#the blue hydrangea’s return

[hazelmead]

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[ellecdc]

Come Back, Be Here (finale)

Sirius Black x fem!reader - First Wizarding War Order of the Phoenix - 5.7k

p1 // p2 // p3 // p4 // p5 // p6 // p7 // p8

CW: mentions of past abuse/torture, amnesia, hurt/comfort, fluff, use of Y/N

A/N: Holy. Friggen. Crap. WHAT A RIDE! Thank you all so much for enjoying this story with me - it has truly felt like the most niche book club and I have had so much fun chatting with you all. Feel free to send in requests for these lovely characters in the CBBH universe - I'd love to continue playing with them! xx

Lily and James Potter returned to 12 Grimmauld place on the 3rd of November – Sirius’ birthday. There were long hugs, a lot of tears and soft dinner conversation, but there would be no gifts or raucous celebrating. 

Regulus Black was arrested at Malfoy Manor as a marked Death Eater, but with the backing of James, Sirius and Dumbledore, the Ministry allowed Regulus to be placed on house arrest, confiscating his wand whilst he awaited trial. Dumbledore assured the group that because of Regulus’ defection, his support of the Order, and the memories that Dumbledore, you, and those who were present on October 31st provided the Ministry, Regulus would likely be acquitted of his charges, or at the very least receive a lighter sentence. 

Tom Riddle was quickly charged with treason, tyranny, countless charges of the use of unforgiveables, countless charges of leading or causing the death of wizards, witches, and muggles, countless charges of torture and brutality, eliciting fear and chaos, and illegal use of Dark Magic. He was sentenced to the Dementor’s Kiss and the act was carried out on the 5th of November. 

Peter Pettigrew did indeed receive a fair trial for his role in the Wizarding War. He was questioned under Veritaserum, and it was found that he was guilty of treason, using unforgiveables, contributing to the fear and chaos of a treasonous leader, the use of Dark Magic, and sexual assault and brutality. He was sentenced to life in Azkaban.

Lucius Malfoy came looking for his son and was thus arrested by the Department of Magical Law Enforcement on the charge of being a marked Death Eater. He was questioned under Veritaserum which proved Lucius was guilty of harboring dangerous criminals, using unforgiveables, contributing to the fear and chaos of a treasonous leader, and the use of Dark Magic. He was sentenced to life in Azkaban. His property and vault at Gringott’s were seized by the Ministry and, after taking what was owed for reparations, was placed into his son’s name. 

The Ministry respected Narcissa Malfoy’s dying wish and placed Draco Malfoy in the care of Sirius Black and Y/N L/N. The Ministry offered the couple access to the Malfoy vault to support Draco’s upbringing, but they opted to leave it aside for the child to choose what to do with the fortune when he was of age.

Narcissa Malfoy’s funeral took place on the 7th of November. The blustery November air accosted the patrons which mostly consisted of Order members and a few of Narcissa’s friends who were able to dodge persecution for their roles or complacency in the war. She was awarded an Order of Merlin posthumously for her role - a title she now shared with you, Sirius, James, Lily, Remus, and later Regulus along with the rest of the Order of the Phoenix. Draco left his mother a beautiful bouquet of narcissus, baby’s breath, lavender, and pink camelia’s. You and Sirius gave her a bouquet of edelweiss, fern, and gladioli. Blue hydrangeas and hyssops came from Regulus who was unable to attend due to the nature of his house arrest but were placed at Narcissa’s headstone by Lily and Harry in the family plot of Malfoy Manor. Andromeda, Ted and Nymphadora Tonks stood by you, Sirius, and Draco at the headstone during the funeral service as Dumbledore spoke of the bravery, loyalty, and dedication Narcissa showed not only to her son and her family, but to the greater wizarding world on the 31st of October. 

“There is not one witch or wizard amongst us today that does not owe Narcissa Black Malfoy a considerable debt. Without her bravery and cunningness, evil could very well have prospered, dooming us all to life of immense pain and suffering. She dreamed of a legacy - of a better future - for her own son as well as for every child of wizard kind. Narcissa was a beyond bright student during her time at Hogwarts, a strong leader in her social circle, a skilled healer during the war, and an incredibly brave soldier. Though, possibly her favourite and certainly her greatest role was that of a loving mother; for she died to ensure that her son would live to see a better tomorrow. Narcissa Black Malfoy is the type of person, friend, partner, and parent that each of us should aspire to be. May her legacy of love and loyalty live eternally.” He said as he raised his wand.

One by one, every person present raised their wand to the heavens in honour of Narcissa Malfoy and her sacrifice to the wizarding world. Draco, Harry and Nymphadora, along with the Weasley children and Neville Longbottom who did not yet have their own wands raised a narcissus flower in solidarity.

The remaining marauders, you, Lily, and Regulus did indeed stay at 12 Grimmauld place for some time. The house was unrecognizable from the time Regulus and Sirius spent growing up there; it was bright, it was colourful, it was full of children’s laughter and squealing, it was a place people liked to come to visit, and it was chock full of love. 

The problem with the new and improved Grimmauld Place? 

Your tribe quickly outgrew it. 

As time went on, your memories seemed to return to you basically in full, and the full extent of your trauma reared its ugly head. For years you became hyper-focused on knowing where each member of your family was at any given moment, and a panic attack threatened any moment you didn’t have everyone important to you within your periphery. The Third Worst Day™ of Sirius’ life (in chronological order, the first being the day he almost ruined things between you two, the next being the day you ‘died’) was the day Lily and James suggested to you, him, Remus, and Regulus that they should perhaps fix up Potter Manor and move their ever-growing family there. It was partly the worst day because of how the idea of James and Lily moving away made him feel, but it was mostly because of the mental breakdown you had at the news. 

“You can’t! You can’t do this! I just got you back, we just got each other back. You can’t do this!” You shouted as everyone tried to get you to breathe. The numerous hands approaching you placatingly was in fact not what you needed at the moment, and you fell into a manic state.

Needless to say, the suggestion was not met well by you, and ended with you being admitted to the psychiatric ward at St. Mungo’s. Sirius sat at your bedside with your hand in his, Lily and James in chairs across from him whilst Regulus and Remus stayed home and watched the children. 

“I cannot live without any of you anymore. I’m sorry, but I refuse. I can’t do it.” Sirius admitted quietly to his friends as he rubbed the back of your hand with his thumb.

You had been dosed heavily with calming draught and dreamless sleep in order to prevent any seizure activity, which you became plagued with due to the trauma of the brain from memory retention and prevention throughout the war. 

“I can’t either.” James admitted, causing Lily to turn and face him.

“I’m sorry Lil’s, I know-” he cut himself off to take a steadying breath. “I know when we got married, you probably imagined us living at the Manor or maybe in another place as independent adults. After we lost mum and dad, I’m sure you imagined us taking that over in their place, and I think I wanted that too, but now, knowing what we know, I would have done things differently. I wish we had moved in with mum and dad and been there to enjoy their last few years with them. We had our own flat at the time and Moony, Pads, and Vix had theirs and I was so lucky that I got to spend as much time with Vixen as I did, being her order partner and all, but then she was gone, and I regretted ever spending a single moment away from her. Now...now I’m afraid that every second I don’t spend with you – all of you, any of you, my family – is a second wasted and I don’t want to waste another precious second. Not anymore. Not ever again.” 

Lily looked imploringly at her husband.

“You really are a bell-end.” She muttered fondly.

“Pardon me?”

“Do you really think I imagined us living alone in that big ass manor just us and our kids? What part of that do you think appeals to me? I love you, James, but a girl needs backup to deal with the likes of you.” 

Sirius and James exchanged a bemused glance before Lily continued.

“I want to live the rest of my life with my family. That’s you, James, and our kids, but it’s also Sirius and Y/N, it’s Remus and Regulus and Draco. Hell, if Alice and Frank or Marlene and Dorcas told me they wanted to move in I’d happily help them pack the boxes.” She laughed as she looked at you and Sirius’ intertwined hands.

“I think we’re all going to be stuck with one another until the end of time.” James said as he pulled his wife into his side.

Sirius smiled greatly at them. “Until all the mischief is managed.”

After that, the friends all agreed that none of them were willing to part from the group, and if for whatever reason anyone felt the need for more privacy, they would opt to build an outbuilding on the property.

“Oi! You’ve gotta knock, Prongs! Fuckin’ wanker.” Sirius had shouted as he hastily pulled the sheets up around the two of you.

“Uhm, maybe you’ve gotta lock the door, Pads.” James muttered with a mouthful of muffin as he came in to sit on the edge of the bed, completely unperturbed by the fact that the two of you were still naked and very recently involved in unmentionable deeds. 

Nevertheless, no one ever felt the need to build their own place on the property.

And Sirius made sure James got a taste of his own medicine a time or two after that incident.

Lily Evans Potter did indeed contact Healer Grundke at the end of the war and was brought on to work under her as an intern whilst she worked toward getting her Healer license. She spent many years in general medicine before moving fulltime to labour and delivery. Sirius often teased her that between the number of days she has spent in labour & delivery as a patient and as a doctor, he was surprised any of their other friends ever saw her. 

His nose was charmed green for a week.

Regulus Black was eventually acquitted of his crimes. He was placed on a sort of life-long probation in the form of a tracking spell on his wand that would alert the Ministry of him ever practicing Dark Magic. He opted to stay with his brother and his friends though he pretended to hate every minute of it. In truth, Regulus found great joy in being an uncle to Sirius’ and James’ children and Godfather to his best friend’s daughter Luna Lovegood. He declined the opportunity to join the Wizengamot, stating that as the rightful heir to the Black name, Sirius should be the one to take the Black’s seat.

Sirius Black, in Sirius Black fashion, dramatically refuted this idea. He did not want to pick up the mantle that was laid for him by the generations of Black’s before him; he refused to sit in the nearly still warm seat that his father had left. It took Regulus, Remus, and Lily all to tell him how much good he could do by not only bringing in a younger generation’s perspective to the Wizengamot, but as a wealthy heir to a pureblood line, a war hero, and an advocate for werewolf and muggleborn rights, he could bridge the gap between the left and right-wing members of the court.

It also helped that you had told him he’d be the only one capable of making the robes look punk rock. 

James Potter opted to be a stay-at-home dad and uncle to care for the children living at Potter Manor. The Potter vaults had enough money in them to last his family multiple lifetimes without every making a dent, and with the money Lily was making as a healer, there was no need to be worried financially. Also, being a kid at heart made him the absolute best friend of any child who met him. As the children grew older, he and Mrs. Weasley worked together to homeschool the children of the Order until they were old enough to attend Hogwarts.

Remus Lupin, never one willing to ride on his friend’s coat tails, spent the first few months following the war applying to various jobs through out Wizarding London. He had hoped that between his stellar academic record, his time spent as a prefect and tutor, his Order of Merlin, and his dedication to the winning side of the Wizarding War, that he would be able to secure a job within wizarding society. Unfortunately, it seemed the wizarding world still had a long way to go with the prejudice it held for werewolves. Walking through Diagon Alley feeling sorry for himself, Remus spotted a “for lease” sign in the window of what used to be a pet store. He immediately sent an owl to the landlord and asked for a meeting. 

Though Remus tried to refuse, Sirius and James insisted on investing in Remus’ planned bookstore.

“I’m not borrowing money, Prongs.” Remus muttered defiantly.

“It’s not borrowing, Moons! It’s an investment! If anything, you’ll be making me more money.” He exclaimed excitedly.

“Moony, please,” Sirius added...well, seriously, “think of how pissed off my ancestors would be to know I’m investing their money in a half-blood werewolf’s business which happens to stock muggle literature?” 

With a mischievous smirk, the deal was settled, and the lease was signed. 

Remus wasted no time to get started at the bookstore. He walked into the small storefront and conjured a broom, deciding to start by sweeping up the hay and owl droppings.

No sooner had he started did he hear the door chime. 

“Oh! My apologies, we’re not quite open yet.” Remus offered as he made his way to the door. He stopped in his tracks when he saw you and Regulus standing in the entry.

“I should hope not. This place looks awful.” Regulus commented with a wrinkled nose.

You elbowed him hard in the ribs.

“Looks like you could use some help.” You said cheerily as you held out a stack of papers. Remus took them gently to find your CV and cover letter. Before Remus could even look up, Regulus dropped his on top of yours in Remus’ hand.

“All my references are either dead or in prison so.” He offered with a shrug.

“I’ll vouch for him.” You said.

You were smiling at him so kindly and so sweetly, Remus wanted to cry. You had always been his biggest supporter; championing him through every milestone in Remus’ life. He was certain he didn’t deserve even half of the love you gave him, but he was eternally grateful for every drop of it.

“Thank you, guys.” Remus said wetly as he pulled the two of you in for a hug. Regulus groaned the entire time but when Remus finally pulled away, he had a slight blush. 

“Yeah, yeah. Well, what is family for?” He muttered which elicited a sharp gasp from you and a bark of laugh from Remus.

“Don’t be going soft on us now, Black!” Remus said with a laugh and ruffled his hair. 

“Fuck you guys, clean this barn up on your own.” He grumbled as he turned to leave, but the two of you wouldn’t let him.

He was grateful that you didn’t. 

Sirius eventually proposed to you – though beg was likely a more appropriate definition.

“We should get married.” He had said to you late one night as he came back to the bedroom after putting Draco down. 

You lowered your book into your lap as you considered him. “I beg your pardon?”

“We should get married.” He repeated plainly.

Your lip threatened to quirk into a smirk, but you kept your face blank. “And why should we get married?”

Sirius guffawed at you. “Uhm, maybe because we’re in love? And I’m the best and would be the best husband?”

You continued to stare at him.

“Why shouldn’t we get married?” He asked, now beginning to panic.

“I never said we shouldn’t.”

“Then why won’t you marry me?” He shrilled as he moved to kneel at the end of the bed.

“You’re the first thought in my mind when I wake up in the morning and my last thought at night before I fall asleep. Fuck, you make up the majority of my dreams too. Did you know that? Did you know that I go to the Ministry and count down the minutes until I get to see you again? Did you know that when you’re at work, I spend my time thinking about what you’re doing, who you’re talking to, what they’re saying to you and you to them? And not in a stalkery way, I swear. But I just think you’re the coolest fucking person ever and I’m jealous of everyone who gets to listen to you speak when I’m stuck at home or at work. And I watch you with Draco -our sweet boy - and our Godson and the other children and I get fucking giddy thinking that I get to spend the rest of my days with a woman so lovely. So, marry me. Marry me, damnit!”

It was a battle to keep your face straight but by the absolute grace of God you did before saying “Siri, babe, you’re coming off a little desperate.”

There was a brief pause before you got a “you cheeky little minx” and 45 seconds of tickling which turned into kissing which turned into touching which turned into so much more.

You were sticky and satisfied as you both caught your breath, still intertwined with one another when you said, “I will.”

“Hm?”

“I will.” You repeated as you leaned onto your elbow so you could look him in the eyes. “I’ll marry you. Marry me.”

Sirius stared at you in awe before pulling you down into his embrace for a searing kiss which once again turned into so much more. 

And you guys did. Marry each other, that is. It was a beautiful spring day on the grounds of Potter Manor with only your closest family and friends. It was perhaps a touch smaller than what either you or Sirius grew up picturing your wedding to be, but it was so much better than either of you could have ever imagined.

“...I thank my lucky stars every day that I get to love such a wonderful woman. There’s not one person in this world who deserves to know the likes of you, me least of all, but will do everything I can to ensure I get to keep what little light you’re willing to share with me forever. I have already loved you in sickness and in health, for rich or for poor, and in life and in death. There is not one planet in any universe, nor a timeline that exists where my love for you does not. I vow to you that you will never spend a day in this life not being loved by me. Wherever you go, I go; in this life and the next.” Sirius said through his tears. 

With a smile you began your own vows. “Sirius, I have had the absolute pleasure of getting to witness you become the man you are today. It wasn’t always easy or pretty, but I have seen you through it all; the good, the bad, the really bad, and the ugly. And I have loved you through all of it. As I laid dying, I told James that I didn’t regret a single moment of this life with you, and that is still true today. Every moment, all the blood, sweat, and tears, brought us here today - and I would still do all of it again if it meant getting to stand here today by your side. I made a vow that I would find you in our next life and I would love you there too. Well, here I am. I found you. I will always find you.”

Lily, Marlene, and Alice stood by your side, and James, Remus, and Regulus stood by Sirius’ as your magic was bound together, and you were pronounced husband and wife.

Sirius hung the framed parchment that Remus had found in the wooded area where he first met Regulus in his office. The note symbolized your dedication to him, to your friends and family, and your unyielding perseverance. The parchment was later joined by your wedding pictures, drawings that he and Harry had painted back in Grimmauld place as well as pictures Harry and Draco had given him since, and the first ever check he received for his investment in A Marauder’s Map to Books. 

You loved working at Moony’s bookstore; everyday felt like getting to hang out with your best friends even though you pretty much lived with them as well. It was nice to see Remus and Regulus in a setting outside of the parental/guardian role you’d all taken on following the war. You were surprised at first (though you supposed you should have known better) that Remus and Regulus worked really well together – Regulus’ uptight and serious façade was well balanced with Remus’ laidback and jovial personality. Regulus would handle the more difficult customers whilst Remus made sure every customer who came in felt welcome. Things often fell by the wayside or got overlooked when Remus was away due to the moons, and Regulus was quick to pick up the slack. Regulus would often get too caught up in work and forget to stay fed or hydrated, which Remus counteracted by briskly walking past Regulus and placing biscuits and cups of tea brewed exactly to Regulus’ liking before he could refuse. If you noticed Regulus’ cheeks tinge peak and a shy smile grace his lips – you didn’t mention it. 

Draco grew to be a very happy child; you and Sirius couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride every time that boy giggled or laughed. You kept your word and left the Malfoy vaults untouched save twice a year when Narcissa would purchase a gift for Draco on June 5th and December 25th. 

He was such a good son and an even better big brother. 

Draco was the most jealous of Harry when Harry became a big brother to his sister Jasmine Potter. It was hard not to chuckle at how proud the four-and-a-half-year-old was as he bragged about being the ‘bestest big brother’ and watching Draco skulk around the house. 

“I could be a big brother! Really, I could. I’d be so nice and gentle, and I would share all my toys!” He told you and Sirius solemnly as you tucked him in to bed. You assured him he would indeed be a wonderful big brother, but not to worry about it too much as you were sure Lily and James could use two big brothers for their newest addition. 

You both gave him kisses goodnight and closed the door behind you. You’d hardly made it two steps from the door before your husband had you pushed up against the wall. 

“I could be a really good daddy too, you know?” He whispered into your neck before starting to suck on your pulse point.

You couldn’t stifle the moan that escaped your lips. “Are you trying to tell me something?” 

Sirius kissed his way back up your jaw before slotting his lips against yours. “Perhaps we should give the kid what he wants.” He managed between kisses.

You chuckled.

“He gets everything he wants already, Siri.” You whispered back as you pulled his body flush with yours.

“What about me, hm?”

You pulled your head back to search his face. “Do you want another baby, Sirius?”

Sirius’ pupils seemed to blow wide at the sentiment. “I don’t so much want a baby as I want your baby, my love.” He whispered reverently.

Your restraint snapped and you launched yourself at him. He caught you as your legs wrapped around his waist and your arms around his neck, carrying you down the hall to your bedroom.  

Approximately ten months later you gave birth to your daughter Aurora Black.

September 1st, Kings Cross Station

“Merlin’s saggy balls, how do you – for fuck sa– oh, got it!” Sirius could be heard behind you as he fought with the pram. 

“Would you watch your mouth?” Lily muttered.

“Yeah Pads, watch your fuckin’ mouth!” James loudly announced causing other parents to look over at the absolute freak show that was the Potter & Black family’s stepping onto Platform 9 ¾.

“Sorry.” You offered with a quiet smile to a particularly perturbed looking couple as they grabbed their smarmy looking child and ushered him away from the likes of you. “Wankers.” You muttered as they hobbled off.

“Who’s a wanker, mum?” Draco asked as he slid up beside you. The rotten child knew he wasn’t supposed to use such language but couldn’t pass the chance at getting to repeat your nasty comment.

“Presently, it’s you.” You commented while teasingly narrowing your eyes at him. 

“Oi, leave your poor mum alone! You’re buggering off to Hogwarts and leaving her with the likes of me for the next ten months.” Sirius said as he (finally) made his way to you with the pram in tow. The three-year-old twins seemed none the wiser that they just nearly got folded into the damned thing and thrown onto the tracks in a fit of rage. 

“My deepest condolences during this trying time.” Draco offered you severely.

Sirius scoffed and you laughed as you pulled him into an embrace. You were waiting for the day he pushed you away because hugging your mom goodbye in front of your friends was embarrassing. But today, you relished in the feeling of your first child letting you hold him tight.

“I’m so proud of you, Draco.” You murmured into his platinum hair.

“Thank you, mum.” He responded quietly. 

“Draco! Harry! Over here!” The sound of Hermione Granger interrupted your hug as Draco turned to wave at his friends. 

“Be good kid, okay? Look out for your sister?” Sirius asked as he pulled Draco into his own embrace.

“’Course, dad. I’m not new here.” He teased as he ruffled Aurora’s hair.

“Draaaccoooo...” She whined in response.

“Go see ‘Mione.” You ordered Draco with one last side hug. Harry and Draco swapped parents and siblings to give their respective goodbyes before heading off to catch up with their friends. 

“Are you ready, Rory?” Jasmine Potter asked your daughter kindly. She was a year above Aurora and was very excited to get the chance to show her younger cousin around the castle. 

Your daughter looked between her cousin and her parents before Sirius spoke up. “Jazz, do you mind giving us a minute?” He asked his Goddaughter.  

Jasmine turned to talk to James and Lily who were busy entertaining Posie and Lyra as you and Sirius bent down to talk to Aurora.

“What’s on your mind, love?” You asked your daughter gently.

Your heart welled as Aurora’s eyes turned glassy.

“I’m not ready.”

Sirius made a cooing sound as he wiped the tears from under her lash line. “What are you most worried about, my little star?”

Aurora sniffled miserably. “What if I’m sorted into the wrong house?”

You and Sirius couldn’t help but rear your head at the comment. Out of all the things you thought would be worrying your daughter on her first day of boarding school, which house she got sorted into was not it.

“Rory, that’s the exciting part baby.” You tried as you rubbed her arm consolingly.

“I get it, Ro, I was worried about which house I was going to be sorted into as well.” Sirius commented.

Aurora rubbed a fist against her eye as she turned to consider her father. “Really?”

Sirius nodded solemnly. “Really. You see, I came from a long line of proud Slytherins. I was supposed to get sorted into that house too, because I was supposed to be just like them. But I couldn’t be like them, I could only be like me. So, I was sorted in Gryffindor, even though my family didn’t like it.” 

“Did you get in trouble?”

Sirius nodded sadly. “I did.”

“But Ro, you know that no matter what house you get sorted into, me and daddy are going to be so, so, so proud of you. And we’ll be proud of you because you’re you, not because you were sorted into Ravenclaw or Gryffindor or Hufflepuff or Slytherin.” You added with a soft smile.

Aurora seemed to consider this. “Well, Harry and Jazzy are in Gryffindor, and Draco is in Slytherin. I’d like to be in one of those I think.”

You nodded at her, but it was Sirius who answered.

“That’d be pretty cool, huh? But listen, I met the most fantastic people in my house even though I knew no one in it when I first got sorted. Uncle Prongs and Uncle Moony were my dormmates for seven years and look at us now! Completely co-dependent and still living together.”

“What is co-dependent?” Aurora asked with furrowed brows.

“Not important. What I’m trying to say is, Rory, you are going to give that hat a run for its money, you know why?” Sirius asked.

Aurora shook her head.

“Because you are your mother’s daughter. And she is the the most loyal, the most cunning, the bravest and the smartest person I know. You’ve been raised by the most spectacular person, and any one of those houses will be lucky to have you. Got it?”

You watched as Rory took a deep breath and squared her shoulders before offering her dad a solid nod.

“Atta girl!” He said as he enveloped her in a hug and kissed her head. “You show that sorting hat who’s boss.” 

Aurora chuckled as she moved to hug you.

“I’m so proud of you, my love.” You said into her hair. She tightened her hold on you before letting go and stepping back.

“I think we’re ready for you, Jazzy.” You called, and the older girl came and took Aurora’s hand as they headed towards Draco and Harry to board the train.

James and Sirius wolf whistled and hollered, waving frantically as they watched the kids walk away. Hermione, Harry and Draco chuckled while Neville and Ron turned beat red at the attention.

