#the energy in the arena is immaculate

[minarixx]

𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫'𝐫𝐞 𝐋𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐌𝐞 ✯ 𝐊.𝐒𝐚𝐤𝐮𝐬𝐚

"𝙁𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙞𝙣 𝙤𝙣𝙡𝙮 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙖𝙧𝙢𝙮, 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙩𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨, 𝙙𝙤𝙣'𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙞𝙜𝙣𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙢𝙚. 𝙄'𝙢 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙥𝙖𝙧𝙩𝙮"

PAIRING. Sakusa Kiyoomi x f!Reader

CONTENT. angst

The olympic volleyball player, Sakusa Kiyoomi finds himself grappling with the complexities of his relationship with Y/N as it becomes public knowledge.

WC. 1.3K

A/N. Release this song for streaming alr Taylor.

Masterlink - Songs Unwritten

𝓣he sunlit stadium buzzed with excitement as the much-anticipated volleyball tournament unfolded before a cheering crowd. The spacious arena boasted a grand design, with towering stands that could accommodate thousands of enthusiastic fans. The atmosphere was electric, with vibrant colors adorning the venue, reflecting the energy and spirit of the event.

The central focus of the stadium was the immaculately prepared volleyball court, situated at the heart of the action. Its pristine surface, made of smooth, polished wood, gleamed under the radiant floodlights. The boundaries of the court were marked with bold, contrasting lines, providing clear demarcation for the players and ensuring fair play.

On either side of the court, towering electronic scoreboards loomed large, displaying the current match score, set information, and timers, ensuring that no fan missed a moment of the thrilling encounters. Enormous high-definition screens were strategically positioned around the stadium, broadcasting close-up shots of the players and captivating slow-motion replays, further enhancing the spectator experience.

The stadium was divided into different sections, each designated for different categories of spectators. The VIP section, with its plush seating and impeccable service, catered to prominent figures from the sporting world, celebrities, and high-ranking officials. The regular seating area, stretching across multiple levels, offered comfortable chairs with ample legroom, ensuring a pleasant viewing experience for the enthusiastic fans. In one of these seats was Y/N L/N. 

And in the court, among them stood Sakusa, a talented volleyball athlete whose dreams were woven into each powerful spike. But beneath his cold exterior lay a shadow of doubt, a fear that threatened to unravel the fragile connection he shared with the girl who held his heart, Y/N. 

Their love had blossomed amidst the thunderous applause and echoing cheers of the volleyball arena. The court had been their sanctuary, where they exchanged glances filled with unspoken promises and whispered sweet nothings in the midst of practice sessions. But as their relationship deepened, so did Sakusa's apprehension about revealing their love to the public.

Their paths crossed during a brief break, as they both reached for water bottles at the vending machine. Y/N mustered the courage to strike up a conversation, her voice laced with genuine interest.

"Great game out there! Your spikes are impressive," she complimented, her eyes twinkling with admiration.

Sakusa turned to face her, a charming smile that was covered by his mask but you could still see the outline of. His gaze met hers, and in that moment, something unspoken passed between them.

"Thank you," he replied, his voice cold but his tone with gratitude. "Do you play volleyball yourself?"

Y/N's laughter danced on the breeze as she shook her head, a playful glint in her eyes.

"No, I'm just here to enjoy the game and cheer on the players. But who knows, maybe I'll give it a try someday."

Their conversation flowed effortlessly, as if they had known each other for years. They shared stories, dreams, and the occasional witty banter that drew smiles and laughter from both of them.

Days turned into weeks, and their bond grew stronger with each passing encounter. The whispers of an undeniable connection filled the air, igniting a flame of hope within Y/N's heart. Sakusa, too, felt an inexplicable pull towards her, as if they were two puzzle pieces meant to fit together.

One evening, as they sat together on the beach, watching the sun dip below the horizon, Sakusa turned to Y/N with a glimmer of excitement in his eyes.

"Y/N, I have something important to tell you," he began, his voice tinged with anticipation. "I promise you, soon, I will announce our relationship to the world. I want everyone to know how much you mean to me."

Y/N's heart skipped a beat, overwhelmed with a mixture of joy and anticipation. She had waited for this moment, for Sakusa to embrace their love publicly, to stand up for their relationship.

But as the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, Y/N found herself tangled in a web of empty promises. The whispers of lies grew louder, circulating among their circle of friends and acquaintances. The announcement Sakusa had promised remained nothing more than a distant dream.

Y/N's heart grew heavy with disappointment, her trust eroding with each passing day. She longed for the validation, for Sakusa to fulfill his word and show the world they were together.

Y/N, with her infectious smile and fiery spirit, was unafraid to showcase their affection to the world. She longed for Sakusa to stand proudly by her side, to declare their love to the world without hesitation. But his reluctance to do so left her feeling unseen and unimportant, an invisible figure in the shadows of his ambitions. 

During this match however, rumors swirled through the air, like seagulls riding the wind, spreading their wings of deception. They whispered of a love shared between Y/N and Sakusa, a relationship hidden behind closed doors. As the gossip reached Sakusa's ears, his heart sank. He had hoped to shield Y/N from the harsh realities of public scrutiny, believing that by keeping their love secret, he could protect her from the judgments of others. But the whispers had grown louder, the rumors more persistent, weaving their way into the fabric of their lives.

Y/N's heart ached as she overheard a group of girls conversing nearby. Their voices dripped with disdain, their words weaving a tapestry of hurtful assumptions.

"Did you hear? Sakusa would never date someone as plain looking as her," one of the girls sneered.

"Of course not. He's way out of her league. He's way better off with a Victoria Secret Supermodel," another chimed in, her laughter echoing like shards of broken glass.

The volleyball tournament came to a close, leaving behind a flurry of emotions and weary bodies. As the sun dipped below the horizon, the players and their supporters gathered for the much-anticipated after-party. It was meant to be a celebration of their achievements, a moment of camaraderie. But for Y/N, it would become an evening of isolation and heartbreak.

The room buzzed with laughter and animated conversations, the air filled with a mix of triumph and relief. But amidst the lively atmosphere, Y/N stood on the outskirts, a mere shadow amidst the revelry. The whispers of the rumors still haunted the room, their echoes drowning out her attempts to find solace.

Sakusa, lost in a sea of conflicting emotions, struggled to navigate the space between his love for Y/N and the pressures from the public and his managers. He knew he had let her down, allowing the rumors to drive a wedge between them. Yet, the fear of jeopardizing his career kept him at bay, caught between the love he felt for Y/N and the image he was expected to uphold.

Y/N's heart ached as she watched Sakusa move through the crowd, mingling effortlessly with others. The smile that once brightened her world now seemed distant and unattainable. Her insecurities gnawed at her, pushing her to the edge of despair.

Summoning all her courage, Y/N approached Sakusa in a secluded corner, her voice trembling with a mix of desperation and longing.

"Sakusa, please," she implored, her eyes pleading for him to understand. "I can't bear to be ignored any longer. I need you to choose me, to stand up for us, despite what the public and your managers might say."

Sakusa's gaze wavered, torn between the woman he loved and the world he knew. The weight of his indecision etched lines of torment upon his face. He reached out, his hand hesitating in mid-air, but ultimately withdrew.

"I wish it were that simple, Y/N," he whispered, his voice tinged with resignation. "But I don't want to lose everything I've worked for. I'm sorry."

The words landed heavily on Y/N's heart, a final blow to the hope she had clung to. Tears welled up in her eyes as she turned away, the weight of rejection pressing down upon her like an iron cloak.

As the party continued, Y/N remained a distant observer, her smiles forced and hollow. She watched as Sakusa mingled with adoring fans and accepted the accolades from his teammates. But with each passing moment, the emptiness within her grew, a void where their love once thrived.

©Minarixx 2023 - please don't copy, repost or translate without my knowledge credit or permission.

#hq sakusa #sakusa kiyoomi #kiyoomi sakusa #sakusa x you #sakusa x y/n #sakusa x reader #sakusa angst #sakusa kiyoomi x you #sakusa kiyoomi x reader #haikyuu one shot #hq oneshot #haikyuu angst #haikyuu x self insert #haikyuu x female reader #sakusa x female reader #msby

[irlvernon]

DID SOMEONE SAY FAV SVT PERFORMANCES!!!!!! omg hii ok time to buckle in. i have a yt playlist full of my fav performances - svt moments of all time -but unfortunately half the videos have been taken down bc copyright 😭💔 fml truly..

- my life was probably changed forever by their 2021 AAA performance like hello!!! rock ver of rwy!!!!! the anyone outfits!!! THE DANCE BREAK!!!

- 2018 japan arena tour - habit and when i grow up perhaps the best singing ive ever heard…

- im also so fond of hit song - shining diamonds concert the seungkwan vocals oh my goddd hes just a baby And yet the most beautiful heartwrenching noises are escaping him.

- i also do really love highlight from 2019 kcon la performance unit PERFORMED!

- speaking of perf u their diamond edge concert !the theatrics are INSANE, the use of guitar solo instrumentals is gratuitous, and im SO here for it lmao

- this is getting really perf u heavy but bets moonwalker+wave is TOOO good (this specific video’s crowd is so funny 😭😭😭)

- okay okay last ones we of course cannot leave out jbtc fearless+left&right 2021 despite it being an empty crowd their energy was IMMACULATE plus hoshi minghao and dino/vernon dance break What more could u need seriously.

- kbs 2017 festival JUN PIANO! no more needed

stopping myself here before this really becomes a daunting wall of text 😭 a lot of these r classics/well known but u know u can never go wrong with those!!

if u got this far im soo sorry turns out this is a huge can of worms for me (nervous laughter) ! there are honestly hundreds of svt performances icould talk about for dayyyyyys i love love love their performances they are so SO unmatched in that area and even through a screen they are so captivating <3 what i would give to one day attend a svt concert……… alright thanks for letting me ramble maxogie 😭❣️hoping all those links work

OH MY GOD LEO i love this so so much pls know i appreciate u sending all this 😭 its like u read my mind!!!!!!

the 2021 aaa performance is sooo good. i also always watch the behind the scenes of that (that one's in my comfort playlist lolll)

that japan arena tour... im so mad i still havent found a full copy of it i wanna watch it so bad 😭 they all sound immaculate as always but WOW JEONGHAN SOUNDS FUCKING AMAZING

cried a little at the hit song mention. u think they still know this song?

I LOVE A PFU STAGE AHHHH !!!!!! this particular highlight stage was so good to watch bc theyre at the center of the stadium and you can hear the crowd singing>!?!??!?! and im a sucker for a dance break. instant addition to my live perf playlist

be the sun pfu stage is the bane of my existence. thats probably my most watched stage of all time. theres this stage mix of junhui during wave that is top 1 in my live perf playlist and i recommend u watch it

OH MANNN how could i have forgotten jbtc 2021 !!! we need to bring theaterteen back let them be dramatic again PLEASE

kbs 2017 is also woozi drums!!!! i wish there were subs of that video :( i wanna know what theyre yapping about

thank u again for doing this i love talking about seventeen's music so much 😭 i saved that playlist if you dont mind <3

tell me your favorite seventeen live performance

#ask #fav

[bagofherdreams]

The 1975 SATVB Milan '24

My box band 🥹💜

Two days ago I had the most amazing experience of my life. I was lucky enough to see my favourite band live for the first time. It's an experience I'll never forget and I haven't stopped thinking about it since then. The whole concert just keeps playing on my mind (pun intended, sorry).

Between Robbers, Fallingforyou and About You I died, touched heaven and resurrected repeatedly. Honestly, heavenly does not even begin to describe it.

I was on the verge of tears throughout Be My Mistake and the sight of everyone's flashlights lighting up the whole arena accompanying the sound of Matty's voice and guitar was incredible.

