’t already know. 

“Uh, it’s you,” Taehyung says sheepishly. “I wasn’t planning on drawing you, I didn’t have a gift in mind, but I was practicing sketches the other day and an hour later I looked down and I had drawn you. And I felt bad for not telling you, because that’s weird, so I thought that you could see it.”

“You drew a portrait of me? Just randomly, from memory?” You ask, looking down at the sketch in your hands like it’s just ruined your life. 

“Yeah, so?” Taehyung asks. He looks terribly nervous. 

“So, that’s—people don’t just do that, Taehyung. You don’t just draw a picture of someone purely from memory while you’re practicing sketching,” You say, reeling back as he tries to lean in, attempts to explain himself. 

“What do you mean? I did that. I thought of you and I drew you, what’s so bad about that?”

“I don’t know if you missed the memo, Taehyung. I told you in New York. We’re not dating, Taehyung,” you tell him, so firm and certain in your conviction that you hardly pay attention to the way his shoulders sink. “We’re barely even friends. I’m not interested in you like that. Please don’t think otherwise.”

“Don’t tell me what to think,” Taehyung snaps, and he’s mad. Really mad, not like the fake anger from freshman year when you tried to get back at him by being an equally-annoying neighbor. “Don’t tell me how to feel. I drew you, Y/N. Not because I’m obsessed with the idea of us getting married, or because you’re my muse or some bullshit like that. I drew you because I thought of you, and I draw what I think of. Don’t tell me what to fucking think.”

“Do you like me, Taehyung?” You ask, on the verge of shouting.

Taehyung’s furious. “So what if I do? Huh? What difference does it make? You’ve told me over and over that you don’t like me back, so why does it matter? It’s not like I’d ever have a chance.”

“I told you because I didn’t want to confuse you,” you hiss, standing up and beginning to grab your belongings. It’s clear that this conversation is turning sour. 

“Confuse me? You didn’t want to confuse me?” Taehyung shouts. “You did a damn good job at that. Telling me in New York that you hated being called Mr. and Mrs. Kim, but holding my hand as we walked around the city and looked at art together. Kissing my cheek in the fucking bar but then patting me like on the back like I’m just a sadass friend of yours. Can you blame me if I was confused, Y/N?”

“I told you,” you say again. 

“I’m sorry, Y/N,” Taehyung bites. “I’m sorry that I fucking fell in love with you, even though half of the time you acted like it was alright. My mistake.”

“It was your mistake. I never said I wanted to date you,” you tell him firmly. You refuse to take the blame for something you had made so explicitly clear. 

“Can you fucking blame me for being hopeful?” Taehyung asks. He’s standing up, about to head back into his bedroom, absolutely furious. “You held my hand and kissed me on the cheek and I thought that meant that you felt it, too.”

“Taehyung—”

“Keep the portrait, Y/N,” Taehyung spits. “I don’t ever want to see it again.”

He slams his bedroom door. 

It’s a good thing you made friends with some upperclassmen when you were a freshman. 

After packing your belongings into your little suitcase and standing in the lobby of Taehyung’s apartment complex, you remember that one of your old friends who had graduated last year still lived in an off-campus apartment since he would be beginning graduate school at the same university. 

“Yoongi?” You ask when you hear him pick up your call. 

“Y/N? What’s up?”

“Long story,” you say with a sigh. “Would it be alright if I stayed with you until school started?”

“Holy shit, you’re on campus? What the fuck, yeah, sure, you know where I live. I’ll be here whenever you stop by,” he says without question.

Fifteen minutes later, you’re standing outside his door, double checking to make sure you’d got the right apartment. 

You barely get the first knock in before the door swings open to reveal Min Yoongi himself, clad in all black and looking very tired. 

“Are you okay?” You ask. He looks exhausted. 

“I could ask you the same thing,” he says, ushering you inside. 

“Have you been up all night?” You ask, resting your suitcase against the wall. 

“I took a brief nap between two and three, but yes, I have been,” he says like it’s natural. 

“You’ve always been a chaotic sleeper,” you say with a shake of your head. 

“The grad school grind stops for no one,” Yoongi says with a sigh. “What’s up? Why are you on campus?”

“It… it’s a long goddamn story. Do you have time?”

“I have a piece due for a small indie band tomorrow at noon that’s barely finished,” Yoongi says.

“Oh,” you say. You suppose the story can wait. Yoongi offered up his abode to you until classes resumed if you needed it, and there’s no way in hell you’ll be going back to Taehyung’s. 

“What do you mean, ‘Oh’? I got loads of time,” Yoongi says. He plops down on his couch and motions for you to sit next to him. “Tell me everything.”

Yoongi has always been a particularly good listener. Not just to other people’s words, but to music, to the sounds of the chords and the notes of the piano. He has an ear for things that most others would never notice. 

It’s the same thing for when he’s doling out advice. 

“To clarify,” Yoongi says when you’re finished telling your story, thirty minutes later. You had warned him that it would be a long one. “You had once hated his guts, but no longer hate his guts?”

“I stopped hating him after freshman year,” you admit, more to yourself than to Yoongi. It’s true. The moment the two of you stopped seeing each other, everything dissipated. 

“And now you like him.”

“We’re friends,” you say, tentatively. Maybe less than friends after the disaster that just went down in his living room. 

“But he drew you a portrait of yourself,” Yoongi mentions. 

“I said that it was complicated,” you say with a frown. 

“It doesn’t sound that complicated,” Yoongi says. And maybe he is a graduate student with more life experience under his belt than you, but you think that it’s pretty complicated. 

“What do you mean?”

“It sounds like he likes you, and you like him. I wasn’t really interpreting it in any other way,” Yoongi says casually. 

You reject the notion immediately. “I do not like him.”

Yoongi frowns. “Would you really be here, in my apartment having a relationship breakdown, if you weren’t confused about your feelings for him? Really?”

“I just needed to get out of his damn apartment, that’s all,” you say, avoiding eye contact. Yoongi has this very annoying habit of being extremely reasonable all of the time, and it bothers you immensely. 

“Sure, okay. Y/N, I’m not gonna dictate how you feel and try to change your mind, or anything. But if you can look me in the eye before the end of your break and tell me, one-hundred percent honestly, that you don’t like him, then I’ll believe you,” Yoongi tells you simply. “How about that?”

It sounds like a very doable deal. Maybe it’s not doable right now, but it certainly seems possible in the future. In the future, specifically. 

“Fine. But you’re making a big deal out of nothing,” you tell him matter-of-factly. Why does he care? It’s not like you’re worried about it. 

As it turns out, you’re worried about it. 

You’re worried about it because even though you’re not in the same room, not in the same building, not even on the same goddamn street as him, you’re thinking about him. Thinking about how much fun the two of you could be having right now as you relish in the last couple days of your winter break before the cold reality of school hits. 

Think about the things you could be doing. Exploring, going out to restaurants, finding new little gold mines in this city that you call home. And instead, you’re moping around your friend’s living room wishing that the two of you hadn’t ruined the whole thing. 

Maybe you had been too harsh. Taehyung has a right to be mad at you for lashing out at him. How was he supposed to feel? You held his hand and kissed his cheek and pretended that it was still freshman year, that the two of you were still just two people stuck together by unfortunate circumstances. Acted like nothing had really changed despite the years going by. Going through with all of these adventures with him knowing, in the back of your mind, that once classes started back up, you’d probably never make an effort to see him again. 

Drawing a portrait of you says one thing, but dancing around him says another. Every time you fucking see Yoongi in his own goddamn home you try to muster up the bravery to tell him that you don’t like Taehyung the way that he thinks you do, and you can’t. 

He sets up his pullout couch in his living room for you when you go to sleep that night, you dream of Taehyung. Envision him wandering the halls of a nameless museum, priceless pieces of art hung along every wall, from van Gogh to Monet to Picasso. He turns back around so you get a view of his face, dream up his curly black hair and soft eyes, sparkling with wanderlust as he roams the corridors, stopping to spare a quick glance at every painting he passes. 

And then at the end of the hall, he pauses in his tracks, looks up at the painting on the wall. You watch as the camera zooms in on what he’s looking at, what made him stop in his tracks the moment he laid eyes on it. 

It’s your portrait. A simple piece of paper out of a sketchbook, graphite on the coarse canvas. It’s barely more than a line drawing, your eyes here, your nose there, the little freckles that decorate your skin. It’s only in one color and still, even now, it leaves you speechless. Taehyung made that. He drew that, line by line. He made that for you. 

You wake up in a cold sweat at seven in the morning. Yoongi’s fast asleep in his bedroom, and you know he won’t be waking up until the hour on the clock reads double digits. Frantic, you scramble through your backpack until you pull out the sketch paper a little bit larger, a little bit thicker than the rest, still wrapped up in tissue paper. 

Pulling the paper away to reveal the canvas, you stare down at it in the hazy light of the sunrise, small rays beginning to stream through Yoongi’s window. Your fingers trace along each line, picturing Taehyung as his pencil scratched along the paper, over and over until it looked perfect. Taehyung made this. He sat down, thought of you, and drew this. 

A picture may be worth a thousand words but this one doesn’t say a thousand words. Instead, it only says three. 

Curiosity getting the better of you, you flip the sketch over to see if there’s anything else he’s drawn. There isn’t, but you find a little note in the bottom right corner. 

Y/N,

I hadn’t realized that I had drawn you until I was nearly finished with this. My bad, but it was too late to stop. I don’t know if I’ll ever give this to you, or if I’ll just have a guilty conscience for the rest of my life, but just in case I do, I want you to know this: art inspires me, and you are no exception. 

Tae ♡

When Min Yoongi wakes up that day and trudges out of his bedroom, he finds you sitting on his pullout couch, staring down at a sketch in your hands. When you turn to look up at him, he sees your red eyes and wonders how long you’ve been out here, crying. 

“I can’t do it, Yoongi,” you tell him. 

“Do what?” Yoongi asks, even though he already knows the answer. Why else would you be letting your tears drip onto your portrait?

“Tell you that I don’t like him. Because I do. And I can’t lie to him like that.”

Yoongi grins. He knew you’d come around, like you always do. You may have quite the stubborn streak, but you’ve got a big heart, and it always gets the best of you. 

He sits down next to you, glancing down at the portrait. It’s gorgeous. Taehyung did a wonderful job. He looks at you as you cry over a sketch of yourself, and he thinks that, even if he doesn’t really know this Taehyung character, the two of you will make a perfect pair. 

“You should tell him that,” he tells you with a nudge. You look up at him, scared for your life. “I think he deserves to know.”

The night before winter break ends, you ask Taehyung if tenants of his apartment complex are allowed on his rooftop. He says no, but also says that his landlord is out of town for the holidays. 

In the biting cold of a mid-January evening, you climb up the stairs of his apartment complex and push open the heavy metal door to the rooftop, a gust of wind nearly blowing you right over. Looking around, you spot Taehyung in nothing but a sweater and a scarf, sitting on the edge of the rooftop and looking out over the city. 

“Aren’t you cold?”

He turns around to find you standing next to him, wrapped up in a long coat, gloves, a beanie, and a scarf. 

“I’ve got a warm body,” Taehyung tells you, looking back out into the sea of lights. 

“This is scary, isn’t it?” You ask, sitting down next to him. Your feet dangle off the ledge, and normally you’d be insistent on sitting in the middle of the rooftop where no danger can befall you, but this feels a lot more personal. 

“Why did you want to meet me up here?” Taehyung asks, all business. 

“I just wanted to talk,” you tell him. “You know, since it’s the last day of winter break and all.”

“It went by fast, didn’t it?” Taehyung muses. 

“I remember failing my final and missing my flight like it was yesterday,” you remember fondly, laughing. It seemed like the end of the world at the time, but there’s always a silver lining. You just didn’t know what it was, back then. 

You think you have a pretty clear idea of it now. 

Taehyung chuckles, letting the two of you fall into a comfortable silence as you gaze out at the rest of the city. Taehyung’s apartment building isn’t particularly tall, but it’s got enough height to it that it feels like you’re looking out over a place you hardly recognize. There are so many things you don’t know about this city, despite having lived here for over two years. So many things you are aching to find out, and only one person you’d really like to do it with. 

“What’s your New Year’s Resolution?” You ask randomly, interrupting the quiet that had befallen the both of you. 

Taehyung jumps at the sound of your voice piercing through the atmosphere, caught off guard. You lean in, expecting him to answer. 

“Oh, um, I guess to draw and paint for fun more. A lot of the stuff I’ve been making in school I’ve been doing because I had to,” Taehyung says quickly. It’s sort of obvious that he made up the resolution on the spot. “Uh, what’s yours?”

You press your lips into a thin line, smiling to yourself. “To be honest.”

Taehyung scoffs at that. “Believe me, Y/N, you are more than honest. Brutally so.”