You propped Lyra on your hip and the two of you continued to wave as the train pulled away. None of you stopped waving until you couldn’t see your babies anymore.

A sob tore its way through James, and you looked over to see Lily making alarmed eye contact with you as she awkwardly patted his arm and he and Sirius leaned into each other.

“First time?” An older woman asked as she went to walk past you.

“No” was yours and Lily’s chorused response as you peeled your husband away from his best mate and moved him toward the pram where your youngest two sat forgotten. 

“Lord, is it going to be this bad every time we send one of the kids off the first time?”

“It’ll be worse!” Sirius cried emphatically as he fell into your arms, basically crushing poor Lyra who was still sat on your hip. You looked over to Lily hoping for help only to see her in a similar predicament. 

“Sirius Black, at this rate our youngest three won’t ever want to come back to Kings Cross Station.” You muttered as you moved Lyra to your other hip so you could support your husband’s weight.

“Good! Then they’ll never leave me!” 

Your heart twinged as you patted Sirius’ back.

“Siri, look at me.” 

For a moment you thought he might refuse, but he unfolded himself slowly and stood to look at you. 

“This is what we fought for, my love.” You said as you caressed his cheek. “So that our babies could go to Hogwarts and learn and be children and be free and be safe.”

“I still hate it.”

You laughed at his petulance. “Me too, actually. Do you think Hogwarts is hiring? What if we all just move there?”

“Great idea, Vix!” James cheered from beside you, eyes rimmed and cheeks glistening. “Lily flower could work in the infirmary, Padfoot could teach astronomy, you could teach muggle studies, I could teach flying, Moony could teach defence against the dark arts and Regulus could teach potions! It’s perfect!”

Though you had to admit this plan of James’ actually sounded pretty perfect, your attention turned to little Posie falling asleep in Lily’s arms. 

“Why don’t we discuss this more once we get these kiddos down for a nap, hm?”

Sirius found you later sitting in the sunroom with a book in hand. He thought you made the prettiest picture sitting in the soft sun filtering through the leaves of the trees outside, plants surrounding you with your nose buried in a book. So, he took a picture. 

“I wasn’t ready!” You whined with a smile on your face.

“You’re always ready.” He said as he pressed a kiss to your lips. “I’m sorry I was such a mess at the train station today.” He said as he lifted your legs off the loveseat to sit down and replace them atop his lap.

“You don’t have to apologize, Siri.” You said as you tapped him with your book. 

“I’m supposed to be the one taking care of you.” He commented, his gaze seemed far away as he watched the branches dance in the September breeze.

“You can do that tomorrow.” You whispered back.

A smile graced his face before he turned to look at you. “I love you; did you know? I don’t think I say it enough, but I do; I love you.”

He punctuated his sentence with three loving squeezes of the fat of your thigh.

“Sirius. Every breath I take means ‘I love you’.” You responded and sealed it with a kiss. 

You got an owl from Draco and Aurora later that night.

Aurora was a hat stall.

She was also sorted into the same house as her mum.

Thank you so much for reading! Can't get enough? Check out these CBBH themed one shots, or, feel free to request a one-shot from your faves in this universe!

#marauders era #marauders au #marauders fanfiction #sirius black #sirius black x reader #sirius black x you #sirius black fic #marauders x reader #first wizarding war #first wizarding war fanfic #reader insert #escapism #self insert #canon divergence #hurt/comfort #sirius black hurt/comfort #sirius black one shot #sirius black blurb #sirius black ficlet

[meazalykov]

Joao Felix is in love

joao felix x reader

headcannons and how you guys came to be <3

warnings: a few mentions of 18+ endeavors but nothing detailed.

❀⋆ The first time Joao met you, he didn’t care about you. That is harsh, considering most relationships have a good start, but he was under the spell of his ex-girlfriend. The Atletico player didn’t want to let her go after many scandalous events. You found the Portuguese boy attractive plus he had a shy and confident aura. After a few months, accepting that he might not like you as much as he loves Magui, you left him alone entirely.

❀⋆ A year later in summer 2023, Joäo was at his lowest. He left Chelsea after a six month loan to go back to Atletico. Meanwhile, you finished your Bachelors degree in Humanities at the University of Madrid. When the Portuguese arrived in the Spanish capital, Atletico’s coach made him train with youth teams. In a careless response, Joao received tons of hate in the media for expressing how Barcelona, a rival club, was his childhood dream club. Atletico fans didn’t appreciate this at all and harassed him until he was aware. Magui left him in the dark for Lando Norris at the same time. You had no idea this was happening, since you forgot about Joäo to focus on your last year of college. One day, a mutual friend of yours and Joaos told you how bad he was doing mentally. The care and kindness in your heart felt torn as you searched Joao's name on twitter and saw the flood of hate tweets about him. You couldn’t handle it, so you reached out to Joäo offering support. You still cared about him after a year of cutting contact from him.

❀⋆ Joäo didn’t realize how much he missed you until you started talking to him again. In return, he talked to you constantly afterwards. He always listened and smiled at what you had to say. At first, he was scared to admit that he had feelings for you. The Portuguese got cheated on by his ex and didn’t want to regret opening up his heart again. Don't worry, it didn’t take long to admit to himself that he grew feelings for you.

❀⋆ As I said before, he is a great listener when he isn’t distracted by his airpods. He will constantly pay attention to what you've talked about to him and what you repost on social media. He saw you had a folder dedicated to Blue Hydrangeas on Pinterest. A few days later, he bought you a ton of flowers (Blue Hydrangeas) along with other expensive things that you appreciated.

❀⋆ When you visited his house in Madrid for the first time, you met his dog that you’ve seen on social media, Floki. If you’re a dog person, you gladly took the boy into your arms as he ran to you at the front door. If you’re afraid of dogs, you’re hesitant to engage with the boy as he licked your ankle once for attention. Eventually, Joäo got you to hold Floki and your fear drifted away. Floki loves you so much and the Portuguese boy noticed this. Every time you went to Joäo’s house, the brown boy always laid on your lap and followed you like a personal guard dog around Joao’s house. Joao took note of this, realizing that Floki isn’t that clingy with him.

❀⋆ Barcelona accepted Joäo on a loan contract and you were excited for him. After he moved to Barcelona from Madrid, you were nervous. You were in love with him and didn’t want it to go to waste by his absence. He didn’t forget about you, once he settled into his new house he asked if you would come live with him. Some people might have hesitated in this position but you said yes. After graduating college in Madrid you wanted to move and experience living in a new city. Joäo asks you to officially be his girlfriend once you settle into his home. He mentioned that he couldn’t have a long distance relationship with you since he can’t imagine going days without seeing you. He makes you comfortable in your shared home.

❀⋆ The boy will always cater to anything you want since he moved you away from your old home. If you’re a cat person, you talked to Joäo about wanting to get a cat. Joäo supported your decision since he wanted Floki to have a friend when he had to travel for away games. At the adoption center, a young brown cat walked up to you and sat in your lap. The one year old cat was named “Brownie” by the shelter. Joäo and you loved Brownie and noted how her color matched Floki’s. Both of you adopted the cat and Floki loved her as soon as she stepped out of her cat carrier. This warmed your heart as you nearly cried in Joäo's arms.

❀⋆ Joäo has a set time for going to bed before training in the mornings or game days, which is midnight. You were nervous when you first moved in, considering that your sleep schedule isn't consistent. There are times where you're asleep before he gets to bed after playing FIFA and there are times where he's in a deep sleep by the time you get unready from the day and go to bed. Floki and Brownie are on the bed asleep every night beside you and the four of you sleep peacefully.

❀⋆ Love Language? It's physical touch for Joäo. He loves touching you. Sometimes his hand will be on your lower back when you're standing beside him. Every time he gives you a hug, he will ALWAYS kiss your forehead, neck, cheeks, or lips in the process. When you're sitting on your shared couch in the living room, he will lay his body on top of you and sometimes falls asleep on you. When you both have sex together, which is every night because you guys cannot keep your hands off of each other, he gives you so much praise and makes you melt.

❀⋆ One thing Joäo will accomplish doing is scaring you with small pranks. One day, you were recording a video in the living room for your job and Joäo was standing in the background with a creepy mask on. When you looked at the corner of your screen as you recorded yourself, you jumped as your heart was close to ripping out of your chest from seeing the figure in the background. Joäo started laughing loudly as he took off the mask to see your reaction. "Stop it Felix, that's not funny!" you say as he continues to laugh until he is begging for air.

❀⋆ When Joäo scores goals with Barcelona, he will make a symbol with his hands that point out the letter of your name. If you think that he can’t make a hand symbol with your first letter, he will do sign language that points out your letter. He is thinking about you always and always dedicates his goals to you, something he never really did with Magui. Fans noticed this after awhile and loved how much you made him happy.

❀⋆ One day, you had to leave Joäo for a few days since one of your siblings was expecting a child in Lisbon. After the successful delivery and getting to meet your niece/nephew, you decided to go to a Benfica game by yourself to occupy your time. After watching Benfica win, you meet Hugo Felix for the first time. He liked you for his older brother and noticed how easy it was to talk to you. Surprising Joäo, Hugo facetimed him and your face appeared on the screen as Joäo played FIFA in the living room in your Barcelona home. The boy blushed and was happy that Hugo met you. A few months before, Joao told Hugo how he feels about you and Hugo appreciates how much you’ve supported his big brother during his dark moments in summer 2023.

❀⋆ The Portuguese boy loves listening to music. He will blast music in the house, listen to music on his AirPods before big games, attends concerts with you, and more. He will listen to music genres that you love and usually enjoys it, even if it's music he hasn't listened to. Joäo wants to enjoy what you've enjoyed with music.

❀⋆ The public didn’t get a hold on your relationship with the Barcelona left-winger until Joao posted a story with you in it. This is seven months after you guys were official. Some fans didn’t know who you were so people dug through Joäo’s instagram following and saw your page with about 41k followers. Joäo’s fans were happy and started supporting you since they’re confident that you won’t cheat on him and he had a chance to move on from his ex.

❀⋆ Joäo is down bad for you and is happy that he can open up his heart for someone like you.

<3

#fc barcelona #joao felix #joao cancelo #barcelona #barcelona spain #chelsea fc #pedri #pedri gonzalez #pablo gavi #fermin Lopez #Atletico #atletico madrid #joao felix x reader #joao felix imagine #joao felix x you #joao felix fluff #joao felix smut #pau cubarsi #ronald araujo

[irisintheafterglow]

HAND TWO - PAIR

summary: in a season where you're determined to fly under the radar, newly-returned crown prince!touya todoroki has other ideas. in this hand, a deal is made.

wc: 2k

cw/tags: royalty!au/regency!au, fem!reader, official first meeting, banter and dialogue driven, fake dating, sassy touya again

note: idk how fake dating premises with plots are created like this took me a good 30 minutes of just straight thinking trying to figure out what is a plausible fake dating idea. anyway thank you for all the love on part one, hope you enjoy this part!! also overdue idea credit to @andypantsx3 who originally created a crown prince!touya piece (read it here!) that probably subconsciously inspired this entire series. thank you and hope you enjoy :))

likes, reblogs, and replies are greatly appreciated <3

Your maid’s face was whiter than her knuckles gripping the sides of her apron. 

“You have a caller, miss,” she informs you carefully, bowing slowly and failing to hide her trembling. “It is…”

“I am aware of who it is,” you groan, pinching the bridge of your nose between your pointer finger and your thumb. It’d been exactly one week since Prince Touya all but julienned the ego of your pasty-faced suitor and you hadn’t received so much as a letter of greeting from him since then. All you received once the dust settled were mixed expressions of disgust and awe, along with a shit-eating smirk from the royal currently waiting to be led into the drawing room. “My stepmother?” 

“At tea, miss, with the neighbors. She won’t be back for several hours.” You swear under your breath. With all other members of the family out of the house and your stepmother bragging about your prospects with the sought-after prince, you were on your own. 

“Send him in when the minute hand next strikes six. Tell him I’m in the bath, or something.” 

“As you wish, miss.” Your maid nods and promptly exits the room, leaving you slumped on the settee with no ideas but to beeline for the back doors and disappear among the trees of the garden. Hiking up your skirt and slipping into the yard, you’re careful to shut the door quietly behind you. 

It’s not that you didn’t want to see him, even though you didn’t; in truth, it was fear of what he might say to you or how you two may interact. How are you supposed to look at a man suspected of committing treason against the king, his own father, and upkeep the manners drilled into your head since birth? It seemed too great of a burden to bear, so you resolved to forget your problems and the stranger in your house by walking amongst the flowers, blue hydrangeas that continued to bloom despite the sweltering summer heatwaves. It’s calming, being alone with nothing but the greenery. As your fingers brush over the delicately clumped petals, the hairs on the back of your neck suddenly stand up stick-straight and you don't need to turn around to see why. 

“It’s rude to enter a lady’s house unannounced, Your Highness,” you say into the open air and hear him step out from behind a neighboring tree. 

“I believe I was announced, considering the shaken demeanor of your poor maid.” His voice is low and raspy, like he’d just woken up.  

“What if I was still in the bath?” 

“You’ll have to tell my maids what you use to dry your hair so rapidly,” he replies and you catch him slinking over to you from the corner of your vision, approaching you carefreely with his hands in the pockets of his coat. You don’t look at him yet; in your mind, he was like a monster under the bed. If you simply didn’t look at him, he’d go away. “Unless, of course,” his voice appears over your shoulder and goosebumps break out over your skin. Not yet. Don’t look him in the eyes yet. “You weren’t in the bath at all. At least, not recently.” 

“I’m not sure what gave you the right to invade my house and muse upon my bathing habits,” you counter, finally turning to meet his stare and willing yourself not to wither under it. He wasn’t close enough to feel his body heat, but the arrogance that radiated from his entire being was enough to make you sweat more than the bright sun. He considered you curiously, tilting his head to the side and narrowing those molten blue eyes that perplexed you so. You risk a glance at the scar tissue just under his eyes and chin, its deep purple color rumored to be the result of a fire accident while he was sent away. It unnerved you, but you still found the courage to stare back with consideration of your own, challenging him to say something else. His eyes narrow again for half a second before he brushes past you, walking further down your current path in the garden. 

“You were keeping me waiting,” he states simply. “Not to mention, I am royalty.” You freeze, keenly aware of the power of the man admiring your daisies. “I believe it is you who should be considered the rude one.” The teasing lilt in his voice is not lost to you, but you’re too dumbfounded by his bluntness to think on it further. 

“Argues the one who won my affections and then refrained from any means of communication for a week,” you point out with slight irritation, following him around the bend at a safe distance. He hums again thoughtfully, walking among the flowers like it was his property. Your tease falls from your lips before you can stop it. “Did His Highness run out of royal parchment to write his letters?” 

“Royal candle wax, actually,” he answers stoically, but you catch the mischievous shine in his eyes when they flick to meet yours. “Dreadful effort, trying to write without my beloved candle lit.” 

“Oh, and what is a prince to do?” You’re unable to hide the smirk that finds its way onto your face and he seems to notice your less-hostile demeanor, the faintest amusement breaking out on his features. Handsome features, you had to stop yourself from admitting. “I don’t understand,” you say after a deep exhale.  

“I believe the candle was a gift from my great-grandfather.” His eyes continue to look over the rainbow of petals lightly swaying in the breeze. “Terribly well-loved by my father and the court alike.” 

“No, Your Highness–”

“If this is to work, you must refer to me as Touya.” He’s still not looking at you. 

“That is precisely what I don’t understand.” You muster up what courage you could to close the distance between you two, crossing your arms to properly confront him. “What are you trying to play at, Your Highness? What is supposed to ‘work?’ With all due respect, I’d like to know now if I am one of your latest games to irritate your relatives.” 

“And what would you do if you were?” Shit. His attention moves from the flowers to your face and you’re met with the same cold, unwavering stare from the week prior. “What could you do, realistically, but play along? I am royalty.” 

“You needn’t keep reminding me, sir,” you mumble. “But before we continue, I feel you must know. I did not have the intention of entertaining suitors this season.” You catch one of the maids peeping from around the corner of a topiary and motion for her to prepare tea for you and your caller. 

“What were you doing at the presentation duels, then?” 

“Fulfilling the wishes of my stepmother,” you answer wryly. “Whatever plans you have devised, I am the wrong lady to assist in enacting them.”

“I imagine that, instead of participating in this season, you would rather be reading from the libraries of King All Might himself?” The Prince falls into step behind you while you make your way to the garden’s gazebo, fully furnished to accommodate callers. You sensed, however, this particular suitor would rather sit on the floor than at your family’s lofty dining set. 

“I’m surprised you understand,” you remark, neatening a stray napkin. When you look behind you, the prince is leaning his shoulder against the frame of the gazebo and observing you. Your manners somehow return, despite his lack thereof. “Do you prefer Earl Grey or green?” 

“Neither,” he replies immediately. “I don’t care for tea.” 

“Nor do I, but the servants will linger if we don’t give them a chance to gossip in the kitchen.” The prince’s eyes narrow once again only for a moment, like you said something unexpected. 

“In that case, tell them green.” You murmur his request to the nearest servant and the handful subtly eavesdropping politely excuse themselves back into the house, no doubt eager to relay what little information you and the prince had exchanged. 

“You still haven’t enlightened me on why, of all the ladies present at the duels, you chose to duel for my hand,” you begin as he takes his seat across from you and pops a piece of fruit into his mouth. “Especially when I am guaranteed to hinder any plans you have for–”

“You know nothing of my plans, as of yet,” he interjects. His face is carefully blank, seemingly too calm for your present situation. “Your reluctance to entertain suitors is exactly what is going to help me leave this kingdom.” 

“I don’t understand,” you reiterate. “Your Highness, I do not wish to be in this season at all.”

“I share the same sentiment. Here is my proposal that will, in theory, rid us of both of our stressors: I will court you and, on the night of my father’s ball where I will surely propose, I will disappear, leaving you with nothing but a broken heart and a humble reparation of $100,000. A percentage of which, I note, can then be used to book passage out of Musutafu and find those books from King All Might’s mythical library. Do you follow?” You don’t remember when your jaw fell open, but it takes significant effort to regain your composure. When you eventually register what the prince had just offered, your face burns from a feeling you had never experienced before. It was a mixture of shame and shock, but mostly…excitement? 

“You’re out of your mind,” you manage to force out. “I don’t think–How could we–It would never work!” What the hell was he thinking? 

“You don’t know that,” he answers coolly. Maybe he’s not thinking at all. Maybe the prince is an idiot. 

“But why not leave now? Why wait until the night of your father’s ball?” An unreadable look crosses over his face, one that makes your stomach turn. He fixes himself in a blink, though, and the sudden darkness that fell over the prince’s face is gone before you can comment on it. “I just don’t understand why you need my help doing this, Your Highness.”

“My father grows impatient,” he admits bitterly and when you meet his gaze, it’s burning. “He wishes to crown me as king within three month’s time, and I–” 

“You do not wish to rule,” you finish quietly, the realization clicking together in your mind. “By courting a lady, you force him to put off your coronation until you propose.” 

“By courting you,” he explains further, “I also guarantee that this affair will remain strictly one of business.” You can’t help the scoff that leaves your mouth. 

“You think that if a woman were to fall in love with you, she would reveal your true whereabouts?” 

“Women are fickle creatures,” he states simply. “You did not wish to fall in love this season, so you will not reveal my true whereabouts once I have faked my passing.” He sighs, pulling back the sleeve of his coat and checking the time on his watch. “It really is quite simple. Allow me to court you, stay silent about my disappearance, and be rewarded with $100,000.” 

“And if we’re caught? If this charade is revealed as a farce and your father declares you King the following day?”

“Doubt in my plans is the first step away from succeeding,” he concludes. An approaching servant with a fresh pot of tea momentarily takes your attention and the prince stands, bowing in farewell while you’re still frozen behind your teacup. “I do hope you’ll join me at the races tomorrow afternoon,” he drawls out your name once the servant places the pot on the small table. His voice drips honey-sweet poison, drawing you in even as your body screams at you to run. The message hidden beneath his words, however, is clearer than crystal. “But, in the case of your absence, I will assume my affections have been denied.” You stand, dipping into a graceful curtsy. As you rise, your words ring in your ears before you can stop them. 

“I look forward to our time together, Your Highness.”

if you enjoy my writing and would like to support me, you can buy me a coffee on my ko-fi! you can also check out my full masterlist here :)

#dabi x you #dabi x reader #dabi x y/n #touya todoroki x you #touya todoroki x reader #touya todoroki x y/n #mha x you #mha x reader #mha x y/n #touya x you #touya x reader #touya x y/n #bnha x you #bnha x reader #bnha x y/n

[goosefruit]

5 times vanessa brought you flowers (drabble collection)

vanessa shelly x fem!reader

tw: none

a/n: i need her to show up at my door with a bouquet of flowers ples

Hydrangeas

The first time Vanessa showed up at your door with a bouquet of flowers was on the night of your first date. 

She nervously shuffled her feet, wondering how you might react to her last-minute grocery store purchase. In her defense, she had just finished working a night shift mere hours before she had to start getting ready for tonight. 

An arrangement of baby blue hydrangeas laid in her arms, with little white flowers filling the gaps. 

Vanessa had stood in the flower section of the store for a good half hour as she tried to decide on the perfect offering for you. The obvious choice would be roses, but she was afraid of coming off too strong. 

After all, she had only known you for a week, after dancing with you at a bar. Even then, there was a spark between the two of you that she had never felt before, and she knew that she would do anything to have this work out. 

So she decided on something perhaps even more thoughtful than roses. 

The hydrangeas had caught her eyes the moment she saw them. They were the same shade of blue as the sparkly aquamarine earrings you always wore (she knew because you were wearing them the night you met, as well as in most of your Instagram pictures). Something about the delicate hue reminded her of your soft smile and gentle eyes.

Those same blossoms of blue were seen in your favourite vase for months after, its petals dried and preserved.

‎‎ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ°•. ✿ .•°

Wildflowers

For your one year anniversary, Vanessa had planned a picnic in a nearby meadow. 

You sat under the warm May sun with your eyes closed, leaning against your girlfriend's shoulder. The occasional cool breeze tickled your skin as you basked in the sunlight, sighs of delight falling from your lips. 

In every direction, fields of colour stretched on for miles. Flowers of all shapes and sizes were beginning to wake from their winter slumber, with many already in full bloom.

Groggily, you opened one eye to admire how wonderfully Vanessa’s blonde locks gleamed in the afternoon light.

“Hey honey,” she smiled when she noticed you staring. Giving you a peck on the forehead, she began to stand up. “I’ll be right back.”

You thought about following her, but were in way too comfortable of a position for your muscles to want to move. Instead, you laid back on the picnic mat and listened to the birdsong overhead. 

Vanessa returned soon after, prancing towards you in her pretty pink sundress. She held out a brilliant bundle of wildflowers: reds, blues, oranges, and yellows amongst various shades of green. The stems were tied together with a blade of grass, assembled into a perfect little bouquet.

“For you, my beautiful girl.”

‎‎ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ°•. ✿ .•°

Lilies of the Valley

This time, Vanessa had to ask the Internet for help.

You and her had been in rocky waters for the past week, arguing over trivial things such as who was going to do the dishes. 

She knew that you were only matching her attitude, as she had been quite unfair in how she spoke to you lately. Really, she didn’t mean it—the long, stressful shifts at work had gotten the better of her, but instead of talking it out, she pent up those emotions until they overflowed. 

Vanessa knew she had to do something to clean up the mess that she had created. 

A Google search for apology gifts gave her a list of ideas, and she set out for the store while you were at work one day. It took her several tries before she found a florist that supplied what she was looking for.

The vase held a bunch of delicate little white flowers, each hanging off of thin green stems in rows. There must have been at least a hundred of them, every one perfectly bell-shaped. 

She recalled that you had once stopped to admire a patch of these on a walk, which is why she recognized them almost immediately when they came up on her search. Apparently, they symbolized apology, amongst other things. 

Knowing that she would already be at work by the time your shift ended, she left the flowers alongside a note on the dining table:

My dearest Y/N,

You are my world, but I haven’t been treating you like it lately. I’m sorry that I’ve been a terrible communicator, and for taking out all my stress on you. You didn’t deserve that.  

I got you a little something here: Lilies of the valley. It has a pretty name, just like you.

I know it doesn’t make up for how I acted, but take it as a token of my love. Really sorry I can’t be home tonight; you know how my shifts are. 

Maybe we can do something fun when I get back?

I’m going to do better from now on, my love <3

-Nessa

‎‎ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ°•. ✿ .•°

Roses

On Valentine’s Day, you received the sweetest, reddest roses. 