I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes) was an out of body experience and so was A Change of Heart. Singing along to these two songs was extremely cathartic, especially the first one.

With If You're Too Shy and, even more (obviously), with The Sound I jumped so much that I think I have exhausted my energies for a month. It was one of the most liberating and exhilarating feelings I have ever experienced.

I shouted "Sellin' Petrol" so loud during It's Not Living that I shocked myself in the moment. Love It If We Made It was another highlight, I could not fathom that I was there witnessing the guys playing this masterpiece live (immaculately, I must add) while singing along with all the fans.

Somebody Else and TOOTIME were also so much fun. I loved how Matty had different sectors of the audience sing the bridge of the former and then all together and I am so happy he did the little shimmy for the latter.

The guitar solo in Sex, and, goes without saying, the whole song, were spectacular. I was truly amazed.

I cannot express how lucky I feel that I also got to experience Give Yourself A Try live, and as the final song. I would have also loved to get People, but to be honest, I'm glad they ended with Give Yourself A Try 'cause I like it better and this song is so special to me, my everyday companion. I danced and sang like crazy and it was perfect.

I haven't mentioned every song they played, but they were all perfect.

I will be forever thankful that I got to have this experience. It was the most amazing night of my life and I still haven't been able to move on from it. Probably never will (at least until I get to see them again, hopefully).

I love the 1975 so much.

#the post-concert depression is hitting very strongly #how I wish I was still there #the 1975 #the 1975 still at their very best #matty healy #adam hann #george daniel #ross macdonald #satvb #satvb:Milan

[swiftscion]

blooming villain - team 10 steel round

Confidence surges as the enemy crumbles. Larcei is allowed to have her victory, no matter how much struggling and yelling it took to steal it from the jaws of defeat. She watches in awe as Lucina tears out the mech’s spine, before the splash of electrolytes gives way to another change in scenery.

This time, an art gallery. Rather than a cage or forcefield, a cube of glass panes keeps their fight contained. It is a giant display case, housing what will soon become a masterpiece of carnage. Ornate floors are covered with sprawling red rugs, the fine trimmings at the end of each tile a work of art in their own right. Paintings adorn the walls outside their box, ranging from detailed sceneries to immaculate portraits. And again, an audience revels in the spectacle. This time each member is distinguishable with a unique and pompous outfit; dresses studded with dewdrops contrast against the finest suits Larcei had ever seen. They all have opera glasses glued to their faces, which, when viewed as a collective whole, gives them an eerie undertone. Not one single eye can be seen, not one intent made clear on a face.

So she turns to the new set of enemies, and tightens her grip around the sword she’d been bestowed. A Brave Sword: standard in its making, but a reminder of mother. Of the few things Larcei inherited from her, the Brave Sword was her most treasured memento. She knows now that mother is watching--knows she cannot afford to fail her. 

Paintings hover on the opposite side of the arena. The first four--two eyes, one nose, one long mouth--make up the conglomeration of a face, while the other four float on their own. They are beautiful, but so creepily animated. Looking at one in particular, of an upside-down man hanging from his ankle, sends shivers down her spine. It earns her scorn.

Larcei uses Brave Sword! Roll 2d20 = 16 and 14, hit and hit! -6 HP and -6 HP, Everlasting Art activates; Portrait of the Hanged Man 0.5/10 HP

Her sharp sword cleaves through its paper face, ripping a giant X-shaped tear into the priceless peace of art. The audience gasps--likely offended that she would vandalize such a thing--but the tone of the gasp shifts into one of excitement as it begins to counter.

Portrait of the Hanged Man uses Halahala! Roll 1d20-2 = 1, miss! Larcei 7.5/10 HP

A warped blast of eldritch energy arcs across the air. The sound is something unheard of by human ears, something akin to a screech from the void or the rending of space. But luckily for Larcei, the assault on her ears is the only one she suffers. It is an easy dodge, requiring just a small hop to the left, and leaves the painting open for a follow up.

Only, by the time she rushes back in, it has begun to crack and fade away. Her sword swipes at nothing--again, twice--and she’s left bewildered. “Huh, I guess that was it. Scissors really do beat paper...” 

So she makes her way back to her team, figuring it’d be best for them to stay grouped against so many opponents. Of note is the fact that her voice has returned to normal--no longer an affront to those she fights beside. 

“Looks like another easy fight, wouldn’t you say?”

UP NEXT: @nagaficat @exclted @artificidel @allegreta

#IC #EVENT THREAD (BLOOMING VILLAIN) #NAGAFICAT #EXCLTED #ARTIFICIDEL #ALLEGRETA #toaarena2022winter #//kind of a low hanging fruit thread title #//but it's aesthetic

[newmusickarl]

Best Live Shows of 2023

In the age of streaming and with ever-mounting logistical cost pressures, it is more important than ever to go support the bands you love by catching their live show and, if you can, pick up a record or some merchandise whilst you’re there.

Of course, the price of live music itself for the average fan is going up too, with £100+ tickets for stadium/arena shows and £40+ tickets for academy shows, quickly becoming the norm. That said, if you look beyond the household names selling through Ticketmaster’s exploitive dynamic pricing system, you can still find plenty of great acts playing live shows for £10-£20. So, if you find yourself constantly being priced out of the large stadium shows, why not spend that money on five grassroots shows instead – you may just find your next favourite artist in the process!

As for myself, I live for live music and by avoiding those top tier tickets and focussing on cost-effective festivals and shows with great line-ups, I’ve packed in more live music in 2023 than I ever have in my life. Including festival performances and warm-up acts, I’m grateful to have caught 127 performances in 2023, hopefully helping in some small way to support the artists and up-and-coming acts I adore.

With that mass of live music, it’s been hard to whittle this down to just my 10 favourites. So, in true New Music Weekly fashion of avoiding difficult decisions and leaving stuff out, firstly here’s the honourable mentions in chronological order:

Honourable mentions:

Foals at Engine Rooms, Southampton, May

Simply one of my all-time favourite bands at the peak of their powers, in the smallest venue I’ve ever seen them play (800 cap). Biblical!

Opus Kink at Dot-to-Dot Festival, Nottingham, May

The annual “get-me-in-that-pit” performance at Dot-to-Dot festival, proving I’m not too old yet for at least one moshing session per annum. Just like Bob Vylan the year before, my friendship group approached the ska-punk outfit with trepidation, but all ended up fans by the end of the set.

Mickey Callisto at Dot-to-Dot Festival, Nottingham, May

Imagine Freddie Mercury’s Live Aid performance, but in a tiny loft venue – that is essentially what synth-pop superstar Mickey Callisto delivered at Dot-to-Dot festival this year. Next level showmanship and an electric end to the day’s proceedings.

Swim Deep at Rescue Rooms, Nottingham, June

The Brummie indie darlings celebrated 10 years of Where The Heaven Are We this summer, performing one of my all-time favourite albums in full. They also played the ever-magnificent King City twice in the career-spanning set!

Young Fathers at Best Kept Secret Festival, Beekse Bergen, June

The band that have defined 2023 for me, it seemed like much of the audience in the tent with me at Best Kept Secret were catching the Scottish trio for the first time and weren’t sure what to expect. The result was a truly mind-blowing performance, with the energy from the stage radiating around the tent to the point of elation and thunderous applause by the end of the set.

Watch Young Fathers at Best Kept Secret 2023 here

The War On Drugs at The Piece Hall, Halifax, June

American rockers The War On Drugs performing anywhere would probably be enough to get a mention here, such is their stature as a live force. However, with support from Warpaint, a euphoric rendition of Under The Pressure and the gig itself taking place in the beautiful surroundings of the Grade I Listed Piece Hall, outdoor summer shows don’t get much better.

Confidence Man at Splendour Festival, Nottingham, July

When you need a lift during a washed-out festival, get Confidence Man to save the day. Having waited a long time to see them perform live, the Aussie dance outfit didn’t disappoint as the sun cleared just in time for their dazzling half hour of power. Immaculate choreography and joyous vibes aplenty!

Walt Disco at Rescue Rooms, Nottingham, September

A special shout-out to Walt Disco, who supported Nation of Language at their Rescue Rooms show in September. They are my pick for the best warm-up act of the year, with their David Bowie-inspired dramatics and glam rock chic leaving me eager to catch them again in the future.

Read the full review for both Walt Disco and Nation of Language here

Don Broco at O2 Academy Leicester, Leicester, December

Genre-bending heroes Don Broco are one of the most fun live acts around and even with a neck brace leaving frontman Rob Damiani more restricted than usual, they still blew the roof off. Usually not a fan of O2 Academy venues, this was also one of the better ones I’ve visited and it all just made for a great Saturday night.

Jadu Heart at JT Soar, Nottingham, December

My final show of 2023 and easily one of the most magical of the year. Performing in JT Soar which is an old garage turned Sleaford Mods’ recording studio, electro-folk outfit Jadu Heart brought string-tinged beauty and festive spirit to the intimate space. With only around 30 people in attendance and the bargain price of just £5 for the ticket, it was capped off with a pair of singalongs to Christmas classics Happy Xmas (War Is Over) and Fairytale of New York.

Read the full review for LeftLion here

That’s the honourable mentions then, now onto the main event – out of the 120+ performances I’ve seen in 2023, these are the ten that ended up leaving the biggest impression.

Top 10 Live Shows of 2023

10. The 1975 at Motorpoint Arena, Nottingham, January

One of the most discussed arena tours of the year, The 1975 kicked 2023 off with a spectacle. Split into two parts, the first half covered their latest album, Being Funny In A Foreign Language, and then the second half was just wall-to-wall greatest hits with 10,000 people losing their minds. Add in some unique staging and some surreal, theatrical interludes, it made for one of the most memorable arena gigs of the year. In fact it was so good, we’ve already booked to see The 1975 Still At Their Very Best in 2024, this time over in Brussels.

If you’re intrigued to see the show for yourself, their Madison Square Garden performance is streaming on YouTube and Amazon – check it out below.

Watch it here

Stream the live album here

9. The Lottery Winners at Rock City, Nottingham, November

Sometimes the best gigs are the ones that come along and surprise you. With support act Deco a favourite in our household and having seen indie-pop outfit Lottery Winners once previously at 110 Above festival, this one was booked purely on the basis that it looked like a fun Saturday night. Add in up-and-coming Notts rockers The Publics, you’ve got three quality bands at Rock City for £18. However, what I didn’t expect, was this show to be as life-affirming as it ended up being.

For context, once upon a time Lottery Winners were due to support Embrace at Rock City only to be dropped when Embrace feared The Lottery Winners would receive a bigger reception than them. So finally getting the opportunity to play the iconic stage where legends such as David Bowie and Nirvana have played before, you could see The Lottery Winners were putting everything into the performance. The fact I didn’t really know a single song of The Lottery Winners didn’t matter at all either. With plenty of laugh-out-loud, inter-song banter, some thunderous crowd singalongs and the band themselves in genuine tears at certain points in the set, it was just an incredible, emotionally uplifting night.

8. ROB GREEN at Rescue Rooms, Nottingham, February / ROB GREEN at Hockley Hustle Festival, Nottingham, October

Yes, I’m cheating again! But twice I saw Notts’ soul/pop artist ROB GREEN in 2023 and both were magical in their own unique way - so it was impossible to separate them.

Back at Hockley Hustle festival in October 2022, I saw Rob play an acoustic set that just completely blew me away. Having heard only positive things about him up until that point but not knowing too much about his music beyond that, it was one of those performances where I went in with not too much expectation of what I was going to hear, and then left just in complete awe of what I had just experienced. It was a borderline spiritual experience at times, with Rob’s mix of spoken word poetry and gospel-inspired singalongs just captivating and immensely uplifting.