“To others, yes,” you reason. You always were a tell-it-like-it-is sort of person. “But I’m not very good at being honest with myself.” You swing your legs slightly as they dangle over the ground below, kicking into each other. Taehyung turns to look at you, waiting for you to continue. “Yoongi says I’m a very stubborn person. I always have been. Once I determine something is the way it is, it’s very difficult to change my mind.”

Taehyung chuckles to himself. He’s probably quite familiar with that aspect of your personality. 

“But I realized recently that sometimes, things change without you even realizing it, and that instead of being afraid of those changes, you should embrace them. So that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to be more honest with myself, because I think I’ll make everybody around me, including myself, happier.” You continue. 

“Good for you,” Taehyung tells you mindlessly, turning back to face out towards the city. 

“Kim Taehyung, I’m not finished talking, yet,” you demand, forcing him to look back at you. “I hated you in freshman year. You were the worst thing to happen to me that year, annoying and full of yourself. And I didn’t know you in sophomore year. We stopped talking and decided that it was better if we never did again.”

He lets out a little huff of breath, visible in the cold night air. 

“But I do know you now. You offered me a place to stay when I missed my flight after what might have been the worst final I have ever taken in my entire life. You took me to New York, and we made vegetable soup together. You let me hold your hand and kiss you on the cheek, and you drew me a portrait,” you say firmly. He looks up at you and finally, finally, his eyes aren’t foggy. There’s no haze, no mist. You look into his eyes and you can see yourself reflected in the ink black of his irises. He’s beautiful. He’s sitting on the ledge of the roof of his apartment building in the middle of January with nothing but a sweater and a scarf on, and he’s beautiful. “You are the best thing to ever happen to me.”

Before you can even take another breath, Kim Taehyung places a cold palm on your scarf-covered cheek and pulls you into a bruising kiss, his other hand wrapping around your waist as you shuffle along the ledge, closer and closer. And even if his hands are cold and his lips are chapped, his mouth is warm and soft, wanton and desperate. You beam at the feeling of his lips on yours, wrapping your arms around his neck as you ring in the New Year for real. This is how it was supposed to be. This is what you had been waiting for. 

When you part, Taehyung’s lips are a cherry red to match the tip of his nose. His brown eyes are twinkling, and not from the light pollution of the city. 

“Can I be honest, too?” Taehyung asks. He’s got the biggest goddamn grin on his face. “I think I’m in love with you.”

The words are music to your ears. “My honesty is rubbing off on you,” you tease. “Because I think I’m in love with you, too.”

Smiling, grinning, positively fucking beaming, Taehyung wraps his hands around you and kisses you again. It warms your heart from the inside out, blossoms like a tulip in spring. When you started this winter break, you thought you had reached your lowest point, but you’re finishing it on a high that you hope never fades. He loves you, he loves you, and most importantly, you love him back. And as it turns out, the movie where beautiful male art student lead and hardheaded and impenetrable female lead are stuck with each other for four weeks has a happy ending, after all. 

↳ links are broken, but don’t forget to message me with any thoughts or feedback!

#taehyung fluff #taehyung angst #bts fluff #bts angst #bts scenario #v fluff #v angst #v scenario #taehyung scenario #bts imagine #taehyung imagine #v imagine #bts au #taehyung au #REPOSTING BC IT WASNT SHOWING UP IN THE TAGS #w: four weeks

[astrognossienne]

scandalous beauty: athalia ponsell lindsley - an analysis

“Not that St. Augustine citizens went around killing people they didn’t like. But Athalia was not on a level playing field. Nobody liked her, so there was not a big hue and cry when she was killed.” - Sally Boyles, a neighbour of Lindsley’s

For someone so brash, loud, and ballsy, her life, especially her early life, was quite a mystery. Just like her controversial death. On January 23, 1974, former model, dancer, political activist and television personality Athalia Ponsell Lindsley was murdered with a machete by an unknown assailant on the front steps of her home in St. Augustine, Florida. Her murder is notorious more than four decades after it occurred. The only eyewitness said a man attacked Lindsley with a machete in broad daylight on the front steps of her white mansion. Gossip swirled that neighbour Frances Bemis knew who killed Lindsley and would notify authorities. Bemis was later murdered on her nightly walk. Police arrested only one suspect for Lindsley's murder, which remains unsolved to this day. For someone who was a Leo, I don't think Athalia was a very happy person. I think she tried to bring others down, with her based on her ill-concealed dissatisfaction with the way things were. Unfortunately for her, her demise happened in a town that didn’t care for her.

Athalia Ponsell Lindsley, according to astrotheme, was a Leo sun and Libra moon (the moon is speculative). She was born Mary Anne “Athalia” Fetter in Toledo, Ohio in 1917. Her parents were both wealthy New Yorkers; her father was a utilities magnate and her mother a socialite. Shortly after her birth, she and her family moved to Isle of Pines (now known as Isla de la Juventud), Cuba where she was raised until the age of 12. By the time the parents moved to Jacksonville, Florida and enrolled her in parochial school, she was winning beauty contests and pursuing an acting career. After high school, she moved to New York City, where it didn’t take her long to be employed as a fashion model for the celebrated fashion designer John Robert Powers, which helped her land work in some Broadway musicals and as a hostess on a TV game show. By 1949, she was the hottest model in NYC. She was just as hot off the runway as well; the list of Ponsell’s sexual conquests was long, including the likes of actor Tyrone Power and Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. She was reported to have been married three times, one of  them to a man named Ponsell, but there is no information on him or her other two spouses. She had a scrapbook of all the celebrities and people she was acquainted. But success had quickly gone to the young model’s head, and by 1954, she’d burned all her bridges at her modeling agency, and her reputation as “the bitch of New York” was well-earned and kept her from earning any more work in the entertainment industry.

Out of work, over the hill, and her looks fading, Ponsell quit her 20-years of modeling and entertainment work and retired to a white stucco mansion in St. Augustine in 1972. By that time, the 55-year-old washed-up model became embittered. From the moment she arrived in St.Augustine, she did her best to position herself at the top of the city’s high society. But the sides of that pyramid were very steep, and to the city’s old-school cultural hardliners, she was an outsider, and an obnoxious one, at that. St. Augustine is known for being a rather cliquish town, and unless you have Spanish, Menorcan, or WASP roots, any newcomer is looked at as an outsider. She was known as a pain in the ass, criticizing everything she thought was wrong with the town and its citizens. Naturally the upper crust didn’t take too well to her. She may have annoyed them, but she did catch the eye of another important person, Mayor James Lindsley, a St. Augustine native who went by the nickname “Jinx”. Jinx was known around the city for his ability to work hard and drink even harder. He was of the generation where if he was wronged, or if there was a problem, he settled his differences with his fists. Despite his passionate love affairs with ass kicking and Jack Daniels, Athalia was drawn to Jinx’s good standing with St. Augustine’s old guard, Jinx was attracted to her still-good looks and fiery personality. The two courted hard and fast, and just a few months after they met, they married.

Their marriage was rocky from the start, providing the town with juicy gossip. In fact, just 3 months into the marriage, the two separated. They wound up living in separate homes, fighting back and forth about possessions and property. She may have treated her husband and the town like dirt, but she was very moved by animals and took in a lot of strays and accumulated a coterie of animals. This didn’t endear herself to the neighbours, and they complained of dogs barking and other noises coming from her makeshift “animal shelter”. One neighbour in particular that took exception to Athalia and her animals was a hot-headed county manager called Alan Stanford. Stanford lived next door to her on Marine Street, and the two clashed from day one. Stanford filed several noise complaints against Athalia and her pets, resulting in her arrest. In revenge, she made Stanford’s life as county manager a living hell. She became a fixture at City Hall, attending every county meeting she could and accuse Stanford of all sorts of improprieties, from the mismanagement of county funds to stealing equipment from the road department. Some of these accusations weren’t entirely unfounded, but it got to the point where her presence was dreaded. She was after his job and wanted him fired. Stanford, in turn, threatened her life. December of 1973, she found out that Stanford lacked the civil engineering degree required for all county managers, and went to the state to report him.

On January 23, 1974 she attended her last city hall meeting, armed with petitions of several citizens calling for Stanford to resign. She exposed the fact that Stanford forged documents and padded his experience and qualifications as county manager. Later that day, to celebrate, she met her estranged husband Jinx for lunch. The day went surprisingly well, going shopping in Jacksonville and running errands. At approximately 5:30 pm, they both went home to their respective houses. As Athalia walked her pet blue jay around in her front yard, an intruder emerged from her back yard, armed with a machete. Moments later, the police department received a call about a murder. The police arrived to the provided address and found Athalia sprawled across the front steps of her porch, nearly decapitated and hacked to death with a machete in broad daylight.

The scene was chaotic, with neighbours trampling all over the grass trying to get a look, contaminating evidence. In their great police work, the cops never thought to rope off the crime scene. When her husband Jinx was notified of his wife’s murder, he took his time getting to her house, making a pit stop to his attorney’s office along the way. A few hours later, the cops find a machete in his pickup truck. But an open-and-shut case this was not. In February of 1974, the rumour was that Jinx killed her in a drunken rage. Even though Jinx had a violent temper and smacked his wife around, in the eyes of local investigators, he was “unarrestable”; they had no real evidence against the mayor and he even passed a lie-detector test. A tip from one of Athalia’s neighbours came in: it seems the neighbour’s 19 year-old son claimed to have witnessed her old nemesis Alan Stanford kill her. There was a trail of blood that led from Athalia’s front porch directly into Allen Stanford’s back yard. More than a few weren’t concerned with Athalia being killed because she was such a bitch that they feel that she deserved what she got.

In March of 1974, there was a blood-stained machete, a watch, and blood-soaked trousers found in a bag in a swamp; the blood on the clothes matched Athalia’s, and the clothes belonged to Stanford. On February 22, 1974, Alan Stanford was arrested and charged with murder. On January 1975, the murder trial commenced. The prosecution had a strong case and a guilty verdict seemed almost certain. Just before closing arguments, Stanford’s defense team called the 19-year old witness to the stand. Despite previously identifying Stanford as the killer, the young man was now unsure of the identity, having never actually seen the assailant’s face. On the day following the killing, a young nurse rode her bicycle as she always did. The police stopped her and questioned her about the murder. The nurse picked out a third suspect, deputy sheriff Dewey Lee, as the killer, further muddling the waters. The jury found Alan Stanford not guilty, despite the mountain of evidence against him. Local authorities were so upset by the verdict that they refused to re-open the case. Even though Stanford was acquitted of the murder, Athalia wound up getting the last laugh in the end, they local county board voted 4 to 1 to fire Stanford due to his lying about his credentials. He wound up leaving town shortly afterward. Today, St. Augustine is different; most who lived on Marine Street during the 1960s and 1970s have either moved away or passed away. Athalia’s house, now a historical landmark, still stands today, a grim reminder of how local resentment can go too far.

the murder of frances bemis

Frances Bemis was a socialite and neighbour of Athalia Ponsell Lindsley who happened to be a close friend of hers. Shortly after Lindsley’s murder, Frances started gathering information in order to write a book about the murder, claiming that she had information on what really happened. On November 3, 1974, she went for an evening walk and disappeared. Her body was found near her house, her skull crushed by a cement block. Her murder has never been solved.

This was the next analysis that I planned to do after the Robert Mitchum one, so I decided to just get this one out of the way.

Stats

birthdate: July 25, 1917*

*note*: due to the absence of a birth time, this analysis will be even more speculative.

major planets:

Sun: Leo

Moon: Libra

Rising: unknown

Mercury: Leo

Venus: Leo

Mars: Gemini

Midheaven: unknown

Jupiter: Gemini

Saturn: Leo

Uranus: Aquarius

Neptune: Leo

Pluto: Cancer

Overall personality snapshot: She had a prestigious, compelling presence, even when she was just clowning around, and a natural ability to command both respect and affection from her friends and colleagues. In the nicest possible way she assumed the position of the leader because she had a strong independent streak and believed in her lofty, worthy ideals, but she also gravitated towards collaboration and an impartial examination of the facts. She could be bossy and yet her bossiness was so diplomatic that it was convincing, even impressive. Although she wanted esteem and tended to identify with honourable goals and people, she could work alongside others she respected and she really wanted the best for everyone. She had style, and she instinctively knew that ‘manners maketh man’ and that, if for some reason they didn’t, they went a long way in making life worth living. When she came into her own, she developed a strongly aesthetic approach to life and are naturally creative. She needed a very positive, active medium through which to express herself, such as drama, teaching or running her own business.