Vanessa had taken a day off just to prepare for the occasion, taking it upon herself to decorate the entire apartment with candles and petals. 

At her insistence, she picked you up from work, wearing a suit so nice it made you feel underdressed in your plain blouse and jeans. The look was completed by a rose between her teeth, one corner of her mouth lifted in a gentle smirk. You giggled at how ridiculous but sexy she looked.  

She presented you with a bouquet she had hidden behind her back, a dozen more roses bound by lace and gold wrapping paper. 

Each flower had been carefully handpicked by her, the process having taken her nearly half a day at the florist’s. She made sure to select only the most vibrant ones, with every petal intact, for her babygirl. 

They smelled so good, it made your heart flutter. Of course, you knew that roses were known for their fragrance, but something about getting them from the love of your life made the sweet scent all the more mesmerizing. 

To top it all off, the lace holding everything together had the same colour and pattern as that chic white lingerie set you knew she loved seeing you in. 

You took a mental note to change into it before the evening’s fun.

‎‎ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ°•. ✿ .•°

Paper flowers

You were puzzled when Vanessa took an unusual interest in the crafts section of the dollar store. 

Your girlfriend had never expressed herself as an artistic person, always leaving all the home decor DIY stuff to you. But now, she was buying stacks of coloured paper and disappearing to her office with them for hours at a time. 

You had been reading on the couch one Sunday afternoon when you felt her hands cover your eyes from behind. 

“Don’t peek! I have a surprise for you,” she whispered excitedly. 

You nodded, keeping your eyes shut as she set something down on the table in front of you. 

“Okay, now open your eyes!”

The product of her mystery project blew your mind beyond words.

In a tall glass vase, she had placed paper flowers of all different colours, each resembling different species with shocking accuracy. They were folded with such neatness that you immediately understood why it had taken Vanessa so long. 

“I saw a video online, so I knew I had to make some for you,” she grinned cheekily. “The papercuts were all worth it.”

You grabbed her face and kissed her, all while a singular thought circulated through your mind: How many other hidden talents did this woman have?

#fnaf x reader #vanessa afton #vanessa fnaf #vanessa shelly #vanessa shelly x reader #vanessa monroe #fnaf vanessa #wlw fluff #flowers #vanessa shelly drabbles #vanessa shelly imagines #vanessa shelly fluff

[tsunael]

If there's anyone out there that cares about flower language and symbolism like I do, I made an informal write-up some time ago about the in-game flowers (that you can put in your house) and the different symbolism that they can mean.

I included the symbolism for the in-game colors as well when they were available.

Also as a disclaimer these could be incorrect, have contrasting meanings, or have different meanings in different real-world cultures. White chrysanthemums (kiku) are usually a funeral flower in Japan for instance. (My Japanese professor once said they were a faux pas for her to receive in a bouquet!) So your mileage may vary!

This was simply a fun personal project I made for myself that I thought other people might enjoy as well! So here's a question to answer in the tags:

What flowers would your WoL have in their residence?

Arums (calla lily) 🔷magnificent beauty, feminine modesty

Brightlilies (easter lily) 🔷purity, refined beauty 🔷White: virginity, purity, majesty 🔷Pink: wealth and prosperity 🔷Red: warmth, desire 🔷Yellow: gaiety, falsehood, "I’m walking on air" 🔷Orange: hatred

Campanulas (bellflower) 🔷humility, constancy

Chrysanthemum   🔷cheerfulness, "You’re a wonderful friend" 🔷Red: I love you 🔷White: truth 🔷Yellow: slighted love

Cosmos 🔷harmony, peace, modesty, "the joys that love and life can bring", beautiful

Dahlias 🔷dignity, elegance

Daisies 🔷innocence, beauty

Lilies of the Valley 🔷return of happiness, sweetness, humility, purity

Oldrose 🔷Red: I love you, love, beauty, passion, romance 🔷Blue: mystery, attaining the impossible, love at first sight 🔷White: innocence and purity, "I am worthy of you", reverence 🔷Yellow: decrease of love, jealousy, friendship

Shroud Cherries (cherry blossom) 🔷spiritual beauty, a good education

Tulips 🔷perfect lover, fame 🔷Red: declaration of love, true love, eternal love, romantic love, "believe me" 🔷Yellow: hopeless love, unrequited love, brightness, sunshine 🔷White: ask for forgiveness, purity 🔷Purple: royalty

Hyacinths 🔷sports, games, rashness 🔷Purple: I am sorry, sorrow, "please forgive me" 🔷Red: play 🔷White: loveliness, "I’ll pray for you" 🔷Blue: constancy, sincerity 🔷Yellow: jealousy

Hydrangeas 🔷heartlessness, boastfulness, "You are cold"

Morning Glories 🔷love in vain, affection

Violas (violets) 🔷modesty, faithfulness 🔷Purple: daydreaming, "You occupy my thoughts" 🔷Blue: watchfulness, love 🔷White: candor, innocence 🔷Yellow: rural happiness

Byregotia (begonia?) 🔷Beware

Carnation 🔷fascination, love, distinction 🔷Red: "My heart aches for you", deep love, admiration 🔷White: sweet and lovely, innocence, pure love 🔷Yellow: "You have disappointed me", rejection, disdain 🔷Purple: capriciousness, changeable

Moth Orchid 🔷love, beauty, refinement, beautiful lady

Sweet Pea 🔷departure, good-bye, delicate pleasure, tender memory, blissful pleasure

Triteleia 🔷 They're a North American wildflower also called 'triplet lilies' or 'Ithuriel's spear' which is a reference to John Milton's epic English poem, Paradise Lost. It's about an angel sent by Gabriel to find Satan in the Garden of Eden. Satan, in the form of a toad, is introducing evil suggestions into the ear of Eve when Ithuriel pokes him with a spear. Satan then returns to his true form, "for no falsehood can endure Touch of Celestial temper, but returns Of force to its own likeness." It is to an unknown but imaginative scholar of English letters that we owe the common name of this plant.

Long story short, I can't find any symbolism for this one. Would make a possibly good Halone/Ishgard reference if you wanted to read into it, though!

#queue time #mine #ffxiv #tsuna has white brightlillies white daisies and red carnations in her house 🥺 #with some white chrysanthemum and shroud cherries growing #and a yellow oldrose bouquet... #I should update them tbh

[nariism]

something borrowed, something blue

pair. itoshi sae x gn!reader

content: childhood sweethearts, angst, angst, angst, NO COMFORT no happy ending i'm warning you, sae leaves for spain much later here, use of y/n once (1), not proofread

synopsis. it's his wedding day.

wc. 2.1k

everything you know about weddings comes from fairytale books.

you have fond memories of the days spent curled up in the lap of a woman whose name brings you to tears with nostalgia, kind and warm as she read to you.

the itoshi brothers' mother was good at painting pictures with words; animating true love's kiss, soulmates, princesses turning into frogs and back again.

even as a tiny child you knew they all ended the same way: wedding bells and happily ever after.

she was a poet in her own right, spelling out for you what love could possibly be. as a naive child, you believed her — put blind faith in the fact that love was always perfection, that it was something easy. it was something that fills you to the brim until you're overpouring, fantastical and rare and beautiful.

she sweet talked you into believing true love is something all people find one day.

it wasn't as simple as the stories she told you made it out to be. ironically, the person who taught you so always sat to her left at the dinner table.

itoshi sae was your first. he was your only. it wasn't a foreign or unknown emotion pounding at the confines of your ribcage every time he would take your hand and drag you along with him and rin to get ice cream.

it was cruelly familiar. an ode to their mother who was waiting on the front porch for them to return home to her. love.

you grew up next door to the itoshis. your most distant memories replay with the sounds of rin's laughter in the background. they were happy kids. happier than they ever would be again.

the window of your bedroom was directly across from sae's. it was there that secrets were whispered, falling on deaf ears to the sleeping world. things that only you and him would ever know. you spent seventeen summers sitting at your windowsill under starry night skies talking about menial things.

you planned your whole lives together at that conjunction of your homes; wooden furnishings in the kitchen with green accents, a garden full of hydrangeas, lanterns strung up amongst the trees. and he promised he would buy you anything and everything you wanted, lavish or not, "just because".

you spent your entire life in love with itoshi sae. with the idea of giving your heart and soul to him. that maybe he would do the same for you if given the chance.

when sae turned eighteen, he received a very, very important letter.

the paper was thick and fancy and lined with gold. there was an official seal at the bottom of it along with a signature he couldn't read.

you remember that day vividly. you'd relived his birthday for as many years as you were alive, after all.

he was sitting in front of his birthday cake with the candles blown out as he read it aloud. champagne popped, balloons flew, people clapped, the whole shebang. you made eye contact with him from where you were sat, directly across the table in your usual seat.

it was then that reality came crashing down on you.

you were always staring at his big back, and not once had he ever turned around. not once had he ever deemed you more important than his dreams. not once did he prove to you that he loved you like you loved him.

you fought that night. he broke your heart over a leftover slice of chocolate cake.

life goes on, as they say. every part of you yearned for sae like flowers wishing for rain. you left a piece of yourself in his bedroom all those years ago, half of your soul that you hoped would always haunt him.

(it did.)

it's a mundane tuesday afternoon when you get the text.

the number was saved on your phone from many years ago, but it's been so long since the chat was active that your previous messages have been automatically deleted.

rin: are you going?

your answer is instantaneous.

y/n: no. why?

it’s a long while before rin texts you back.

rin: mom wants you there

it's all the convincing you need. you would just have to grit your teeth and sit through it, no matter how painful. you don't blame their mother in the slightest; your relationship with sae was your best kept secret, after all. it would have created a mess if you dragged their mom into your fighting.

how could she have known that she was marrying off your one and only love to a complete stranger?

everything about him is beautiful today. he's rented out the biggest venue in the city, strung up with crystal chandeliers and fancy clothed tables. it's uptight and luxurious.

you can't help but realize that it looks absolutely nothing like what you used to talk about as kids.

"the colour scheme clashes with your eyes, you know."

you watch as he tenses up at your voice, eyes drifting from his suit to you in the reflection of the mirror.

"wasn't my choice," he tells you casually, as if nearly two decades of history doesn't exist between you.

"your tie is all messed up."

"it's good to see you, too."

you're quiet in response, sauntering over to him and reaching out to fix the knot in his tie. he allows you to touch him, for old time's sake. your fingers brush against his throat and he swallows.

sae knows everything about you. almost 90% of his childhood was spent by your side. he knows what colours you like, which ones you would have chosen for your own wedding theme. he knows what kind of cake you would have wanted, too.

he did his best to persuade his bride into choosing things that wouldn't remind him of you.

it was a futile attempt.

fate works in funny ways. no matter where he looks he sees you, and his shitty plan to make this wedding the complete opposite of what you would have wanted only made him miss you more.

what do you do with memories of someone who isn't yours anymore? he doesn’t know how to handle memorizing every part of you and not using it.

you were his biggest regret, without a doubt. if he hadn't accepted that team drafting, would you still be together? would you be laughing over chocolate cake and telling your friends how you and him are childhood sweethearts? soulmates?

sae has never been impulsive. he doesn't like to be. there's nothing beneficial about being reckless.

but then he sees you, and it feels like you were never apart. he's afraid he'll wake up only to find out you were just a dream built on distant memories. or maybe he'll wake up in your arms, seventeen again, as if the world never caught up to him.

he loves you and the gravity of that makes him weak in the knees.

his whole life has been carefully constructed, at least that's what most people think. the reality is that it's all a lie; carefully constructed doesn't matter if the house is made of wet paper.

there's something nostalgic about letting you fix his tie. it reminds him of when you were both ten and looked up online how to do a windsor knot, just for the fun of it.

silence fills the room as you fix his outfit, sloppily thrown together because he couldn't care less about how he looks when marrying someone he doesn't want. then he stupidly opens his mouth in a last ditch attempt to make you his, blaming this familiar feeling raging inside of him on the nostalgia you bring with you.

“can we talk?” he pleads quietly.

“what is there to talk about?”

“about us.”

“there is no us.” not anymore. he abandoned that notion many years ago on his eighteenth birthday.

he contemplates you for a moment, just staring at you with a finality in his eyes that you wish was there the night he broke your heart. if it was, maybe the story would have ended differently.

"run away with me. let's go somewhere far from here. i don't care what anyone else thinks anymore. i just need you. i need you."

he never stopped needing you, even when thousands of miles separated you.

you blink at him in surprise. there's consideration in your face as you look at him, completely dumbfounded by his sudden confession.

it's the first time you've spoken in years. in fact, it's the first time you've laid eyes on him since that night. 

he's throwing everything away to be with you. your heart breaks because half of you knows you shouldn’t, and the other half of you screams to take his hand and start new again.

"sae..." there it is. a fondness sweet as honey clinging to your throat when you speak his name for the first time in years. there's an expression cast on his face when you call for him, as if he's been put under a spell, bewitched by your voice. 

for a moment he genuinely believes you'll actually agree to do something so stupid and reckless. just once, pretending like your whole world isn't falling apart around you. hope glimmers in his eyes. but then:

"we can't." he’s too late.

"please," he begs, forehead knocking into yours. you recoil from him so fast that you take his breath and a piece of his soul away with you.

it's been years, yet here he stands with your heart clutched in his palms; greedy fingers digging into the rotten core of fruit. you belong to him — you always will, as sure as the sun rises every morning, as sure as the sky is blue.

he knows it, too. it only makes it hurt all the more.

there isn't a doubt in your mind that you love him still, utterly and all-consuming and never-ending. the very idea of being in love with itoshi sae after all this time makes you feel so sick you might keel over and throw up.

he's just a stranger standing in front of you. your heart shouldn't tug at the sight of his watering eyes.

"shut up and go get married, sae."

you leave him standing alone in that room. he lets you go.

it's not until he's standing at the altar that it dawns on him: sae doesn't know very much about weddings.

the more accurate truth would be that he doesn't know a lot of things outside of football. but he does know one thing: your wedding day is supposed to be the happiest day of your life.

so why does he feel like throwing up?

his bride-to-be doesn’t look at him. doesn’t speak to him. their relationship is obligatory and nothing else. a union rooted in their mothers’ old friendship. sae didn’t put up a fight when his mom called him over to introduce them. he didn’t say a word until they got up to leave.

(if he did open his mouth, he would have choked on his own vomit.

in all honesty he should have, because maybe he would have scared away his bride and this whole headache never would have happened.)

she’s pretty enough. but he doesn’t like her.

there are no feelings of love in his heart, no care for what his soon-to-be wife says or does. he’s surprised she hasn’t left him at the alter yet, considering how little they even acknowledge each other.

it’s a good enough reason to explain the emptiness inside of him; that he’s entering a loveless marriage because of his mom’s social networking. he has other reasons, but none of them mattered until you showed up at the door.

loneliness is a part of sae. something he grew familiar with, something that slept in the same empty bed as he did while he tripped over his own tongue learning how to speak spanish.

he never realized how disgustingly lonely he felt in his own relationship until he saw you again.

he's supposed to be happy. he's supposed to fall in love. but he can't. not when you're sitting ten feet away from him with your fingers clinging tightly to his mother's.

sae meets your eyes only for a moment. eighteen years of his life spent by your side rings in his ears; your laughter, your tears, every part of you painfully ripping through him.

you're his soulmate. it's always been you. there was only ever you. how could it be anyone else?

he swallows and it feels like a thousand nails dragging down his throat. regret melts his brain into mush. he wants to object his own marriage and you seem to sense that, because you give him the tiniest, most subtle shake of the head.

don’t, please. 

sae’s stomach sinks. there’s only one acceptable answer he can give the officiant right now:

"i do."

maybe in the next lifetime.

© ALABOADOA 2023 — please do not translate or post my works to other platforms.

#— whispers in the wind ✧ #sorry not sorry (i am sorry please accept a hug) #blue lock #bllk #blue lock x reader #bllk x reader #itoshi sae #itoshi rin #sae itoshi #itoshi sae x reader #itoshi sae x y/n #itoshi sae x you #sae itoshi x reader #sae itoshi x y/n #sae itoshi x you #bllk angst #itoshi sae angst

[cherubispunk]

THANK YOU, MR. MILLER - bfd!Joel Miller x Reader

summary: caught up in the devistation of you parents ever crumbling marriage, you seek help and comfort from your older neighbour.

a note from lucy: this is one my faves i've written so far. I hope you enjoy because I did.

playlist

wc: 7789 warnings: 18+ MDNI! no outbreak au! bfd!joel, angst, fluff, smut, p in v smut, fingering, oral - fem receiving, light choking, age gap (reader is twenty one, joel is in his forties), swearing, mentions of infidelity and divorce.

Most days you wished you could tie your fluctuant thoughts together in a neat little bunch with a ribbon, maybe yellow or blue, knot it into a bow. Like a bouquet of flowers. Except they were not flowers. They were brambles and stinging nettles and those weird little dandelions that only stay pretty until a gust of wind strips them bare to their stalks. 

To spite this, you had an avarice for perfection. As a result of all the times life seemed to spiral out of control. Like ivy up the trunk of the oak tree in your back garden. You cried the day your father had to saw it down; Only being Eight and watching through the sliding glass doors of your living room. Your treehouse came down with it. All that was left was a stump now smothered by your mothers prize winning hydrangeas. Tonight seemed to be one of those moments. One of those life altering experiences that are jarring even if you see them coming. 

Deep down, in the pit of your gut that formed first at the family dinner table through awkward conversation, you knew it was coming. Your brother who left home a year before you, yet to return even once from the army, knew it. Everyone else on the street did too. Heck, maybe the whole of Austin’s suburbia knew? Knew about the pathetic crumbling foundations your parents’ marriage sat on. It was tilted at an alarmingly steep angle as pillars of salt corroded, eroded, dissolved. It was jarring in a way that knocked air out your chest and winded you. A way that blew your eyes wide. Now, without you or your brother in the house, they had no reason to keep up appearances behind closed doors as well as in the open, and they slipped.

It's why you found yourself staring at the front door of the Miller household. Praying that the only friend you had in close vicinity, heck in Austin, full stop, could hear you rant about the shit you encountered barely mere moments ago. The same shit that was happening under the roof of your childhood home. In your parents’ marital bed. 

Just like the decay of a loving vow, It was no secret you had changed over the time away. You filled out your clothes more, despite losing a little weight from how skint college made you. Long gone were the awkward blemishes to your skin, and growth spurts that made your jeans too short in the leg, and growing pains of puberty. You had a little skip in your step. One that was no longer weighed down from the dull life you lead when back home. Your first year of college was difficult to begin with. But you slipped into routine there. And you found your people. A few friends, some on your course, some not. But coming back after your third year…it was…new again. 

And the way Joel’s eyes roved over you for a split second upon seeing you at his door— it made an invisible shiver of something jolt down your spine. A shiver that rattled each vertebrae. It had you smoothing over the hem of your shirt into your stupid little gym shorts. You chose to wear them because it was comfortable to travel in. But now you felt cold and small under his gaze, like an ant under a. His face softened when he saw the shimmering streaks of tears run down your pretty little face, eyes red while you reached up to wipe your nose and sniff. God, the ground should just open in a gaping hole and swallow you, bones and all.

“Uh, sorry to bother you so late, Mr. Miller.” You choked, closing your eyes and holding in  breath, cursing how easy it was for you to cry. Your mother often chided you for it. Said ‘no one likes a crybaby’. And your father would butt in with ‘stop having a bubble’. Words that still sting as they yelled out in echoes in your mind while you stood on his doorstep. “Is…” another sniff, “is Sarah in?” Joel’s head tilted to the side slightly, only askew as he tutted slightly and offered a sympathetic smile of pity, “No. She’s with her boyfriend. Ain't been back yet.” 

“Oh.” You nodded. How foolish you had been to think that your end of term dates aligned with hers. “Okay. Thank you anyway.” You turned to leave, only getting about ninety degrees in your turn on his doorstep before he stopped you. 

“Do you want me to give her a message when she gets back tomorrow?” He watched as only your head turned back towards him, your feet staying firmly planted to the floor. Jesus Christ, you missed the sight of him. Missed seeing him in the mundane setting of suburbia. It made it so much more interesting. His shirt, it hugged his torso, the sleeves clinging to his large biceps like a second skin and stretching the dark fabric taut. A deranged part of you slipped back to your 18 year old self, peeking through the window to see him pushing the lawnmower across his front lawn in the dry heat, a dark patch of sweat collecting on the dip of his lower spine and across the wings of his shoulder blades. 

“No. That, uh…it's not urgent.” You tried, the corners of your lips tugging a smile, a sad little one that made you look far worse. A lie smeared across your now pale face. 

“You look tired, Sugar.” He said, the words seeping into the very marrow of your aching bones, wrapped up in that southern drawl you missed hearing through your open bedroom window. In the morning’s when he called out to his brother if he picked him up for work. Tommy, you remembered, was his name. “You got somethin’ weighing on your mind?” You willed yourself to shake your head, but you couldn’t bring it within yourself to lie right now. So instead you just nodded. “You wanna come in for a second?” He asked, glancing between you and the house across the street. The one unspeakable acts of infidelity were currently happening just beyond the white picket fence, and the manicured green lawn. It made your stomach twist into knots and your belly churn in a queasy mix of bile and the muffin you got at the airport that early morning. His eyes, however, stayed on you when you too glanced back, swallowing dryly when he saw the soft curve of your ass hang out the bottom of your bunched up shorts, the soft, malleable skin teasing him, making him hot beneath the collar. He had to adjust his jeans slightly as they got a little tighter, the nasty thoughts of how the swell of your rear would ripple with the dents of his fingertips if he was rough enough. Would they leave bruises on your skin? 

Fuck. Joel cursed himself in the tangled confines of his mind. Damining for the sexual frustration that caught him off guard. He hadn’t had a good fuck in years, but the way your tear stained cheeks glowed in the dim light of his porch had him caught up; Wondering if you’d cry like that for him as he bent you over his kitchen counter, tits pressed to the linoleum, cheek smushed under his hands, your body jolting from erratic thrusts, his hips sapping into your behind. Would you cry out his name? Or would you resolve into whimpers and whines? Joel would admit, using the sight of you as a way to set his dick wet was the lowest of low, a depth he didn’t think he’d reach even in the throes of painful, biting sexual frustration. But it seemed to have boiled down and condensed together over the years. And being parched of the sight of you, your innocence over the time you were away — to then have you flung back at him? It had him growling in his own mind. Clawing at the yellow wallpaper. Just shy of a year since seeing you last over the street. That’s all it took for desire to light a fire in the pit of his belly and set up camp. And it wasn’t a traveller anymore. It was there to stay until satiated. The length in his jeans wanted him so gravely of that. 

Pervert. He thought to himself bitterly, laced with a vehement venom. It neighboured his lust for you. 

“Okay.” He found himself blinking once, twice, a sharp inhale of air waking him up as it shot through his nose. You replied with the affirmative! 

“Okay.” He nodded back, jaw ticking, the muscle in his neck flexed under the pressure of his teeth biting together, making you want to mimic it with your thighs— to ease the ache just slightly.

He stepped to the side. 

With an audible gulp, one that made you cringe, you tiptoed on a proverbial tripwire, a livewire, into the foyer of his house, past him. A breeze followed you through with gusto, making a mockery of your senses as it blew his scent into your face when you turned back round to face him. He closed the door and you felt a relief, one that was short lived because you were now surrounded by him. His smell, his sight. Everything about him, it was clinging to the walls, painted a white that you imagined glowed a warm, mellow yellow in the morning light. An oddly domestic thought to be having given you were thinking of all the ways he might just make you fall apart just two seconds ago, drooling over him his tight fucking t-shirt.

It did look so warm, though, a faded black from being washed so often, the Rolling Stones album cover printed on the front was cracked, like the canvas of an old oil painting. Specks of white fluff clung to the fabric, a normal sight. But it did nothing to help your want for him. It would smell so richly of him, so lavishly of Joel. You knew it. 

‘God, this was so inappropriate!’ You scolded yourself in your head, letting him lead you into his kitchen. If you had a tail that little fucker would be folded shamefully between your legs, curled in sin.

The only sound in his kitchen came from a fan that hummed weakly as it oscillated on the counter. It reminded you of a thought you had when leaving university for the summer. Would I miss the cool rain of Colorado? You felt a lot like that fan. Pathetic. Swinging meekly between left and right. Never able to stick to one side due to the instability you grew up around. Smothered in. 

“College good? People treatin’ you well?”Joel asked as he filled up a glass of water for you and slid it across the counter your way. You nodded tentatively, wetting your lips with your tongue before raising the glass to them. He watches with a secret hunger as the cool glass met your lips and you take a small sip to soothe your parched dry throat. 