So fast forward to February this year and I finally got to see Rob perform with a full live band setup. However, thanks to the utter jubilance from the crowd, his impressive backing vocalists and immensely talented band, it just amplified that feeling from Hockley Hustle 2022 tenfold. With my whole immediate family in attendance with me too to celebrate my mum’s birthday, it made it even more special.

Fast forward again to Hockley Hustle 2023 and Rob somehow managed to top his 2022 performance by pulling in a string quartet to perform alongside him. Here’s what I said in my review for LeftLion:

“Performing in the corner of Broadway Cinema’s café with the Rob Rosa String Quartet accompanying him, people are literally queueing at the door to catch even the smallest glimpse of his incredible thirty-minute set. And rightfully so, as the enigmatic performer has this unrivalled ability to bring immeasurable positive energy to a room and leave the audience sitting on Cloud Nine. Storming through performances of early singles Life Goes on and Sleeping on My Own, Rob gets noticeably emotional when the crowd singalong with recent single from his forthcoming EP, I’ll Be Around. “It’s so good to be back in NG1,” he exclaims, with the Nottingham faithful grateful to have him back. He then ends as he always does with a joyously euphoric medley of classic covers, leaving the crowd in Broadway Cinema fully uplifted and proving once again why he’s the best live performer in Nottingham.”

Read the full LeftLion roundup of Hockley Hustle 2023 here

7. Spector at Rescue Rooms, Nottingham, December

A band that have defined the last 10 years of my life but most definitely the last two months of my 2023, Spector delivered one of the best albums of their career to date in November with Here Come The Early Nights. Eager to hear the new songs from that record live, I headed down to Rescue Rooms to catch them for the third time in that venue, for the sixth time in Nottingham and for the tenth time in total! With fierce competition from their past selves, Spector pulled out all the stops and delivered a rip-roaring set that packed in so many anthems, I lost my voice completely from all the singing along.

Of course, it may be recency bias but for me this was right up there as one of the best performances I’ve seen from them over the years. It just further cemented why they are one of my favourite bands and also one of the best bands to see perform live. If you want all the details from the night, you can read my review for LeftLion below.

Read the full review for LeftLion here

6. The Chemical Brothers at First Direct Arena, Leeds, October

The legendary Chemical Brothers were another band that I saw live twice in 2023, however as fantastic as they were at Best Kept Festival over the summer, their own arena show in October was just the next level up.

If you’ve not had the pleasure of seeing Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands before, let me assure you they put on one of the best live shows on the planet, especially in an arena setting. The hypnotic, mind-melting visuals they put together to accompany their set is just like no other, in addition to all the big production tricks like confetti, lasers, giant balloons and even massive robots too.

However, all of that will only get you so far, you still need the bangers to back it up. Thankfully with a career-spanning 30+ years they have them in abundance and their setlist in Leeds was near faultless. A lot of cuts from their 2023 album For That Beautiful Feeling were included with Goodbye in particular standing out, as well as all the classics you’d want to hear such as Galvanize, Go, Hey Boy Hey Girl and Block Rockin’ Beats. They even had space for one of my all-time favourite songs, Wide Open. Probably the best show from them of the five times I’ve seen them and easily one of my favourite arena gigs of the year.

5. Oscar and the Wolf at Best Kept Secret Festival, Beekse Bergen, June

When you travel to another country and spend hundreds of pounds on a festival for one particular artist, it’s important they deliver. Sure, Best Kept Secret had a phenomenal line-up this year that also boasted The Chemical Brothers, The 1975, Aphex Twin, Young Fathers, Caroline Polachek, Christine & The Queens, Nation of Language, Arlo Parks, Billy Nomates, Interpol and so many more, so I would have gotten the value anyway. But Best Kept Secret Festival was really all about seeing one man – Max Colombie AKA Oscar and the Wolf.

You see having discovered Oscar and the Wolf at Dot-to-Dot festival in 2015, his music instantly resonated with me and he quickly became a favourite of mine. The issue is the Belgian indie-pop superstar isn’t really known here in the UK. So, whenever I have been able to see him live over the years since, it’s been in quiet festival slots with short sets and a small crowd who aren’t familiar with his output. So, when choosing a festival to attend in 2023, we chose Best Kept Secret for one key reason – Oscar and the Wolf was headlining it.

You see whilst the UK hasn’t caught on to Max Colombie’s talents, over in Europe he is a headline act on the level Muse, Liam Gallagher, Arctic Monkeys, etc. So having decided on Best Kept Secret over Rock Werchter as it looked less commercial and a much more manageable capacity, we ventured to the Netherlands to catch Oscar and the Wolf live with a crowd of 20,000 and, importantly, one which knew the words to all of his songs.

And with that massive expectation on it, Max and his band still managed to exceed all expectations to deliver a dazzling Saturday evening performance. Full of brain-melting guitar solos, a flawless setlist, Max’s own incredible vocals and all the big production tricks, it was everything I hoped for when booking the festival. To finally see one of my favourite artists with a crowd deserving of his music, it was such a special moment.

If you’re intrigued to see more and want an introduction to Max’s output, you can watch a 30-minute snippet of his performance from Best Kept Secret below.

Watch Oscar and the Wolf at Best Kept Secret here

4. Stevie Nicks at T-Mobile Arena, Las Vegas, March

It is very rare I get to tick off two bucket list items, let alone two in a single week. But earlier this year, I was fortunate enough to travel over to Las Vegas for work, a place I had always wanted to visit. Whilst I didn’t get to see everything in the short time I was there, I did have enough free time to get a flavour of the one-of-a-kind city. Of course, seeing a show is a must out there and when looking at what was on, I noticed that none other than music legend Stevie Nicks was in town for one night only. Biting the bullet on a last-minute ticket, whilst I will never get to see Fleetwood Mac perform live, I was fortunate to catch Stevie that night – which feels like the next best thing.

The production of the stage was utterly entrancing, with montages and artistic visuals projected on the screens behind her throughout. Her voice sounded as good as ever even at 74 too, with the live band playing alongside her also fantastic. Playing through all the classics from both her solo career and time in Fleetwood Mac, it made for a really special show. It also ended on quite an emotional note, as Stevie paid tribute to both Tom Petty and Christine McVie in the encore. Performing Free Falling and Landslide to round it off, she was noticeably moved following her performance of the latter.

I feel incredibly lucky to have had the chance to experience that, seeing a genuine musical legend on the opposite side of the world. One of the defining highlights of my 2023 and a moment I truly will never forget.

3. Self Esteem at Eventim Apollo, London, March

These days, the performance happening on stage is only 50% of what makes a good show. If you get the wrong crowd of people more interested in getting pissed or talking through the set, then you can quickly end up distracted during key moments. But for the final stop on Self Esteem’s Prioritise Pleasure UKtour at the Hammersmith Apollo, the entire audience were there for one thing and one thing only – a performance from Rebecca Lucy Taylor.

Off the back of a huge breakout year following the success of Prioritise Pleasure, this one felt like a victory lap as the crowd erupted into thunderous ovation after every single song. The production of the show itself was incredible too, from the dazzling choreography and vocal performances to the impressive costume changes and staging. It felt like an arena-level pop show but with the intimacy of an academy venue, just the best of both worlds.

The biggest testament I can give it though is what I touched on at the start. A lot of shows I’ve been to post-COVID, when it comes time for the acoustic songs they are sadly often spoilt now by crowd chatter, with people’s loud conversations disrupting these intimate moments. That didn’t happen with Self Esteem, as at one point she took centre stage just her and a guitar to perform her track John Elton and honestly you couldn’t hear a pin drop. Instead, everyone just stood in awe and respectfully engaged with what they were witnessing on the stage.

I said back in March this was one of the best shows I’ve ever had the privilege of seeing and I think I stand by that. An unbelievably special night thanks to a respectful crowd and an artist right at the top of their game.

2. Creeper at Rock City, Nottingham, November

Speaking of one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, I think it’s well documented at this point just how blown away I was seeing Creeper at Rock City last month. The only other time I had seen the Southampton-hailing goth-rockers previously was years ago at Slam Dunk festival and I’ll be honest, their show didn’t leave much of an impression on me at that time. However, with this performance coming less than a month since the release of their operatic third album Sanguivore, which I had been playing constantly, it seemed like the perfect storm for a special night – and my assumptions were correct.

Here's what I said in my review for LeftLion:

“Bringing with them a uniquely theatrical live show unlike any I saw in 2023, it was full of dramatic production, crowd surfers, circle pits, plenty of monstrous riffs and a faultless setlist. The moment of the night however came in the form of a stunning rendition of debut album favourite, Misery. Driving home the special connection Creeper have with their fans, phone torches were switched on and several audience members climbed onto shoulders to emotionally sing along with frontman, Will Gould. As the song reached its peak, Will didn’t even have to say a word or move a muscle - the crowd just instinctively belted out the song’s gut-punching refrain. A beautifully powerful moment and one of the most spine-tingling I’ve ever experienced inside that venue. With red confetti then shooting out of cannons onstage during the triumphant closing performance of 2023 single Cry To Heaven, it was a suitably mind-blowing finish to a truly mind-blowing rock show.”

See LeftLion’s full list of Best Gigs of 2023 here

Read my LeftLion review for Creeper at Rock City here

1. James at Northern Echo Arena, Darlington, August / James at Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, October

So here we are at my favourite live show of 2023 and guess what – I’ve cheated again. Here we have two shows that both had the recipe for an all-timer - one of my favourite bands of all-time, one of the best live acts in the country and a band with 40+ years of exceptional music in their catalogue. Funnily enough, all three of those ingredients are Mancunian indie legends, James.

I saw James twice in 2023 and what has landed them in the top spot is the fact that each time I saw them this year, they delivered a unique experience. Each of these gigs, one in Darlington and one in Nottingham, offered something completely different from the other but ended up equally as sensational for their own reasons.

The first in Darlington was just the perfect line up in the most perfect setting. An August summer’s day with three of my favourite bands on the bill together – Maximo Park, Editors and James. The venue was a decent-sized Rugby stadium, but rather than having the whole thing open, the stage was to one side of the pitch, with one side of seating open and then the pitch the standing area – so it was set up more like a bowl than an open stadium.

What worked perfectly was the fact that although we had booked seats, we didn’t have to stay in them all day. We could sit in the seats and chill for the support, make use of the toilets and quieter bars etc. but then when we wanted to go have a dance and get into the mix, we could walk down onto the pitch and join the standing crowd. This is the first gig I’ve been to with that set up and it just added to the whole experience.

In terms of the bands themselves though, it was just a fantastic day of music. Even before the trio of Maximo Park, Editors and James, you had shoegazers Pale Blue Eyes, up-and-comers The Kairos and 00s indie outfit The Pigeon Detectives, who in particular were much better than I expected. Then as fantastic as Maximo Park and Editors were, it really was all about James who just reaffirmed to me why they’re one of my favourite bands. Ploughing through the hits as the sun was setting, Tim Booth wandering gracefully through the crowd and the band on stage sounding so effortlessly tight-knit, just like a band who have been playing together for 40 years should sound. It may have been the booze, it may have been the life-defining songs, it may well have been a bit of both – but I’m not ashamed to say I was near tears at a couple of points. Just magical.

If that wasn’t enough, I would see them again a few months later at Nottingham Royal Concert Hall, this time backed by a full choir and orchestra. Having had the devastation of the cancellation back in April, after waiting over a decade for them to repeat their 2011 orchestral tour, this was a rescheduled show I had been waiting a long, long time to see. And boy was it worth the wait.

Playing some of my favourite deep cuts that I would never get to hear in a normal set like Space, Alaskan Pipeline, Ten Below and Someone’s Got It In For Me, but then with the strings and extra voices accompanying them too, it just amplified their already world class live show to another level. With goosebump-inducing singalongs to Many Faces and Sometimes also throughout the night, this was another special gig that I’ll remember for a long time.