Anything to do with beauty and harmony interested her, such as decorating, design and painting. Her interest in social equality took her into politics or the law. She had a strong sense of herself and stubbornly followed her own personal code of ethics, yet she also enjoyed being part of a group that had a common purpose or bond. She cherished ideals of liberty and equality, but if there were some distasteful tasks to perform she moved very smoothly into the role of delegating – well, she thought, someone has to give the orders around here or we would have no harmony at all. Although she seemed to enjoy an easy, breezy approach to life, there was quite a serious side to her personality, and she could be surprisingly controversial and provocative. She was willing to stand up and be counted, and perhaps make it look easy. She had a natural appreciation and enjoyment of the good things of life; she assumed that they should be hers by birthright. And through cunning charm, calculated boldness, and intelligent maneuver she managed to have plenty.

She was ambitious, sound at giving orders, carried responsibility well and was a good teacher, especially able to bring out the best in children. She believed in herself and generally knew the right thing to say at the right time, although she could show a stubborn and dogmatic side. She had a high opinion of her mental powers, and it was certainly true to say that he had plenty of mental energy. She was a mentally restless person, both versatile and broad-minded. She experienced personal growth through analysis and using her intellect, although the collection and communication of facts may have been an end within itself. She was a reliable and loyal person. Her will and sense of honour were strong and she was a great organizer. On the downside, her self-assuredness could become dogmatism and imperiousness. Conservatism may have affected her creativity, artistic values and love affairs. This expressed itself as self-imposed restrictions or as selfishness. She often felt inadequate, which created an insidious form of oppression over all her forms of expression. She could also take herself so seriously, that people think that she was older than her years.

She belonged to a generation that could be unpredictable in that it liked to instigate change simply for the sake of shaking things up and providing stimulation. Humanitarian ideals became extremely important, as well as the belief in absolute freedom for every individual. She came up with radical new ideas which she stubbornly followed. As a member of this generation, she may have felt deep spiritual convictions, although she may not have seen herself as religious in the traditional sense of the word. She was part of a very artistically talented and creative generation that wanted to escape from the demands of the world around them into a world of excitement and glamour. Members of this generation loved the theater and the cinema, in fact, any sort of creative self-expression. They also believed in the rights of any individual to express themselves. This generation was both idealistic and romantic, selfish and individualistic. Lindsley embodied all of these Leo Neptunian ideals. Also, as a member of the Leo Neptune generation, she experienced and fully embraced changes in sexual mores and attitudes, changing the way people approach the whole issue of romantic relationships. Changes were also experienced in the relationships between parents and children, with the ties becoming looser. She was part of a generation known for its devastating social upheavals concerning home and family. The whole general pattern of family life experiences enormous changes and upheavals; as a Cancer Plutonian, this aspect is highlighted with Lindsley’s father dying relatively young and her having to care for her mother until she died.

Love/sex life: There is never any question as to the ground rules of her erotic universe: what best served her ego, best served her libido. She had a marvelous capacity for enjoying sex but her pride and self-possession always came first. Some people might have found the egotism of this position offensive but many others hardly noticed. After all, a lover as lively, generous and exciting as she had good reason to be proud. There was always a distinctively theatrical quality about her love making. She wanted sex to be a big event, full of drama and intellectual significance. This grandiose approach to sex can certainly be entertaining but it often made her romantic moments seem less than spontaneous. More importantly, real life sex rarely met her cinematic standards. This is one reason why she often found the idea of love much more appealing than its physical manifestations.The sex in her head was never common or clumsy, and she could always count on great reviews.

minor asteroids and points:

North Node: Capricorn

Lilith: Virgo

Her North Node in Capricorn dictated that she needed to develop the more caring and compassionate side to her personality and try to place less emphasis on the materialistic aspects of her life. Her Lilith in Virgo ensured that she exhibited a Madonna-whore complex; she made her way through the world with her sensational wits and she had no time for constricting judgments. She confronted the grittier facts of life, especially sex. She was good at sex but not as a form of sappy emotional expression.

elemental dominance:

fire

air

She was dynamic and passionate, with strong leadership ability. She generated enormous warmth and vibrancy. She was exciting to be around, because she was genuinely enthusiastic and usually friendly. However, she could either be harnessed into helpful energy or flame up and cause destruction. Ultimately, she chose the latter. Confident and opinionated, she was fond of declarative statements such as “I will do this” or “It’s this way.” When out of control—usually because she was bored, or hadn’t been acknowledged—she was be bossy, demanding, and even tyrannical. But at her best, her confidence and vision inspired others to conquer new territory in the world, in society, and in themselves. She was communicative, quick and mentally agile, and she liked to stir things up. She was likely a havoc-seeker on some level. She was oriented more toward thinking than feeling. She carried information and the seeds of ideas. Out of balance, she lived in her head and could be insensitive to the feelings of others. But at her best, she helped others form connections in all spheres of their daily lives.

modality dominance:

fixed

She wasn’t particularly interested in spearheading new ventures or dealing with the day-to-day challenges of organization and management. She excelled at performing tasks and producing outcomes. She was flexible and liked to finish things. Was also likely undependable, lacking in initiative, and disorganized. Had an itchy restlessness and an unwillingness to buckle down to the task at hand. Probably had a chronic inability to commit—to a job, a relationship, or even to a set of values.

planet dominants:

Sun

Mars

Pluto

She had vitality and creativity, as well as a strong ego and was authoritarian and powerful. She likely had strong leadership qualities, she definitely knew who she was, and she had tremendous will. She met challenges and believed in expanding her life. She was aggressive, individualistic and had a high sexual drive. She believed in action and took action. Her survival instinct was strong. She wanted to take herself to the limit—and then surpass that limit, which she often did. She ultimately refused to compromise her integrity by following another’s agenda. She likely didn’t compare herself to other people and didn’t want to dominate or be dominated. She simply wanted to be free to follow her own path, whatever it was. She brought about complete and profound transformations in her life, good or bad (and it was often bad). She felt the need to let go of what was familiar to her and accept new and different ways of being and doing things. There were areas in her life where she had to accept regeneration, which involved the destruction of the old and the creation of the new.

sign dominants:

Leo

Gemini

Cancer

She loved being the center of attention and often surrounded herself with admirers. She had an innate dramatic sense, and life was definitely his stage. Her flamboyance and personal magnetism extended to every facet of her life. She wanted to succeed and make an impact in every situation. At her best, she was optimistic, honorable, loyal, and ambitious. She ventured out to see what else was there and seized upon new ideas that will expand their communities. Her innate curiosity kept her on the move. She used her rational, intellectual mind to explore and understand her personal world. She needed to answer the single burning question in her mind: why? This applied to most facets of her life, from the personal to the impersonal. This need to know sent her off to foreign countries, where her need to explore other cultures and traditions ranked high. She was changeable and often moody. This meant that she was often at odds with herself—the mind demanding one thing, the heart demanding the opposite. To someone else, this internal conflict often manifested as two very different people. At first meeting, she seemed enigmatic, elusive. She needed roots, a place or even a state of mind that he could call her own. She needed a safe harbor, a refuge in which to retreat for solitude. She was generally gentle and kind, unless he was hurt. Then she could become vindictive and sharp-spoken. She was affectionate, passionate, and even possessive at times. She was intuitive and was perhaps even psychic. Experience flowed through her emotionally. She was often moody and always changeable; her interests and social circles shifted constantly. She was emotion distilled into its purest form.

Read more about her under the cut.

Athalia Ponsell Lindsley was a former model, Broadway performer, actress, dancer and television personality who died in a savage late-afternoon attack at her home on Jan. 23, 1974. Wife of the once mayor of St. Augustine, James "Jinx" Lindsley, who died a few years after her death. Mrs. Athalia Lindsley was very active politically.

She also took in many animals, such as dogs, cats and even two goats. At the time of her murder, she was outside trying to rehabilitate one of her rescue birds, a blue jay named Clementine which had an injured wing. She had rescued the little bird from neighborhood cats.

Athalia Ponsell Lindsley was a very devoted daughter who took care of her mother full time until her mother passed away.

She was 58 years old when her life was brutally cut short.

A neighbor and local politician was the only person ever arrested and tried for her murder, after a very dramatic trial, a jury found the defendant not guilty, and he was acquitted

(x)

#athalia ponsell lindsley #leo #star analyses #scandalous stars #long ass post #mine

[foreficfandom]

Mystic Messenger - Wedding Headcanons (Bride! MC)

--- Zen ---

Zen's a surprisingly down-to-earth man, and he wanted the wedding to be a modest, but gorgeous affair. It’s a rooftop wedding, where everyone gets to see the two most beautiful people in the world get married amidst a bright, morning cityscape. Zen creates an amazing set of custom vows that make him cry, and it ruins his makeup but he doesn’t care. 

It’s all paid with his and your own money, which isn’t a whole lot but enough to afford a very put-together package. Zen insisted on catering from a famous brewery, and there’s a very nice open beer-on-tap bar.

There’s also a very important scheduled evening dance, of course. Your new husband asks for your hand like you’re royalty, and the two of you begin a very romantic slow-dance with a specific playlist in the background. When that ends, the music picks up and everybody starts getting a little wild. That delicious beer must have kicked in.

Zen’s arm rarely ever leaves your waist for the rest of the evening. He begins to refer to you as ‘my SPOUSE’ to everyone you have a conversation with. His face is literally glowing with pride.

By the time the two of you get married, Zen’s a very established actor, so its a celebrity wedding that attracts reporters and curious starwatchers. The two of you graciously (you more than Zen) accept Jumin’s gift of security guards to keep them off the venue.

The honeymoon is a beautiful week spent in the Maldives, enjoying the therapeutic beach life. Paparazzi end up hounding the two of you a little bit, but nothing can truly ruin this bliss. This perfect love.

--- Yoosung ---

He’s been dreaming of this day and its finally here!! He almost can’t believe it, and spends a lot of the planning just kinda fanboying himself. He can’t decide between themes and packages ‘cause it all seems wonderful to him. His parents end up helping quite a bit, especially on the parts he finds particularly confusing, like booking a venue and managing costs.

The two of you eventually settle on a garden-like wedding, taking place in a beautiful park. He loves the vintage lace look of your dress, and matches with an old-hollywood-style suit. Thanks to the advice from his family, the two of you avoided purchasing entire wedding packages and instead sourced everything from different retailers, which required a lot more research but saved money. 

The two of you said your vows underneath a gazebo lined with flowers, and then walked back down the park to the reception area while everyone tossed bucketfuls of petals upon the two of you. Yoosung was tearing up pretty badly from happiness, and almost tripped twice. By the time you guys made it to the dining tables, Yoosung’s glasses were fogged and he couldn’t stop smiling. 

The reception lasted longer than planned ‘cause everyone was having so much fun. You two had hired a pizza truck that carted their wood-burning oven on-site, along with a massive snack table and colorful cocktail dispensers. Yoosung asked to dance once, twice, and maybe five more times. You had to take off your heels to keep up with him, which just made the moment that much more beautiful.

The honeymoon had to be short, but it was a peaceful five days spent in Shanghai. 

--- Jaehee ---

One of the first things planned was going to local fashion shows and shopping for dresses, since according to Jaehee, it was this season that designers begin to shell out the good stuff. Jaehee settled on a cream-colored silk trumpet dress with an embroidered veil. You chose a dress embroidered with gold-colored thread to match hers. 

And that set the tone for rest of the wedding. Gold decor, pearly-white chiffon, and dots of warm red embellishing the tablecloths, bouquets, and plate settings. Jaehee was always the one on the phone with the planners, since she had That Business Voice which made everything go so much more smoothly.

You married in a temple, an hour away from the city. Jaehee and you met at the altar simultaneously, and held hands over vows. You could see her tearing up for the first time ever. 

The reception was held in a small park nearby, where a light catering was offered underneath a large tent, along with several chocolate fountains and bottles of expensive champagne. Jaehee really wanted to avoid a huge social event, since her past job at C&R required a lot of boring business events. So after speeches were delivered and everyone had their fill of chocolate and wine, you all barreled into your cars and zoomed back home for the afterparty, which was a lot more casual and involved blaring Zen’s musicals on the flatscreen while everyone played drinking games.

The two of you had a long and indulgent honeymoon spent traveling between Greece and Italy, doing everything from spa hotels to skydiving. You ended up with two album’s worth of pictures to remember it by.

--- Jumin ---

You might have thought he’d be pulling out all stops when it comes to the wedding, but the man’s a devoted Christian - even if he doesn’t show his religious side often, it was important to him that his holy union wasn’t too ostentatious. 

But he’s still Jumin, so everything’s designer. The outfits, the catering, the decorations, the transportation, even the invitations sent out were on luxury emboss paper lined with real gold leaf. So your wedding actually begins a few days before it even starts, with a visit to a celebrity spa for a red-carpet all-over treatment, and then you spend hours getting your hair, makeup, and nails done. 

Both the ceremony and the reception are held in a large, lavish hall. There’s a huge crowd of guests for business reasons, along with reporters and other representatives from the press, plus even some politicians. When Jumin takes your hand at the altar, there’s a literal spotlight shining on the two of you while the room grows dramatically dark.