“Yeah.” 

“Where'd you go again? Washington, right?” “Colorado.” You corrected him.

“Colorado. Right.” 

He paused after nodding…and the air was once again stagnant due to the fall of conversation.

“What major?” He asked again, making you look up at him in a skittish movement. Like a fucking deer in headlights. You wanted to bolt like a rabbit at the sound of a shotgun instead. I’m your disgust, your feet stayed firmly planted into the linoleum tile of his floor. 

“Uh, I'm studying education.” He nodded, pursing his lips as he mulled the thought over in his head with a nod. 

“You wanna teach then?” He inquired. You nodded, “Sounds about right. You were always so giving. Very selfless of ya.” You set the glass down, swallowing down the sip you took just before. You can’t help but smile a little at that, eyes closing as you let yourself feel — for just a moment — that you were meant to be laced up in his words; Wrapped and held in place by a little bow. Like a birthday gift, or something under the decorated tree at Christmas. 

This little second to yourself didn't go unnoticed by Joel. It made his heart thrum rapidly, pinch behind his lungs in the cage of his ribs. It had him up in arms again over his riling thoughts. They stuck to the walls of his mind, clinging to them like a rabid animal. If you’d let him, he'd sink his claws and teeth into the action upon those images. Spur it into play. Maybe sink his teeth into the plush of your skin too. Would you like that? To be carnally desired. Would you consent to that horror born of lust? He thanked the separation of the kitchen counter hiding his cock that pressed to his thigh under his jeans, blood flowing south as you held back tears again after a wave of short lived relief. 

“What’s up, pretty girl?” He asked. Making your eyelids spring open again to meet the dark chestnut of his irises. The warm hue from the under cabinet strip lights illuminated the individual honey gold flecks in them. You swore your knees buckled, joined groaning. “You got a lot running round that head of yours.” He pointed out, noticing the tight scrunch of your brow. It would curl like that out of pleasure, give him half a chance. He was sure of it. Fucked out and overstimulated, limbs sprawled out beneath him like a wire in a snare trap. 

Your silence was deafening and he sought out to fill it when giving you another once over. Her rounded the kitchen counter, praying your eyes stayed on his because the way your shirt swallowed you whole had him wishing he was the one doing that instead, covering you with himself. Holding your naked self to his chest. Feel. 

“You wanna sit for a bit and talk about it?”

You gnawed at the tip of your thumb, a nervous habit that had Joel wrapping his large hand around your wrist and pulling it back. His digits engulfed your wrist completely. His size compared to yours was startling. His smile was kinda, masking the thoughts of what those tiny hands would look like, wrapped round his dick as he hissed at the friction your smooth plans would give him. Would it wrap round the girth perfectly? Would your thumb meet your middle finger as you took hold onto him? Probably not. 

He swallowed, trying not to think the same for your lips as you once again darted your tongue out to draw the plush pink of your bottom lip between the whites of your teeth. 

Instead, he settled for pulling you gently forward, cheating you round towards the living room with a steady palm to the small of your back. He felt the jolt you made, and then the way your muscles eased, the arch of your spine soothing and straightening out. 

With a gentle touch, he led you to the sofa, sitting beside you. Waiting for you to speak. 

“E-everyone saw it coming.” You croaked out, an annoyance and intolerable hate for yourself and your dumbfounded stupidity pinching at your sides. “Even I saw it coming! I just don’t understand why I had to find out in such a-“ Joel watched your eyes dart around the carpet of his living room, as if the answer would lay right there, nestled between the threads and fibres, “a messy way…” you continued with a small voice. He titled his head towards you, raising his brows with gentle ardence for what you had to say. 

And so you spoke. Told him of the messy tangling of your fathers limbs with another woman’s. The sound of them. Disgusting. Gut wrenching. How they mingled with the bedspread in a frantic assembly of passion and appendages. 

Joel’s face turned into a grimace. He knew. He saw the two of them enter your home together when washing the dishes of his meal for one. Drunk, cheeks flushed with the secret they carried. An infidelity. He’d seen your mother commit a similar sin earlier this very week. He cleared his throat, resting a careful hand on your thigh, one that would make him lose control had it not been for its place just above your knee. Any higher and he was in hot water. He knew it. 

“Sweetheart,” he started in a soothing, sympathetic but also telling manner, “Adults don’t always get it right. We…we ain’t perfect either.” He tried. He felt like he was having a conversation with Sarah. A torture of de ja vu. Way back when. Years ago she asked what happened to her Mummy. And he had said the same line of truth. A bitter, harrowing truth. But one everybody discovered sooner or later. He wished you knew it before and he wasn’t the one to twist those pretty features into pain instead of pleasure. He was silently begging to whatever higher power that was watching, that he wasn’t being perverted. That you didn’t see this is some little trick to get you vulnerable, in a headspace where he could fuck you until you felt better. Or until you entirely forgot. Forgot all but the way to mouth out his name in a shrill cry. 

If you even knew in first place all the things he wished to do with you. To you. 

“Sometimes you just find someone who ain’t right. They might be at the time. And you feel so sure ‘bout it that you make promises.” You listened, relayed it in your mind while you bit the inside of your cheek in futility. It wasn’t easy. Not by any means a conversation you wanted to have. But it was needed. The two of you knew it. A twisted part of you was glad it meant you got a chance to talk to him. To have him touch you gently. 

He reached forward, tucking a single lock of hair behind your ear to see the hues of your irises. The way they gleamed slightly with tears. It was the prettiest sight of total devastation he had seen. Joel was no man of hubris, but he’d be damned if he didn’t think that getting you on all fours, crying a little for him in pleasure would boost his ego. 

You glanced up at him, grinding your teeth together nervously while the ghosting of a calloused fingertip skimmed the top of your right cheekbone. If it weren’t for your thighs sticking uncomfortably to the leather of the sofa in this heat, you would have decayed to submission and slipped to the floor. 

Joel let his knuckles that he cracked together to feel the grounding of physical pain, feel a comfort instead as they skimmed down your jawline. Physicality was so much tamer to him than emotion. There was the promise of knowing when you’d feel better that came with the ache to his joints and lower spine. 

'`Thank you, Mr. Miller. It’s okay.”  You sniffed, “I- I’ll be okay. I think.” Joel let a kind smile spread over his face. 

“I know you will. You're a strong little lady. But please, call me Joel” Your eyes closed again and you swallowed. But opening them – that was the damning part. Because the moment they did, you saw how he flickered between each of your eyes. It must have been the intimacy of having the permission to use his first name, because it had you inhaling deeply in need of him. 

You were surely frozen to the spot, his hand moving slightly higher up your thigh in a gentle caress before dragging back down to squeeze your knee. You let yourself have the pleasure of gazing at his lips. A mistake because it made you yearn to kiss him more. How would rough hairs of his upper lip feel against your cupid's bow?

It seemed your body moved of its own accord, for your lips met his. It was unlike anything you could have imagined when in bed, two fingers buried in your pussy, imagining they were his. His hot breath fanned over your lips, making you want more. But it was cut short when he pulled away with a groan. 

Your skittish nature took hold of the reins and you jumped back, springing to your feet, hands tugging in your hair. “Oh, god- Joel- I…” You stammered, tears once again welling in your bloodshot eyes, “I’m so sorry. I thought…”

What? What did you think? That something would come of kissing your older, very age inappropriate neighbour? Fuck. 

He stood up quickly after you, fists balled as if he was holding something back. Joel watched as you paced the floor once, twice, stopping at the far end of the room by the wall, distance yourself from the magnetic pull you had to him. “Hey, it's okay.’ He assured, taking a tentative step closer, hands now flat, fingers spread slightly as he tried to calm you down. “I’m not mad, sweetheart, okay?’ You took a breath in through your nose. Let it out again in a tremble of breath. 

Another step closer. He was closer than needed, but you weren't the one making that call. He was. So you took it as a good sign, still pleading for his forgiveness though. 

“Sorry.”

“You don't have to apologise for nothin’, Sugar.” He assured with that slow southern drawl again. It stretched out his syllables and smoothed out his vowels with it. God, it was a beautiful sound. One you wanted to muffle with your lips, with your legs over his ears. He was now an inch away from your chest, leaning closer to whisper in your ear. “I’d be lyin’ if i said I hadn’t wanted it.” 

The sentence sent a jolt throughout you. 

“Look at you.” He mumbled into the crook of your neck, the junction of your throat. A swallow passed through it, the cartilage of your windpipe flexing under his lips. “Too beautiful not to be touched.” 

Those words struck a certain chord on your heartstrings. Plucked away at them like a harp. Made the beating of that very organ thrum in song. A tuneful symphony he felt through your pulse. 

Too beautiful not to be touched.

No one had said that to you before. No one. And it was like a life altering experience. A mere ‘thank you’ didn’t feel like enough to respond with. It felt pathetic to say in comparison. And silence was so much more pathetic. But you couldn’t really articulate anything to say back. You just…stood there in awe of him as he continued to place careful, open mouthed kisses to your neck. 

“How would you do it?’ You asked breathlessly, eyes closing, lashes fanning out over the tops of your cheekbones, “T-touch me?” You stuttered through fragmented, beating breaths. His kisses, they grew messier by the second now, and he hummed in amusement into your skin. Into the heat of it that crept up your throat. This was so wrong. So perverse it hurts is what he thought. But the pleasure from just his lips — it stung at the backs of your eyes like a prickling of tears; Oh god, it felt right. Right. Real. So, so…real- it was real. Repeating the word in your mind had it losing its meaning for a second, a jumbled up sound in the voice of your inner ear, your articulatory process working overtime just to feel into him. Feed the need for him.

“First.” He started, pushing you gently by the slope of your shoulders, until your back collided softly to the painted plaster of his living room wall, “I’d push you up against the wall.” He paused, pressing an open mouthed kiss to your collarbone, the shallow skin that was teased into view for him as he hooked a finger into the crewneck of your large t-shirt. “And then, I’d pin you down.” The thought made you whimper, a pulse of pleasure aching between your legs. Unquenchable, not able to be soothed by anything that wasn’t the touch of his rough fingers, the calloused pads of his digits. Middle and forefinger. 

“You want that?” You nodded frantically in reply, breath catching your throat as he tugged at your shirt more. “Words. Use that pretty mouth of yours for words, sweet thing.” 

“Y-Yes, Joel.” You stammered. Pathetic. Embarrassing. But it was impossible when his whole weight, his broad frame, toned with years of manual labour, pressed you into the wall. “Yes.” He let out another amused hum, except it tailed off into more of a growl now. A guttural one that rumbled in the back of his throat and reverberated in your ears. Rattled your ribs until they ached. It pinched them. The skin over them too and the lungs under them as well. Lungs that shivered from his touch.  

“You wanna feel pretty.” It was not a question. A statement of understanding. One that made you think he once cracked open your skull and read each thought. The pages of your diary, even. Back to front. Cover to cover. Scour each word, ravage it of meaning the same way you wanted him to do with you. To your cunt that pulsed and soaked the fabric of your underwear. It made the skin of your inner thighs sticky as it dripped down gluttonously. “You want me to make you feel pretty, hm?” 

“Please.” 

He pulled back, a gleam in his eyes, and an almost evil smirk to match curled at the corner of his chapped lips. “I can do that, sweet thing.” He cooed, lulling you into a false sense of security. “I can make you feel pretty. Matter of fact, doll. I can make you feel fuckin’ beautiful.” You were now waving a white flag over your head to him. In that battle between your morality and lust, the turmoil of your needy, disgusting thoughts that echoed in your bones. It filled the hollow space between them. He stole away into it. He would make you feel pretty. Beautiful. He said so himself into the skin of your neck that now prickled violently with goosebumps. They made his words physical, scribing them out. A beautiful collision. And a stunning one it would be if he defiled you with the thrust of his hips. He’d make space for himself anywhere and you'd let him. Let him make roots in your mind. And not just the thought of him that you conjured up. No. He’d anchor himself there. Without your help. He’d make them himself. Without your involvement or investment.  

It was no longer a question of how much you were willing to let up to him. How much of yourself you’d give up to him and set in his possession. It was now the complete certainty of how much he wanted. Or needed. You saw in his eyes he needed it. A comfort, a release of clashing teeth and viced limbs to his waist and back. It frightened you how easy it was to give that to him. To let him take that pleasure and make it his. His. His, his, his. Carve out a chunk of yourself from your arms that you hoped would surround him in the throes of messy heat. Give it to the man on a silver platter, surrounded by pomegranate, cherry and apple. Sweet fruits of you. Your fruits of your labours to him. 

“We should stop��” Joel said into the skin of your neck, hands grasping at your hips, upper thighs. His fingers sank and embedded into flesh. He kept changing his mind, you kept changing your mind. But the actions he bought on, pressed to your skin by crafted lips, a little too far away in his own head — they went against his inhibition. Perfectly encapsulated the erotic stimulation as his hand slipped down your side to tangle messily with the hem of your shirt. 

“We should.” You agreed breathlessly, immediately, chest in tandem with his, it’s rise and fall as they beat ceaselessly together, touching up to one and other. 

“—But I can’t.” He continued. 

“Neither can I. So please don’t.”

Being wanted. Wanting too much. It fed the idea of him but left you starving as you found those roots you made of him in your head being overgrown and overtaken by his own now. It was happening. In his own living room. Behind the closed curtains as he drew closer, closer, the windows seemingly fogged up to the outside. The suburbia that held its messy and primitive life, guarded by picket fences. Greying and peeling picket fences. Not white. Not pure. Not anything but decaying. Oh, you’d decay into him in a heartbeat. Give it all to him. Let him take it. Going through to the beating of your heart and crashing through your ribs. Rip it out your aching, pinching chest. A gaping hole left behind.

He didn’t stop. And thank god he didn’t. Because the way his hand smoothed between your thighs, between the seam of your shorts. Maybe it was something that was so taboo no one spoke of it? Maybe you too wouldn’t even speak of it after this. But it was too addictive to bother you. It seemed to flare your synapses, send shockwaves of rolling pleasure, cascading from your slouched shoulders as you slumped slightly more into him and off the wall. Your head spinning in circles loosened your chemicals. An endorphin rush. Pulled out your centrefold, staples bent and mauled as your pages fell from the book and onto the floor in front of him. Letting him tear you apart column by column. 

“Lean back, pretty girl.” He commanded softly. Deftly. It made you feel like fine art, sculpted veins of his hands that flexed as they palmed your cunt through the two thin layers of fabric, slick clinging to them. You obeyed so well.

Joel’s curved, rigid nose ran along your carotid artery. The one that thumped with your quickening pulse. This anticipation and forbidden pleasure made him realise he was always more comfortable in chaos. In something a little out of the ordinary and unstable. Unhealthy. Joel gave into the temptation of low hanging fruit because it was there. And you got so little from anyone that what small intricacies you were handed, you let him. Let him as he snatched it up and bit a hunking chunk out of your soul. A souvenir for himself. Pulled the apple from the tree in the garden of Eden, sank his teeth into it, let the sweetness seep out of the core onto his tongue as it unravelled into addiction. 

You were his apple now, and your teeth were bared to him, like his were to the delicate, shallow skin of your neck, the ridges one slopes of your collarbones. While his fingers, long and thick, slipped past the hem of your shorts, deeper past the little bow in the centre of the hem of your underwear. The crown of your head fell back gently to plaster, and mouth fell open with a small high gasp as he finally made contact with your clit. He hummed again. The slick you offered him made it so easy to give an experimental circle of his fingers. 

Middle and forefinger pinching it slightly, circling it the way you felt you circled each other before now. 

“Don’t wanna break you, sugar. Gotta be careful.” He said as his fingers coaxed you into bliss. Toes curling in your socks and high top converse. 

“Please- I don’t care if you do- just—“ More. You needed more. Nothing, no matter how much you dreamed of this, seemed to be enough yet. “More. Please let me have more.” 

“How much more?” He growled, rolling his hips into your thigh as he lost a little composure. It was just as he thought. Your begging was so sweet. Did God feel this way when he heard prayers?

“Inside. I want to feel you inside.” 

His breath hissed in his throat as it caught between the walls of his windpipe and the strings of his vocal cords. With a slow, dragging pace of rough fingertips, he moved further down your slit, spreading your lips apart and holding a single pad of his digit to your hole, teasing you at your entrance. He growled again, teeth and mouth parting as he sank them into your shoulder. It made you cry out in a sharp wail when he slipped a single finger into your fluttering heat, cunt suffocating his digits. He was up to his middle knuckle deep in you, pulling out to do the same with two now. Middle and forefinger, curling them. Physically be king you towards a release. Your legs tensed and relaxed as each wave of pleasure rumbled through you. Hips bucked slightly into him and his free hand grapes at the flesh of your hip once more to slam your ass back into the wall. 

“Good girl. Such a pretty little lady. Beautiful little cunt for me.” He cooed after unlatching his mouth from the purple bruise of a bite mark on your shoulder. His hot breath kissed the shell of your ear and made the ache settle into pleasure deep in your walls. Right at the end. Right there. “Is it all for me?”

“Yes!” You whimpered, “Yes— all for you, Joel.” 

“Mhm. Good girl. Beautiful little lady.” 

His fingers seemed to pick up a pace, but it was hindered by the tight material of your clothing. So he opted to shove it over the swell of your ass, down to your mid thigh. Not bothering for want and need of pressing his fingers back into you. Plunging them back into your tight heat. The warmth and wetness lead to lewd sounds squelching between your quivering thighs, the meat of your flesh. 

“Good girl.” He whispered again, grasping your chin in a vice grip and pulling you closer, crashing his lips to yours in a clashing of teeth and mingling of moans. “So fuckin’ needy. So fuckin’ Love it.” Joel growled, “And it’s all for me. Makin this old man feel so special, doll.”

Tears burned your eyes with the white hot pleasure that coarser through you like a racehorse. They slipped from the threshold of your waterline, and the moment he tasted them against your lips, he pulled from them, licking a hit stripe up your cheek. He lapped them up, inhaling deeply through his nose, caught up in everything your body gave him. “Gonna make you feel so fuckin’ beautiful. Make you forget about it all. Only want you to remember my name.” You nodded, his fingers now up to the hilt in your tight little hole that clamped around him, threatening to spasm as you lost control.

 It burned in your lower belly. The crying, shrill screaming promise of climaxing. 

“You’re so close. Can feel it.”

“Yes, Joel.”

“Want you to come for me. Let that pretty little cunt of yours come on my fingers.” It was purely debaucherous, disgusting how fucking good it felt. It made you angry for some reason unknown to your mind. But your orgasm was so tangible at the time you couldn’t bring yourself to care. 

You cried out, your slim fingers gripping at his hair, fisting the curls between your nails and palms. It burned you up inside. Or was that from his fingers? Fuck, the thought of his cock and what pleasure it would unfold inside your anatomy had your mouth watering. 

“Good fuckin’ girl.” He growled obscenely into your ear as the most animalistic howl you had made yet tore through your bronchioles and rattled in his ears; Bounced from the walls. 

The moment your walls stopped squeezing him he pulled his fingers from your messy heat and shoved them past your lips, teeth scraping at his knuckles. “Taste it. Ain’t it beautiful? Ain’t you just the prettiest little gift to me?” You nodded, eyes locking zealously with his while you cleaned his fingers of your release. The tang of your juices had your eyes rolling back in your head. And Joel wanted more. So he pressed them further into the cavern of your mouth. His blunt nails passed the hard palate of your mouth, pressing into your soft palate nod. And the gag you gave out had his already angry cock twitch viciously in protest behind his zipper. 

“Gonna get you naked now, Sugar. Gonna see what pretty little body you’ve been hidin’ away from me all this time.” 

You nodded frantically, these moments of oblivion being all that you needed now. The infidelity of your parents’ now a thing of the past, cast to the attic of your mind palace. The walls are now painted in colours of him. Lifting your arms to aid your own undressing, he yanked the hem of your shirt up, tossing it aside, large hands now hooking into your bottoms and pulling from your still quivering legs. Those same hands, ones that you were convinced were crafted and out into this very earth for your pleasure, hooked under your thighs, lifting you up into him. Legs wrapped around his waist without hesitation while he carried you to his stairs, ascending them with haste burning in his stomach. Your hands tugging at his hair and your lips to his neck made his strides larger, taking the steps two at a time. 

You were well into the belly of the beast now. Consumed and swallowed, wallowing in a haze of postcotial bliss.  

His foot kicked open the door of his bedroom, and you felt the spring of the mattress under your back, pushed down from the rebound as he found himself once again on top of you. His hips now met yours, still clothed and he could feel your wetness seep through the waters of clothing.  

“Please, Joel, wanna feel you.” He was slowly going at you with a stitch picker, pulling you apart from the seams of your fabric. And he relished in it. You both relished in it. “Wanna see you. All of you. Please?” 

A hand of his hooked behind your calf, pulling each of your shoes from your feet, followed by your socks and he smirked devilishly down upon you. “Oh, yeah?” He asked, chuckling evilly to himself. A sound that made you writhe atop his bedspread; Made you want to creek into his skin and barks yourself between his spine and ribs. Any free space of him. 

“Yes! Please.” You begged, reaching out to grasp the hem of that shirt he wore. It’s faded fabric bunching in your meagre handfuls. He growled, dragging you closer by the swell of your thighs, pressing the hard and defined line of his dick through his jeans into your wanting slit. Pink and puffy cunt swiping against denim. The friction made you jolt. 

“Sure thing, Beautiful.” – ‘I’ll make you feel fuckin’ beautiful.’ It echoed again in his words and wanting, hungry actions. – “As soon as I taste that gorgeous pussy of yours.” 

He sank to his knees, joints not clicking because he felt young. Fucking Alive. A hot stripe made by the flat of his tongue made you mewl, a hand in his hair once again. The other splayed out on the covers, propping you up to get a view of him buried so deeply between your thighs, nestled into their apex, tongue fucking into your fluttering hole and the tip of his nose pressed to you clit. Your brow scrunched, jaw unhinged. Like him. With every slight roll of his head, the defined curl of his nose brushed your clit deliciously, each nerve ending of the bud was alive, live a livewire. It rattled in your bones, steam through your blood. Tingling as the sensation spread through your limbs, almost like pins and needles. 

The angle was altered ever so slightly as he hooked both of your knees over his shoulders, inhaling the sweet musk of your cunt. He growled into it, lips smothered in your juices that gushed onto his tongue.”Come on, little lady. Wanna taste you gushing over my tongue.” Joel mumbled drunkenly between your parted thighs, his eyes boring deeper holes into your already blown pupils. Dilated and wide. 

It was all the coil needed to burn brighter and tighten in its twisted knot, snapping clean in half as you reeled. You shoulder blades crashed back down to the mattress, back arching, strung tight in a deep curve while you writhed. He tugged you closer, moaning lowly into the seam between your thighs, slurping needily at what your body gave him. He hummed, addicted now. That taste was fatal. He had his forbidden fruit and he’d jump to far higher branches to get another taste if it came to it. 

“Taste so good. So fuckin’ good, doll. Like sugar.” He cooed again, pulling back once he had his fill for the time being. A good thing because the way the scruff of his chin rubbed at your thighs was starting to become harder to ignore. 

You watched through heavy, half lidded eyes as he pulled off his shirt to reveal sweet skin, the slight pudge of his stomach. You followed the smattering of hair in his happy trail down to his jeans, just as he popped the button. 

“Gonna fuck you real good, now, Sugar. Gonna make you feel so beautiful.” You believed him. Every word as it became gospel to the pair of you sinners. “Gonna me you want it even after this.”

“Always wanted it, Joel.” You mumbled, hypnotised by his fingers as they hooked into his jeans. He tugged them down over his hips, dragging down his adonis belt, softer, less harsh compared to the contours of the rest of him, such as his arms. He pulled them down in one swift motion with his boxers, his heavy cock slapping onto his lower abdomen, thich, red, the tip swallowed and leaking, drooling gluttonously with a rivulet of precum down the underside of his length. 

His hand wrapped around it, the large splay of his palm did nothing to dwarf its size with he jacked himself once, twice, three times to the sight of you. Fucked out from merely his tongue and fingers. He squeezed the base of his cock with hiss, pulling his bottom lip between his teeth after cursing under his bated breath. 

“Promise it’ll only hurt for a bit, Sugar.” He swore sweetly at the sight of your anxiety. How you shifted slightly atop his covers. He was able to read you so well, like a book he had scoured the ages of every night before bed. It made you feel special. Sacred. The way he did it so easily. It was everything you wanted. Someone to tell you and assure you of your safety even when you didnt voice a single concern. “I’ll make you feel so good.” 