So there you have it, my favourite shows of 2023. Just one final part of my New Music Weekly awards still left to come and it’s a big one – my Top 100 Songs of 2023 playlist.

It’ll be dropping soon so keep your eyes peeled and thanks for following along so far!

#live music #live music review #best of the year #best of 2023 #best live music 2023 #best lives shows #best live performances #best live performances 2023 #the 1975 #stevie nicks #james #creeper #oscar and the wolf #self esteem #the lottery winners #spector #the chemical brothers #rob green #best kept secret festival #foals #walt disco #the war on drugs #don broco #jadu heart #confidence man #young fathers #swim deep #mickey callisto #opus kink #dot to dot festival

[intyalote]

some skate america highlights, now that I’m no longer rushing around and have a second to think

kanadai: the vibes were IMMACULATE who cares about levels!! the energy in the crowd for both of their skates was unmatched. like. they’re so hot. their costumes slayed. two of marina’s best programs. at that point scores are unnecessary they’re already perfect.

jun: junabauer irl is as breathtaking as you’d imagine, I can die happy having seen it live. crowd went wild when he moonwalked in his sp. his gala performance was so good too, I don’t even like believer but that ex was a revelation. also at the end he did a little finger heart it was so cute.

the standing ovation and general support for gracie gold... seeing her land those two 3lz3ts was incredible, I’m so happy for her.

ilia’s 4A: insane and unreal. I almost wanted to look for wires because he just floated?? it was huge. I feel like the ~2000 of us who saw it live are the luckiest people on the planet.

2 minutes straight of cheering through the end of kaori’s free and a standing ovation... the crowd knew what was what. and it was the last competition program too, what a way to end.

kao miura’s rock solid, clean and incredibly presented sp after everyone before him flopped, I think the whole arena was just :0000 to see a 2 quad sp of that quality so early in the event. good for him.

women’s victory ceremony - kaori doing some kind of. I don’t even know. shenanigans with her flag and then amber/isabeau joining in, some people gave them flower crowns and amber posed with a pride flag, it was all very wholesome.

new faves who have some unknown compelling performance quality in person that doesn’t always come through in video - haein lee, rino matsuike (get better soon!), ekaterina kurakova (okay, we all know she’s pure sunshine but it’s x100 live)

#figure skating #skate america 2022 #it was so fun!! #only thing i regret is being too shy to ask more skaters for pictures/autographs

[elitehoe]

Houston AEW Dynamite + Rampage thoughts and reactions!!!

DYNAMITE

Samoa Joe vs Johnny Elite: JOHNNY ELITE AHHHHHHH as soon as we sat down he came out and we lost our shit like lost it fully I'm so happy about Johnny... I'm already planning matches out in my mind that I wanna see!! My brother and I knew Joe would win, but we still enjoyed Johnny's debut so damn much!! Hope Joe and Lethal have a match at DoN and end out this feud soon.

My nooj boi Rocky + best friends came out and I was probably the only one screaming in our section 🤦🏻‍♀️ ....

Matt and Matt's feral little brother feud is fucking coming *screaming at the top of my lungs* my brother isn't a Bucks stan like me so he was like ehh "hope they lose" 😂

CM PUNK 😭😭😭😭😭 I WAS SHAKING SO DAMN BAD WHEN CULT OF PERSONALITY CAME ON LIKE FULL ON SHAKING ALL MY PICS AND VIDS ARE SHIT CAUSE OF HOW BAD I WAS SHAKING

"ABORTION RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS" TSHIRT YESSSS MY PRO WOMEN + PRO CHOICE KING THANK YOU FOR THAT ❤️❤️ SENDING YOU LOVE

Konosuke Takeshita vs Hangman Adam Page: The second I was breathing the same air as CM Punk my brain went error 404. Then Konosuke came out and AHHHHHHH. HANGMAN IS EQUALLY AS PRETTY AS HE IS ON TV WOOOOOW HIS GEAR IN PERSON IS GORGEOUS!!! Babes I wanted to throttle myself into the ring and eat the pin so neither technically lost 😭. Konosuke did so damn good in that match and Hangman was darling as always!!!! My brother didn't know who Konosuke was, but he likes him now after that match! He was super impressed and I was so happy that he liked him!! We're both Hangy stans and were rooting for Hangy to win. So much more impressed with Konosuke after each match in AEW!! I also love that everyone else is loving him cause he deserves all of the love ok? Ok!!!

GTS FOR THE WIN 😳😳😳 HANGMAN BELOVED THAT WAS THE SEXIEST SHIT IVE EVER FUCKING SEEN 🥵 OH MY FUCKING GOD AND WHEN THEY CIRCLED AROUND EACH OTHER A BITCH ABOUT DIED

Also Houston fuck you and your CM Punk chants COWBOY SHIT ALL FUCKING DAY 😌😌😌

Swerve and Keith Lee vs Workhorsemen: The crowd reaction to Swerve and Keith 🤌🏻 IMMACULATE ENERGY IN THE ARENA. The match was great, the post match altercation *shaking in my seat* I was in the same room as Ricky Starks everyone shut up I'm having a moment!!! Christian my love if I wasn't with my brother I would've been acting a god damn fool over my favorite zaddy!! Fashion icon Hobbs 🥰 Jurassic Express entrance in person *chef's kiss* can't wait for the DoN match!! We knew Keith and Swerve were gonna fuck shit up!! Swerve's house and Bask In His Glory chants are 100/10 vibes!!!

Booing MJF in person was an astronomical vibe 100/10 will love to do again!!

Houston let his ass hear it tonight. Like damn he is sooooo good and I wanna cheer him, but I know he wouldn't really want me too cheer him so... Boo 👎🏻!

Wardlow 10 Lashes: I immediately went 😳😳😳 he came out shirtless let's start there bitch FROTHING AT THE MOUTH took every lash and FLEXXXING LAUGHING SMIRKING 🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵 Wardlow in person got to be the most beautiful man I've ever seen what the fuck babe you're sculpted by every god!!! They all legit took their time on the creation of Wardlow!! My brother is a Wardlow stan AHHHHHH I really won today!!! Also Wardlow tits in person 🥵

WHAT THE FUCK IS UP SHAWN SPEARS MEET MY ASS OUTSIDE YOU LITTLE BITCH WE NEED YO HAVE A LONG TALK ABOUT WHAT YOU DID TO WARDLOW 🤬🤬🤬

ROPPONGI VICE VS FTR DEEEEEAAAAD SOPH LOST FUNCTION EYES ROLLED TO THE BACK OF MY HEAD ALMOST MOANED THAT MATCH IS GONNA BANG SO FUCKING HARD 😩😩

Kyle O'Reilly vs Rey Fenix: 100/20 exceeded all my expectations. We were in absolute awe of this match start to finish!!! My brother wanted KOR to advance I wanted Fenix so we had a little sibling argument about this mid show and we chanted against each other.. Great vibes tbh.

KYLE O'REILLY VS ADAM COLE IN THE OWEN CUP FINAL TO COMPLETELY JUMPSTART THE FALL OF THE UNDISPUTED POLYCULE?!?!??! THE POSSIBILITIES OH MY FUCKING LORD I CANT WAIT FOR DON!!!!!!!

Also I would very much love to see reDRagon vs Lucha Brothers TK if you could fan service me that, that would be greatly appreciated k? K love you!! 💕

Regal and Jericho face to face confrontation: EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP I GOT TO BREATHE THE SAME AIR AS HIS LORDSHIP WILLIAM REGAL LIFE IS COMPLETE I FEEL OKAY UNALIVING NOW *kidding of course 😶*

JON MOXLEY WAS IN THE SAME ROOM AS ME IM NEVER LETTING THAT GO 🥺🥺❤️❤️ also everyone who hates the wild thing theme fuck you that shit bangs!!!

When Eddie Santana and Ortiz popped up I legit forgot how to breathe my soul left my body and I know I was screaming but I wasn't coherent enough to actually hear myself screaming...

No Yoots cause he's in Japan for Best Of The Super Jr so 🥺 but 😆 I STILL GOT TO SEE MY BELOVED BLACKPOOL POLYCULE ❤️❤️

Fuck Chris Jericho that is all

WHAT chants for his lordship??!? WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS WRONG WITH YALL?!?! This pissed me off tbh...

WHEN HE CALLED DANIEL GARCIA FLOWER I ALMOST DROPPED TO THE FUCKING FLOOR

TK should fan service me and book Bryan vs Eddie before DoN let them fight it out pls!!

BLACKPOOL POLYCULE VS JAS AT DoN GOD DAMN BITCH THAT IS GONNA BE A FUCKING TREAT!! Lowkey wanted the Stadium Stampede tho Mox baby that would've been legendary ok but I'm happy I'm getting the match either way soooo.. Yea..

Britt Baker vs Maki Itoh: We thought it would be Athena cause it was Houston... But I wasn't disappointed just sad cause I wanted my girl in aew. I adore the Joshi tho so Maki was a welcomed surprise for me!! Overall Maki and Britt had a great match!! Really interested in seeing what they're gonna do with Maki I've seen she's supposed to be in the states for a while!!

TONI TIME TONI TIME TONI TIME TONI TIME can confirm Toni Storm is just as gorgeous in person as she is on tv!!!

Schiavone ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Serena Deeb was talking her shit!!! When she called out Dustin AHHHHHHHHHHHH and slapped him TELL ME RIGHT NOW SHE WOULDN'T BE A PHENOMENAL ADDITION TO BCC SHE HAS A SLAPPING KINK LIKE THE WHOLE POLYCULE!!!!

THUNDER ROSA MY FUCKING BELOVED AEW WOMEN'S CHAMPION MI REINA LA MERA MERA MI CAMPEONA!!!!

Serena meet my ass outside for hurting Rosa 😤

No seriously Serena Deeb vs Thunder Rosa is gonna be a phenomenal ass match and I wouldn't mind them extending the feud after DoN!!!!

Also also also TK give me the mixed tag!! Rosa and Dustin vs Serena and partner of her choice GIVE IT TO ME NOOOOOOW ANTONY

Jeff Hardy vs Adam Cole: We had Adam winning due to Bucks interference... JEFFERY NERO HARDY I just about fainted seeing Jeff!! Hearing the Hardy Boyz song doing the lil dancey dance with Jeff *INCOHERENT SCREAMING* that was ASTRONOMICAL 1000/10 RECOMMEND. Adam attacking Jeff like the evil rat he is. Severe disappointment from both my brother and I when we didn't get Adam Cole's entrance... But Adam did fan service the crowd by doing baybay mid beating the shit out of Jeff xd so thank you rat babe ilysm ❤️❤️ !! Main event was too short for my liking 😩

BUCKS VS HARDYZ IS FUCKING COMING IM FROTHING AT THE FUCKING MOUTH IM SCREAMING DYING PASSING OUT SHITTING MYSELF TAKING A PUFF FROM MY INHALER

NICK JACKSON AND I BREATHED THE SAME AIR 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 I GOT TO SEE MY BUCKY BOI'S OH MY GOD Y'ALL DONT UNDERSTAND HOW I FELT I WAS SHAKING LITERALLY SHAKING AND HYPERVENTILATING CAUSE I WAS SEEING MATT AND NICK MY FAVORITE BITCHY BABYGIRLS 💖💖

And yes besties Matt Jackson's hair is just as pretty in person as it is on tv 💖 I love my milf Matty J 💖

My brother does not like the Bucks so we had entirely different reactions 😂 he got happy once Darby and Sting came out tho so good for him I guess... I was too busy foaming at the mouth over Matt and Nick to really notice his reaction.