So your wedding is kinda a publicized business event, which isn’t super ideal but Jumin tried his best to keep it as special as possible. He deferred to you when it came to almost all the decisions, such as the color scheme of the decor, and what kind of menu you wanted. Almost everything was based off of your preferences, which is what Jumin wanted. He desired nothing but you as his spouse, and that’s what he was getting. 

Jumin rarely ever gets overly emotional, including at his own wedding, but for the rest of the evening he couldn’t keep his eyes off you, and whenever you turned your head your new husband was smiling, absolute adoration in his eyes.

The honeymoon is a worldwide tour, of course. With cruises, five-star hotels, attending operas, and dining at the most famous places.

--- Saeyoung ---

He’s free from the agency and Mint Eye both, and he has you with him. He never been be happier, or feel more free than he ever did. So the wedding reflects it; it’s held outside, by the sea, lightly managed so there’s almost no schedule to adhere to. 

It’s super important that he makes his vows to you under god. So it takes some digging until he finds an actual church that’s within a short distance from a gorgeous beach. The two of you marry under brightly lit stained glass windows before hopping into one of his sports cars and race to the reception area. The other guests have to catch up.

He cries at the ceremony, of course. He eventually leaves his glasses off because his eyes keep welling up. He recites from the bible. You can feel his hands shaking. 

And at the reception, it’s p a r ty time. There’s music playing and a very important playlist is playing that the two of you made beforehand. The catering is seafood and barbecue. There’s very little alcohol, and lots of dessert. 

It’s a smaller crowd of guests, but that’s what made it so special. You all played at the beach with spontaneous games of badminton, or dunked yourselves into the beach then running off laughing, and joked amongst yourselves for hours, long after night came around and the area was lit up with Saeyoung’s jacked lighting system.

The honeymoon is spent in South Korea, in Jeju-do where the two of you go on sunny car rides along the cliffs, go spelunking in gorgeous caves that light up like the universe, and stay in a traditional bathhouse. 

--- Saeran ---

Saeran will always and forever adore the ‘princess’ aesthetic on you. When you two first met, his Ray alter embodied and obsessed over it, but nowadays he simply enjoys the magical romance of a fairytale love story. It reminds him of his longing daydreams when he was younger, and how it all eventually came true.

It’s an evening wedding, held in a hotel banquet hall, planned and catered by an expensive company he and his brother both shelled enthusiastically to purchase. He didn’t really know anybody aside from the RFA and you, and only made like one or two other friends since beginning recovery. So you invited all your friends and family you knew would support the two of you, and it turned out to be an intimate but loving crowd.

SOOO many flowers. Bouquets dot the walls, sit at every table, and line the isle. And Saeran beforehand prepared your bridal bouquet himself. It was a very carefully crafted arrangement that masterfully relayed a thorough message of love, commitment, and family.

Saeran’s quiet but surprisingly calm. It’s just ... pure happiness. He’s every bit a prince when he takes your hand at the altar. This wedding marked more than the beginning of your union, it was evidence that his life was good.

He wasn’t super enthused about traveling anywhere for the honeymoon, and wanted to spend the time alone with you at home, where its safe and familiar. But you convinced him that an extreme change of scenery can do wonders for his depression and anxiety. So the two of you spent an amazing twelve days in Canada, where he got to experience a world he’d never seen before. He took really well to hiking, which turned out to be a great low impact exercise option for his frail physical health. 

--- Jihyun ---

The reception’s held outside, by the Suncheon Bay area - a beautiful national wetland park with amazingly unique scenery and wildlife. The ceremony beforehand is held inside, and its short and sweet with custom vows.

He’d want a Catholic wedding if it’s okay with you, or if not, a fusion wedding where the vows aren’t religious but its overseen by a pastor, or something like that. 

As a photographer, he’s surprisingly anal about the timing of the event. There has to be the perfect amount of natural sunlight during the wedding. So the ceremony is held in the late morning, then he quickly urges you outside where beautiful pictures are taken of the two of you standing amidst gorgeous nature. 

There’s a surprisingly big crowd. Jihyun is a popular man, so aside from the RFA there’s his various art friends, his other friends, his older friends, not to mention your own friends and family. His father does show up, but it’s sadly stilted.

He’s worldly and artsy, so the banquet is multicultural, with lots of his personal favorites he’s experienced from around the world. You notice a lot of french bread.

And don’t forget, he’s a rich boy! So everything’s quality stuff. You don’t have to worry about expenses with him. He’s not ostentatious to the level of Jumin, but he’s still got a packing wallet.

The honeymoon is spent touring Central America, which he particularly loves for its blazing sun and colorful culture. You split the trip between luxury all-inclusive resorts, and countryside roughing it.

#mystic messenger imagines #mysme imagines #mystic messenger #mysme #zen mysme #yoosung kim #jaehee kang #jumin han #saeyong choi #saeran choi #jihyun kim

[nalufever]

do you have any more nalu fic recs?

Sorry, not sorry - you’ve unleashed more than you could’ve guessed. ^^ Always happy to Recommend a List of Fics ~ And thank you for asking! Admittedly there’s a few Recs that aren’t Nalu - I got excited to share my favs. ;)

A Girl Worth Fighting For: Natsu navigates unspeakable horrors to win Lucy’s love or Natsu goes shopping, looking for the perfect white day gift. 

A Lesson: Natsu and Lucy can’t keep themselves from expressing their passions - and the results are bed breaking. Short but smutty - smexy in fact. ;P 

A Solidly Constructed Kiss: Erza strong-arms Lucy and Natsu into working the Kissing Booth to raise funds for a school trip. Lucy’s never been kissed and Natsu acts like he’s never entertained even the idea of kissing another person. Things naturally come to a head when Lucy and Natsu are given the task to build the actual booth; will they fight over construction or build themselves some kind of relationship? 

Fairy Tail Week: A collection of drabbles from tumblr prompts to celebrate Fairy Tail. Fairy, Ladies, Lads, Magic, Guild, Ultimate Team, Stronger, Mashima, Tail. Only rated teen to err on the side of caution, family friendly content featuring most of the Fairy Tail Guild! 

Feathers and Scales: Angel/Demon AU. Devils are more than they seem and Angels no less. Pitted against each other in a never-ending battle for souls, a single Angel and Devil trade mercies and fall in love. Warning: major character death(s). 

Full Moon Secret: Natsu had wanted to tell Lucy his secrets, to share his family history with the fey…it had just never been the right time. Tonight the truth was going to be revealed, one way or another. 

Okay, I could just keep hyping all of my own fics individually - but I won’t - other than to just put in a link to ALL OF THEM. ;) Fair warning, I have a few other fandoms works in all the Fairy Tail stories - from Brooklyn 99 to The Flash, Snow White with the Red Hair, RWBY, Blue Exorcist, Teen Titans and some Hakuouki. Yes, I’m a shameless self-promoter. Speaking of that - one more I need to rec!  Natsu’s Stars in Lucy’s Sky. I swear Imma finish this. 

I also have more than a few favourite authors who write for Fairy Tail (and other fandoms) ~ some have not contributed lately to Fairy Tail or chosen to concentrate on other fandoms - but I like them and their excellent writing. 

ObsessedwithNalu: One of my first fandom friends and pretty much any of her FT stories is gold. @obsessedwithnalu  

Christmas Treats: Admittedly a gift to me and very cherished for that fact - and - it’s frigging awesome. Lucy does a little holiday baking at home before Fairy Tail’s Christmas party. Natsu, as always, is there. One thing leads to another… 

Thanks, Krov: When Krov decided to relax at his favorite bar after work, he never imagined that he’d be seeing some of his old guild members, especially since he thought they had died long ago. Nalu fluff. 

Edo-Nalu love fest: Submissions for the Nalu love fest week of 2014. But instead of regular Nalu, these ones feature Edo-Nalu. Smut-tastic and delightfully mature. 

ImpracticalDemon: Another early fandom friend who’s still writing this, that and the other thing - and she’s just GREAT. Again, a link to all her works and a few that are special to me follow. XOXOX @impracticaldemon  

May the Best Man Survive: “Gray would never have in a million years thought he’d host Natsu’s bachelor party (Nalu pairing). Why is it his job to herd the bunch of rowdy mages from bar to bar, ending up at the guild where the real surprise party is? Oh yeah, the idiot had asked him to be the best man at his wedding. Hijinks, chaos and hilarity ensue.” ^^ A prompt supplied by me and I’m smirking so wide because the fic Imp came up with delivered more awesomeness than I could have hoped for! 

A Star At His Side: “Accidentally Fall Asleep Together” for Endragoneel on tumblr. Natsu and Lucy spend the day together at a festival in Magnolia. Natsu ends up watching more than just the stars when the festival is over… 

Christmas Gifts: When Erza walks Wendy home from the Guild’s Christmas Party, Wendy realizes how alone her friend and mentor is feeling. She sets out to recruit Lucy, Natsu and the rest to break Jellal out of prison for just one night, as a Christmas gift for Erza. Meanwhile, Natsu has accidentally burned some of Lucy’s writing. Will she forgive him? 

Dark Shining Light: One of the best and most welcoming writers I have ever interacted with! I’m still gobsmacked she’s a friend! She’s a legend and I don’t know what else I could add to any discourse about her writing - but the classics are classic for a reason, yeah? Here’s a few of my personal favourites of her works and just know there’s too many to list them all! AKA @ff-darkshininglight 

Mischievous Cat: Let’s just say there have been a few incidents where Happy has come in at a bad time. 

What Belongs to a Demon: Everyone knew she belonged to the great demon lord and she would prove that she deserved to stand by his side. 

The Truth Revealing Cards: Lucy should have known if there was a card that would reveal her secrets, Natsu would want it. 

Eliz1369: Got introduced to her for her Hakuoki fics but she’d dipped her toes into FT as well ~ and this is a great fic. ^^ @eliz1369 

The Light of Fairy Tail: The members of Fairy Tail may be their own brand of crazy, but their hearts are always in the right place. 

rougescribe: Shame on me for not reading more of this author’s works! @rougescribe  

Fire Sprite No 5: For him, Heaven wasn’t a place or a single moment in time. It was a feeling built on memories upon memories, past and present and a hope for future ones all tied down together. All sharing one common denominator: Her. Nalu. Tumblr Valentine’s Event. 

Fallen Ark Angel: Admittedly I only have interacted from afar with this writer. I mainly read Nalu fics but I love her take on Mira and Laxus and her next gen offspring characters. She’s got a lot to offer and it’s all superb. @fallen029

Loving Satan: Loving Satan is never easy. But when she loves you back, its twice as bad. 

Madartiste: Another one-sided love affair with someone else’s writing. And her stories are all wonderful and prolly appear on hundreds of Fic Rec Lists - but here’s one of my Favs! @madartiste  

Hoarding: Getting interrupted gets old fast. 

UranoMetria: I added her to my stable of fav authors 05-03-2014. Wow. Eons ago and even if I’m not sure she’s still active in the fandom, I salute her. Kudos. 

The Goddess Gate: With six years of partnership, Natsu and Lucy are torn apart by a mysterious visit from a secret magic council. Lucy is kidnapped and her memories suppressed. She fights her way back home to regain her life - with a startling secret revealed as she begins to remember. The lives of all Earthland hang in the balance. **Okay, this is a wicked old fic - but amazingly written and fuelled my own desires for writing. Last updated in 2018 but who knows? Some current attention may slay any demons on her back in regards to writing - and even if not - the hours of enjoyment reading this is worth giving a comment just to say, ‘thank you for writing.‘ 

Wild Rhov: Do I even need to say anything about this author? Famous, famous, famous. Excellent. Writes a lot of pairings and fleshes every relationship into something REAL. I Can’t Even. @wildrhov  

Beastly Possession: Something is murdering people in Magnolia. When Lucy is attacked, Natsu goes on a rampage to find the culprit, and everyone in Fairy Tail wants revenge. But could this bloodthirsty attacker be someone they know? Warning: High octane nightmare fuel! Do not read while eating, and beware of red eyes in the dark! 

Shell1331: Introduced via Imp. This writer is in a few fandoms and is worth reading. @shell-senji  

Juicy: Impulsivity and poorly chosen words get Natsu into more trouble than he’d expected, which is saying something for him. 