He ran the tip up and down your slit, having to hold back from slamming into you when the bulbous head notched at your entrance.

“You on birth control, beautiful?” He asked as he leaned over you, bent at the waist, wrapping your legs around him securely. 

“Y-yeah.” 

Joel took that as a go ahead to push into you, pressing his hips flush to yours as you swallowed him inch by deliciously thick inch. 

“Good girl.” He crooned, spelling both of his psalm over your hairline sweeping the hair that stuck to your forehead in the sheen of sweat atop your skin. His large hands dragged over the top of your skull to the crown of your head, down the back of your neck. The delicate dragged of roughened skin made a trail of goosebumps rise over your skin, blazing in his touch’s wake. He trod a path with his hands down to your breasts, kneading each one between his palms, still buried to the hilt inside you. How he had so much restraint, he didn't know. And neither did you. But the needy roll of your hips into his showed just how desperate you were. He groaned at the start of the friction between you, and slowly dragged back out of you, moving just as slowly back inside. 

The motion turned into a needy clash of his hips to yours. Again. Again. Again. Somewhere along the sting of passion and heat, his hand wrapped around your throat, feeling the flex of it as you swallowed under his palms. He bit down into your neck, reaching out from you as his hips slammed erratically. His heavy balls slapping against your ass. 

Your cunt drooled down his shaft, down to the base, down the sensitive skin of his cock. He growled and ground and hissed in your ear, grip tightening in your neck. You felt it tighten. And tighten. Right in the pit of your stomach, deep in your sopping wet cunt. Suckong him back in as the angle of his hips snapped up into the spot that had you seeing entire constellations. They darted to and fro across your vision. It blurred the edge, spotted slinging over the back of your eyes that now burned with tears of pleasure. 

His fingers gripped tightly at your hip, thin brushing over your hip bone down your mouth to toy with your clit. And action that sent you spiralling, babbling his name nonsensically among a string of curse words. So pretty and fucked out beneath him. Joel couldn't help but stare in awe as your eyes rolled back into your head when your orgasm hit like a freight train. 

He came undone coon after, his climax hitting a crescendo with a growl bitten into your shoulder, leaving another beautiful purple mark on your flawless skin. His thumb still rolled over your clit gently, helping you ride that experience out for all that it was worth. 

And then he scooped you, took care of you, let you stay the night. And when you were asleep, wrapped up in his sheets, clean, loved. He stole away downstairs, gathering your clothes, bunching up your panties in his fist, hiding them away in his nightstand. 

Not that you would have cared. 

You didn’t have to gather your thoughts anymore. Joel replaced them and the stinging nettles and the brambles and the dandelion stems with pretty sunflowers, lavender and sweet peas. And he tied them up with a sweet little ribbon of pure gold. Just for you.

#joel miller #joel miller x reader #joel miller x y/n #joel miller x you #joel miller x #the last of us #the last of us fic #joel miller fanfiction #joel miller smut #joel miller fic #tlou hbo #the last of us hbo #joel tlou #lu’s little bookshelf

[circinuus]

can you make dazai blush?

0.6k words. gn! reader

❥ inspired by this video, and here's my honest reaction; possibly ooc dazai

dazai, who is eloquent in his words and smooth in his gestures; a ladies' man with looks that are easy in the eyes and a voice pleasant to the ear.

dazai, who eyes you curiously when you first step into the agency, wet behind the ears, timid at kunikida's instructions and atsushi's reassuring words.

dazai, who finds the way you stumble your words very endearing, who finds the way the apples of your cheeks heat in crimson adorable whenever he reaches for your hand and starts a soliloquy about how you're just like a beautiful flower.

dazai, who pauses before waving a woeful hand when you return his grasp with a more secure and worried squeeze after he gives you an offer on a lover's suicide. your silent worry and reprimand do not cease even with kunikida's and atsushi's notions that such is just how the agency is.

dazai, who started looking forward to going to the agency every morning, wondering what expression you'll make today. will you bashfully scrunch up your nose if he compliments how your eyes sparkle like the evening tsurumi river that failed to drown him? or how your hands are as soft as the petals of a foxglove? will your eyebrows crease in frazzled concern if he eats that poisonous shroom again?

dazai, who frowns and is against the idea of you going for a fieldwork near yokohama port—more than he expected he will be.

dazai, whose face freezes and tongue paralyzed when you stop him after work one evening, in your arms is a bouquet of fresh blue hydrangeas. "thank you for being such a good senior," you said with heartfelt gratitude. dazai thinks of the possibility of you mistaking him for kunikida, or yosano, or atsushi, or other people from the agency. the possibility is unlikely.

dazai, who usually brushes off or basks in compliments that come his way, but is now stuck in perplexed blinks when you told him about how kind he is, the white stray cat still cradled in his arms and occasionally licking his cheek.

dazai, who is a suave man—accepting honmei chocolates here and there with practiced ease—only to pause in a hesitant, surprised, expression when you hand him a store-packaged box of chocolates. a giri chocolate, he realizes, before covering everything with his usual fanfare and tease.

dazai, who couldn't pinpoint his small exhale is out of relief or disappointment.

dazai, who now doesn't know what to do with you because he is scared of catching feelings, and you catching feelings for him.

dazai, whose, for the first time in forever, mind got thrown off balance and blood rushing to his cheeks when you absent-mindedly drop an innocent comment before the day ends, your eyes still solemnly set on the reports you devoutly type out.

‎

"i'm going to give my honmei chocolate and confess my love to you after work."

"eh?"

"are you free after work?"

"mm."

"be prepared then."

"okay."

"why is your face red?"

dazai, who now sits straight trails off a chuckle. his fingers subtly tighten on his complete suicide book as he raises it closer to his face.

"wasn't that basically a confession?"

and you, who are finally freed from the shackle of fatigued absentmindedness and gasp in morbid realization, face bursting to a million shades of rose.

"ah!"

"please forget i said that-"

this is basically the sunshine x the flirt turned to a mess--because of genuine affection. fic writers, i beg you to consider this concept: a blushing and flustered dazai, a thread 🤡

♡ @ashthemadwriter

#bungou stray dogs x reader #bsd x reader #dazai osamu x reader #dazai x reader

[mdawgswizzleinthehizzle]

this image is actually so pretty with the snow and the flowers even though its daunting since its joel’s resting place.

but some things i noticed were the inscriptions on the gravestones.

joel’s is literally just his name in all caps, but looking at the others on the sides, you can see that some of them have no inscriptions at all. some of them are just flowers and crosses.

now this could very well mean that the people who were buried there were unknown. loners in town, people who lost all of their family and when they died, nobody knew their name.

but even for joel, they just put his name.

and i like that.

obviously, tommy would have known his birthday so they could have put his birthday and date of death like people do today. they could have done the whole “loving father, amazing friend, big brother” spiel. but they just put “JOEL MILLER”

obviously, by the flowers and letters left at his home after he died, joel was loved, or at least liked, by pretty much everyone in town. just by who he is and what we know of him, he probably was a huge help to many people, hospitable, and he worked with the patrol in order to keep the town safe. he was probably well respected.

so just to engrave his gravestone with his name, it leaves the interpretation open of who joel was to everyone in town. a friend, a brother, a mentor, a father-figure, whoever visits his gravestone can visit him for who he is. joel miller. everything rolled in one. he doesn’t need a label or a reminder of the day he died inscripted onto his grave. joel was a lot of things to a lot of different people so the town will just remember him as joel miller.

the simple vase of flowers is nice too. joel was never a sappy, emotional guy so just the small little vase of flowers is enough token of appreciation. its simple, its sweet.

to get technical, white lillies, the flowers in the vase, are a very common funeral flower and represent purity, rebirth, and the return of innocence after death. joel did a lot of bad things during his life, even if for good intentions, but he’s passed now. at peace, hopefully reunited with sarah somewhere. blue hydrangeas are known to represent regret, apology, and forgiveness. a perfect representation of the end of his and ellie’s relationship. or really their entire relationship.

#the last of us #joel miller #pedro pascal #ellie williams #hbo the last of us #the last of us hbo #tlou #bella ramsey #joel tlou #ellie and joel #tlou analysis #tlou angst #tlou fluff #tlou spoilers #tlou 2 spoilers #tlou 2 #tlou game #tommy miller #tlou hbo #ellie tlou #tlou2 #tlou part 2 #the last of us 2 spoilers #sarah miller

[brittle-doughie]

I have been meaning to ask about how did y/n cookie met the dragons and how they gained their favoritism? (sorry if this makes you uncomfortable)

The Deal with Dragons

Apologies in advance, I may have strayed off in some parts!

The overall deal is that Y/N Cookie has this natural charisma about them that makes cookies warm up to them at a faster rate then the others. This is combined by what you do towards the dragons. I am going off with the event stories as a basis.

Pitaya Dragon Cookie

Y/N Cookie was alongside Mala Sauce and the others when they came to see Pitaya, they participated in the fight against the red dragon. They were quite amused to see you defend the others along with Milk, they found your determination to protect admirable. When you all took your leave, they made a quick request in return for the favor with their scale, that you should return sometime to spar again.

You agreed with Mala and the others wary about it, but you reassured them it was alright, you’ll be ok. From there, you’d come to see Pitaya as promised and spar with them. That one visit would to multiple ones, to the point where they would be daily visits! They’ve grown attached to you by this point and probably won’t be letting you go now.

Ananas Dragon Cookie

Trying to warn Dino and Milk that perhaps digging into the mountain to get the dragon’s attention may not be the best idea. Wouldn’t you know it, next thing you knew, a rather angry dragon descended upon all of you, whisking you away to their lair. The others were imprisoned, you were spared their fate by instead being a servant to the now named Ananas Dragon Cookie, considered more appealing looking then the others. You took note of their rather high and mighty attitude, it was justified, they’re still a dragon after all.

They knew they made the right call making you their servant when you dove in to protect Pineapplemur alongside Mango, with Milk managing to save you all with his shield. However your position would not last, as you wanted to go along with the others to find the other dragons. Ananas tried a number of times to get you to stay, but would ultimately, reluctantly, let you go. On the promise that you would return to them when your business was done with the others, it pained them to not have you be their side.

Lotus Dragon Cookie

I love Bellflower so much ahhh

This time, it’s a matter of not seeing you

Lotus would be made aware of your presence ahead of time, long before you’ll even arrive at the palace. They’re most intrigued by this new arrival among the others that they’ll request Hydrangea to keep a lookout for you, she’ll know the one when she sees them. Lotus has been made aware of your existence, and their wish is to see you. They wanted to hear what your wish was…

Disappointed that the Mala gang haven’t brought you to them, Hydrangea could sense the slight irritation in the blue dragon’s voice, and to be honest, she shared that sentiment, but it quickly passed. No matter, they could wait, it would make the fated encounter between the two of you all the more memorable. Bellflower and Ginseng sensed it too, and decided that for your safety, it was for the best that you don’t visit the palace.

So close, yet so far. Hydrangea could now hear the blue dragon silently growl as the opportunity to meet you in the dough has evaded them once again. Their mandolin playing coming to an end with a sour note as they stared out the palace window. For once, the dragon themself wishes that they could see you face to face, to hold you, to cherish you. Your presence here is torture to them if they couldn’t meet in you person. Hydrangea had also grown curious of you with the way their great one ponders about you constantly, she wants to see for herself exactly who were you..

It comes to a boiling point when the cookies, with Brave’s gang in tow, return to the palace, the Lotus Dragon losing more of their patience when they once again didn’t see you amongst the group. Bellflower had you hold up outside in the event of something going wrong, she refused to put you in harm’s way! Though this proved to only irritate Lotus. The one time THEY wished for something themselves, it’s not getting granted. Lotus, throughout the encounter, would constantly ask where were you, where was this cookie they’ve sensed since the beginning? Just bring this cookie to them and they’ll give the answers the group seeks.

Bellflower and the others would refuse to hand you over and the dragon ends up not getting to see you as they feel your presence leave the island. They’re pissed to say the least, teeth bared sharp in a scowl and their eyes glowing. Hydrangea would follow their sentiment once more, how hard was it to get a cookie to see the palace, why haven’t they made a wish? Whatever desires they had, could’ve been fulfilled here. For once, Lotus looks upon the sky and wished for the day they could face you, to see you with their own eyes, to show you their warm embrace…

Lychee Dragon Cookie

You ran ashore along with the Brave gang where you encountered the Rambutan Tribe and Mangosteen Cookie. Mangosteen Cookie would relentlessly ask you to spend time with them, you didn’t want to hurt their feelings, but you always felt a chill down your spine when you saw that split second look of impatience on their face when you reject them. Mangosteen’s “charm” didn’t seem to have much effect on you, just perfect. The one cookie they actually want to spend time with, they’re immune to Mangosteen’s capabilities.

Why wasn’t their charm working?! You’ll come with them, won’t you? YOU’LL ADORE THEM LIKE THE OTHERS WON’T YOU?!

Lychee gave the group the false hope that if they handed you over, they could walk out of that cave in one piece. You refused the offer before the others could, you despised the way they use their powers to manipulate these cookies and being harm to many others. To hear these words from you, Lychee actually felt..a little heartbroken. No..they didn’t understand…

You were just a cookie, yet you were doing THIS to them! Why wasn’t their sweet words working….why weren’t you giving them the affection they wanted…why…why were you siding with THEM?

You were pretty much the only cookie they missed when the dust settled. They could only look downwards at the ground as they replayed memories as Mangosteen Cookie in their head, as you smiled at them, as you gave them words of support, patted their head. They didn’t want to admit it..but a part of them is saddened they’ll never get that ever again..

Longan Dragon Cookie

Upon closer inspection of your now frozen stature, Longan was disappointed to see a face of utter fear and terror plastered on your face, it really didn’t help that signs of your previous encounters with the other dragons littered your body. Longan had a feeling this would happen, of course their fellow dragons can’t do the simple task of ensuring their dearest is in perfect condition and without a crumb of their body missing.

The other dragons were battering at each other, determined to prove to one another that they were the only one fit to have Y/N Cookie as their beloved. Longan would refuse to allow them to see the cookie, much to Lotus’s more vocal protests as recompense for the condition they found Y/N Cookie in after their little incursions. However, they could be given the opportunity to see you again, but on the grounds that you are to be shared among the group…

Have fun with 5 dragon partners!

#brittle answers #cookie run x reader #cookie run x you #yandere cookie run #pitaya dragon cookie x reader #ananas dragon cookie x reader #lychee dragon cookie x reader #lotus dragon cookie x reader #longan dragon cookie x reader

[suguwu]

lover be good to me: part one

You meet Kita Shinsuke on a rainy summer day, with a sea of hydrangeas swirling at your feet. You know him instantly, as only a soulmate can. He seems like a good man. Like a good soulmate.

But it's your wedding day.

minors and ageless blogs do not interact.

pairings: kita shinsuke x f!reader, oc x f!reader

notes: this fic has been a long time coming—it's basically my baby at this point. i'm so excited to finally get to share part one with you! i am so thankful for everyone who has sat thru me yelling about this to them. and a million thank yous to my beta, between your enthusiasm for this fic and all your help with it—i don't know if it could have been done without you!

title and part title are from hozier's "be" and "nfwmb"

tags for this part: soulmate au (first words), this is a very reader-centric story, very significant reader x oc, slow burn, hurt/comfort, pining, alcohol consumption, anxiety.

see main fic tags here.

wc: 13k

The hydrangeas are in full bloom.

You can see them through the window: the sea in each blossom, the radiant blue of them veined through with white, ocean and foam detailed in petals. They nod with the rain, weighed down by the fat droplets. 

There are two men that keep passing through the sea of hydrangeas like ships, leaving little eddies of blooms in their wake. They must be vendors considering they’re weighted down by boxes, though neither seems bothered by their load. 

You watch them for a moment. They’re both efficient, unbothered by the slow, steady drizzle. You rest your chin on your cupped palm, eyes drawn to the shorter man. There’s a few strands of hair peeking out from beneath his hat, the hazy gray of it—black-tipped like thunderclouds—an odd contrast to his lean, toned body. 

He makes his way through the courtyard, and you lean forward to keep him in sight, your nose almost pressed against the foggy window pane. He steps carefully around a drooping hydrangea bloom, his calm face visible for the first time, and something threads through you for a breath unraveling too quickly for you to place. 

He ducks beneath the eaves and out of your sight. 

Just in time, too. The rain picks up drumming gently against the ground, carrying a few loosened petals with it. The other man—broader and taller but no less graceful for it—spits out a curse. He hurries forward until he too is gone from view. 

“Told you it would rain,” Abe says from behind you, making you yelp. She presses in next to you. Her breath billows over the window pane blooming hazy against it, a marine fog. 

“You did,” you say with a laugh. “So did the weather channel. Almost a full week before you did.”

She scoffs. “Yes, but that’s their job. Mine was sheer instinct.”

“And listening to the weather channel?”

“Must you slander me?”

“Yes,” you say, smiling, but your gaze returns to the courtyard where the hydrangeas are bleeding petals under the rain’s heavy cut. 

“Are you nervous?”

You meet Abe’s gaze in the reflection of the window pane. Her dark eyes are warm and soft, and maybe a little bit sad. 

“Should I be?” you ask.

She wraps a small hand around yours and you realize you’ve been tapping your nail against your water glass, a crystalline symphony. 

“No,” she says firmly. “You shouldn’t.”

Warmth blooms in your chest, sprouts like flowers between the cracks in the concrete. You lean into her. She sighs, long and put-upon, but she tilts towards you, opens her body to you. It’s an invitation you know well. You rest your head in the crook of her shoulder and stare out the window.

“Yeah,” you say. “You’re right.”

“Always am.”

“That’s debatable, Natsu.” 

She grumbles but starts to pull away without comment when the kimono stylist calls out for her. She pauses for a moment. She leans in and adjusts your shiromuku carefully, her fingers deft. Then she squeezes your hand softly, familiar and warm, like a song you’ll always know. You squeeze back. 

You watch her reflection in the window until it blurs at the edges. She’s already bickering with Yoshikawa by the time it fades entirely from the foggy windowpane, their voices carrying. You’re sure that they’re curled together over Yoshikawa’s phone, flicking through the itinerary you’ve already forgotten most of. 

There’s movement beyond the window and you perk up as the man from before walks by. He’s kept under the eaves by the increased rain, and you can see the way it’s dampened his hair to something closer to slate.

There’s a gleam of amber above the boxes he’s carrying; the briefest flash of his eyes, bright and keen. He sweeps by the window almost close enough to touch, and you press your fingertips against the cool pane without thinking. 

It’s this closeness that lets you see his phone—a flip phone, of all things, with a little charm you can’t quite make out dangling from it—slip from his pocket. You wince as it drops out of view. 

He keeps going though, utterly unfazed. The rain has overshadowed the noise you realize, and you’re darting outside before you even know it, the shoji rattling slightly from your force. The summer humidity rolls over you, so stark against your aircon-chilled skin that you shiver with it. 

“You dropped your phone!” you call out after the man, hurrying along the engawa to scoop it up, careful of your shiromuku’s hem. The tiny charm is a stylized stalk of rice, you realize, the little panicles at the top colored with shimmering golden paint. It’s cute. A little at odds with his utilitarian flip phone, but cute nonetheless.

Ahead of you, the man goes still.

He’s turning around when his name unfurls inside of you. 

The movies hadn’t said it was anything like this.

There’s no passion ripping through you like forest fire, no lightning strike sizzling his name into your very bones. It’s slow and soft, like slipping into bathwater after a long, hard day, the heated kiss of it a balm against all of your bruises. Like the bloom of the first crocuses, a promise of spring after the long winter. 

“Oh, Shinsuke,” you breathe, and you think you’ve never known a name so well, that each curve of it was made to fit upon your tongue. 

The man—Shinsuke—stares at you. And then his lips tilt into a faint smile, tender like the oncoming dawn; a watercolor sky burgeoning with sunlight, a world coming awake. You think you could build a home in the way he looks at you. 

“There you are,” he says softly. “I’ve been waiting.”

You know.

You’ve known for years that he’s been waiting for you; it’s been scrawled on your skin this whole time. He has always, always been waiting for you.

Your soulmark pulses faintly. For a breath, you think you can see it glow despite the heavy layers you have on.

“Shinsuke,” you say again. It’s a helpless little sound, the edges of it catching in your throat like burrs. You need to say something else. You know you do. You know what you have to tell him, but he’s looking at you so softly that the words keep getting lost. 

Your grip on his phone tightens until the little rice charm is cutting into your skin.

His smile starts to fade. It curls in on itself, wilting at the edges, like the last of the summer flowers.

He’s been looking at only you, you realize. Just you. Your face, most likely, but it feels like something more—as if he’s seeing down to your marrow, as if he’s flayed you open beneath his tender gaze. He’s only been looking at you. Nothing else. 

He’s been looking at you, but you think he’s seeing the rest now. Your careful makeup. Your pristine hair.

Your lavish shiromuku—carefully embroidered with the elegant sweep of cranes’ wings and with delicate petals unfolding into bountiful chrysanthemums—that fits you perfectly, the heavy silk of it as white as driven snow.

You couldn’t find the words for it, caught up in the gentle sun of his joy as it pooled golden around you, but he’s finally seeing what you couldn’t say.

It’s your wedding day.

***

Your soulmark appears when you’re twelve, all without you even noticing. 

Summer is in full bloom in Toyooka; the wet lick of a heatwave has settled oppressive over the countryside. It’s relentless. Even the rice fields seem to feel it, the verdant green ripple of them becoming a honey-slow shiver under the wind’s gentle touch. 

In the heat the cicadas’ call goes lazy; the storks only come out in the earliest parts of morning. They wade carefully through the still waters of the rice paddies, their beaks flashing in the weak sunlight as they needle down into the murk. 

The rental house is tucked carefully between two farms, a lone house amid the rippling rice plants. It’s old but well-maintained, a perfect little hideaway for your mother to finish her study. In the heat, she keeps the shoji doors open wide to let in the dancing, citronella-scented breeze. The first day you wander around the house to weigh the papers down with a mish-mash of items: the fruit bowl, pilfered from the kitchen counter under your father’s nose; encyclopedias long outdated; a pair of petal-flecked garden shears. 

It helps it feel like home.

Abe and her mother have come to Toyooka too; your mothers spend their days bent close together, talking in a language you know by heart but still can’t understand. Caught up in their research, they leave you to your own devices.

Away from all of your other friends and the bustle of the city, you and Abe roam free like a pair of stray cats. You spend the days without chores wandering through town, your arm hooked through hers, both your tongues stained sky blue from the Gari-Gari Kun popsicles from the conbini. The grannies wave at you as you pass by them; the two of you wave back with sticky fingers. 

You flit in and out of the rice paddies, scooping up tadpoles from the murky water. The farmers grow used to your presence quickly; they greet you cheerfully, accepting the onigiri you bring with little nods. 

After you splash through a paddy to coo over them, Watanabe lets you feed his ducks. He pours the feed from his hands into your smaller ones with a grunt. His hands are strong but aged, the dark skin on the back of his hands papery in the sunlight, wrinkled like old parchment. He teaches you both how to sprinkle the feed into the water just right so the ducks go arrowing across the water, little ships without sails. 

The days are long and short in the same breath.  

At night, Abe’s flashlight flickers in her window like a firefly, long after you are both meant to be in bed. You flash your own message back, little secrets wrapped up in ribbons of light, never mentioned after dawn. The two of you are woven together as only childhood friends can be.

And it’s Abe that sees your soulmark first. 

It’s midday and the clouds are rolling in across the clear blue sky hanging heavy and low, a gray promise of afternoon thunder. The two of you trace shapes in the clouds, shaded under a massive camphor tree, bumping into each other’s arms as you go.

There’s a rabbit in your cloud, the puffy edges of it extending into fluffy gray ears that wisp and sway with the growing breeze. You’ve just traced along the little curve of its nose when Abe—who has been burbling away like a spring brook, her chatter weaving a spell around the two of you—goes silent. 

Then she shrieks and grabs your arm.

“When did it come in?” she asks breathlessly. She’s shaking you too hard for you to see what she’s talking about, but there’s only one thing that tone could mean. 

You freeze, your heart pounding in your ears. For a moment, you consider closing your eyes, as if that will keep it from being real. As if that will rewrite your fate. 

You think of all the quotes you’ve scrawled in your notebooks late at night, and hope for all of them and none of them. 

Abe gives you another little shake. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me! It’s so early! How long have you had it? Has anyone said it yet? What do you—”

“I don’t know!” you say, shaking her off and scooting backwards, pulling your arm towards your chest. 

She scowls. “How do you not know?”