Also Nick Jackson's hair is also prettier in person than it is on tv like seriously I need the number to the person who dyes his hair!! !!

I GOT TO SEE MATTS PHAT ASS IN THOSE WHITE SHORTS 🥵🥵🥵 I SUPPORT NICK JACKSON WEARING PINK THOSE ARE MY RIGHTS 🥵🥵🥵

RAMPAGE

WHEN THE LIGHTS TURNED OFF FOR THE HOB ENTRANCE I PASSED AWAY SAW THE OTHER SIDE AND RESURRECTED HOLY SHIT

House of Black entrance in person is such a fucking experience I want you all to experience that!!!

House of Black vs Fuego Del Sol, 10 and Evil Uno: OH MY FUCKING LORD BRODY KING SEES FUEGO AND GOES 'I need to obligate this twink' HOLY SHIT BRODY DEMOLISHES FUEGO EVERY SINGLE TIME. Uno and Brody was HOSS AS FUCK holy shit MALAKAI BEING FUCKING MALAKAI AND ON MY GOD I WANTED TO PASS OUT. Also happy birthday spooky dutch daddy I love you 🖤 !!! Respectfully Mr Buddy Matthews sir all I was looking at was your TIDDIES those are the nicest TIDDIES I've ever fucking seen WOOOOW. Also Buddy did the CERO MIEDO AND I LOST ALL SANITY. MALAKAI I KNOW YOU DON'T WANT US TO OBJECTIFY YOU BUT HOLY MOTHER OF FUCKING CHRIST WAS I SALIVATING!!! Malakai looks fucking delicious in person. Hard to focus on the match when HOB was walking around looking beautiful as fuck. No but really we both wanted HOB to pick up the win and god damn we're we so in awe of this match!! It was amazing!! This was 1000% my holy shit match I was completely mesmerized!!!

WAKE THE FUCK UP WE'RE GETTING DEATH TRIANGLE VS HOUSE OF BLACK AT DOUBLE OR NOTHING BABES OH MY GOOOOOOD LORD

THE TOMBSTONE WITH THE HOUSE OF BLACK AND DOUBLE OR NOTHING CHIP GLORIOUS

Penta is 😍😍 Rey Fenix is 💖💖 PAC is 🥵🥵🥵 and Alex was there... No I'm kidding I love Alex ❤️

Shawn Spears vs Big Damo: Gonna be honest besties did not know who the fuck this was at first but then it finally clicked and I was like OOOOH OK. Didn't really care for this match... I wanted to see Shawn get his ass beat for what he did to Wardlow! I really liked Shawn's post match promo about Wardlow being Superman and him being the Giant Killer. That steel cage match next week is gonna be so fucking sick can't wait to see it!!!

DESTINATION UNKNOWN RUBY RUBY RUBY RUBY SOHO 😱😱😱😱 My brother LOOOOOVES Ruby and was wearing her shirt so he was so incredibly happy to see her and y'all know Ruby is my girl!!

Kris Statlander vs Red Velvet: We were both pulling for Kris!! GALACTIC ICON KRIS STATLANDER MY BELOVED I HOPE YOU HAVE FUN BEATING RED VELVET'S ASS OK LOVE YOU 💕💕 such a good ass match... However the crowd pissed me off cause they were chanting dumb shit during the match and it was so incredibly annoying!! Really killed my vibe 🙄🙄🙄 so happy Kris advanced tho!!

RUBY RUBY RUBY SOHO COMING TO KRIS STATS RESCUE AND ANNA JAY COMING TO RUBY'S RESCUE AHHHHHH I LOVE WOMEN 🥰🥰🥰

TK I'mma need you to run Anna Jay vs Jade Cargill back please and thank you kind sir GIVE IT TO ME!!!

Men of the Year promo: Wow this was the first time they didn't make me physically fucking nauseous... But can we please fucking end this feud and let Scorp have a good reign as TNT champ?!?? Also Scorp and Kaz please give us an SCU reunion at the California show!!!

HOOKHAUSEN WORKOUT VIDEO WAS ABSOLUTELY FUCKING GOLDEN I WAS GIGGLING LIKE A CHILD THAT VIDEO WAS EVERYTHING TO ME!!!! Also Tony Nese disrespectfully sir my eyes were on your tiddies and your tiddies are 🤤🤤 HOOKHAUSEN RIGHTS ARE MY RIGHTS

ITS TIME FOR THE MAIN EVENT AHHHHHHHHHH

Blackpool Polycule want another son together ❤️❤️ Dante baby come join the fam!! Matt basically said Dante needs a loving and peaceful life not one full of violence. Bryan says he loves peace and violence and that their first son is thriving in the violent but loving atmosphere of the polycule sooooo.... Matt is invalid as fuck and he will steal Dante!!! 😡 Added that last part myself that didn't really happen but like it could... So!!

WILLIAM REGAL ON COMMENTARY AHHHHHHH

Bryan Danielson and Jon Moxley vs Matt Sydal and Dante Martin: This was my brothers match of the night and that's totally valid cause it was fucking phenomenal. DANTE IN BLACKPOOL POLYCULE WHEN??!? I was on the edge of my sit all fucking match!! Ok ok ok so where we were sitting I had the best view on Mox back and y'all all know I'm a slut for that man's back 🥵🥵 also heel Bryan is beloved and I would let him do sadistic things... These were my internal thoughts as I was trying not to be a fucking menace in front of my bro, but like I should've cause he was practically begging for Hookhausen all night ... Anyways back to the match!! Air Dante is my fave Dante 😱😱😱 MOX UNALIVED MATT HOLY FUCK!!! BRYAN AND MOX WANT THIS CHILD SO BAD THEY'RE BEATING THE SHIT OUT MATT FOR HIM. We knew BCC would win but damn did we think Dante had the win at some points. You could 100% see that Dante got Bryan's Respect and Bryan was basically drafting the adoption papers in his head!!

Hopefully we see a knew BCC member soon or maybe not idk but I would love to see Dante in BCC since we couldn't get Daniel Garcia cause Jericho wanted him 🙄 .

Post match brawl OH MY GOD REGAL WAS FUCKING SHIT UP YOU GO KING!!! I WAS TOTALLY REACTING NORMAL TO THAT DEFINITELY NOT SCREAMING MY LUNGS OUT NOOO NEVER!! Eddie beloved he was fucking everyone up, my brother said and I quote "Eddie fights like he has actual real life beef with you" and that's so vaild cause he truly fights like his life depends on it. So much happened in this segment holy fuck it was exquisite!! 🤌🏻🤌🏻

Ok so Bryan's leg got stuck between the ramp and the ring during the brawl. Which TK needs to now abandon the whole ring and ramp connection cause they were trying to get him unstuck for like 10 minutes. Bryan looked like he was in a lot of pain and at first we thought it was part of the story, but Mox was pretty heated about it so... Once they finally got him unstuck, by pushing the ring away, Bryan got up and put his hands out to us to signal he was okay, which was relieving!!! He did limp away though and they continued the story as best as they could.... I don't know how much of this will be on tv since it was after the main event, so I wanted to fully recap it for y'all. I hope Bryan is okay and I'm sending him healing vibes ❤️❤️ !!

STUFF THAT HAPPENED BETWEEN SHOW BREAKS... KINDA IN ORDER... KINDA NOT...

Justin does not get enough credit for keeping the crowd into the show during the commercial breaks and show changes!!

This is my official I appreciate Justin Roberts statement cause I appreciate Justin Roberts!!! ❤️

Houston adored one of the I believe security or backstage people, his name was Bob ❤️ we love Bob and claimed him as ours! During breaks Justin had lots of fun with the crowd and Bob, Bob and his son Bob Jr also had a match... A best of 3 rock paper scissors match BOB WON AND IT WAS AWESOME!!

BOB CHANTS HOUSTON LOVES BOB ❤️

TK HAS BEEN SO ADORABLY AWKWARD AND I NEED HIM TO STOP BECAUSE I REFUSE TO FEEL THINGS FOR HIM I REFUSE I FUCKING REFUSE

The Lord and savior Antony Khan himself came out and was really cute and sweet nice and thanked us for being there. He also said he doesn't come out after every show but he had to cause we were being an awesome crowd 😂 TK babe we've seen the post show videos it's okay to admit you come out to thank the crowd!!! He said he loved the Houston energy and can't wait to be back again to deliver our great wrestling city more amazing wrestling!! Also went down a list of iconic wrestling matches that happened in Houston, that man is an actual wrestling sponge. I don't know how he remembers all of that shit but he does!!

King if you love us so much give us a PPV we proved tonight we would adore it, it was a packed crowd start to finish and the energy was electric TK... Love... Babe.... Antony... Give Houston a PPV soon... K that is all love you ❤️

THE ACCLAIMED AND THE ASS BOYS CAME OUT JUST BEFORE RAMPAGE STARTED

I've lived to see a Max Caster rap life is truly soooo fucking great byeeee I have a vid of his rap but my ugly ass voice is in the background 🙄

Austin and Colton mistaked us for Austin then Dallas and then Mr Ass himself Billy got it right also no Bowens which was 💔 but I've seen that his boyfriend confirmed that he had knee surgery so sending healing vibes and prayers to him!!! ❤️❤️

I adore the acclaimed and the Ass Boys ok ok ok

My brother was disappointed we didn't get to see Hookhausen and I was too... So when the Ass Boys came after Rampage to call out Danhausen for starting the Ass Boys stuff. WE FUCKING ACTED A WHOLE ASS FOOL FOR THIS STRAIGHT UP JUMPING UP AND DOWN SCREAMING FOR HOOKHAUSEN

They were ganging up on Danhausen CM PUNK CAME OUT AHHHHHHH THEN HOOOOOOOOK CAME OUT AHHHHHHHHHH they did their thing with the Ass Boys. Punk did GTS on Austin and Hook put Colton in Redrum which as they should cause no one hurts Danhausen and gets away with it!!! OH MY GOD CM PUNK EMPTIED OUT HIS WALLET FOR DANHAUSEN TO HAVE LOTS OF MONIES AND HOOK WANTED DANHAUSEN TO SHARE AND HE DID GIVE HOOK SOME OF HIS MONIES !!!!!!!! We lost our shit for that by the way like completely fucking lost our shit

FINAL THOUGHTS

And that was all babes overall 10000/10 experience holy fuck what a show start to finish god damn my ass was THRIVING the energy was IMMACULATE!! I truly can't wait for the next Houston show!! Also for this being my first ever wrestling show it was truly the greatest time ever and my brother had the best time. We talked all day about wrestling and like wow wow wow do we fucking ramble for hours! Also I do not have a voice after tonight. Wrestling social media is a toxic ass place, but actually being in the arena with wrestling fans is a special experience I promise you that babes!!! If aew is in your city 100% recommend you go!! Okkk I love y'all byeeee 💕💕 !!!

#typed this at 2am so if I missed some stuff sorry #overall it was the best experience #don't really know what to tag this #soph talks #soph's aew experience #aew #aew lb

[holdinbacksecrets]

i still have not fully processed them being in my neighborhood. jeonghan posted another photo from my street and i screamed. i don't think i'll ever recover from this. my mind in racing with so many boyfriend thoughts. it seems like he really enjoyed it here which makes me so happy!!!

you have asked my bias before but my main bias is mingyu and then i go through a rotation of cheol, jeonghan, and vernon as my second bias.

this was my second time seeing svt but my first time seeing them in the states. the show was amazing!!! im a very big concert person, svt are honestly the best performers ive ever seen. they have such good energy and you can feel and see all of the passion and love each of them individually have for performing and being on stage. whether it's just one member or all thirteen, they have such amazing presence that it's just mesmerizing. i could write a whole essay about it. i was so close to the stage it had me in shambles. mingyu and cheol kept coming to our section, i was loosing mind and couldn't stop smiling. the vibes in the arena were just immaculate. it was the best night ive had in a long time.