AbsentAngel: Everyone should know this writer. Been stalking her since 2014 so that says something. Tho, it’s prolly just that I’m creepy. ;) My suggested fic here is being re-written/has been? into something original and worth being purchased when it becomes available and re-read over and over. No, I am not being paid to shill but I am open to having senpai notice me. @absent-angel  

To the Flame: She stares, transfixed, as the blood runs down his fingers and begins to pool in his palm. He holds his hand up to her lips in offering, and she tears her eyes away from the blood to study his face. He is smiling softly. “Go on Luce, I didn’t cut them for nothing.” [Vamp AU] 

HawkofNavarre: Loved for awesome and delightful Gruvia content. Looks like there’s a tumblr but I can’t manage to link it. :(

You Stole the Rain: He just wanted to be friends; fine, she just needed to change his mind. Gray x Juvia 

Ricardian Scholar Clark-Weasley: Not sure I spelled that right even after checking three times! I usually short hand that to RS-CW in my head. And she’s prolific - has a tonne of fandoms and is a tower of talent. Is anyone reading all my fangirl gushing? 'Cause she follows one of my fics and comments (sorry I haven’t updated that fic in a while) and it’s a source of happiness that someone who writes so well happens to enjoy some of my content. Okay, bragging over - back to the Recs! 

Tales of Fairies: A collection of oneshots exploring different friendships, ideas, sad themes, comical scenarios, and lots and lots of pairings…but mainly Nalu. 

snogfairy: Another giant in the FT fandom. Impressive talent. @lineffability  

naughty nalus: smutty nalu oneshots B) ***Mature content!*** 

Rivendell101: Another giant in FT and other fandoms. This author would be considered required reading if I ran a fandom course in a University setting. Just sayin’ @rivendell101  

Crave: /krāv/ Verb. To feel a powerful desire for (something). They crave each other. And satiation doesn’t come easily. He growls against her again. “Beg for it,” he demands, lips ghosting against her. 

Lakerae aka @hidetheremote : Did you think I’d forgotten you? Ha! Gotcha good! You’re an inspiration to me because you’re working so hard to publish your children’s books. Kudos to you li'l sis! You’re busy but still make it a point to talk to me and I love you for that and everything.

The Gift of the Magi: A Gajevy Twist: A retelling of the classic Christmas story “The Gift of the Magi,” with your favorite Fairy Tail couple Gajeel and Levy! It’s Christmas time and Gajeel and Levy exchange gifts. They both are surprised what they receive and learn a lesson of the true meaning of Christmas. 

I could add more and more as I search my saved favs on FF.net ~ and I’m sorry to not include all of them - but this is crazy long as it is. If you read and like any of the recommended fics, please be sure to let the author know. To the authors of these and all fanfics, Thanks for everything.

#fic list #rec fic list #fan fics galore #mainly Nalu rec'd fics #sorry not sorry #asks #answered #more than poor anon bargained for

[whatdoesshedotothem]

Sunday 1 May 1836: SH:7/ML/E/19/0036

9

- The notes written last night vid. above went at 8 this morning - finish, dullish morning - F50° at 9 ¾ am at which hour breakfast till Mr. Husband came at 10 ¼ Thomas Pearson soon came about the 2 cows - bade £15 for them  would not give more than £16 nor would I take less than £17 supposing myself to allow him 20/. profit - agreed that he should take them to Atherton fair on Thursday sell them for me and have 5/.  a piece for selling them whatever price he should sell them for - then Holt came and about 11 Mr. Jubb - kept him perhaps near ½ hour - mentioned about Mrs. Briggs - Mr. J- to give her a hint to conciliate Oddy - mentioned about the Dispensary - suggested that an appeal be made to the public for 1/8 or what not upon their subscriptions to raise a thousand more (£4900 subscribed about £1700 to give for the ground) - said I would give £5 towards the fitting up of the museum - mentioned having heard talk of an exchange - if a better site than I had could be got I should be glad  - if not, I had a plan of my own which, if nobody could produce a better, I would aid as well as I could - said it might not be more costly than what might be thought of by others - I could at least answer for its beauty - just hinted at a sort of thing like the Bourse at Paris the entrance end fronting Northgate and one side fronting St. Anne’s street - alluding to Rawsons’ joint stock bank Mr. J- seemed evidently all in its favour - said they had allotted him very few shares - £7000 worth of shares were applied for at the premium - the profits of the bank at present 10 or 12 thousand a year - on the 2 connexions (H-x and Huddersfield) the latter the larger of the 2 - said I was glad to hear it - I dared say, I knew people who would give up their shares to Mr. J- if he wanted more shares and if the Bank would allow it - offered to do anything I could for Mr. J- in Paris - I thought he seemed rather fearful of giving me any large commission - (for fear of price or what?) - no sum named or hinted at - I simply wrote down in my rough book  (in his presence) ‘Preparations of the eye and ear for Mr. Jubb’ - then with Holt in the north parlour Mr. Husband waiting in the drawing - mentioned about Illingworth - H- thought what I had proposed to advise A- very fair - he (Holt) would not take less than £15 per acre on Charnocks’ coal - about 8 acres and about 3 acres already got - said they had agreed about the 2nd pit (but did not say more on this part of the subject) - Holt’s measurement not done - bad air in the mines - could not get in of a fortnight or 3 weeks some new Thirls driven - Respecting my own concerns agreed to mend Joseph Mann’s price for the Listerwick Long goit - now that stone can be had on the spot, he is to get it, and dress and wall and arch and complete the goit (now 2ft x 3ft. 3in) at 9/. per yard up to the north east side of the throw where the stone will wear out and after crossing the throw to have the old price again i.e. 5/6 per yard for labour - Desired as little coal as possible to be got at Walker pit - the trespass to be ascertained by Holt, John Oates, and one other master collier besides our workmen Joseph and Robert Mann - the wheel race to be began of on Tuesday next - Holt says the meer drift would be began of - can be done without damage to Charles Howarth - a whimble hole will give vent enough - said I was anxious about Mrs. Machin’s coal - the children are of age that Samuel Holdsworth has no more power - they will sell but the mother wont - she has only a life estate in the farm - ask Mr. Gray if the children cannot give a tithe good enough and then to let Holt know that he may complete the purchase without troubling his for her signature - then went with Messrs. Holt and Husband to the meer head - Holt satisfied it was be better to take the water in higher up where Messrs. Husband and Mawson pointed out - determined that it shall be done so - then to the meer-drift - the setting in or opening into the meer done yesterday, right - then to the glen and explained where I wanted the Lodge drift stuff to be pulled up - Holt valued the driving at 2/6 per yard, pulling up at 1/6 per yard (a man cannot pull more than 2 square yards per day) and carting to be considered of - I said I calculated the whole at 4/6 per yard the throwing back the soil being extra - then to the Lodge Holt left us - explained a little to Mr. Husband where the stuff should be put (Husband thinks 3000 yards to be moved - I said I thought not exceeding 2000) - then walked with Mr. Husband towards Pump and told him to set the wall in front of the house with its road face in a line along the Shibden hall side of the causeway and finish each ending of the new wall in a quadrant of a circle - Road face to be walled with lime and the old parpoints - face towards Shibden hall dry walling with the stone taken from the wall along the present approach road -  and in front of the carriage house court - left Mr. about 11 /2 and came in wrote as follows to ‘Messrs. Parker and Adam, solicitors H-x’ to go by Frank tonight

SH:7/ML/E/19/0037

‘Shibden hall - Sunday 1 May 1836. Sir - Be so good as send me back Miss Walker’s order upon Messrs. Briggs - she did not know of their prospectus at the time of giving me the order; and I would rather she did not draw out the money just at this time without further consideration - I will give you a check on the Yorkshire District bank for the whole sum required - I am sir, etc etc A. Lister’ - then wrote the following to go tonight to ‘Mr. Rogers Cutler Sheffield PPD’ ‘Shibden Hall 1 May 1836- Sir - I shall be much obliged to you to make me two gardener’s knives, the handles to be such as usual - the blades to be of the usual size but the cutting edge straight  I mean them as presents to foreign gardeners, and shall be glad to have the metal and workmanship the best you can turn out of your shop - Be so good as send a bill in the parcel and direct it to Mrs. Lister to the care of Messrs. Hammersleys, Bankers, London I to be there by the 11th instant - will order payment to be made to your agent in London   I am, sir, your obedient servant A. Lister’ - had just written the above at 3 ¾ pm when Mark Hepworth came - [looking] into account 4 bills = 9.2.6 and the cow £13 and new gin horse 6 guineas + 10/. for his trouble of buying him and still Mark with money paid in a/c and Ruthin at £11.10.0  owes me a balance of £2.11.6 to be paid at the next rent day - the £18 for the 3 Hill top grass fields (he is to pasture all but the new seeds and these he will [mew]) to be paid at Xmas rent-day - somehow got one thing confused with another so that tho’ right at last and all clear, yet a long while pothering and had Mark till long after 4 - then till 7 10 at colliery accounts - dinner at 7 10 sent my letter (1 p. of ½ sheet black edged note paper) to ‘Mr. Rogers, Cutler Sheffield ppd’ and my note (vid. above) to Messrs. P- and A- Marian came and sat with me till about 8 when had Joseph and Robert Mann till 9 - they brought estimate of new approach road making that is rubbling - [laying?]and rubble 1ft. deep and 13ft. 6in. wide (finding everything) at 35/. per rood - Lodge drift.... said I should be obliged to come over again - should be here next Tuesday week - settled that Robert Mann + 3 should go on by day till 7 return at that time - to finish at the back of farmyard - and puddle about the rockwork all that is necessary - and wall up gap in the paddock wall near Greenwood’s cottage and get the farmyard paving done - Gave Joseph his new book beginning with Listerwick Long goit - 2 [entries] = £18 + £15 = £33 and he from this time begins with Mr. Parker - I am to keep Joseph’s old book - had coffee warmed up and sent for Marian and she sat with me till 9 55 when we both went to my aunt - Marian glad I should not be here when she went away at 8 am next Tuesday week - I said I would not be here then on any account - did not like partings - neither of us said more but both seemed to feel the thing and neither liked to dwell upon the subject - I remained with my aunt till 10 ½ - then came upstairs to the blue room - I had wished Marian goodnight in the drawing room - yet came upstairs to me, saying, to wish goodnight and stood talking to me till 11 25 - said if my aunt was poorly she would come and see her for a few days - I said everything would always be ready for her - she asked if I should like her to leave M-‘s mahogany writing desk (the 1st M- ever possessed and which she valued) that Marian has used ever since being here - I said after a moment’s pause, I felt I ought not to like it to be taken - Marian thought perhaps I should not mind about it now - no! no! said I, that ought not to be - I will give you another - Marian stood talking as if she had not resolution to leave me - poor Marian! my heart aches for her and for myself too - but I had talked of Mrs. Briggs and household arrangements and alterations in and additions to the house, and of [?] end of my idea of a plan for an exchange etc talked of anything that seemed not triste - when Marian was gone wrote all but the 1st 12 lines of the last p. and so far of this till 12 10 at night at which hour F35° then poked up my fire and sat at accounts till six in the morning - then an hour looking over my drawers 

[chattingwiththelightkeeper]

A Few Lifestyle Thoughts, The I Love The 80’s Version

There are two lifestyle phrases that thankfully I do not see often here on other lifestyle sites but they are all over FetLife like the hair on Chewbacca’s face and they drive me a bit bonkers. These two labels I believe started with the best of intentions, but sometimes the best intentions go Wham! causing a person to say A-Ha these have ended up in some Dire Straits.

The first label is “under protection” and in the beginning when God created the earth and internet, I think there was well-meaning behind this label but a good notion does not always lead to good results. The good intention is that a supposedly knowledgeable dominant will serve as a gatekeeper for a newer submissive and protect them from all those hungry wolves looking for fresh meat but Tiffany is not too busy singing in shopping malls that she needs a secretary to manage her contacts. So that means Tiffany is going to have to deal with dumbinants, f*ck boys, and all the other crappy people that hideout in the kinkasphere even if Sir Frankie Going To Hollywood is playing a gatekeeper role. What I believe Sir Frankie Going To Hollywood should be doing rather than answering Tiffany’s emails is relax, don’t do it, and introduce her to other good people like himself who could be mentors on her journey of self-discovery. The new submissive is an adult, making an adult lifestyle choice, and experienced people need to be there to mentor, teach, and offer advice but we still have to let those who are new do their thing. Does that mean Tiffany may become burned by an idiot, sadly yes it does and playing secretary is not going to stop mistakes/life lessons. One of the parts of adulating that completely sucks is that when life gives a surprise quiz because we no longer just receive a poor grade with the opportunity to do extra credit next week but a failure in the adult world is life’s way of teaching us important life lessons. No matter how much we want to help others avoid the same mistakes we have made in our pasts, some people will always ‘insist’ on learning that same lessons the hard way.