“I didn’t notice it.”

You hadn’t. Maybe it was the sleepy haze of summer days running together.

Maybe you hadn’t wanted to see it.

Now that you know, it’s easy to see your mark. It’s already settled into your skin, the kanji tucked carefully into the tender flesh of the crook of your elbow. The characters are neat, precise little things, delicate at the edges. It shimmers silvery in the sunlight. A winter moon’s glow inked into your skin.

Abe plants her hands on her hips. “You didn’t notice your soulmark?”

You shake your head. “You know I would tell you!!”

She huffs. “I guess. You really didn’t know?”

You yank on a tuft of grass. “Nope.”

“Idiot,” she says, but it’s fond. She nudges closer to you despite the heat. “Who doesn’t realize their mark was written?”

“Me, I guess.”

“Guess so. Lemme see,” she says, making grabby hands at your arm; you let her yank it close with a sigh. She peers down at your mark with heavy concentration.

“You look like Granny Takada right now.”

She pouts. “Do not!”

“You do,” you tell her. “You’re all squinty.” 

“Do you want me to read it to you or not?”

You take a second too long to answer, the words caught in your throat, tangled on your tongue. Abe glances up. Something passes over her face; it’s too quick to know, a fleeting summer storm. She drops your arm with a sigh.

“The kanji are complicated,” she complains. “Too hard to read. Leave it to you to have a soulmate like that.” 

“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?” you ask, wrinkling your nose even as you relax, your muscles uncoiling. 

She snorts. “Nothing, nothing,” she coos, smacking your hand away when you swat at her. “Let’s go, it’s gonna rain. We can’t track mud inside again.”

“That was you, not me.”

Abe ignores you, popping up to her feet and rocking back on her heels. She takes off before you can stand her braids streaming behind her like kite ribbons, and you yelp out a protest as you scramble to your feet. 

“Nat-chan!” 

“Keep up!” she shouts, halfway to the rice paddy that edges the little meadow, and you take off after her.

The skies open on the two of you when you’re almost back to the rental, the rain relentless and heavy as only a summer storm can be. You both shriek but the water is warm, and you giggle at the way Abe’s bangs are plastered to her forehead even as you keep running.

You tumble into the genkan just as the first lightning strike splits the sky. You’re practically tripping over each other. Abe knocks into the getabako, jarring a pair of your father’s shoes, their well-worn soles rolling upwards like the barnacled hull of a capsized boat. She grunts with the impact.

“Quiet,” you hiss.

“I’m being quiet,” she hisses back, just as your mother rounds the corner and fixes the two of you with an unimpressed raised brow.

Abe’s mother peeks around the corner too, her lips thinning as she sees the water dripping from the two of you. “You’re soaked,” she says. “And you’re making a mess of the genkan, Natsumi.”

“Sorry,” she mutters.

Her mother sighs. “Weren’t you supposed to be back earlier? Before the rain?”

“We got distracted because her soulmark came in!” Abe says, pointing to you with no remorse. 

You gape at her. 

“What?” she says. “It’s in a pretty obvious spot.” 

“Natsumi,” her mother says, exasperated. “You’re always jumping in feet first.”

Abe grumbles, but goes quiet when her mother eyes her.

“Chieko,” your mother says. “Do you need umbrellas for the walk home?”

“If it’s not an inconvenience.”

“Of course not.”

You and Abe engage in a rapid-fire round of mouthing things to each other as your mothers search for umbrellas, too close to risk actual words. Abe speaks fast, even in exaggerated slow motion, and after you think she says something about snails, you decide it’s too incomprehensible to keep trying. You wave her off with a quick tilt of your head. She scowls but stops, crossing her arms with a soggy squish. 

The scowl disappears from her face as soon as her mother steps up beside her, handing her one of your umbrellas. She traces a finger over the nearest little cat design, petting lightly at its fabric ears. 

“Let’s go before you catch a cold,” Chieko says. “Say goodbye.”

“Bye,” Abe says, her voice stilted.

“Bye,” you parrot. 

“Alright then,” Chieko says after a moment. She looks at you, considering. You bite the inside of your cheek, running the tip of your tongue against the pinched flesh. 

She sighs. “You’ll figure it out,” she says softly.

You should have known that she wouldn’t offer congratulations. The relief spreads over you like a balm, soothing the scrape you hadn’t even known was there. 

You nod. 

“See you tomorrow,” your mother tells her.

She and Abe disappear out the front door and into the downpour; Abe throws you one last look before the door closes behind them. You look away. 

Your mother is quiet for a moment. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

“I—I don’t think so.”

She considers you. “Alright,” she says. “I’ll get you a towel and then you need to go change before you get sick.”

“Okay.” 

She disappears down the hallway without another word. 

You look down to your soulmark. At the thin kanji of it, the gleam of them like spiderwebs caught in a moonbeam, an ethereal silver. When you touch it, tracing a fingertip carefully against the crook of your elbow, it just feels like skin. As if it’s always been there. As if it’s always been a part of you. 

Upside down, the kanji are difficult to parse. You run your fingers over them once more, and then your mother is there with a towel. You yank your fingers away as if burned. She doesn’t react, just handing you the towel and corralling you upstairs to dry yourself off. 

Dinner is quiet that night and you go up to bed early, tired from the ups and downs of the day.

You’ve just finished brushing your teeth when the flickering catches your attention. You spit out the last bit of foam and rinse out your mouth before padding over to your window. 

A little light bobs up and down across the way; at moments, you can make out the vague outline of Abe’s face when she brings the flashlight up with a sharp jerk that almost hits her chin. She’s cycling through the attention-getting code you’d made up a few years back. 

You consider pulling your shade down entirely. 

Instead, you pad over to your dresser drawer and pull out your own flashlight. You settle into bed with it heavy on your lap. You pull at the edge of the faded sticker slapped below the switch, tearing a little piece of it off. You flick it on for a second. Just enough to let Abe know you’re there. 

It’s not your normal greeting, and Abe’s window stays dark for a long, long moment. 

Mad at me? she finally flashes, little pulses of starlight in the dark.

You are. Soulmates are different for the two of you. You’ve grown up hearing all of the jargon for your mother’s study, and you know that she has too. You know the low rate of soulmates meeting, and you know the distant look in your father’s eyes as he wraps tender fingers around his blackened mark. 

It’s different, and you thought she knew that. 

Sorry, her flashlight blinks out. I am.

You think of how she complained about the kanji of your mark despite being the most proficient in your classroom. 

Mad at me?

You wonder how you would have told your parents that you’d received your mark when you can barely acknowledge it yourself. 

You raise your flashlight.

No, you send off. Not anymore. 

Good, she immediately sends. 

You talk until your eyelids are drooping and your jaw is cracking with non-stop yawning. It’s easy to say goodnight, knowing you’ll see each other in the morning. You pull down your shade and climb into bed.

You fall asleep with your hand cupped over your soulmark.

***

It takes you three days to finally ask what your mark says. 

Evening is coming to life, the sky darkening into plum, the faintest hint of cotton-candy pink lingering on the horizon. As your father sets the table, you’re unable to resist the quiet call of what fate has scraped into your skin. 

He blinks, trading a look with your mother, but then he smiles softly. 

“After dinner,” he tells you. “Okay?”

You nod.

It’s your mother who reads it to you later, the two of you whispering together on the engawa surrounded by the flicker of the summer fireflies. You curl tight into her side, a rib returned. 

“There you are,” she reads softly, stroking a thumb gently over the kanji. “I’ve been waiting.” 

Her voice is a honeyed drip, sweet and steady, and though she is smiling, you think she sounds sad. She shifts to press a hand tight over her stomach as if it’s the only thing holding her together, as if she’s suddenly too big for her body. You know her mark is there. The kanji has gone sour and black, an eclipsed moon. 

“I don’t know if I want them to wait for me,” you whisper to her. 

She presses a kiss to your hairline. “You don’t have to know, tadpole.”

You bite the inside of your cheek. 

She shifts beside you. “You don’t have to wait for them, you know,” she tells you.

“Really?”

“Really,” she says.

“Do you think I’ll meet them?” you ask, kicking your feet and looking out into the night. A firefly flares bright, and you consider running to catch it. You’ve always been quick enough. The fireflies have always been trusting enough. 

She nudges a knuckle against your cheek. “The chances are low,” she admits, because she has never lied to you about soulmates. “And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

“Why?”

She sighs. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

She still has her hand pressed hard against her ribcage. 

You bite your lip and don’t ask anything else. 

The two of you stay curled together under the stars, watching the trucks trundle down the road as the late-working farmers return from the paddies. Eventually, she ushers you inside, and when she thinks you aren’t looking she knots her fingers in your father’s shirt. The fabric winds tight around her fingers, cutting into the softness of her skin. Her shoulders are trembling. Your father cups the back of her head and brushes a kiss to her hairline. 

You go up to your bedroom without a word because even this young, you know there are things you aren’t meant to see. 

Not long after that night your mother and Abe’s mother publish the study. It’s a culmination of years of grueling research on soulmates, of half-written notes on napkins when you go out to restaurants, of simmering arguments between her and Abe’s mother, of death threats and poisonous words. 

It covers the concept of soulmates like kudzu, winding over the romance of it and smothering it beneath statistics and a dissection of societal impact alike. 

It gets a nickname soon after publication, and your mother’s smile is a melon rind curve, bitter at the edges. 

They call it the Heartbreak Study.

***

Summer comes to an end.

You leave Toyooka on a rainy afternoon, the light drizzle sending water droplets racing down the train window. The storks huddle together in the paddies, their wet feathers gleaming like the moon. Abe is warm at your side curled into you, already half-asleep from the underlying hum of the train. It picks up speed and the rolling green of the countryside blurs like a watercolor, smearing across the horizon as you head back to the city.

It feels like you’re leaving more than the countryside behind.

Still, the city is a comfort, the bustle of it a familiar song, and you’d missed the neon lights that dot the streets like little flowers. With the return of school just around the corner it’s nice to settle back into the rhythm of city life, so different from the steady, unyielding heartbeat of Toyooka. 

You unpack your clothes and yourself too, slotting everything back into your city life, trying to fit back into it like a well-worn pair of shoes. 

“Oh,” Yoshikawa says lazily the next day, when you and Abe find her sprawled out on a bench by the conbini, sucking on a popsicle. She peers up at you, her long hair flowing around her shoulders like weeds in the current, softly swaying with each little movement. “You’re back.”

“She got her soulmark!” Abe says, dragging you forward by your wrist to display your mark. 

“Natsu,” you groan, ignoring the way she tugs at your wrist to pull you even more into Yoshikawa’s space. “Really?”

“What, you weren’t going to tell her?”

“Yeah,” Yoshikawa drawls, her dark eyes sly. “Were you not gonna tell me?”

“Shut up, Yocchan,” you say. “You know I was going to tell you.”

“You sure?” she asks, propping herself up on her elbows. “Doesn’t quite sound like it.”

“Yocchan.”

“Fine, fine, I’ll stop teasing. Can I see?” 

You hesitate for a breath. 

“You don’t gotta,” Yoshikawa says, biting into her popsicle with a loud crunch. Her lips are blue with it, the same color as the mid-morning sky. It drips down her elegant fingers, catches on the small scars littered across them. She licks at them absently, but her gaze is keen.

“It’s fine,” you say. “I’m just…still getting used to it.”

She hums. 

“Great,” Abe says, using her grip on your wrist to tug you forward again. “Look, look, look!”

Yoshikawa pushes herself the rest of the way up slowly, tucking her popsicle between her teeth as she reaches for your arm. Her fingers are sticky against your skin. She’s quiet as she reads your mark, her brow slightly furrowed. 

She lets you go after a minute, and you try not to fidget.

“Romantic,” she says. She lays back down on the bench.

Abe makes a strangled noise. “That’s all?”

Yoshikawa blinks slowly, but there’s a smug curve to her lips. “Is there something else to say?”

Abe stamps her foot. “There’s so much to say! She got her mark! The first of us! The first in our year!”

“Nah, Sasaki got his right before the break.”

“He did?”

“He did?” you echo. Relief blooms in you, rooting in the cracks of you, and you let out a tight breath you didn’t know you were holding. 

“Yeah,” Yoshikawa says. She closes her eyes and raises her face to the sun. It bathes her, turns her golden, an offering at the ending summer’s altar. “Our moms are friends. Heard them talking about it.” 

“Oh,” Abe says, pursing her lips. She glances at you, and you don’t know what she sees in your face, but her eyes go soft. “I guess it’s better that way. It won’t be as big of a deal. It’ll be fine.”

“You think so?” you ask. It comes out smaller than you meant it to. 

She nudges you with her hip. “Yeah,” she says, her voice gentle. There’s a promise in it. “I do.”

Yoshikawa hums her agreement as she bites off the last of her popsicle, ignoring Abe’s wince. She sucks the stick clean and glances at it. “Oh,” she says mildly. “I won.” 

“What?” Abe cries out, practically clambering on top of her to grab the stick. “How do you always win?”

Yoshikawa grunts under her sudden burden, stretching out one long arm to keep Abe from grabbing the stick. “S’not my fault you have bad luck.”

“C’mon, you already had a popsicle today!”

You watch them struggle, Abe doing her best to blanket Yoshikawa’s lanky frame with her tiny one. The laughter bubbles out of you, spills from you like an overflowing urn, loud and unrestrained. 

They turn to you in unison, brows raised. 

“Let’s go to the park,” you say, laughter still sweet on your tongue. “Don’t want to waste the day.” 

They eye you for a moment. They look at each other and shrug. 

“Conbini first,” Abe says. “I want something.” 

“You can’t have my popsicle,” Yoshikawa says.

“I don’t want your stupid free popsicle!”

“You were just trying to grab it!”

“Well I don’t want it anymore! I want mochi instead!”

This time you swallow down your laugh, let it spread warm through you like bottled sunshine. You follow the bickering pair into the conbini. They wait for you at the door, and you link pinkies with them both so they can drag you down the snack aisle.

For the first time since getting your mark, it feels like everything is going to be okay.

***

School starts up again.

It’s still warm, the last dregs of summer lingering in the air as you walk languidly to school with your friends. Abe flits ahead, her dark hair shimmering under the morning sun, and you think of a little darting fish on a reef, a quicksilver flash of scales. She greets other classmates easily. They always have a smile for her, and she falls into step beside them for a moment, chattering away. 

But in the end she always turns around and waits for you and Yoshikawa.

She’s off in the distance when Yoshikawa glances down at the silver peeking out of the crook of your elbow, exposed by the summer uniform’s short sleeves. 

“No wrap?” she asks. 

“No wrap,” you say.

You’d thought about it, but wearing a wrap screams that you’ve gotten your mark. With yours tucked tender into the crook of your elbow, you might be able to get away with it. At least you hope so. You know how many eyes will be on you when people realize, and you shift on the balls of your feet, pressing closer to Yoshikawa.

She hums. “Alright.”

You know that tone.

“Do not cause any problems,” you warn her.

She blinks slowly, like a smug cat with a patch of sunshine all to itself. “I would never. Do you want some toast?”

“Do I what—”

She pulls a handkerchief filled with toast out from her bag, little oily spots of butter bleeding through the hand-embroidered cloth. “Toast,” she says, holding it out.

“Don’t try to distract me,” you say irritably, but when she nudges the toast in your direction you slip a piece free of the handkerchief. You’ve eaten breakfast but no one makes bread like Yoshikawa’s mother, a hobby she’d picked up in her year abroad as a teen. Any of her loaves crackle perfectly under the bread knife, each slice thick and hearty, woven through with herbs and spices. 

“I would never.”

“Liar,” you mutter, sinking your teeth into the toast.

“So mean,” she says, but she’s smiling.

“Hurry up!” Abe shouts back to you both, her hands cupped over her mouth to unnecessarily amplify herself. 

Yoshikawa ignores her, sauntering along as your fellow students pour past you both. She moves like a river current, languid and flowing, and immoveable from her path. 

“You’re the worst,” Abe tells her a few minutes later, when you’ve finally caught up to her. 

“Uh huh.”

“Don’t ignore me, Yocchan!” 

“I’m not,” Yoshikawa says, holding out the toast again. She always brings enough for all three of you. “You just say it so much that it’s lost all meaning.” 

Abe grumbles, but she snags a piece of toast. It crunches beneath her teeth, a crackling symphony. “This is bribery, you know,” she says through her mouthful, scrunching up her nose. 

Yoshikawa shrugs. 

“C’mon,” you say, poking at them both. “We’re gonna be late.”

Abe links arms with you. Your mark flashes bright with the movement, glimmering like snow in the moonlight, all prismatic ice. 

She hums, shifting her arm just enough that your elbows are interlocked, hiding your mark as she tugs you towards the school gates. “Let’s go then,” she says. 

Yoshikawa falls into step on your other side. She leans over and softly bonks her head against yours, her long hair a veil for you both. You press together for a breath, then she pulls back and links her arm through your other arm as you enter the school grounds.

You make it two whole periods before someone notices. 

It’s Hasegawa, of course, her deep brown eyes going wide as you reach into your bag for your textbook. She says something to her seatmate, and Honda’s eyes snap to you.

You keep arranging your supplies. You set your pencil down next to your notebook and line them up as precisely as you can, nudging it back and forth until it’s perfectly aligned as they whisper to each other. They keep glancing at you until Yoshikawa leans back in her seat and flashes them a razor-edged smile. Honda squeaks, and they both go quiet after that.

But there’s no escaping it. You can feel eyes on you all day, and murmurs follow you everywhere. You barely eat at lunch, pushing the pieces of your bento around as Abe and Yoshikawa crowd you on either side. 

You almost make it to the end of the school day, but then Ueda and Nakajima stop you in the hallway. You bow to your seniors as they look you up and down. 

“We heard you got your soulmark,” Nakajima says, swaying in place just slightly, like kelp caught in a current. “Is it true?”

“Yes,” you say, trying not to fidget with your sleeve.

“When?” Ueda asks, frowning.

“Over the break.”

“Early to be getting your mark,” she muses. She doesn’t have hers yet, you think. Only a handful of people in her year do. 

“They say the earlier the mark manifests, the stronger the soul bond,” Nakajima says. 

It’s a common belief, one of the oldest wives tales there is, but you’ve spent too long listening to your mother. You know better. Still, your stomach twists.

“What does yours say?” Ueda asks.

You bite your tongue; the pain flashes through you like lightning, bright and sharp and bitter. The bitterness lingers, fills your mouth until you have to swallow it down. It stings the whole way. 

Ueda waits.

When you tell her, it feels like each word is being torn from you, as if they’d rooted into your very flesh. 

(You suppose they have.) 

For a breath, Ueda’s face twists. You think of the first hint of rot in ripe fruit, when the scent goes too sweet, a promise of decay. It isn’t the first time you’ve seen jealousy over a mark, but it’s odd to have it directed at you. 

I didn’t ask for this, you want to tell her. I don’t know if I even want this.

“Oh, how lovely,” Nakajima murmurs, moon-eyed. “You’re lucky to have such a devoted soulmate.”

You smile, but you think it’s a poor imitation of one, soured at the edges as it is. “Yeah,” you say, because she’s looking at you expectantly. “I am.”

“Well, congratulations. Right, Machi?”

“Yeah,” Ueda says, flashing you a tight smile. “Congratulations.” 

“Thank you,” you say, the words ash on your tongue. 

Nakajima tilts her head, bird-like, but Yoshikawa comes to your rescue, calling out your name from down the hall. You bid your seniors a quiet goodbye before hurrying to her.

She slings an arm around your shoulders, squeezing lightly. 

“Okay?” she asks.

“Yeah,” you say. “I’m fine.”

She hums her disbelief but leaves you be.

With her by your side, smiling pleasantly and radiating danger, the day passes without anyone else approaching you. Abe joins you again, looking proud of herself in a way that means she caused a problem, and you wonder what you did to deserve both of them. 

They come home with you when school ends, waving to your parents as you head up to your room. You collapse face-down on your bed and Yoshikawa laughs, low and deep and a little bit sad. 

She and Abe curl up around you like cats. They talk about everything and nothing, filling up your room with their presence until you start to go lax against them. They shuffle closer as you do and they’re warm against you, like sunbaked stone. You sink into that warmth and breathe out deeply.

The next few weeks will be filled with questions, with murmurs behind your back, with everything that comes with getting your mark so early. You know that, but there’s one other thing that you know, too.

With them, you know you’ll make it through. 

***

The school year blurs past in a watercolor of seasons. Fall gives way to winter, curling up under the biting cold; spring chases away winter in a riot of color, the sakura buds unfurling as your upperclassmen graduate, each bloom inset into the branches like a little jewel. As summer beckons, the days warming as the promise of rain hangs heavy in the humid air, Kimura gets her mark.

She’s only the third person in your year to get hers and she’s coy about it, wrapping it in a ribbon, the burgundy silk luscious against her skin. It’s as eye-catching as she meant it to be. 

It’s elegant in its own way, though the ribbon wilts slightly as the day goes on, mostly from the way she keeps touching it. She strokes along the ribbon as she talks with her friends. You’re not sure she realizes it.

A few people glance your way, their eyes flickering to your elbow, but their attention is as fleeting as the first snow. Their gazes return to Kimura, to the bruised burgundy of her ribbon.

Something loosens in you, unravels from where it’s been knit tight around your ribs. 

Honda gets hers next, and then Watanabe gets his. 

Slowly, mark after mark comes into being, words unfurling across skin. As more of your classmates receive their marks, yours fades into the background. It becomes common and you sink into that commonality, having long waited for the spotlight on you to cease.

Your mark fades into the background, like a star just after dawn—known only to those who know where to look. You try not to think of it. Sometimes you even succeed.

In your second year of high school, there’s Takao.

He’s a quiet boy. Stoic, even, his face almost stony as he introduces himself as the new transfer student. But he has a dandelion tuft smile, downy soft and fleeting, carried off by the wind not long after it blooms across his lips. 

You like it, his smile. 

You watch Kimura—your class rep, a position she’s held since middle school—get to her feet. Takao is setting up his desk when she approaches, methodically laying out his supplies. He keeps them in neat rows and you can’t help but smile when you see that his eraser is a battered little Keroppi, its round eyes almost flattened into a straight line on one side.

The class’s chatter softens, a few people glancing towards Kimura and Takao. You can’t see her face, but her fingers are trembling, just a bit. He looks unbothered. There’s not a trace of nerves in him, until you realize that the tips of his ears have gone faintly pink.

Kimura’s voice doesn’t carry when she greets him so you don’t hear what she says, but you see the tension bleed from her after Takao speaks. 

Not soulmates, then.

She relaxes, and from the way her hands are moving she’s starting to outline the classroom expectations. You shift in your seat, starting to turn away, when a flash of movement from Takao catches your eye.

He looks at you from beneath the fan of his eyelashes from across the classroom. He has a small spray of fading freckles, you realize, speckled over the bridge of his nose like a cluster of stars. He gives you that smile again. It takes a moment to realize you’re staring, and you look away, your cheeks hot.  

“You’ve got a crush,” Abe sing-songs at lunch a few days later, jabbing her chopsticks into your bento and stealing a piece of pickled daikon. 

“I don’t,” you say, moving your bento away as she tries to steal another piece. 

Yoshikawa snorts. She’s sprawled out on the grass next to you and Abe, her long skirt caught up around her calves. There’s grass caught in her black hair, the verdant blades swaying as she moves, as if floating in the whirling eddies of the darkened sea.  

“If you’re gonna lie,” she says, turning over onto her stomach, “at least do it well.” 

“I’m not lying!”

“Liar.”

“Such a liar,” Abe agrees. “You stare at him all the time.”

“No I don’t!”

Abe’s grin goes sly. “I didn’t say who,” she tells you. 

“I—it doesn’t matter who, I don’t stare at anyone!”

Yoshikawa raises an eyebrow. “So you don’t stare at Takao.” 

You scowl down at the ground, ripping up a small chunk of grass. You rub the blades between your fingers until they’re a fine pulp, and the scent of a freshly mowed lawn permeates the air.

“See?” Abe says. “Told you.”

“Are you going to talk to him?” Yoshikawa asks, peering up at you. She’s sly-eyed, her gaze keen despite the way she yawns. 

“Not yet,” you say. It takes you a moment to realize that you’re cupping a hand over your mark, rubbing your thumb over the thin skin just above it.

Yoshikawa smiles, warm and soft and knowing, and doesn’t say anything else. Instead she moves closer to you, curling around you like a crescent moon, her head padded on her discarded blazer. You settle into the cradle of her.

Abe is grinning wildly. “I knew that you had a crush,” she says, popping another bite of your rice into her mouth. 