-🦢

when i saw the picture of jeonghan at the bottom of someone’s staircase, i wondered “swan’s house??!!” lol

these days, the boyfriend thoughts are coming in an abundance

i love how they share so many pictures with us, and i’m so glad they have time to explore the cities they visit 🥺

god, i’m seriously so forgetful. ahhh sorry for asking again, but thank you for reminding me >.< whenever i learn that hansol is in someone’s bias line i get a little giddy lol

i agree with you completely! the energy was impeccable, and i wish i could exist in it at all times. they’re truly fantastic at what they do and such incredibly entertainers. i love that your seats were really close. oh god… head in hands at the thought alone 😭😭😭 how was 2 minus 1 as literally 2 minus 1?

#s talks #🦢 anon #carat chats

[ynghiacuocsong60]

Man City, Liverpool circle Musiala... | Transfer Rumors Zone The sun hung low over the Allianz Arena, casting long shadows across the immaculate pitch. Inside the stadium, the buzz of anticipation hummed through the air, a palpable energy that seemed to crackle with every step taken by the players as they emerged for training.

#youtube

[fuckeveryypeople]

2023

Last year was amazing and unbelievable, i felt like i was living in a movie.

Start the year in the most unhappy place, in a work and a city that was making me unhappy, working for someone that didnt get about is workers, and probably involved in a lot shady stuff, people and money. In a city where rain and cold are part of your daily routine, getting wet because it was unavoidable, but still with amazing people that i met from another countries, going on dates with amazing women, but my energie got drop by a point i couldn´t be there anymore, so i just left the place with no notice, unhappy and not telling anyone...

The next stop around may, was the place where i reagroup and wanted to start thinking about what i wante to do, so i just went there to prepare for my 2 weeks in a city where 2 festivals where to happen... In this city estayed with my friend and my brother, went out, crazy nights, great vibes with the homies, but i left...

The next two weeks where a dream, fantasy, could think i could live something like that, first festival immaculate vibes, me and my group of friends, my confidence where out the roof, outifits on deck, on point, womens loking at me in the arena, in the streets, i saw life some of my favorite artist, first night i met an amazing woman, that is everything i´ve never thought i wanted, we enjoyed ourselfs for the entire night, saw each other the next day, in the end we didnt say goodbye but "See you later"... the next festival same thing but the vibes where different, still enjoy some of the best perfomance of amazing artist, after i got to see my family again after almost a year, from there everything went down, lost my flight back to my brother house and got banned from certain airline company, got so sick that i couldn´t fuck i woman i wanted the way i wanted...

Got back to my brother´s house, looking for jobs, tryng to get my visa aproved to work there but got denied, tryng to think about what i wanted for myself, my live, the 2/3 months was the moment of my life where i felt more lost, wanting to die, looking for ways to kill myself, ghosting everyone in my life, loosing the joy of life, the joy of living, seen everything fallin in you, having my brother at that moment was important, because he understood what i was going through and gave me a place where i could be myself and reborn, he took me back to a place where i had to enjoy the little wins of the day to day things, he was going through stuff i was going through stuff, but we help each other...

I started to think about my death and forgot to simplify things, till i found myself again, and i took a decision where i found a new country, new city and new job...

Here in this new place im taking things slowly, in a enjoyable pace, im back to beggining, i have to learn a new industrie, i have to learn how to take orders again, restarting in a new culture. just enjoying the process, the girl i met on the first day of the festival we will see each other again in 2024, my joy of life, joy of living, seen my future, seen my confindence back again...

SO MANY STORIES I DIDNT PUT HERE, DIDNT ELABORATE PROPERLY, IF YOU READ THIS TILL THE END, ASK AND I SHALL WRITTE THE ONE MADE YOU CURIOUS... THIS WAS A YEAR WHERE I SEE MY HIGHEST AND LIVED MY LOWEST OF THE LOW...

#personal rant #fuckedup #low point #happiness #sad thoughts

[thekarina]

Here lie the keepsakes from the premium showcase SYNK in Japan.

Let us take you back to two exciting days when we performed the majority of our hit song shows in Japan. Despite the fact that this was our first visit to the country, it was reported that over 40,000 people were seated in the arena to share the experience with us. We would want to thank you for your continued support, and despite this being our very first premium showcase in a foreign country, you showered us with so much love that we will undoubtedly return to show you a stronger aspect of our performances! For the time being, we’d like to show you some photos taken during the meeting to accompany fans and lessen the longing of having to miss our presence these previous days.

Enliven the arena with the opening act of ‘aenergy’⠀✿⠀The first goal was to establish great vitality in the crowd, as they would undoubtedly demand it as the set list for the premium showcase may include stages that require the enlivening of the atmosphere to be performed immaculately. Their bond is stronger than ever, proving that the idols on stage share the same synergy with their fans, who continue to make thunderous applause, praising their charisma expressed on stage with every move.

The vicious act of ‘Black Mamba’⠀✿⠀Do you recognize our formation as a group? If you look closely, it would be Ningning’s high note that paved the path for the dance break, which required the strength of our heads to move in continuous circles. Now that I’ve revealed where this move originated, I’m sure you can see the resemblance. What better way to march to the arena’s stage with the utmost confidence radiated from our mere presence and strengthen the great energy formed in the premium showcase than with our very first song, which ultimately became one of the most remarkable K-POP performances with incredible rhythm?

A gentle reminder that ‘Life’s Too Short’⠀✿⠀A mellifluous hymn cast by lingering feelings in a delicate reverie, the fairies have brought upon the uplifting message in the shape of a song intended to heal people who hear it by chance. We’d love to share this experience with you because you’re the selected ones who have been given the opportunity to go on a truly unforgettable adventure.

To live within a ‘Lucid Dream’⠀✿⠀She was a fairy, and she knew better than to use her voice to enchant others with the promise of a realm of serene quietude and innocence. She creates a spell of everlasting kindness with her charms, one that may take a while before breaking out of, and she remains outstanding of it all.

September 10 | Updated from Karina’s archives under <aespa’s Premium SYNK Showcase in Japan>

#🏹 ⊹ Karina’s Page #🧸 — September #📜 — “Premium SYNK showcase in Japan”

[chaotic-kitty]

For The Love Of Gods Domestic Headcanons!! Part 3

Warnings: none 

Alright, I’m officially finished with this request! I hope it’s what was wanted.Thank you and sorry for any mistakes.💕

Part 1 | Part 2

Leonidas:

How do they sleep? Do they snore? Steal blankets? Ect.

When he sleeps alone he sleeps in the starfish position. When he sleeps with you however, he loves it when you lay on him and he can fully hug you. Leo likes the feel of you in his arms and the weight of your body on his. He doesn’t steal the blanket to get warm, he just takes up a lot of blanket in general. Snores very rarely and when he does it’s LOUD! Like dad snores, you know?

Do they prefer baths or showers?

Leo likes showers after he’s finished working out. He likes to bathe in the hot springs [under the arena] when he wants to wind down or have some alone time. Would prefer to bathe and shower with you.😏

Are the clean or messy?

Leonidas is pretty organised. Everything has its own place and he cleans often. Being the God of Stamina, energy is the one thing he has an abundance of. So when it comes basic chores, most people do their chores and other mundane activities around their energy levels and this can mean that it takes a little bit for the average person to get to certain tasks. Not Leo! Leonidas always has the energy to stay on top of stuff like cleaning. Though it’s not the most entertaining thing in the world, so that can make him hesitant to do it.

How frequently do they wash their hair? How long does it take?

He washes his hair regularly. But maintaining his perfect hair is a rigorous process.  From washing his hair to applying hair oils and treatments, Leo will spend close to a few hours tending to his hair. He won’t necessarily ask you to help but he does appreciate the company, so long as you swear not to tell anyone about just how much work goes into his hair care.

What is their love language?

Physical touch. Leonidas loves to touch you, whether that be hugging you or even throwing you over his shoulder and carrying you.. He can never get enough & he just loves the feeling of you.

Favourite wind-down activity?

Self care nights! You two will have nights where you will put on face masks, eat your favourite foods together while watching something, and wearing the comfiest clothes you own. It’s a good bonding experience and a great way to wind down from your duties. The skincare routine you guys do is immaculate! Eonia only has the best, so you guys are using the best products this side of the universe. Other times though he’ll go for a run to help wind-down. Either by himself or with you.

Who cooks and who cleans?

He loves cooking with you! You guys will regularly make big meals that consist of a few different dishes and sides. They are always incredibly healthy and tasty! Leo insists on making extra to have for later and to share with the rest of the group. He also prefers to split the cleaning up duties. You can wash and he can dry!

What is the main reason for arguments?

Honestly, I think most arguments or general clashes come from just spending too much time together. Not to say you spend an unhealthy amount of time together. But sometimes if you spend a large amount of time with someone without breaks, you just start treading on each other’s toes and getting irritated with one another, which will lead to arguments.

Calysta:

How do they sleep? Do they snore? Steal blankets? Ect.

Caly when she sleeps on her own will just spread out. She also tosses and turns a lot. When she sleeps with you, she holds you until you fall asleep then she’ll roll over and sleep facing away from you. Calysta does this because she is scared of falling asleep with you in her arms and accidentally hurting you by squeezing too tight ect. She doesn’t like doing that as she prefers to cuddle you, but she doesn’t want to hurt you either. If you wake up, spoon her from the back (so that she’s the little spoon) it will make her happy and it’s very comfortable. Also, Caly doesn’t steal blankets, she steals pillows…

Do they prefer baths or showers?

Calysta doesn’t really like either of them. While she likes swimming, there is just something about being under/in the water to wash herself that she doesn’t find appealing. Not that she doesn’t like to be clean! She just doesn’t like she process. Will often opt for showers as they’re faster. She loves if you join in as you make the experience more enjoyable.

Are the clean or messy?

She’s messy. Very messy! Early into your relationship you might not realise just how much but after you both move into together it becomes very obvious. Caly tries her best to keep on top of things, especially after she’s accidentally stepped on a few possessions (hers and yours) and broke them.

How frequently do they wash their hair? How long does it take?

She washes it every few days and it doesn’t take too long. But it’s obvious when she has [washed her hair] as there is hair EVERYWHERE! My girl sheds more hair than any of the other LI’s. You find her hair on you all the time, as well as in some other pretty weird places.

What is their love language?

Physical touch. Caly has a hard time expressing her emotions and at times even understanding them so she often prefers to show love through physical affection.

Favourite wind-down activity?

Her favourite wind-down activity is going to her secret cave and cuddling with you as you two talk about how your day went.

Who cooks and who cleans?

Calysta likes cooking for people. When she cooks, she tends to make more meat based foods, so if you don’t like meat then it’s better that you prepare your part of the meal. Caly LOVES desserts and will spend more time preparing sweet treats than she does cooking her meal. Will try to eat dessert before dinner. As for the cleaning up, you both take turns! Who cleans and who dries depends on what was cooked. Calysta has broken many dishes because she tends to forget her own strength.

What is the main reason for arguments?

Caly has a habit of keeping her thoughts to herself and pair that with the fact she’s not good at expressing emotions? It doesn’t end too well. Arguments usually arise because of her keeping all of her thoughts to herself until it all comes crashing down on the both of you. Because of this when fights do happen it involves a lot of crying and raised voices. You’ll both need time too cool down before you can resolve things, however Caly is stubborn and like I said, doesn’t do emotions well so she can end up moving on before you’re ready without even an apology or discussion about what’s wrong/has happened. This can throw you both into a vicious cycle if not dealt with properly. You may need someone to step in and play mediator.