The other part of this is based on my conversations with submissives who were or are “under protection”. I sadly discovered that the majority of their ‘protectors’ started their interactions as a suitor for the submissive. When Sir Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s amorous advances, fueled by dreams of Tiffany crooning “I think we are alone now, there doesn’t seem to be anyone around” were rejected, he changes his approach and switches to the noble-sounding “let me protect you” but truly sounding like a mall cop. Countless people are protecting others by requiring people to fill out applications, undergo an interview process, or crazy hoops to jam through (up for a game of One On One? I call dibs on Dr. J) in cyberspace so that they can keep everyone away from their “precious”. While being a protector may have been started with noble intent I feel it is time to stop the silly protection gig and be a mentor. Teach, share and point a new submissive to positive people including submissives, not just your dominant bandmates, so the submissive can build mentoring friendships to learn and grow from. Although a submissive rejected a d-type, it does not give that dominant an opening to play ‘mall cop’ and approve or deny conversation, friendship or anything on behalf of that person but the submissive themselves. Remember, they are an adult, in an adult world and just because you are not going to be their Daddy does not mean you can play parent by trying to control who they have contact with.

The other term that makes me facepalm is when a submissive says “I am under consideration” by Daddy Devo. I believe that Daddy Devo and Babygirl Bangles are both lucky if they have found each other in the ‘p’ filled ‘ool’ of lifestyle dating. Now it would not grind my gears if both Daddy Devo and Babygirl Bangles said they were “under consideration” to each other but it is one of those old D/S dogmas that make it appear that Babygirl Bangles is privileged for Daddy Devo’s attention and affections. I simply wish both would simply say “we are dating” or simply both express they are considering each other which shows their mutual interest while politely saying bugger off to anyone else because Daddy Devo will only whip it for Babygirl Bangles and she only walks like an Egyptian for Daddy Devo. I think it is just time we put this old saying to bed because no matter how long the duet lasts, during that performance both dominant and submissive are equally as honored to have each other and the d-type is not more important than their s-type.

Thanks for listening to what was stuck in my gears today and after writing this I think I might need to wander off to watch I Love the 80’s.

As with all of my writings, please see this disclaimer.

©TLK2021

[magpiemorality]

Bring It On, Moceit/Moremus, 5/5

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5  AO3

We’re here; the final part. The happy ending, hopefully… 

Huge thanks to @littlestr​ for the original prompts! And thank you all for following along with this fun weekend jaunt, I have come to adore these boys and they’ve outgrown the little prompt oneshot they were supposed to exist in, constantly yelling at me for more attention until now we’re here. There’s even art HERE by @sometimeswritingsometimesdying go look at it!!!! 

Without further ado; please enjoy.

Warnings: dismissal of polyamory (character doesn’t believe it’s real/feasible), swearing 

Patton Sanders was the prettiest boy in the whole college...

***

Patton Sanders was the prettiest boy in the whole college. He wasn’t being vain or anything; there had once been an online poll on the college gossip blog and he’d won hands down. It was just fact at this point. 

He was also currently (in his own internal poll) the saddest. Everything had been going so great (shut up Remy it had) and then it had taken a turn towards the endgame and then- 

Well, what had happened with Remus? Patton still wasn’t sure, and Remus was ignoring his texts so he had no clues to go on apart from the fact that one minute the boy was giving him some very upmarket salmon filets and pulling off a classing hair-behind-the-ear move that would have possibly even led to a kiss- and then nothing. Remus had suddenly… changed his mind? He’d freaked out for some reason anyway, and had just run off. 

Since then nothing, nada, total radio silence (yeah so it had only been two days so what Remy shh) and Patton was falling into despair. There had to have been a vital signal he’d missed somewhere that would have turned the whole thing around. 

Maybe the fish was a clue? 

He and Remy had spent a full evening poring over the fish. Was it a secret message? Symbolic in some way? Was there something written on it? Patton had drawn the line at trying to open it up and check the inside because he still very much wanted to save it to cook for Remus some day, so it had been rehomed in the freezer after a careful perusal of storage methods on Google. 

And there was a whole other problem now too- Dex was avoiding him. Over text, on campus, in the cafe; everywhere Patton could think of to try and run into his second paramour turned out to be a bust, and the only way (again, two days was ages Remy don’t be a bitch) he could have avoided even accidentally bumping into Dex for that long was if the other boy was actively staying away. 

Those texts went unanswered too. 

(Remy was starting to lose patience.)

“But I just don’t-”

“Oh my god gurl please don’t finish that sentence!” Patton’s very best friend and emotional support gay snapped, slamming his Starbucks cup down on the table (situated outside the cafe, so they could be seen by as many people as possible, of course). “I literally can not with you.”

Patton’s nose wrinkled. “My tutor Logan says we shouldn’t say literally when it’s not grammatically accurate.” 

“Your tutor Logan can literally suck my dick. No seriously; he’s hot, get me his number and I will consider literally forgiving you.” 

“But-”

“Baby, sugarplum, Patty-cake- for the love of all things caffeine; just take a chill pill okay? Boys will come and go in your life and if they’re worth anything at all then they’ll be back. Besides, they’re probably just duking it out over you somewhere. Maybe shirtless. Maybe there’s baby oil…” Remy trailed off with unfocused eyes, sipping his drink absently and Patton sighed, because even that nice (very nice, saved for later) image not enough to dispel his melancholy. 

He checked his phone again for the millionth time that day. Spring break was coming up and the cheer squad Whatsapp was going wild with anticipation, but Patton wasn’t in the mood. He’d foolishly hoped that one of his handsome men was going to sweep him off his feet and away to somewhere spectacular for the holiday, but that hope had tanked dramatically in light of recent developments. Normally that would’ve just made him shift his hopes towards prom, but it wasn’t enough of a big deal as it had always been in high school, and it was really more of a friends’ night out situation. Not the sort of time to be expecting big dramatic declarations of love, you know or whatever. 

No, the universe seemed to be spelling out ‘Patton Sanders is going to die alone’ pretty hard, even if Remy wasn’t in agreement. 

“Who are you texting, anyway?” Patton asked, picking at his nail polish with a pout. “Let me at least live vicariously through you until I waste away, a tragic damsel whose beauty was lost to time…" 

Remy looked up, talking around the straw in his mouth. “Jesus you’ve got it bad. And it’s none of your business, P, I’ll tell you when you aren’t moping.” The way Patton visibly and genuinely sagged seemed to revive Remy’s best friend sympathy instincts, because he quickly finished his drink, took Patton by the hands and pulled him up. “Come on cupcake, it’s the weekend and we’re going shopping. Because no matter what happens with your boys- it’s nearly Spring Break and we are gonna look hot to trot!” 

And who was Patton to disagree with such flawless logic? 

***

Maybe there was something to be said for the mystical powers of retail therapy, because when Patton flopped down on his bed that evening there was a text notification from a blocked number on his phone that made his heart beat wildly. 

It contained an invitation, to meet the following weekend at a destination that would be sent in a future text, and it was signed ‘from your not-so-secret admirer’. 

The week went by horribly slowly. Even practice seemed to drag, and yet… 

Suddenly Dex was meeting him every day with his tea again, no word of explanation but a soft smirk always hovering around his lips, lighting up his usually serious face. 

Suddenly Remus was watching and winking at him from across the gym- not approaching this time round but offering little shy waves and offering help when he could, putting away the gym equipment or offering a protein bar on the way out just as Patton’s stomach started to rumble. 

Something was up, and Patton’s head was in a spin, but it was oddly perfect. 

Even Remy couldn’t believe the change. 

“You’re totally one hundred percent sure they’re not on drugs?” Patton shot him a look. “Okay just double checking. Joined a cult? Kidnapped by aliens and replaced by pod people? Serial killers planning on luring you in an-”

“God, Remy, no!” He hit his friend with his pillow, laughing at the offended noises Remy made before he joined Patton in giggling on the bed. “No I think they just… sorted something out. It’s weird though, right? Like there’s something weird happening? Not bad weird, but…”

Remy mirrored his shrug. “You’ll have to wait and see what happens with your ‘not so secret admirer’,” he said, singing the name. “Do you have any clue which one of them it is?” 

“Well no. But surely it’s Dex? I mean, he’s Dexter, he can sort out a blocked number. It’s… Remus is a total carebear but he’s not exactly James Bond, you know? It’s got to be Dex. But he’d just out and say it, I know he would, so I don’t- I can’t be sure. Remus is the dramatic one…” Round and round in circles they went but never came any closer to solving the puzzle. 

Friday came and went and at long last it was time to head out for the grand reveal. Remy had helped him get dressed (cute but weather appropriate and with good running shoes, just in case) and they were waiting in the living room for the address to come through. 

His phone buzzed. 

Once they’d stopped shrieking in excitement they googled and found the address was of the same cafe he’d spent so much time in with Dexter over Winter break, which- it was probably not a good thing that his heart had sunk over ruling out the possibility this was Remus all along, right? It had simultaneously skipped a beat at the confirmation that it was Dex, so… You win some, you lose some he supposed. 

Crunch time. 

He hurried along the streets- glad for the tiny size of their college town and for the lack of rain on the crisp February morning- and slipped into the cafe. Only to see not Dexter O’Reilly sat inside waiting for him, but- 

“Remus?!”

***

Let it be known that Remus Duke was not the prettiest boy in the whole college, far from it. Nor was he the most intelligent, nor the richest nor the most popular. However what Remus Duke had in spades was earnest charm. It was lethal in a one on one situation, and he made sparing use of it so as not to abuse his power. 

Let it also be known that Dexter O’Reilly was far from immune to said charm, especially when it was turned on him from a few feet across a brightly coloured, messy, but shockingly cosy room in a frat house on Greek Row. If Dexter was the Slytherin here then Remus was almost certainly the Hufflepuff who would drive said Slytherin to world domination. 

In this case, of course, world domination was replaced by Patton Sanders, and the prospect of getting to date him. The concept was the same though, and the intense level of detail required to get the plan exactly right was too. 

In fact, Dex had stayed way later that night than either of them had expected, as they’d plotted and planned and discussed various ways of making their dreams reality. What Remus lacked in book smarts, he made up for with an innate talent for asking exactly the right questions to fix any inefficiencies or problems before they ever arose, and you bet Dex had made a mental note of that for future reference. 

What neither of them had really considered, was the exact reaction Patton would have when he walked in the cafe door on Saturday morning to find not just Remus, but- 

***

“And Dex!” Patton’s eyes were big and round as they switched back and forth and back and forth between the two young men. He clutched his phone in his hand like a lifeline, wondering if this was going to turn out to be the worst day of his life so far, rather than the tentative best he’d pencilled it in as… 

“Hey,” Remus smiled hopefully at him, standing up and awkwardly trying to gesture Patton to his seat like a magician’s glamorous assistant or something. Patton took pity on him and did in fact sit, still mostly set to ????? and !!!!!! and only just managing to process what was happening. 

Opposite him, Dexter crossed one long leg over the other, and Remus perched on the edge of the third chair like he was physically restraining himself from getting up to go be closer to Patton. Which wasn’t entirely untrue, as it happened. 

“Guys, what’s going on?” Patton asked weakly, looking to Dex for guidance, but it was Remus who replied. 

“Well,” he started, twisting his hands around nervously. “We ended up having a bit of a chat, last week. I um, I- oh fuck what was I supposed to say?!” Dexter snorted softly and Remus pouted at him. “You’re no help, we said we’d do this together!” 

You could’ve knocked Patton over with a feather. His mouth actually fell open at the display of camraderie. Suddenly the serial killer theory had merit. 

“Patton. Through a convoluted set of circumstances we ended up discussing our possible futures… with you. It’s fairly clear you’re struggling to choose between the two of us, right?” He waited until Patton nodded slowly. “So we thought… why choose?” 

“My brother Roman told me about this class he took last semester see, about like, changing identities or something. People, basically, and he heard about all these different things they never taught us in school! And one of them was-”

“Wait,” Patton interjected, holding a hand out because he was ninety percent sure he knew where this was going, but- “That’s real? Having… sharing partners is real? It actually works?” 

“Hey how’d you know what I was going to s-”

“Yes, darling, yes to all of that. If the people involved are honest and open and willing to work on it,” Dexter interrupted, smiling at Patton. Remus was also looking at him, nearly bouncing in his seat with excitement, overflowing with energy like always. Gosh Patton loved his energy, his enthusiasm for life, his potential, ahem, stamina… 

He turned back to Dex, only to be filled with warmth at the look he was getting, because he loved the way Dex gave him special smiles he gave no one else. He loved his soft, clever words, and his gentleness. 

Oh. 

“Oh.” There was quiet for a moment before the two hopefuls shared a concerned glance. 

“Patton?” Dexter prompted. “Is that… a good ‘oh’ or a bad one? We uh, we know it’s kinda not what you were expecting, probably?”

“And you can take your time to think about it!”

“Thank you Remus, yes. You can take your time, darling. But we would like to try this with you. However you like. And if we want to change things down the road… we can talk about that too.”

Patton was the prettiest boy in the whole college. Seemed like today he was the luckiest, too. “Yes!” He shouted, leaping out of his seat to grab them both in a hug, dragging them together forcefully. “Oh gosh, goodness, yes, that sounds perfect!” He gave them each a kiss on the nearest cheek and sat back down, cheeks red but smile bright, holding his hands out for them to take one each. 