“Oh, like we haven’t seen the way you moon over Takeda!” you say.

She shrugs. “She’s cute.” 

You huff and reach over to steal some of her tamagoyaki. She yelps, scrambling to pull her bento away as you snatch at the last piece. “Mean!” she says, watching as you eat it, the fluffy egg practically melting on your tongue. “I want the rest of your daikon!”

“Get your own!”

She reaches for your bento and you swat at her. The two of you bicker for the rest of lunch, only ceasing when you return to the classroom and take your seats.

Out of the corner of your eye, there’s a flicker of movement. When you glance over, Takao is already watching you. There’s a smile tucked sweet into the corner of his mouth, a sliver of a thing. 

It’s you who looks away first.

You’ll talk to him eventually, you think, cupping a hand over your soulmark once again. 

Just not yet.

***

Not yet lasts longer than you thought.

You and Takao trade glances across the classroom for one week, then another, and then another still. Each look is a fleeting thing, like a shooting star streaking across the sky. 

But you don’t speak to each other. 

You learn the sound of his voice through others when he speaks to your classmates and teachers. It’s quiet, steady, with a warm rasp to it that makes you think of billowing smoke. He blushes to the tips of his ears when it cracks. It’s cute in a way that makes you ache.  

You learn the sound of him, but never for yourself.

Still, you gravitate towards each other. He offers you a tangerine one morning, his smile small, soft, and earnest. When you nod he uses his fingernail to split open the peel, unfurling it in a smooth motion. The peel curls bright around his hand. He separates out a segment and gives it to you, his fingertips damp with sticky juice. They leave shy little imprints across your palm. 

The fruit bursts across your tongue like sunshine, golden and warm. Takao is watching you with hopeful eyes. You grin, and hold your hand out for another.

He sits down next to you to share it. The classroom is full of chatter, but the two of you are quiet, wrapped up in your own world. Suddenly, it’s not so much that you’re scared of speaking, but that maybe you don’t quite need it. Not yet.

It would be nice, you suppose, but as time passes, you and Takao find ways to fit together without speaking. Instead, you learn the tilt of his mouth and the crinkle of his nose and the way his fingers run through his hair. 

It works. It’s not quite enough, but it works.

And so not yet lasts just a little bit longer, the two of you steering away from the cliff’s edge looming in the distance. 

Another month goes by. 

You spend hours with Takao, the sight of you together a common thing to the point where your classmates ask you where he is when they’re looking for him. You can usually tell them. You’re incredibly aware of each other, caught in each other’s gravitational pull. 

Sometimes it feels like you’re destined to only orbit each other, to never truly touch. 

But sometimes you almost speak.

It’s a golden afternoon, the wind rustling through the leaves like a lullaby, filling the space between you both. You’re tucked together on one of the benches in the school’s yard watching the flow of students as they head to their clubs. 

Takao is sunstruck, haloed in gold, and it makes his dark eyes even deeper, an obsidian sheen. You’ve seen it before, but there’s still something about it that makes your stomach flip. 

He shakes his head, trying to get his hair out of his eyes. It doesn’t work, and he does it again. You think of a wet dog and try to stifle your laugh. 

When he does it for a third time, you reach out and brush your fingers through his hair, sweeping it back from his face. He turns into the touch, just slightly.

Someone shrieks out a laugh, and you look up to see one of the girls in the other classes batting lightly at her boyfriend. He murmurs something to her, and her smile grows wider. 

Your stomach twists, coiling tight as you watch them banter with each other. The gaps between your ribs seem to grow, until the empty space is what you’re made of. 

You want, you want, you want. 

You wonder if you’ll ever have.

Takao senses your change in mood but you say nothing, and the two of you separate not long after. 

Your father is watering the plants when you come home. They fill the windows of your home, the sun streaming through the verdant leaves, leaving emerald patches of light on the floor, nature’s stained glass. 

He’s quietly humming to himself, each note off-key, but he stops as soon as he sees you. He eyes you for a moment. 

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Nothing,” you say.

“You were better at lying when you were little,” he tells you.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Now what’s wrong?”

You tell him. It spills out of you like an oil slick, coating everything it touches. You tell him about Takao, about the silence, about it all. You hadn’t realized how much the quiet was eating away at your bones. 

“So what is it, exactly, that you’re worrying about?” your father asks when you’ve finished. It’s a sharp question, razor-edged, but his eyes are soft.

“What if he’s not my soulmate?” you ask him.

He blinks. “Does that change how you feel about him?”

You take a moment to consider. You think of Takao’s smile, and the way his fingers linger against the palm of your hand when he hands you the erasers to clap; the way he lets you take pieces of his bento, all without a word. 

“No,” you say. “I don’t think so.”

“There you go, then.”

“But if he’s not my soulmate—”

“You know the statistics as well as I do,” he says.  “If Takao isn’t your soulmate, that doesn’t mean you can’t be with him.”

“They’re waiting,” you whisper.

“That doesn’t mean you have to,” he says gently. “You’re allowed to make your own choice.” 

You’re not sure that you are.

“What if he is my soulmate?”

Your father puts down the watering can. You see a flash of his soulmark. It’s blackened, a charred smudge against his skin, and when you glance up at his face, there’s something old in his expression. For a breath, you don’t know him at all.

It’s gone as soon as it came, like a shadow beneath the summer sun. He smiles at you. “Then your mom and I will have to meet him, won’t we?”

You balk. 

He laughs, a sound that shimmers in the air. “I’m joking, tadpole,” he says. “And if he is—you’ll figure it out. There’s no point in guessing before you even know.” 

You fidget with your sleeve, rubbing your thumb over the fraying hem of it. 

There are worse things than losing something you never had, you think.

“Okay,” you say. “Okay.”

But things are easier said than done.

It’s not easy, not with Takao. It’s hard to find the words when you’ve spent so much time living in the space between them. 

You find yourself on the rooftop with him during lunch. It’s unseasonably warm, thick puffy clouds sitting high in a robin’s egg blue sky, and you’re sitting side-by-side, close enough to touch. Close enough, but not quite.

Takao hands you some anpan; you give him one of your onigiri, peeling the packaging open for him. He nudges against you, a silent thank you, and something in you breaks. 

“This is stupid,” you blurt out, loud enough that a few heads turn your way.

You clap your hand over your mouth immediately. 

He blinks, staring at you with his lips parted, and your cheeks start to heat. And then he laughs, the sound like woodfire smoke, billowing out of him in low, slow tones. It sweeps over you, settles on your skin, and though your cheeks heat more the sight of him sparks something in you. 

He laughs freely and warmly, his eyes crinkling at the edges. It doesn’t stop; if anything, it flows more strongly, like a river to the ocean. You find yourself swept up in it, laughter bubbling up inside you. 

When it spills out of you and joins his, it sounds like a song. 

“I cannot believe that’s what you said,” he says, and oh, you’ve ached to hear his voice when it was meant for you. You drink it in, swallow it down, something for you alone. “Of all the things.”

He laughs again, short and sharp with delight, but your smile is wilting, going brittle at the edges.

You finally have Takao, only to lose him a moment later.

You’re not soulmates. 

***

It changes things. 

You don’t mean for it to happen, but it does. Suddenly, the language between the two of you is different. Too used to speaking without words, neither of you are prepared for actual speech. You stumble over conversation, the words caught in your mouths like pebbles in a wave, spinning over and over until they’re worn down to nothing. 

“You’ll figure it out,” Abe says, lounging upside down on your bed, tapping away at her controller, her brow furrowed as she smashes at the buttons. “You just gotta adjust, that’s all.” 

You sigh. It’s not something you can explain, really. How one space was filled and another emptied. It leaves something in you aching. 

Yoshikawa hums from where she’s sprawled on your floor, barely paying attention to the tv as she hits combo after combo, much to Abe’s annoyance. “Soulmate stuff is weird,” she says. “But it’s up to you.”

“It’s up to him, too,” you remind her. “Not everyone wants to date someone who isn’t their soulmate.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that.” 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Abe says. “He likes you. It’s kinda gross how much.”

Your cheeks heat. “Shut up.”

She sticks her tongue out at you. “Make me.” 

You throw a pillow at her face, relishing her little yelp as she tries to scramble out of the way and almost falls off your bed. 

“Brat,” she says, tossing the pillow back. “He does, though. Like you.”

“I know,” you say, something vast filling you.

“Is this about the waiting thing?” Yoshikawa asks, putting down her controller and turning to face you. She hooks her chin over your knee, looking up at you with knowing eyes. 

You bite at your bottom lip. 

You know the rates better than anyone; you’ve spent your whole childhood hearing a language all its own. Percentages, probabilities, and all manners of complicated academic jargon, all focused on stripping away the whimsy of soulmates. 

Your mother has only ever wanted to understand. But in that coveting, that hunger, she pressed understanding upon you as well, until you’re caught up in yourself, a tangled skein, so knotted that the beginning can barely be found. 

“What if I do meet them?” you ask. “And they really have been waiting?”

Yoshikawa hums; it reverberates through you. “Dunno,” she says. “But what if you don’t meet them?”

You glare. “Thanks, that’s helpful.” 

“Yeah, Yocchan,” Abe pipes up. “Super helpful.”

Yoshikawa tosses another pillow at her. “I don’t see you offering anything!”

“I already said it’ll be fine!” 

“No you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did!” 

You laugh, the sound light but loud. Your friends pause, looking incredibly pleased with themselves. 

“Oh good,” Abe says. “You’re back.” 

“What do you mean?” you ask.

“Nothing,” she says, but you think there’s a bit of sadness to her, in the waning moon of her smile. “Are you gonna play with us now?” 

She shoves a controller at you and you take it with a huff. “Get ready to lose,” you tell her.

“What else is new?” Yoshikawa asks, moving away from you to grab her own controller again.

“Shut up, Yocchan,” Abe says, scowling. “You’re the worst.”

“Love you too.” 

You ignore them both to pick your character, but you can’t help the smile that plays across your lips as they continue to argue with each other. Abe curls herself around you, sticking her tongue out at Yoshikawa. You shift to give her room and your mark catches the light, reflects it back like morning dew. 

For a moment you stare down at the words that have already changed your life so much. Sometimes you wonder how much more they can take from you.

“It’s my choice,” you say. You freeze, not having meant to say it out loud, but Yoshikawa just hums, settling warm on your other side

“Yeah,” she says with a little hum. “It is.” 

But it isn’t just your choice.

You can’t quite understand Takao’s smile anymore. The nuances are lost in the space between the two of you, a language half-forgotten. The structure is there, but you’ve lost some of the words. 

You can’t quite understand his choice, either.

“I’m sorry,” he tells you, a scant few weeks after you realize you aren’t soulmates. The tips of his ears are pink, the color of the early dawn, and his eyes are glassy. “It’s just that—”

“We’re not soulmates,” you finish for him. Your heart is thrumming behind your ribs, a hummingbird battering against its cage. “Right?”

He winces. “Yeah.”

“I didn’t think it would matter.”

Maybe you should have known that it would.

He winces again; his hands tighten on the strap of his school bag. He stares at you, looking helpless, and you hate that you want to cradle his face in your hands. That you want to make it better for him. 

“It—”

He cuts himself off. His lip trembles, wobbling like a spinning top, and it comes to you all at once. It’s written in the space between you, in a language you’ve both been speaking for months, one that’s all your own.

Takao’s lying.

“Tell me the truth,” you demand, clenching your fists. 

He looks away. “We’re not soulmates,” he says. “That’s all there is to it.”

“Liar.”

“Please don’t make this harder than it needs to be,” he says. “Please.”

“Then tell me the truth.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“Fine,” you say. “Fine.” 

When you walk away, he doesn’t come after you. 

***

You hide yourself away among the hydrangea bushes that line the library, settling yourself in a sea of powder-blue petals. You curl up, pulling your knees up against your chest, and cry quietly until your uniform skirt is damp. 

“Well, that’s not good,” Abe says.

You glance up to see her and Yoshikawa leaning over the hydrangea bushes, looking down at you with tender expressions. You immediately cry harder, starting to sob aloud.

“Oh shit,” Abe says, pushing through the puffball clusters of flowers and dropping to her knees beside you. “Don’t cry, don’t cry, it’s okay.” 

“Takao?” Yoshikawa asks.

You nod. 

She smiles, sharp and mean. “Abe, stay with her. I’ll be back.”

You shoot to your feet, grabbing her by her uniform sleeve before she can take off. “No!” you yelp. “No, Asako, don’t do anything!”

“Why not? He made you cry.” 

“He just—it’s okay.”

“It’s not.” 

“He doesn’t want to be with someone who isn’t his soulmate,” you say softly. “That’s…he’s allowed to make that choice.”

She clicks her tongue. “He didn’t strike me as the type.”

“Me either,” you mumble. “I think he’s lying.”

“Why would he lie?” Abe asks, tilting her head.

“Don’t know,” you say. “But it just…it just seemed like he was. Please leave him alone.”

You don’t know how to explain it. You’re not sure you can. It’s a strange little language, the language that forms between two people who haven’t spoken to each other, and you’re not sure anyone who hasn’t created that language between themselves and another could even begin to understand the alphabet of it. 

Yoshikawa hums; her sly eyes are narrowed, the deep brown of them darkened to almost black. “Fine. But if he makes you cry again, all bets are off.”

“Yeah,” Abe says, nudging you up to your feet. “And we know where you hide, so no point in trying to keep it from us!”

Your laugh is watery, but it’s light as it leaves your lips. 

Abe loops her arm through yours. “Let’s go,” she says. “It’s lunchtime and Yoshikawa has a good bento today.”

“And it’s not for you,” Yoshikawa says lazily, stuffing her hands in her pocket as the three of you start to walk. “So don’t even try it.” 

You laugh again and they bicker all the way to the classroom. You’re in the middle of grabbing your own bento when you feel eyes on you and when you look up, Takao startles, looking away quickly. You bite your lip as the tips of his ears go pink once more. 

He glances at you again, and his eyes linger on your face. When his lips curl down into a small frown, you realize he knows you’ve been crying. He looks away as the twist of his lips goes pained. 

Yoshikawa steps in front of you, blocking your view of him. “C’mon,” she says softly, chivving you towards her desk where Abe is already sitting. “Let’s go.”

You follow her after one last glance in Takao’s direction. 

It develops into a routine over the next few weeks. You get used to the feeling of eyes on you all over again. Takao’s gaze feels silken against your skin, and though you shouldn’t, you bask in it. Maybe you’re too used to it; it reminds you of the beginning, when all you had was fleeting looks and quiet gazes. 

But now he looks away every time you look up, though his ears always give him away. 

Still, there’s a comfort to it. It doesn’t go away, even as you simply circle around each other, caught in each other’s orbit once more. This time, at least, you know that you’ll stay this way. 

Except two months after you go your separate ways, you’re assigned to work on a project together.

Your hurt has waned; it’s a healing bruise, now, only flaring to life when you press on it. The hopeful look on Takao’s face barely even causes an ache. You stay in your seat, but he gets to his feet and comes to you as the teacher leaves.

“Hi,” Takao says, fidgeting with the strap of his school bag. “I’m—if you want to switch partners to someone else, I understand.”

“Do you want to switch partners?” you ask.

“Not really,” he blurts out, and this time, his blush is bright, the apples of his cheeks dusted in heated red. “I mean, no. I don’t.”

“Okay,” you say slowly. It feels nice, somehow, looking at him, at his small, timid smile and the way the sun catches golden on his skin. “I guess I’m fine with it.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, I’m—I’m glad.”

“Let’s talk after clubs,” you say. “We can figure out our topic then.” 

He nods. He stands there for a moment; it’s only when you raise an eyebrow that he jolts and heads back to his desk. When you look over, he’s got his hands pressed against his face. You think you see him mutter “idiot” to himself.

The smile tugs on your lips without you even realizing it. 

***

“I miss you,” Takao says, fifteen minutes into your third project session. “I miss you so much.” 

You go stiff. 

The project has gone well so far. You’ve found yourself falling into easy communication with Takao, but you’ve kept it strictly to the project, rarely going into your lives outside of school. Still, it’s easy in a way it hasn’t been in a while. You find yourself smiling, and sometimes he even makes you laugh. 

“Okay,” you say, sounding wooden even to yourself. “I—I don’t know what you want me to say to that.” 

He winces. “You don’t have to say anything,” he says.

You mean to say okay, but what you say instead is—

“I miss you too.”

Takao blinks. And then a smile is spreading across his lips, slow like the dawn and just as warm. “Really?” he asks.

Your cheeks heat, but you nod. 

“Do you think we can be friends?” he asks, almost shy.

You bite your lip. “I think…I think we can try.” 

“I’d like that,” he says softly. “I’d really like that.”

You smile at him, slow and sure. “Me too.”

He smiles back, and the two of you turn back to your project.

You find that it takes time to learn how to be friends with Takao. It’s not like Abe and Yoshikawa with the fluid ease of childhood friends, forged by years and years at each other’s sides, memory after memory built into a firm foundation. Nor is it like your other friends.

Takao seems to inhabit a space all his own. Maybe he always will. It seems right that he would; it doesn’t surprise you that he carved himself a place in your world without even trying. 

It takes time. Eventually, even Abe and Yoshikawa warm up to him, until the four of you are spending summer nights together, popsicles melting down your fingers in the heat. You laugh through sticky lips and sit side-by-side despite the heat.

It feels good to have him back in your life, and high school goes by in a whirlwind of seasons, the years melting together until you graduate. He’s by your side when you do ,along with Yoshikawa and Abe, the four of you taking pictures on the school lawn surrounded by your peers. 

The four of you spend as much time as you can together before you head off to college, just a few scant weeks after graduating. 

It’s easy with Yoshikawa and Abe; the three of you are woven together, a tapestry of home. College is just another stitch, with the three of you attending the same one. You find a cute apartment just off campus, in a slightly worn building with wisteria dripping down the sides like honey. Yoshikawa and Abe like to hang laundry from the balcony; they says it comes back with a floral scent. The dishwasher is broken more often than not, the rooms are tiny, and you love it. So do they, and the three of you build a home together.

With Takao, it’s harder. You drift away from each other in college, pressed in on all sides by classes, studying, and local friends. It feels hard to find the time to breathe, let alone text Takao anything other than a fleeting check-in or a picture of something that reminded you of him.

Unlike before, it feels natural. It isn’t without its edges but they’re dulled, so that they press against your skin instead of cut. He simply fades from your everyday life until the ding of his text message is a surprise instead of a given. 

When he walks back into your life in your third year of college, it’s like getting hit by a lightning bolt.

***

The izakaya is tucked away at the edge of the city, sandwiched between two small apartment buildings that have ivy spidering up the side of them. You watch as a sheet billows on a clothesline, rippling like water, the clothespins holding firm despite the strong breeze. 

The fat tabby lazing on the edge of the izakaya steps doesn’t even lift its head to look at you. It’s sheltered under a verdant fern frond, part of the little forest of plants clustered around the entrance. Some of the plants are spilling out of their pots, sprawling out in great clusters of leaves, the tiny flowers dotted in them barely visible in the light of the nearby vending machine. 

You crouch down by the cat unable to resist, and it blinks itself awake slowly, turning slate gray eyes your way. It sniffs at your knuckles when you reach out to it. It rubs its cheek against your hand once, and then gets to its feet, stretching mightily as your friends laugh from just inside the entrance. You try to pet it again but it pointedly turns away and curls up again under the frond, further in than before, a little forest deity hidden amid lush scenery. 

You stare at it for a moment longer, looking at how its cheeks squish up against its paws. 

“Pouting doesn’t affect Momo,” someone behind you says.

You look up, and then go still.

“Hi,” Takao says, warm like the early morning sun. “It’s good to see you.”

“You too,” you say, as if he hasn’t knocked the breath from you. “How have you been?”

“I’ve been good. You?”

“Are we really going to do this?” you ask, standing up from your awkward crouch. 

He smiles, and you think he might be swallowing down a laugh. “Do what?”

You scowl at him. “You know what,” you say. “The small talk.”

“It’s polite.”

“Is that your main concern? Politeness?”

This time, he does laugh, low and sweet. “No,” he says, his eyes glittering. “You are.”

Your cheeks heat. “You can’t just say that.”

“Just did,” he says. “Are—are you here by yourself?”

“With friends.”

“Do you think I could steal you away for a drink?”

“Yeah,” you say softly. “I think you can.” 

He smiles at you. “Good.”

He ushers you into the izakaya. It’s warm inside despite the open windows, and the scent of fried food lingers in the air. People’s chatter fills the room up to the rafters, little laughs peppered in like champagne sounds, little pops of joy. There’s another cat curled up on a barstool tucked away in a corner, a ball of white fluff that makes you think of dandelions. 

Yoshikawa sees you first; when she sees Takao behind you, she raises a single elegant brow before turning back to your group of friends. She says something with a lazy roll of her shoulders, and suddenly, all of your friends are trying very hard to not look at the entrance. 

“Oh my god,” you mutter.

Takao laughs, the huff of air stirring against your nape. “They’re pretty obvious,” he says. “Should we go say hi?” 

“Later,” you say.

He follows you to the bar. He’s close, and under the scent of fried food you can make out the faintest hint of his woodsy cologne. 

You sit side by side, close enough to feel each other’s warmth but without touching. The bartender brings you your beers, and you look to Takao as he taps the neck of his bottle against yours. 

“It’s so good to see you,” he breathes, his dark eyes soft.

“Yeah,” you say. “It is.” 

One drink turns into two until you’re both sliding closer to each other in your seat, pressing into each other’s sides. You barely keep yourself from curling into him. He leans in close when you’re speaking, so that his voice is rumbling low in your ear. 

You share some takoyaki and then one of the biggest okonomiyaki you’ve ever seen, the pancake stuffed to the brim with filling and heavily topped. When the food arrives, so does the white cat, meowing quietly at your feet as it winds its way around the rungs of your barstool. Takao holds you steady when you lean down to pet it, his hand firm on your lower back. 

By your third beer, Yoshikawa and the rest of your friend group leaves. She gives you a little wave on her way out the door. 

“Sorry,” Takao says. “I didn’t mean to take up your whole night.” 

“It’s okay,” you say. “It’s been…really nice.”

“Just nice?”

“Great,” you admit. “It’s been great.”

He smiles, and it’s that same dandelion fluff smile you remember, sweet and fleeting. 

“Good,” he says, taking a sip from his beer. You watch the way his forearm flexes. “Listen, do you want to meet up again?”

“Yeah, I would.”

His eyes crinkle. “Great,” he says.

You bite down on your smile. 

The two of you finish your beers between lazy chatter. It’s comfortable, as if you never fell out of touch. 

When you leave, Takao waits as you pet the white cat once more, delicately bumping your knuckles against its cheek as it rumbles out a purr. It meows pitifully when you stop, opening its blue, blue eyes with a disgruntled look on its face, and you laugh to yourself, kneeling to give it a few more pets. 

You look for the tabby as you exit the izakaya but it’s gone, likely curled up amid some of the planters further back. You and Takao both stop at the sidewalk, carefully making sure you’re out of the way of any pedestrians, and for a moment, you just look at each other.

“See you soon?” Takao asks.

“Yeah,” you say. “See you soon.” 

“Good,” he breathes, with his eyes so soft that it makes your cheeks warm. 

You say goodbye, and each of you heads home. When you glance back Takao is already looking back at you from the street corner. You give him a little wave, and he jolts before hurrying off.

You smile your whole way home.

***

“It’s so hot,” you complain, flopping down next to Takao on the park bench. “Can we go to the conbini?”

“Popsicles?” he asks.

“No, I want onigiri.”

He raises a brow. “How does that help with the heat?”

“It doesn’t,” you tell him. “The aircon does.”

He laughs. “Oh, of course.” 

You head to the closest conbini, practically swimming through the humid summer air. The air is so thick that you could cut it; there’s rain on the horizon, promised in the encroaching gray-blue clouds hanging low in the sky. 

Inside it’s blessedly cool, the aircon hard at work. The two of you scour the aisles, picking out varying snacks and pointing out new flavors to each other—you try to make him buy a cream stew Gari Gari Kun popsicle, but he refuses—before you head to the cashier.

You settle in at one of the tables, opening your drink as Takao unwraps one of your onigiri, handing it to you before he busies himself with his own food. He gives you a little swat when you reach out for his snacks, making you retract your hand with a laugh. As you pull back, you wonder when the two of you fell back into rhythm.

It’s close to the one you had in high school, but not the same. There’s something new twining through the rhythm, a swirl of notes that resonates through you. It’s an easy flow, a soft ebb and tide, like the calmest of seas. 

“Hey,” Takao says gently. 