#fictif #fictif ftlog #ftlog #fictif for the love of gods #fictif calysta #fictif leonidas #fictif fanfic #anon ask #fanfic writer #domestic headcanons #fictif astrellio

[ve1vetyoongi]

Mic Drop | myg

pairing: yoongi x reader

genre: smut, angst, fluff

au: rapper!yoongi, photographer!oc

summary: when underground rapper min yoongi uncovers the dirty secret behind his biggest rival, your brother and hip hop champion kim namjoon’s success, he is determined to take home this year’s mic drop contest trophy no matter who he hurts along the way. you’re behind the camera, content with capturing namjoon’s picture perfect persona from the sidelines but when his hard-faced enemy Gloss, makes you realise you could be more than just the point and shoot, you start to feel your loyalties shifting.

warnings: multiple smut scenes, dirty talk, dry humping, penetrative sex, fingering, oral sex (both m and f receiving), lots of orgasm denial, multiple orgasms, cum play, cum eating, but also tender fucking lol, very brief mention of death.

word count: 29k (rip)

rating: definitely explicit

playlist: visit my playlist page and select “mic drop.” (all links to be added later)

a/n: ahhh you don’t understand how happy i am to finally put this out into the world!!! i started writing this fic back in july and after a few rewrites (more on this at the end of the post if anyone sticks around until then) she’s finally finished eee <3 also!!! this fic is brought to you courtesy of the love yourself collab! this project has been super fun to be a part of n i wanna say thank you to everyone involved who made it such a welcoming experience! you can check out the masterlist here (link will be added later f u tumblr) to read all the other amazing fics from the incredibly talented authors in this project (literally so talented??? it’s sickening???) (im so excited to finally read them all now im done w this monster lol). all the love as always <3

Introducing Runch Randa!

The host is barely audible over the chants of your brother's name as the lights dim and the arena is sent into a haze of strobe lights.

The air is already heady with body heat and fragrant with sweat from the thousands of bodies smushed together in the pit and beyond that thousands more seated in the stands, phone lights twinkling in the darkened arena like stars. A girl in your peripheral clutches a sign with MARRY ME RUNCH RANDA scrawled in sharpie, torso clad in one of the cheap merch hoodies with your brother's face printed on the front, just like hundreds of others around her.

It's a full house. No one's surprised. The Mic Drop semi-final always creates a buzz of anticipation within the hip hop scene. But this year, with your brother Namjoon returning to compete for the trophy again, there isn't an empty seat in sight.

A buzz pulses through the crowd when the bass kicks in. It makes hearts beat faster, blood run hotter, a crescendo of screams crashing violently through room, the sheer volume enough to make the walls shake in time with the stamp of impatient feet.

It's infectious. Almost. If you hadn't been here a hundred times before, countless nights the same as this one that all started to blur into one somewhere along the line. Different crowds but the same energy, the same hum of anticipation that used to get your bones rattling, your skin hot with suspense. Now it's just routine. Now you feel nothing.

Besides, you're just here to do your job. The photographer. To take pictures, not to enjoy the show. Just like always.

Five seconds. You know Namjoon's set list like the back of your hand by now. Five seconds until he takes the stage and the crowd goes wild.

One, two, three, four...

Like clockwork, the stage lights up and there he is, face blown up in painful detail across every screen. Runch Randa. His stage name pulses through the room, a mantra, chanted until throats turn sore and mouths run dry.

Dark framed glasses cover his eyes but his stance is enough to tell you that he came here to win, his presence immediately filling the empty stage with an energy that makes it impossible to look anywhere else, even for a moment.

He is already damp with sweat, neck glistening beneath the white lights. Like routine you snap a few shots when he taunts the camera with a smirk, brushing a hand through his immaculately gelled hair teasingly, mouth turning up into a grin when the audience roars.

Runch Randa walks across the stage with the ease of someone who lives and breathes for moments like these. Grabs the microphone with two hands, shiny silver rings glinting on his fingers beneath the harsh strobe lights.

You can see his opponents in the front row, nothing but rookies, the intimidation etched into their features visible even from where you stand side stage as they swallow the bitter pill that they stand no chance against him.

Once upon a time you were the same as the wide eyed fans in the pit, filled with an admiration for your brother. He was everything you wanted to be; a whirlwind of fearless, brazen passion when he got up on stage. But things changed once Namjoon won Mic Drop, claiming the trophy at the tender age of seventeen. After that he started filling arenas. Then stadiums. And you were left behind in the ruins of his whirlwind, feeling the Namjoon you once knew slip further away as Runch Randa took center stage, viewing his perfect persona through the lens of your camera with the same sour resentment as the rookies.

Because when a familiar beat permeates the arena, you can't help but close your eyes and imagine the name the crowd screams is yours. That it's you out there instead of him. It's you pouring your heart into the lyrics that you find yourself whispering unconsciously in time with your brother.

Your lyrics.

The lyrics you wrote especially for this performance. The same lyrics that would be streamed by millions, top charts and win Namjoon another stupid trophy to add to his already elaborate collection.

The only reason Namjoon still kept you around was because he couldn't write them himself.

The track ends and the Mic Drop host crosses the stage with a grin. Namjoon's arm is thrust into the air triumphantly.

"And our first finalist is...Runch Randa!"

You snap a picture of your brother smiling victoriously.

"He's gonna win. I know it."

Namjoon's manager Jimin sidles up beside you, grin plastered to his face. It's nauseating.

"Does he ever lose?" You murmur

Runch Randa! Runch Randa! Runch Randa!

--

Mic Drop. The most highly anticipated event in the music industry for its ability to make hip hop artists stars; as well as its tendency to break them just as easily.

Fame. Money. Glory. Just a few of the reasons why rap rookies from across the globe are desperate to compete in the ruthless battle of blood, sweat and rap that is Mic Drop.

They all think they have what it takes. That they have that special something the judges are looking for. Unfortunately, most don't even make it past the auditions phase.

When your brother, Mic Drop legend Runch Randa, announced he would be ditching his celebrity status and stadium concerts to return to his underground roots and compete for the trophy again, it raised a series of questions

Why now? What did he have to prove?

Once the press got wind of the fact that your parent's, CEO'S of the most prestigious record label in the industry Big Hit Entertainment, had run into a spot of financial trouble, everyone assumed your brother's re-entry was a master plan to win the lavish cash prize afforded to competition winners. Sure, you couldn't deny that it was partly true --- Big Hit's stocks were plummeting and a lot was at stake.

Truthfully, though, you knew your brother well enough to see that Namjoon's motives were far more selfish; to put it simply, he was greedy. Fame was his drug. Once he got a taste he could never get enough.

Of course, a cheque signed and delivered by your father's hand shut any rumors down very quickly. Your parent's were good at silencing people if it meant protecting Namjoon's reputation.

Even you, their own daughter.

The name tag labelled OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER was nothing but a cover up for the true reason you spent so much time at Big Hit -- writing each and every one of Namjoon's hit songs. A secret you were forced to keep as you watched your brother through a camera lens.

Which is how you find yourself as his strictly-invitation-only after party, an attempt at building momentum for the big final in just a few weeks time, with a camera in hand.

You're sat in the corner of the A-list club Jimin rented out for the event, swirling the deep red liquid in your glass with a bored disinterest as you watch your brother shake hands with company investors and big buck producers, most of which you'd never even heard of.

These things always seem to drag on, the clock ticking slower with each agonising second spent smiling courteously to uphold the supportive sister persona. Your feet are starting to hurt in your heels and all you want to do is hide away in the Big Hit studio and scribble down the lyrics floating aimlessly in your mind. That's the only good thing about these events -- they give you time to think, a rare relief in between your brother's busy schedules.

"Well, well. If it isn't my favorite lyricist."

A cheerful voice jolts you from your thoughts and when you blink up through the flashing lights you're met with a lazy grin belonging to Hoseok, one of the producers at Big Hit. He's an ex Mic Drop contestant himself, coming fourth and just missing out on the semi-finals three years ago. He never had the stomach for it anyway, he always says, but you never miss the rejection in his eyes.

Hoseok is also one of the only people who knows about your secret. He was hired to help you work on tracks for your brother once he made it big after all, and although he would never admit it you knew he probably had to sign a hefty NDA. Still, you were grateful to have him around — you couldn't deny you made something of a dream team together.

"Mind if I sit?" He gestures with his glass towards the empty space beside you, and you move your purse so he can squash in on the leather couch. "At least some of us are having fun, huh?" You follow his gaze to Namjoon on the dance floor, hands all over some vaguely recognizable celebrity's hips.

You grimace and swig back the remaining alcohol in your glass. "Too much fun, apparently."

Hoseok snorts, wringing his hands. "Y'know, we could get out of here if you're as bored as I am..." His words slur just slightly and you figure his confidence is a result of the amber liquor in his glass. The shy Hoseok  you know well returns quickly though as he averts his eyes when you raise a brow. "Not like that! I just thought maybe we could get a drink or something...if you want to?"

You shift awkwardly, having to shout over the booming club music for him to hear you. "I should really stay here. People might ask questions if the sister of the host just...disappears."

"Right!" Hoseok smiles sheepishly then slaps his own forehead. "Right. Forget I ever asked."

You shake your head fondly and turn back towards the dance floor just in time to see Namjoon whisper in the ear of the DJ, music cutting as he takes the mic and hops up onto the small stage to address the party.

Finally! A sign he was going to wrap up the evening for good!

He clears his throat and the huddle of mingling bodies below him fall into an expectant hush.

"Uh, so I'm not usually very good at these speech things --" He pauses and the crowd laughs. You tap your knee impatiently. "But I just wanted to say thank you. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for your support. So, the next round of drinks are on me! I haven't won — yet — but its never too early to start celebrating, right?"

Namjoon raises his flute of champagne and the party-goers cheer just as a flurry of confetti drops from the ceiling. The music starts again and you're too busy picking the brightly colored paper out of your hair disgruntledly to notice the way the room suddenly quietens and the guests part down the middle like prey from a predator.

"Y/N. Look." Hoseok elbows you sharply and flies forward in his seat, whisky sloshing over the edge of his glass. "Shit! Is that--"

Is that really him? What is he doing here? He's back!

You look up just in time to see the commotion as a figure in a black hoodie weaves effortlessly to the front of the room. You don't recognise him but something about his presence gives you chills.

Namjoon is too busy throwing back his drink to notice as the man climbs the stage, his skinny jeans and high tops sticking out like a sore thumb against the sea of dress shoes and cocktail dresses. He clearly wasn't invited.

By the time your brother senses the change in the air, it's too late.

You feel your face pale, choking when the figure finally turns and lets down his hood, revealing a head of blue hair and a venomous smirk.

"Gloss?"

Namjoon turns and his smile dissolves. He just stares stiffly at the person in front of him like he's seen a ghost. In a way you suppose he has -- the ghost of his past. After all, the last time anyone saw this face was five years ago at the Mic Drop final.

It is him! It's Gloss! Why is he back?

The night that changed all of your lives. When Namjoon claimed the Mic Drop trophy and Gloss, his opponent, lost everything.

It's been years since the last time you saw Gloss but you still recognize the distinctive confidence in his gait, the way his eyes flash with something dark as he looks your brother up and down with a breathy laugh.

Namjoon is frozen, breathing heavily.

Gloss' voice is husky when he finally speaks. It makes you shiver.

"Runch Randa. Long time no see, huh?"

A beat of unbearable silence.

"What are you doing here?"

Gloss's chuckle makes Namjoon snarl. You see the way his jaw tenses and his fists clench. He's too wound up; he'll snap if you don't do something and fast.

You get to your feet but Hoseok pulls you back down sternly by the elbow. "Don't." You protest but his grip is too tight so you just fidget helplessly instead.