“This is going to be so cool!” Remus crowed, and Dex chuckled softly at his exuberance, squeezing Patton’s fingers, his eyes betraying his own quiet excitement.

Yeah, Patton thought. It really was. 

--

Bonus 1 | Bonus 2 | Bonus 3 | Bonus 4

#moceit #moremus #intruality #moceitmus #intrumoceit #polyamory #polyamory negotiations #ts patton #ts remus #ts deceit #ts writing #ts sanders sides #ts sanders sides aus #ts sanders sides fic #sanders sides #sanders sides fic #writepie #bring it on au #what's this a completed work?! #patton sanders #remus sanders #deceit sanders #patton/deceit #patton/remus #deceit/patton #remus/patton #patton x remus #patton x deceit #deceit x patton #remus x patton

[theshatteredrose]

Relic Keepers: Awakening of the Red Lily (Chapter 24) - Original Fiction

AN: Another somewhat long chapter, but I hope its intriguing nevertheless. So, enjoy~

Also minor warning; I use italics a lot in this chapter to signify a guided meditation.

Ao3 | Wattpad | Inkitt | FictionPress

~*~*~*~*~

Chapter 24:

Eishirou sat next to Zayne and across from Misaki at the cafeteria table. With them sat Lyvia and Rinka. Surprisingly, Leon and Ernesta had chosen to join them for lunch. Tatsu, however, declined. He didn’t say as much, he just shook his head and walked off in the opposite direction.

Leon took a seat next to Zayne while Ernesta chose to sit with the two girls on the opposite side of the table. She seemed honestly amused by Lyvia’s attempt to pull Rinka into a conversation. She, however, spoke so much that she didn’t really give Rinka a chance to speak. Though, it seemed to have been done on purpose as Rinka was content to listen rather than speak.

Ernesta had to leave shortly after in order to speak with Sigmund about something. Likely what occurred during that battle match earlier.

Eishirou had noticed a few puzzled looks from the other occupants of the catering hall. But he was beginning to learn to ignore the stares. They weren’t doing any harm. They were just sitting and eating together. That shouldn’t be a cause of concern or confusion.

“Eishirou, do you have your tablet?” Lyvia suddenly asked.

“Yeah?”

“Can you check to see if Little Kitten Café is open yet?” she requested.

Eishirou pulled out his tablet from his bag and tapped at the screen to pull up the local news, promptly finding the subject requested. “Ah, there’s going to be a Grand Opening tomorrow.”

“Yes!” Lyvia cheered. “Can’t wait. It’s going to have kittens available to pet. I love kittens so much. Do you like kittens?” she directed that last question toward the Elite next to her.

Rinka nodded her head. “I like rabbits more, though,” she shyly revealed.

“Oh, wouldn’t a bunny café be adorable?” Lyvia began to prattle.

As Eishirou set his tablet down onto the table, Leon unexpectedly motioned a hand toward it. “What kind of information can you reach through that?”

The question was unexpected. “Pretty much everything, though it depends on connection. Here in the academy, however, I have access to whatever information I require; I just need to know what it is that I want to know about,” Eishirou answered.

“Huh,” Leon appeared mildly impressed. “So, you can find out how Mikiel is doing?”

“Let’s see.” Eishirou returned his attention to his tablet, quickly tapping at the screen. “I can’t fully access his medical records. It’s kinda unethical, anyway. But I can get information on his status.”

As a medic he had authority to enter the medical archives, though he couldn’t pull up an entire medical record. That could only be reached through the security of Communications. He found Mikiel through his patient number and looked up the latest medical notes. They alone should be able to tell him the status that Mikiel was currently in.

“Hmm. He’s still unconscious, unfortunately,” Eishirou answered as he scanned through the notes. “But he’s stable. His brain activity has been steady increasing. Though minor, it’s still an improvement.”

A subtle frown tugged at Leon’s lips. “I see.”

Eishirou cleared his tablet and switched it off. “I’ll be sure to let you know if anything else happens.”

“Yeah, ok,” Leon said simply in response.

“I don’t suppose you guys know anything about those missing Elites?” Eishirou asked as he folded his arms atop of the table and leaned forward.

“Nah, not a thing,” Leon replied, sounding subtly frustrated. “They don’t tell us anything.”

“Veteran Elites are involved, so that might be a reason,” Misaki added.

Leon perked up, confusion on his face. “Veterans? How long have they been involved?”

“Three days now.”

“Huh.” Leon appeared genuinely surprised as he turned toward Zayne. “That’s probably the reason why Sigmund has been pushing us so hard.”

Zayne nodded his head, a light frown on his lips, also. “Yeah, probably. Losing two teams is bit of a big deal.”

It was highly likely that the veterans, and perhaps the administrators of the academy, were keeping quiet about the whole situation. While Eishirou and his fellow Chroniclers were able to access a lot of recorded information, there was still a small section that was off-limits to students like him.

A buzzing of his communicator pulled Eishirou from his thoughts. He reached into his bag and it out. He flicked it on and noted the name on the screen. A pout soon made its way to his lips.

“I’m not talking to you,” he said as he answered the call.

Jacob laughed at the response. “Oh, come now, I was just teasing. Besides, I have good news; Professor Jairus wishes to see you this afternoon.”

Eishirou sat up straight. “What, really?”

“Yes, really,” Jacob returned. “He wants to see you in his office after lunch. Block M, room 105. I’ll meet you there, so be sure to get there on time.”

“Right, I’ll see you soon,” Eishirou replied before he bid goodbye and ended the call.

He wasn’t expecting to visit Professor Jairus so soon. He was a mixture of nervousness and excitement. He hoped that he would be able to help him to pull a recording or two from the Red Lily.

“Professor Jairus?” Zayne asked him.

Eishirou set his communicator atop of his tablet. “He’s specialises in meditation and mana manifestation. Jacob seems to think it’ll be useful in the study of the relic.”

“How is that going?”

“Slow,” Eishirou sighed and reached down to pick up his bag to place it on his lap. “I can’t get a recording from the relic. That’s why Jacob recommended I speak with Professor Jairus.”

Especially since he wouldn’t be heading back to Flutterlight Forest for a while.

“How long will it be?”

“Dunno.”

Zayne lifted his arms over his head and stretched. “Ah, that means I’ll need to figure out what I’m going to do for the rest of the day.”

As Eishirou slipped his tablet and communicator into his back he remembered a previous conversation he had with Zayne. Elites didn’t have hobbies or interests outside of fighting and battling. What did Elites do in their free time if they didn’t have to fight?

“You can come with me, if you want?” he suggested.

“Sure,” Zayne replied immediately, indicating that he was thankful for the suggestion. He placed his hands on the table and pushed himself to his feet. Him doing so prompted the others at their table to take the incentive to move along, too.

“Hey, Rinka, want to go shopping with me?” Lyvia suddenly requested as she sent the other young woman a smile.

Rinka turned to look at him in open surprise. “H-huh? Really?”

“Sure, it should be fun!”

Rinka was unsure on how to respond at first. She meekly turned to Zayne to seek guidance from him.

Zayne nodded. “Go ahead.”

A light flush made its way to Rinka’s cheeks as she turned back to Lyvia. “Kay,” she replied simply.

“Great!” Lyvia cheerfully took Rinka’s by the wrist and began to pull her along with her, prattling mindlessly as they moved out of sight and hearing.

Seeing the two leave prompted Eishirou to glance over at Misaki and then Leon, noting the two looked as though they were feeling left out. They were essentially pairing off, after all.

“Hey, Leon; why not visit Mikiel at the infirmary?” Eishirou suggested as he draped the strap of his bag over his shoulder. “Maybe someone familiar will offer him some comfort?”

Leon awkwardly scratched the back of his head. “Ah, I don’t know.”

“I can show you the way,” Misaki offered.

“No, I meant-” Leon started but paused when Zayne kicked the back of his leg lightly. He glanced over at his teammate, his brow furrowed. Zayne, however, simply shrugged. “Ah, all right,” he finally relented.

“Catch you guys later,” Zayne said simply as he moved to leave, prompting Eishirou to walk with him.

Witnessing the short and silent exchange between Zayne and Leon prompted Eishirou to wonder whether Zayne had suggested to his teammates to give mixing with Passives a try.

“Nice to see others mingling,” Zayne commented idly as they stepped out of the catering hall and into the gardens outside.

“It is.” Eishirou smiled and folded his arms behind his back as he regarded Zayne. “I know you forgot your mana cartage on purpose.”

Zayne didn’t reply nor look at him. He did smile, however.

“I don’t mind,” Eishirou continued. “It was nice, seeing the other side of the academy. There’s always been a huge divide between Passives and Elites. Been like that for as long as I can remember. Chroniclers are weak paper-pushers, and the bottom of the Academy Hierarchy. But Medics are off-limits. So, what happens when you’re both?”

Zayne snorted. “The Academy Hierarchy is stupid.”

Eishirou uttered a short laugh. “Right?”

“Anyway, have you worked with this professor before?” Zayne asked as they headed down the path that would take them to Block M.

Eishirou shook his head. “No, first time. I have no idea what to expect, to be honest.”

They both fell silent as they entered the inner halls of the study block. Eishirou himself hadn’t frequented this part of the academy often, so he wasn’t entirely confident in where they were to head to, first.

Thankfully, Jacob was already there waiting for them. He unexpectedly had a briefcase with him, though Eishirou didn’t think too much about it as he and Zayne approached.

“Ah, there you are,” Jacob said as a form of greeting. However, a telling smile soon made its way onto his lips. “With Zayne, nonetheless.”

Eishirou felt his features heat up and he tried to scowl. “Don’t say anything.”

Jacob uttered a short laugh before he held his hands up in front of him. “I’ll be good,” he promised in a teasing tone. “Nevertheless, you’ve arrived just in time. Let’s get going.”

He bent down to pick up the briefcase by his feet and turned to lead the way. They moved through a steady throng of students as they turned down a couple of hallways. Finally, they reached a room that had the name of Professor Jairus on a plaque upon the wall next to the ajar door.

Jacob raised a hand and knocked once upon the door before he pushed open the door. Essentially letting himself in. “Jairus, hope you don’t mind us turning up a bit early.”

Eishirou stepped into the room at Jacob’s heels. He paused just inside the room, however, and waited by with Zayne.

“Not at all, Jacob.”

A man who appeared to be in his late thirties with short, professionally kept black hair and bright sky-blue eyes behind a set of silver glasses greeted Jacob warmly. He leaned back from his desk and seemed to press a button on the arm of his chair. He then rolled out from behind his desk, revealing that he was indeed in an electronic wheelchair.

“Ah, you must be Eishirou,” the professor stated as he turned his gaze in his direction. “I’ve heard much about you.”

Nothing embarrassing, he hoped.

“Nice to meet you,” Eishirou returned politely.

“I see you’ve brought support with you.”

“This is Zayne,” Eishirou introduced, Zayne nodding his head simply in greeting. “He’s a friend.”

Jairus simply smiled. “I see. Well, welcome to you. Shall we get straight down to business? Today, I would like to walk you through a controlled meditation. Professor Chryses?”

Jacob lifted the briefcase and patted it with his hand. “Here.” He placed it upon Jairus’s desk and snapped it open. Nestled securely in conforming form sat a very familiar relic.

“The Red Lily?” Eishirou questioned, confusion evident.

“By my request,” Jairus explained. “In order to strengthen your recovery abilities, we need to work with the relic itself. Now, before that, I need you to elect an anchor.”

Eishirou blinked. “Anchor?”

“Someone who will be able to quickly awaken you from your meditation.”

“Ah, well-”

“Zayne should,” Jacob interrupted. “I’ll be happy with observing for now.”

“Sure,” Zayne answered before Eishirou had the chance to respond.

Jairus nodded his head, satisfied and wishing to move on. “Very well. Now, Eishirou; take the Red Lily in your hands and move toward the couch.”

Eishirou handed his shoulder bag to Jacob and moved toward the briefcase. He carefully lifted the Red Lily and cupped it with his hands. It felt slightly warm, though that was likely due to it being kept secure in the brief case. With the relic in his hands, he turned to move toward the couch that was located in a corner of the room. It appeared to be made of leather with pillows stacked at one end.

“Now, lie down and keep the relic close to your chest.”

Eishirou sat down on the edge before he scooted back and turned to lie down. He clutched the Red Lily in one hand as he used his other as leverage to get himself comfortable against the pillows.

“Close your eyes. Zayne, stay close. But do not touch Eishirou until I tell you.”

“Ok.”

Eishirou did as he was told. He heard footsteps and felt Zayne’s presence paused next to the couch, which was actually quite comforting.

“Now, focus in on my voice.”