“Hmm?”

“Where did you go, just then?” 

You blink and take a sip of your peach tea. It lingers sweet on your tongue as you meet his stoic gaze. His mouth tilts, just slightly, something tucked up secret in the corner of his soft lips. 

For a moment, you just look at him. He meets your gaze easily; he lets you look your fill, as patient as ever.

“Sorry,” you say. “Nowhere important.” 

“Okay.”

You shake your head. “You’re so—” you break off.

“I’m so?”

You bite at your lip. “You,” you say. “You’re so you.”

His smile is small, but it grows, as steady and sure as the sun’s rise.

“I hope so,” he says, almost flippant, but there’s something soft in his gaze; it brushes over you like silk.

“Shut up,” you tell him.

He just laughs, quiet and low.

The two of you chat as you eat, talking about Yoshikawa’s upcoming art show at a trendy new gallery. You’ve been waiting patiently ever since the curator first picked her up as a featured artist. It’ll be nice to go with Takao, for the four of you to be side-by-side again, something that’s becoming as constant as it was in your high school days. 

When you’re finished Takao takes all the wrappers and folds them up neatly, creasing them until they’re practically origami. You bite down on your smile.

The summer air rolls over you as you step back into it, licking across your skin as only wet heat can. You shudder with it. 

Still you meander through the nearby park, ducking beneath low-hanging branches hanging heavy with fruit, the citrus of them permeating the air. It’s quiet, with just the distant shouts of the playground and the whisper of the leaves in the stirring breeze to accompany you both. 

You find yourself at the koi pond without meaning to and Takao wordlessly heads to the food meter as you settle yourself on the rock wall that edges the pond. The surface ripples, orange and gold scales muted in the murky water like a sunset covered by clouds. You trail your fingertips over the surface, and giggle as they mouth at them. 

Takao presses some feed into your palm when he comes back; the heat of him lingers there. Your mark glimmers in the light as you toss in the feed, a needlepoint flash of silver. You can feel Takao’s eyes on it. But then the koi come up in great, arcing splashes, the quiet pond roiling like the angry sea in their fervor, and you laugh as you dodge the worst of it.

Takao chuckles, and he settles down next to you to hand you the last of the feed.

You curl into him despite the heat, skin against skin, a slick slide of a touch before you fall still. The koi are still churning up the water, their gaping mouths breaking through the surface, and you give them what they want. Scales flicker by, a mesmerizing firework show caught beneath the surface, and so it catches you off guard when Takao suddenly says—

“I’m sorry.” 

You go still.

“For what?”

He shifts beside you; when you glance at him, he’s staring into the distance, his dark eyes caught on something that only he can see.

“For high school.”

You breathe out through your nose. “So you’ve said.”

“I was scared.”

“So you’ve said,” you repeat.

He glances at you, then, and his eyes remind you of the vastness of the unending night sky, dark and glittering.

“I’m not scared anymore.” 

You suck in a sharp breath. He waits, ever patient.

“Me neither,” you say, curling your pinky around his, twining around him like thread. 

He cups your cheek, his touch almost reverent, and presses his forehead to yours. “Okay?” he asks.

“Okay,” you breathe.

He leans in and kisses you. It’s careful and sweet.

It feels like coming home.

He breaks the kiss when you’ve stolen each other’s breath away.

 “Our soulmates—” he starts.

“It doesn’t matter,” you say breathlessly, kissing him again. He’s smiling against your lips.  Warmth floods you. You love him, you love him, you love him. That’s all there is. That’s all you need. 

“It doesn’t matter,” you say again.

He presses his forehead against yours. “You’re right,” he says. “It doesn’t.”

Until suddenly, it does.

***

You and your soulmate—Shinsuke, you think, still tasting the honey of it on your tongue, Shinsuke Shinsuke Shinsuke—watch each other. 

The only sound is the steady fall of the rain. 

It’s picked up again, sending the hydrangeas eddying, spinning in a lazy current as their puffball blossoms catch the droplets. More petals flutter to the ground. The blue of them is stark against the dirt, and you think of what a storm leaves in its wake.

Shinsuke lets out a deep, slow breath, and you wince. His amber eyes have dimmed and the last of his smile has washed away, leaving just the dregs of emotion behind, too faint for you to read. 

You feel too small for your skin; your heart is fluttering, a hummingbird thing, trying to press through the gaps in your ribcage. You take in a shallow breath. It tastes of the earth, of drenched soil and summer heat. You choke on it. 

Shinsuke’s brow furrows as you take in another breath, even shallower than the last, and your heart is thrumming, and his eyes are so sharp, so knowing, so kind. You’re caught in the amber of them, the resin of his gaze pouring over you. 

Even the rain seems quiet now. 

His lips part.

Your ribs start to crack; your heart thumps harder against them. Too strong, too fast, too loud. 

His lips part, and you do the only thing you can.

“I’m sorry,” you gasp.

You run.

#kita x reader #kita shinsuke x reader #hq!! x reader #haikyuu x reader #bee writes hq!! #.kita #.lbgtm #q

[renjibozo]

a coherent (probably not) thought dump about the new buddy daddies PV 3 (and additionally, PV 2)

because i'm sitting crying and need people to hear what i'm thinking about this PV i am brocken

edit: we’re making a few edits because i realized PV 2 exists and now i need to revise some parts so i don’t look like an utter clown next week (and please don’t trust me 100% with translations i’m using my very limited knowledge)

ok so starting off with this from PV 3, you can hear miri telling rei something along the lines of "Papa Rei! Get home quick, 'kay? Because today's!" before it just cuts to the next voice line

a birthday mayhaps? it might be miri’s birthday, it might be rei’s birthday, or it might be kazuki’s birthday and they’re preparing a surprise. unless it’s something else then literally please ignore this entire section

in PV 2, you can see her wearing a party hat along with streamers strung up behind her off to the side + another party hat at the corner of the screen

this means there IS a birthday (like i thought earlier before the edit) and it’s rei’s because kazuki is in the same room as miri while they’re talking

“Papa Rei looks lonely sometimes...” - Miri “Isn’t that guy just always grumpy?” - Kazuki

moving on, kazuki saying something along the lines of "I don't like this season/weather..." and a shot of a drawer opened to reveal a polaroid in the middle of many many knickknacks

judging by one of the shots in the opening,

his wife probably died in the rain and we're getting more information about the incident because it's been hinted at in the early episodes before it became parenting focused

and adding onto this because of a nice person in the replies!

the building behind him looks exactly like aozora daycare, just not sure if its the front or back (maybe the front bc of the hint of a blue gate beside him) but there doesn’t seem to be bushes planted anywhere near the spot where you can see the hydrangeas, so maybe it got planted a while later?

considering the clothes he’s wearing, this has to be before the dinner scene and is what leads up to it... the connections are getting stronger

you cannot convince me that this isn't rei's brother and that he isn't the favorite child

even rei (as seen from a flashback) couldn't call his father "dad" and that he should refer to him as "boss", but then there's this guy fighting him that calls rei's father as "father"

and something something about "Didn't Father tell you to return to the organization?" which implies he escaped the organization and got hired by kyutaro somehow

how he managed to get an apartment? i'll probably just say kyutaro did it i have no idea if he can even make forgeries like kazuki does

additionally: in PV2 you can see more of the gunfight between who i assume to be rei’s brother (older or younger? who knows)

and i assume this is set while miri and kazuki are waiting for rei to come back because it’s his birthday and they set up a nice surprise party for him, so, hoping he hurries back home because he can’t just stand them up like that on his own birthday

OK. NOW. THE SCENE THAT SPAWNED THIS ENTIRE POST.

there must've been some kind of falling out between rei + miri and kazuki because he was screaming "I'm... not your housekeeper!" during dinner

i'm suspecting that they finally got on his nerves if they never pick up after themselves properly or just the small stuff piled up onto kazuki and he had enough despite usually not really minding the fact that he has to do most if not all of the house chores

but another theory i have is that the scene with the photograph is connected and because of the stress, it leads up to him taking it out on rei and miri. i'm distraught i don't want to see this episode but i have to. mfs gonna have a sk8 episode 7 situation and i'm powerless to stop it

already saw a post or two about this one and i also hope it's just a red herring but judging by the shirt that rei has on which is different from the shirt he wears inside the house in earlier episodes, this was probably right after kazuki's meltdown

maybe kazuki ran off somewhere? maybe miri tried following him and got sick in the process and rei had to come fetch her? i just wonder how desperate rei must've been to run to kyutaro for help even if he's not as wary about kyutaro like kazuki is

kyutaro's talking about something being a warning because the organization doesn't forgive something (possibly kazurei taking in miri and raising her)

this shot looks like it could've been a flashback from when his wife died because he was wearing a green shirt during the dinner scene

ignoring the crossed out line because it has to be during the birthday surprise episode because if it really was after kazuki’s meltdown, he has to have been wearing a green shirt. but in the scene where he’s standing in the rain looking a little roughed up, he’s wearing the same exact clothes as here

and then a shot of rei's father without the shadows mostly hiding his face from a flashback!

he's gonna be a major player in the second half and i am Not Here for it

bonus: i think karin's a spy tasked to idk infiltrate kazuki and rei's apartment and see what they're up to i just know she's gonna be a pain in the ass for them

that's all folks i just needed to get these out right now

#future yuzu i'm counting on you #may i be blessed with foresight #actually no i dont want these to come true im gonna be distraught #don't expect a high quality thought dump from me im just rambling #buddy daddies #buddy daddies spoilers #spoilers #(because of the PV) #edited because of new information i found

[lullabyes22-blog]

Do you have any Melvika HCs to grace us with?

:3

Y e s.

It wasn't supposed to happen at all. The first spark of interest kindled on both sides when Sevika filled in for Silco at a gala (some stupid Jinx-related emergency grumble grumble). A hardliner angry at the recent trade deals between Zaun and Piltover decided to send a message by flinging a projectile at the envoys.

Sevika's reflexes kicked in and she ended up snatching Councilor Medarda out of the way. Mel was frazzled but tried to keep her composure while security swarmed the culprit. He was a Zaunite; Sevika's entourage took him into custody.

"Teach him some manners." A half-smile. "But make sure he doesn't end up too well-behaved." i.e. Rough him up but leave him alive. At least until the interrogations are done.

The whole ordeal rattled Mel with flashbacks of Noxus, where such violence is routine. And yet Sevika, ever the consummate lieutenant, made a point to confer with Mel's security detail to ensure the Councilor made it safely back to Topside.

Before departing, Mel likewise made a point to thank Sevika for saving her. After the gala ended, Sevika returned to headquarters to find a floral arrangement of blue hydrangeas and a Thank You card from Mel.

Silco was intrigued, but otherwise kept any speculation to himself.

The next time the women met was at a soiree some weeks later. Mel made a point to engage Sevika in conversation, and ask a little bit about her background and family. Against her will, she was curious about this stoic woman, who seemed in many ways her homeland's ideal of what a warrior should be. And yet she wasn't a dumb jock by any stretch - she had a crafty mind and a sharp tongue, all of which hinted she was used to employing both brains and brawn to stay two steps ahead.

On Sevika's part, she found the Councilor glamorous, but also attempted to keep her at an arm's length. Her penchant for strategy and wordplay put her firmly in Silco's 'league.' And yet, when this Topside vixen wasn't verbally sparring with Silco over politics, she seemed to genuinely enjoy Sevika's company. They even took a turn through the gardens after the soiree, and Mel pointed out the different species of flowers blossoming, as well as their symbolism.

Afterward, during the limo ride, Silco crooked an eyebrow at Sevika's report: "She spoke of violets and lavenders? Well, well..."

A week later, he held a one-on-one meeting with Sevika, wherein he subtly encouraged her to cultivate a bond of 'goodwill' with the Councilor. "As a symbol of friendship between our nations."

Sevika, nobody's fool, understood the subtext: "Take advantage of her gratitude to pry out trade secrets."

On her part, Sevika had little interest in springing political traps. But she was loyal to Zaun, first and foremost, and it seemed as good a chance as any to build a useful alliance.

Ordinarily, she couldn't stand Piltie divas. But this one was a Noxian, and it showed in flashes of steely grit that she seemed at pains to keep hidden. Sevika was interested in exploring that facet further.

Thus began a succession of meetings, both planned and impromptu. Both women understood it was mostly for political show, with an undertone of opportunism. Yet they genuinely found themselves warming to each other's company.

Aphrodite meets Athena vibes: artful delicacy vs brusque honesty, and yet with a shared sense of playfulness beneath their professional veneers.

Neither one was prepared for the rapport to turn into genuine friendship. But by the year's end, they would often be meeting unscheduled to take a stroll along the bridge, and swapping childhood anecdotes in between discussions of business.

Sevika was Mel's living-breathing glimpse into the actual lives of Fissurefolk - all the toil and turmoil, and the hard sacrifices made to survive. On Sevika's part, she found herself reassessing her initial opinion of Mel's girlhood as a privileged wonderland. If anything, it seemed more akin to a high-stakes chess game.

It left them both with a mutual respect for the trials overcome.

The relationship turned physical more by impulse than any calculation on both their part. Sevika made no bones about her preference for women. Mel, while she typically slept with men, wasn't averse to some lighthearted experimentation. However, there was nothing experimental about hers and Sevika's encounter - just an unexpectedly hungry intimacy that caught them both off-guard.

Afterward, they could have agreed not to pursue it further, with no hard feelings. Instead, both opted to see how this would develop, and where it might take them.

Silco, up until that point closely following Sevika and Mel's 'liaisons', was unexpectedly irritated - and territorial. He'd expected a dalliance, not an out and out relationship.

"Not to condescend," he warned Sevika later that evening over a cigar, "But this could end very, very poorly for both out cities."

Sevika's reply: "We can handle ourselves."

(You sound jealous, Silco.)

The two ladies made their connection 'official' during a press conference at Progress Day, where they arrived as each other's escorts for the event.

You would expect Caitlyn x Vi vibes with this pair. And you would be dead-wrong. These are two extremely savvy players who understand the importance of playing it smart - but also loosening up and having a good time.

Mel appreciates that for Sevika's blunt exterior, she still has a coldly strategic side. Likewise, Sevika enjoys that underneath Mel's serene poise is a deeply feisty temper. And yet they have a shared sense of equilibrium. It takes a great deal to rattle them - or make them fly off the handle.

Like any couple, they have their share of arguments - but not that often. They prefer trading licks of a different stripe<3

They also compartmentalize like pros. There is business - and there is pleasure. The delineation between the two is ironclad, and both know better than to encroach in the other's sphere.

Ambessa is keen to meet this 'back-alley Amazoness' Mel has decided to take up with. Mel is wary of Ambessa interfering in their relationship - but Sevika makes it plain she can handle herself in the General's presence.

Indeed, despite herself, Ambessa is impressed. The woman is almost a specimen of the perfect soldier. She invites Sevika to a spar. Sevika accepts the offer with gusto.

It is spectacular - and spectacularly bloody. Mel is horrorstruck. Afterward, over shared drinks and bandaging their wounds, Ambessa offers Sevika a post on her upcoming war campaign.

Sevika declines. She's a Zaunite, not a mercenary for hire. And secretly, she knows such a maneuver would hurt Mel deeply - no matter what front she puts up.

Hers and Mel's favorite activity is watching each other in their natural elements: Mel in the controlled elegance of the boardrooms, and Sevika in the brash chaos of saloons. Afterward, they swap snarky remarks about the fools outplayed and the profits raked in.

They have a time-sharing scheme whereby they have a private property poised between Zaun and Piltover - and where they meet up for their rendezvous whenever they need a breather. Here, Mel introduces Sevika to gourmet Noxian spirits; Sevika shows her the joys of a good Vekauran tobacco. Afterward, they lounge in bed and make idle plans for a quick visit to Shurima or the far continents.

Poor Jayce, left on the sidelines, tries to wish Mel luck - while pretending he's not secretly into it.

Silco, left equally on the sidelines, wonders why he feels like the sucker in his own shellgame.

Rotten luck, boys :x

#arcane #arcane league of legends #asks #arcane silco #arcane mel #arcane sevika #sevika #silco #mel medarda #mel x sevika #sevika x mel #melvika #arcane headcanons #arcane headcanon #fanfic #forward (never forget)/xoxo #forward but never forget/xoxo

[attichaos]

P.2 Common Herbs A-Z

This is D-N of some common herbs and their uses

*longer read*

Daffodil

Love

Luck

Fertility

Used to keep negative energy away from the home or altar. Place fresh daffodils in the home to increase fertility. Wear near the heart to bring good luck.

Daisy

Love

Luck

Innocence

Associated with babies and newborn infants. Incorporate into baby blessings & Wiccanings or to bring protective Magick into a baby's sleeping area. Wear or carry to draw love.

Dandelion leaf

Summoning spirits

Healing

Purification

Defeating negativity.

Bury in northwest corner of yard to bring favorable winds. Use in sachets and charms to make wishes come true.

Dandelion root

Divination

Wishes

Calling spirits

Use in dream pillows & sachets for sleep protection. Bury on northwest side of house to draw good luck.

Eucalyptus

Protection

Healing

Use to purify any space. Use dried leaves to stuff healing poppets, pillows, or sachets. Arrange a ring of dried leaves around a blue candle and burn the candle for healing vibrations. Carry in a sachet or amulet to help reconcile difficulties in a relationship, for protection, and/or to maintain health.

Fenugreek

Money drawing

Fertility magick

Use in floor washes to bring money to the home. Place in a jar and add a few seeds every day to increase money flow to the household.

Fern

Mental clarity

Cleansing

Purification

Dispelling negativity

Keep in room where studying is done to help concentration. Burn a sprig of fern before an exam. Use in sachets and amulets for powerful auric protection.

Fig

Divination

Fertility

Love

Place a branch in front of the door before traveling to ensure a safe return. Write a question on a fig leaf -- if the leaf dries slowly, the answer is yes, otherwise the answer is no.

Figwort

House & business blessing

Protection for the home

Wear around the neck for health and protection against the evil eye. *Poisonous*

Foxglove

Protection of home & garden

Vision

Immortality

Used to commune with those of the Underworld. *Poisonous*

Garlic

Healing

Protection

Exorcism

Repulsion of vampires

Purification of spaces and objects

Used to invoke Hecate. Guards against negative magic, spirits, and the envy of others. Hang in the home to bring togetherness to the family or keep your willpower strong. Said to ward off bad weather when worn or carried during outside activities. Believed to absorb diseases -- rub fresh, peeled garlic against ailing body parts then throw the garlic into running water.

Geranium

Overcoming negative thoughts & attitudes, lifting spirits, promoting protection & happiness. Repels insects. Balances mind and body.

Ginger

Draws adventure and new experiences. Promotes sensuality, sexuality, personal confidence, prosperity, and success.

Adds to the strength and speed of any mixture of which it is a part. Place in amulet, mojo, or medicine bag to promote good health & protection. Use in herbal mixtures for the consecration of athames to strengthen and energize the ritual blade. A ginger root in the form of a human is a very powerful magickal token.

Grape

Fertility

Money

Mental powers

Garden magick

Hemlock

Use to paralyze a situation.

*Highly poisonous, do not consume.*

Hibiscus

Attracting love and lust, divination, and dreams.

Carry in a sachet or burn as incense to attract love.

Honeysuckle

Draws money

Success

Quick abundance

Aids persuasiveness and confidence, sharpens intuition.

Ring green candles with honeysuckle flowers or use honeysuckle in charms & sachets to attract money. Crush the flowers and rub into the forehead to enhance psychic powers.

Hyacinth 

Promotes peace of mind and peaceful sleep. Attracts love, luck, and good fortune.

Named for Hiakinthos, Greek God of homosexual love, this is the patron herb for gay men. Guards against nightmares when used as an oil, burned as incense, or included in dream pillows. Carry in amulet or sachet to ease grief or the pain of childbirth.

Hydrangea

Hex-breaking

Love drawing

Lringing back a lover

Fidelity

Binding

Ivy

Protection

Healing

Fertility

Love

Hang an ivy plant in front of the home to repel negative influence and discourage unwanted guests. Mix in a sachet with Holly as a wedding gift to provide protection to the newly married couple. Place ground ivy around the base of a yellow candle on a Tuesday, then burn the candle to discover who (if anyone) is working negative magick against you.

Jasmine

Uses include snakebite and divination; good for charging quartz crystals. Use in sachets and spells to draw spiritual love and attract a soul mate. Carry or burn the flowers to draw wealth and money. Use in dream pillows to induce sleep or burn in the bedroom to bring prophetic dreams. Helps to promote new, innovative ideas.

Lavender

Love

Protection

Healing

Sleep

Purification

Peace

Promotes healing from depression. Great in sleep pillows and bath spells. Believed to preserve chastity when mixed with rosemary. Burn the flowers to induce sleep and rest, then scatter the ashes around the home to bring peace and harmony. Use in love spells and sachets, especially those to attract men.

Lemon 

Cleansing

Spiritual opening

Purification

Removal of blockages

Add lemon peel to love sachets and mixtures. Soak peel in water and use the mixture as a wash for magickal objects to remove unwanted negativity, especially for objects received second-hand. Use an infusion of lemon to induce lust.

Lemon balm

Love

Success

Healing

Psychic/spiritual development

Use in love charms & spells to attract a partner. Use in healing spells & rituals for those suffering from mental or nervous disorders.

Lemongrass

Psychic cleansing

Opening

Also used in lust spells.

Lettuce

Divination

Lunar magick

Sleep

Protection

Love spells

Male sex magick

Lily

Fertility

Renewal

Rebirth

Marriage

Happiness

Prosperity

Lime

Purification

Protection

Promoting calmness and tranquility

Strengthening love

Mint

Promotes energy

Communication and vitality

Draws customers to a business

Use dried leaves to stuff a green poppet for healing. Place in wallet or purse or rub on money to bring wealth and prosperity. Use on the altar to draw good spirits to assist in your magick. Place in the home for protection.

Mugwort

Carried to increase lust & fertility

Prevent backache

Cure disease & madness

Place around divination and scrying tools to increase their power or near the bed to enable astral travel. Use in sleep pillow or place in a sachet under your pillowcase to bring about prophetic dreams. Use an infusion of mugwort to clean crystal balls and magick mirrors. *Toxic in large amounts*

Nettle

Dispelling darkness & fear

Strengthening the will

Aiding in the ability to handle emergencies

Sprinkle in the home to drive off evil & negativity. Carry in a sachet or use with a poppet to turn back a spell on the one who cast it. Sprinkle on self to remove petty jealousies, gossip, envy, and uncomfortable situations.

Nutmeg

Attracting money/prosperity

Bringing luck

Protection

Breaking hexes

Include in money magick and sachets. Carry as a good luck charm and/or to increase the intellect. Sprinkle nutmeg powder on green candles for prosperity.

And as always, merry meet <3

Atti

(photo - attichaos)

#witchcraft #witchcraft 101 #protection #banishing #witch stuff #eclectic witch #herbal witchcraft #kitchen witch #green witchcraft #hedge witch #witch blog #witch community #witch spell #witch tips #witchblr #witchythings #warding #baby witch #beginner witch #dark witch #cottage witch #traditional witchcraft #witch recipes #herbs #herbalism

[howlsofbloodhounds]

Killer HCs:

He plays dating sims.

He knows and uses the “language of flowers.” Especially STAGE 2, who uses it to say what he can’t bring himself to say.

Before STAGE 1 & Color parted ways, because STAGE 2 has to return to Nightmare, One leaves behind pink carnations and sweet peas. Pink carnations mean “I’ll never forget you” and sweet peas mean “blissful pleasures, goodbye, and thank you for a lovely time.”

Tryna say goodbye for now and that he enjoyed their time together, but also tryna soften the blow that STAGE 2 won’t remember their time together completely.

When Two and Color become closer, Two gifts Color a hydrangea. It means “frigidity and heartlessness”—to refer to Two’s apathetic nature—but also “gratitude for being understood,” because Color is one of the few people who’ve actually put in the effort to understand him.

In return, Color gifts him a forget-me-not and a white clover—which means “think of me.” He’s basically asking Two to not forget him.

Two responds with a pink carnation, a rosemary and a blue salvia. “Remembrance. I think of you, I’ll never forget you.”

After being taken from his alternate timeline, Killer starts keeping a journal to keep track of everything he knows about his STAGES. (Will expand on this later.)

#undertale #underverse #colorkiller #killercolor #color!sans #othertale #color sans #killer!sans #killer sans #killersans #killertale sans #killertale #undertalesomethingnew #sans aus #sans au #bad sans #bad sanses #bad sans gang #nightmares gang #othertale sans #language of flowers #utmv headcanons