Eishirou settled himself against the pillows and stared at the blackness behind his closed eyes.

“I want you to envision yourself in a white room with your third eye. There is nothing in this room. Just white walls.”

Within his mind’s eye, Eishirou opened his spiritual eyes. He found himself in the middle of a simple room. Four walls. No source of light. Just white.

“Now, look to your left. What do you see?”

He turned his head to the side. All that he could see was a single door.

“Good. Move toward the door. Open it.”

Eishirou crossed the room in three strides and stood before the door. He rested his hand on the golden door handle and hesitated for a moment. He wasn’t sure why, to be honest. He just felt as though it wasn’t, well, time for him to open this door yet.

He pushed that hesitancy aside, however, and slowly turned the handle. The door popped open and he slowly pulled the door before him as he peeked through to the other side.

“What do you see?”

Green. The vibrant, lush greenery of the Flutterlight Forest.

“Step through the door and into nature. Do you see anything else?”

Eishirou looked around him quickly. Did a three-sixty. The door to the room he stepped out of had disappeared. In its place was a tall white building.

Oh, it was the tower!

But…it looked different.

“How does it look different?”

It didn’t look as old. The white facade of the stone was vibrant and flawless. There was no moss, nor were there any vines coiling along the outside. Even the foliage around the structure looked different. It wasn’t as dense or wild as he had previous seen of the lighthouse.

“Does it have a door?”

Eishirou looked. Yeah, it did. It was wide open. No puzzle to be seen.

“Walk through the door.”

Eishirou crossed over the stone path that led to the tower. He hesitated as he approached the archway, once again feeling that sense that he wasn’t supposed to be there. Not yet. It was too early.

Once again, he pushed that aside and stepped through the archway.

“What do you see?”

The interior of the tower. Simple, pristine. Barely any furniture. Only the staircase was seen. And it, too, didn’t appear old. But new. A year or two old at the least.

“Walk up the stairs.”

Eishirou raised his eyes to the ceiling, noting that there was a circular opening at the very top. The same as he had witnessed with the tower not too long ago. He ascended the stairs, noting that he could hear a sound of some kind.

“What kind of noise?”

…Humming? No, someone lightly singing. It was almost familiar. It grew louder as he reached the top step.

“What do you see?”

There was…already someone else there. Before a window. An opening where the stained glass was.

Long white hair, a gentle face, and gentle brown eyes. That man...he looked similar to the underground mosaic and the one found within the tower. Though, his skin was a deep brown. He held a regal air to him. His posture, his presence; he was someone of great importance.

And resting upon his brow, nestled within a golden crown, sat the Red Lily. Bright and vivid against the long, flowing white hair.

Eishirou was unable to prevent a small gasp from passing his lips when the regal, almost ethereal man turned his head. And looked directly at him.

"Radiant Soul."

That voice! That was the voice he heard from the Red Lily. It was exactly the same.

"The time is not favourable," he said as he raised a hand toward him and brushed his fingertips against his brow. "This tower, once of protection, is now out of alignment. For now, leave this place be. You are too vulnerable. Strengthen your connection and learn the role of a Keeper."

Eishirou suddenly felt as though he was falling backwards only for something to suddenly grasp his shoulder. He snapped his eyes open with a start. Instead of the lush greenery of the Flutterlight Forest, he stared up at a plain beige ceiling.

"Easy now," a vaguely familiar voice stated. "Take slow breaths."

With the lingering feeling of warmth against his forehead, Eishirou began to remember what he had been doing. In his hand sat the Red Lily, the red crystals as vivid as ever.

That voice...who was that man? He looked similar to the underground mosaic and the stained-glass of the tower. Was he the residual energy stored within the relic or was he some form of entity that lived inside the red lily?

"Eishirou."

Promptly realizing that he wasn't alone in the room, Eishirou finally raised his gaze. He quickly glanced to his left where Zayne was crouched next to him. His hand rested on his shoulder. The very shoulder he felt something grasp to stop him from falling just moments ago.

"I'm fine," he instinctively stated. "I was just startled."

"What did you see?" Jairus asked him. "I lost communication with you for a moment."

Eishirou closed his eyes for a moment to gather himself. "I saw a man who looked like the one in the mosaics. And his voice was the same I heard from the Red Lily."

"What did he say?"

"He said something about me being too vulnerable and to learn the role of a Keeper," Eishirou explained as he opened his eyes.

Jairus tilted his head questioningly to the side. "Keeper?"

Eishirou shook his head. "I don't know what that means."

"I might," Jacob unexpectedly revealed.

Eishirou immediately looked over at him in surprise. "What? Where?"

Jacob folded an arm across his chest as he stroked his chin thoughtfully with his other hand. "Within Irwin's own research he had encountered the word "Keeper" several times. It appears to indicate a social role of importance. Like that of a priest or holy man. Something similar."

Well, the man he encountered definitely held a role of importance.

"I'll speak with Irwin about it further," Jacob confirmed, though also promptly ending that line of conversation. “Moving on, it seems that this session was a success. We have other avenues to explore.”

“Indeed,” Jairus nodded his head and leaned back in his wheelchair. “Truth be told, I was not expecting to progress this quickly. It appears that you have the significant mana to connect with this Red Lily. However, it appears to have a sentient being present. And it is that which is preventing you from reaching recordings.”

“Sentient being?” Eishirou repeated before realisation struck him. “You mean it has a consciousness?”

Jairus nodded his head as he rested his elbows on the arms of his wheelchair. “It may be residual, but yes, that is correct. I would like to work with you further on this project. But not today. It seems that this relic has conditions to be met before it will become active.”

“Let’s return it to the museum for now,” Jacob stated as he crossed the room to retrieve the Red Lily from Eishirou’s grasp. He then gave him a purely patently scowl. “And you, I think you should have the rest of the afternoon off.”

Eishirou wanted to argue that he was fine, but in all honesty, he did feel a little bit dizzy. Likely overwhelmed from the experienced he just had. “Ah, alright.”

Jacob nodded his head, satisfied with that response before he turned to look toward Zayne. A half-smile suddenly appeared on his lips. “And I trust Zayne to escort you back to your room, hm?”

#original fiction #young adult #scifi fantasy #mystery #relic keepers: awakening of the red lily

[soorajradha]

Week 2: Blog

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud” To what extent would you agree with this?

One must understand that this quote was assumed in the 1970’s. The Business dynamics have transformed a lot since the 1970’s, and the way business is done is very much different to 50 years ago.    

This quote was certainly very applicable to that time but now big businesses can’t afford to be unreliable, as big businesses are affecting society and the planet as a whole and therefore needs to give back to the community to be sustainable in every way.

When evaluating a companies’ policy we need to deem a company's corporate social performance. Not just about the economic responsibility of a company to make a profit , or the legal obligations to obey the law. It is also about the Ethical responsibility of doing what is right and avoid harm to others.

Finally there is the discretionary responsibility. This is to contribute to the community and give back to society and be philanthropic in running a business organization.

“The Coca-Cola Company expects to replenish all the water it uses to make its beverages by the end of 2015, five years ahead of its scheduled goal.” (Moodie, 2020)

The statement above shows that Coca-Cola is doing its part in its CSR.

“The company has also launched 209 community water projects in 61 countries, casing matters like improving access to safe drinking water and protecting watersheds. It has affiliated with more than half a dozen aid and development organizations, including the United States Agency for International Development, the United Nations Development Program and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, to help meet its goals.” (Moodie, 2020)

The Cocal-Cola company has taken their CSR very seriously. This can be seen in the statement above.

“Last year, the company used about 305bn liters of water to produce about 163bn liters of beverages sold globally. Based on last year’s sales volume, the company said it had replaced 94% of the water used in its products.”(Moodie, 2020)

Coca-Cola was forced to comply with many regulations. As they were tainted to be the most pollutants of companies in 2019. Coca-Cola has been named the worst company for plastic pollution for the second year running by an environmental pressure group.

This is not the sort of publicity that Coca-Cola need and therefore to mitigate these issues they were almost forced into their CSR work.

Ethics operate at a number of different levels. The macro level is to do with the national and international levels.

Next is the corporate level, this is mainly to do with Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and finally the individual level.

Ethics is about reflecting upon what is right and what is wrong. And CSR is about meeting and exceeding normative and legal standards.

In the 21st century we need to comprehend the concept of the triple bottom line. This includes People, Planet and Profit. This is about doing business with not just the profit in mind, but having consideration for the planet and an organizations stakeholders.

Looking at approaches to ethics, Normative approaches advocate if business practices are right or wrong, inside the rules of the organization, in regard to the cultural norms, and are operating with codes of conduct. This is considering if they are ethical to begin with. Arguably this is not always the case.  

Subsequently the descriptive approach shows what ought to happen versus what actually does happen in reality and scientific perspective.

Another question which arises is are Ethics relative or absolute? Is it possible to say categorically if something is the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do.

Ethical practices can provide a competitive advantage. Company's such as The Body shop and Lush which are cosmetic brands that pursue to only use natural products without animal testing.

The statement below shows the company ethics of Body Shop.

“The Body Shop, along with Cruelty Free International, has been advocating for change for so long (since 1989, in fact) that many people assume that cosmetic animal testing is a thing of the past.” (Muxworthy, 2020)

There’s a strong customer loyalty with brands like Body Shop and Lush as people nowadays are more conscious consumers.

The paragraph below shows the ethics of cosmetic company Lush.

“As part of our fighting animal testing campaign – allowed a performance artist to represent animal testing for the cosmetics industry in our shop window. The images were brutal, yet the representation is a fraction of the horror that occurs behind the closed doors of laboratories across the world. It was also aperformance – at any moment Jacqui could communicate with us or walk out.”(Omond, 2020)

Critics however argue weather business philanthropy is just a clever marketing ploy so a business is seen as if they are always concerned but in reality is just trying to do the very minimum to adhere to basic regulations to make even more profit and gain customer loyalty.

Another school of thought is that the ethics of a business is the concern of the individual and not the business. If a certain individual, with authority in an organization is corrupt, this generally carries on similar to a knock on effect. Because to carry out his/her corrupt behavior, the employees under him will also have to become corrupt in order to accommodate their demands. Ethics resides solely within the free-will of the individual. Organizations are ethically questionable and it’s up to the individual to make sense of and practice ethics.

Individual factors such as personal value systems  and beliefs need to be recognized. When looking at the organization, the power distribution, incentives and rewards need to be identified.

In 1986 Trevino put this into an Ethical decision making model. It is a complex process. The Ethical dilemma depends with the cognitive moral development of the person working in the organization. Alongside that we have the Individual moderators the locus of control, the field dependence and the ego strength of that individual. Moderated by the situation and the organizational culture. All of these will affect the ethical behavior of the individual. They can also be moderated by the situation and moderated by the organizational culture.

The interaction of all these individual and situational moderators will  determine whether behavior is likely to be ethical or unethical.

When thinking about the stages of moral development, Kohlberg’s model is a good paradigm to understand.

It goes from childhood, which is pre-conventional which is level 1. This is where one values external events. One avoids personal punishment and obtains personal rewards. Level 2 is conventional, where one performs the correct roles. When we get a little older, we are socialized into what is acceptable and what is not acceptable, by meeting expectations of others, fulfilling duties and upholding laws.

Level 3 is Postconventional. This is where one has shared duties and standards. One will come across a sense of democracy and relativity of rules.

There are consequences of moral reasoning on leadership. Leaders with higher moral reasoning exhibited more transformational leadership behaviors. They Care about meanings and long term development. There are significant differences between leaders with different moral reasoning on their transformational leadership behaviors.

There are many quandaries in Managing People. People management also needs to be exposed to ethical scrutiny.

Questions of ethics arise from the Human Resource Management (HRM), particularly from the hard dimension of HRM which gives pre-eminence to the business over respect for the employee.

Flexible firm model recognizes diverse categories of workers-should not the ethical employer be giving equal thought to the employment standards of all workers? Largely flexibility is often a risk for job security, especially if there’s no agreement. They can hire and fire as employers like and it meets the businesses demands.

Pressure to ‘do more with less’ escalates anxiety levels. Pressure to work harder and for longer may be dysfunctional as efficiency can decrease in proportion to the number of working hours, actually increasing overall costs. Work pressure combined with job uncertainty can lessen the employee’s authority to fulfil family, community or societal responsibilities.

Transformations of bureaucracies to more entrepreneurial organizations, might lead to increased mistrust, loyalty and mutual obligations. Bureaucracies preserve certain ‘ethical dignities’ lost in market arrangements. Bureaucracy requires a structure outside personal aspirations, needs, and hopes.

Critics argue whether organizations can ever really be ethical because there is a certain Paradox. Is it ever ethical to consider profit ahead of ethics?

The 3 P’s are most imperative when doing business. This the People, the Planet and Profit.

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