Something settles in the atmosphere; a nervousness that makes you itch, makes your heart pump into overdrive as you watch them draw closer, eyes narrowed like boxers in a ring, waiting for the other to make a move. Hoseok covers his eyes.

"I wouldn't start celebrating just yet, Runch. The competition has only just begun."

The crowd gasps when your brother's clenched fist swings at his smug opponent. The rapper ducks but not quite in time and you can't remember which comes first — the crunch that crackles through the speakers when Namjoon's ring-clad knuckles collide with Gloss' face or the ear splitting thump of his mic dropping to the ground.

--

The party ends abruptly. Your head spins with confusion as you watch the guests leave in shock. Seeing Namjoon up on that stage opposite his biggest opponent again makes your stomach sick, like you were reliving the events of five years ago all over again.

Deep down you had always expected this moment to come. For Gloss to return looking for revenge or something. After all, Gloss didn't just loose Mic Drop to anyone -- he lost to Namjoon, his former best friend and music partner. Namjoon and Yoongi. They were supposed to win together. But for reasons still unknown, even to you, Yoongi was disqualified moments before the final commenced, plummeting your brother into the world of fame alone.

After that, Gloss all but disappeared, his pitiful downfall nothing but a hip hop legend to those who heard it. No record deals or sponsorships or stadium tours like your brother. A legend in his own right, but for all the wrong reasons. Mic Drop banned duos from competing thereafter.

Eventually you gather the courage to head into one of the back rooms where the rappers had been hauled by security guards in hi-vis jackets after their scuffle. You can hear Jimin babbling before you even reach the door.

"What were you thinking? Punching him? You better hope the press don't get ahold of this or else you're in big trouble—"

"Let me go!" Namjoon grunts to Jimin whose face is almost as red as his own. "I'm gonna end this once and for all."

"You'll do no such thing," Jimin tuts, pushing him firmly by the shoulder so he slumps into his seat with a roll of the eyes, other hand pressing his phone to his ear. "Do you even understand the amount of damage control I'm going to have to do to? — hold on, yes, this is Park Jimin speaking..."

The room smells of disinfectant and medical gauze and you spot Namjoon instantly, surrounded by an abundance of medics. His breathing is still ragged, the vein on his neck standing to prominence, knee bouncing as he impatiently waits for his ruby knuckles to be bandaged, too engaged to notice your arrival.

To your left you're surprised to find Yoongi. He's the epitome of composure despite the heavy tension in the air. He grabs a roll of bandage and begins to patch up his own fist, eyes lighting up with something you can't put your finger on when you slide into the room.

"Well, look who decided to turn up. If it isn't Namjoon's little sister. Long time no see, Y/N."

You freeze. It's been years since you heard him say your name. It makes you feel funny.

"Yoongi." You swallow. "What are you doing here?"

His shit eating grin makes your blood boil. "I take it you haven't heard yet, then."

You roll your eyes. You should be checking on Namjoon not humoring whatever stupid motives his opponent has. "Heard what, Yoongi?"

"I'm re-entering the competition, too."

You stagger backwards. Yoongi? Re-entering the competition? Mic Drop?

"But--you were disqualified--I don't understand?"

"I was disqualified. Disqualifications are only valid for five years, according to the rule book. Who knew?" He smirks when your eyes widen. "And I think you'll find that my sentence is up. I'm gonna win this time, once and for all."

"I don't think you know what you're doing, Yoongi—"

"There's more." He licks his lips. "I know your secret."

Your heart stops, mouth running dry. You throw a glance over your shoulder. Namjoon is still engaged, swatting away a medic's ice pack with a scowl, thankfully too busy to notice when you draw closer, voice a harsh whisper. "W-what secret?"

Yoongi lets out a dark chuckle, wincing just barely when he touches a damp cloth to the cut in his lip, a red splotch forming on the fabric. "You know exactly what secret I'm talking about, Y/N. Wouldn't it be ironic if someone slipped a tip off to the judges panel about Namjoon's ghost writer—"

"Shut the fuck up Min Yoongi or I'll break your nose for real this time!" Namjoon's voice bellows behind you, making you jolt. He charges at Yoongi, lip quivering like he might make his threat a reality. "Leave her out of this!"

Yoongi's nostrils flare. "Everyone knows she's a part of this, Namjoon, whether she likes it or not!"

All eyes look your way, as if expecting you to say something, but Yoongi's words fall cluelessly on you. You hadn't so much as thought about him in years. What did you have to do with this stupid ongoing feud with your brother that he refused to let go?

You glance between them, settling for sending a blank look at Yoongi and shuffling over to Namjoon instead. Your brother seems prideful at your show of allegiance. Yoongi scoffs.

"Namjoon?" Your mouth is dry with the shock of the situation and it comes out sounding funny, like you're wary of him. A gash above his eyebrow starts to dribble crimson. "Shit, you're hurt..."

"Get off me." Namjoon shakes his shoulder violently and you gingerly remove your hand, brows furrowed at his rejection. He directs his attention to Yoongi. "And you. You want a fight? It's on."

"Joon!—" He waves you off. It's pointless anyway. When he gets this rash there's no changing his mind.

"You want to end this thing once and for all? Then let's do this. You and me. At the final."

Yoongi raises a brow. "Deal. I'd shake your hand but you might try and knock me into next week again."

Namjoon doesn't laugh.

A hoard of security guards bust into the room and head straight for Yoongi. "Finally. What the fuck do I even pay these people for?"

"Get off me!"

You place a hand on Namjoon's shoulder and find that he's trembling. Rage? Nerves? Adrenaline? All three, probably, if the vacant blackness behind his eyes is anything to go by.

You're already trailing behind your brother when you hear Yoongi's voice carry down the hall. "I'll see you at the final! When I win. Secrets always find a way to come back and bite you in the ass, Runch. You should know that better than anyone!"

--

Namjoon begs you to come as his plus one to some scummy gig Gloss is rumored to be performing at tonight. To check out the competition, he says, but you recognise the way he nibbles his lip as he does.

Fear. He'll never admit it but Namjoon is scared he’s going to lose.

You agree to join him because you think it may put his mind at rest.

As Namjoon's manager, Jimin has all sorts of connections, mumbling thank you's into the head set sitting around his ears like a permanent accessory and scribbling down the address of some club down town.

The driver your parent's hired to escort Namjoon around as a paparazzi safety precaution drops the three of you a block away; the car's black tinted windows and shiny number plate would be out of place in such a scummy part of town. The plan would only work if you went unnoticed. Namjoon couldn't risk running into a Runch Randa fangirl tonight. It was technically against the Mic Drop rules to have any intel on your opponents, after all.

You don't like to tell Namjoon that his disguise won't do much for blending in. He dons a designer cap pulled down low over his face, long black coat drowning his figure and expensive leather boots crunching against broken glass and cigarette stumps as you near the club. It's too put together to seem natural, a dead give away that he doesn't belong here among the sea of ripped jeans and septum rings and tattoo sleeves around you. Even with a patterned bandana covering half of his face, the sculpted cheekbones and piercing eyes smudged effortlessly with black eyeliner poking over the top scream celebrity.

Luckily for you, the plain dress and knit cardigan hugging your body doesn't alert the suspicions of the bouncers cross armed at the entrance.

Namjoon wrinkles his nose and prods a half empty solo cup discarded outside with his toe, Jimin practically jittering with nerves and barely avoiding a stumbling drunk as you approach the men who stand at nearly double your size. Namjoon said it was best that you acted as spokesperson tonight — the only reason he even brought you along was because nobody would know your face and your position at Big Hit allowed you to pull some strings.

Your fingers shake as you produce a photography license from your bag, heart pounding as one of the menacing bouncers raises his eyebrow beneath the deep red hue emanating from a tacky neon sign posted above the door.

Luckily the breath you're holding is leaving you in a relieved thank you as he nods, moves to the side and gestures for your entourage to dip inside with the rest of the crowd. Namjoon charges ahead into the darkness and you follow him with an awkward smile to make up for his rude demeanour.

No turning back now...

Music hits like a deafening wave, blasting from the speakers at a volume that makes the walls shiver and your head throb. The club is alive with reckless anticipation, a sea of sweaty bodies gyrating on the dance floor in time with the pulsing beat. The energy swallows you whole, knuckles turning white as you cling to Jimin's sleeve, letting him elbow through the throng of indistinguishable faces that glitter beneath the tacky disco ball dangling haphazardly from the ceiling.

The crowd eventually spits you back out in a quieter corner of the club, Namjoon already making a beeline for the seedy bar. "There's a whiskey sour with my name on it and it's the only thing that'll get me through this shit." He murmurs as he crosses the room and occupies a bar stool beside a couple mid heavy make out session, pulling the hat closer around his face.

With a sigh, you turn back to Jimin who is eyeing up the strip pole and the exotic dancers nearby with wide eyes. "I still don't think this is a good idea."

The italian leather couch you slump into is suspiciously sticky beneath your bare thighs. "He needs to get the apprehension out of his system," you counter. "Once he sees that there's no competition he'll be able to take him down."

"I hope you're right." Jimin is wringing his hands, not knowing what to do with them now his headset is sat on the backseat of the car a block away. "I'd hate for this to knock his confidence."

"What?" You snort. "You think Gloss might actually beat him?"

Namjoon is the best rapper around, there's no debate. Nobody could beat him. Not even Gloss.

"No." His pursed lips say otherwise. You raise a brow. Jimin lowers his voice. "Maybe. Namjoon's rash. Gets ahead of himself. If he doesn't pull it together he'll play straight into Yoongi's hands..."

"Shows starting." Your open mouth snaps shut when the cushions dip beside you and Namjoon throws his arms over the back of the couch, swirling his half empty glass with an overconfident smirk.

Jimin averts his gaze. He knows he probably said too much. Sure, you're technically his colleague but you're also Namjoon's sister, the daughter of his boss. If Namjoon had overheard his position at Big Hit could have been called into question.

You would have to grill him more about Yoongi's motives later. Namjoon was right; the show really was starting.

Lights send the club into a dizzying purple haze, a new beat rumbling through the club that makes your skin prickle. It's almost drowned out by the electricity in the air, the frantic stamping of feet, the brazen chants of a single name over and over that fills you with a funny tingly feeling.

Gloss! Gloss! Gloss!

Something about it feels dirty.

The crowd is packed tightly together in the pit now. Even from where you sit, avoiding club goers eyes on the opposite side of the room, you find your attention glued to the stage. The set up is nothing like the one your brother occupies every night; just a wooden structure, painted black at one point but scuffed and scratched by the soles of shoes that boast the history of the place. The speakers are propped on broken crates, no big LED screens or back up dancers like your parents hire out for Namjoon.

Though none of that seems to matter when your gaze falls on the sole microphone stand placed centre stage beneath a blinding spotlight. It's the only familiar parallel between the two performers. It's a symbol of an artist, of the passion that comes with being up on that stage — any stage. It belongs to a performer.

You have to peer through a sea of frantic waving hands on your tiptoes to catch a glimpse of the combat boots taking the stage in time with the music rushing in your ears, mouth dry at the silver rings glinting under the harsh lights as fingers curl around the microphone.

"Yoongi." Namjoon grunts beside you, back stick straight and alert now. The traces of his previous smirk have been erased, a line appearing at the bridge of his nose. "There he is."

Yoongi throws his head back, breathes in the stuffy air that carries the shouts and whistles of the crowd like it's the sweetest oxygen money can buy.

The stench of beer burns your eyes but you're scared you'll miss a glimpse of his messy blue hair, or the eyes drunk on the fierce energy pulsing through the club to stop watching even if you tried.

When his voice permeates the room it's husky, burning through you like a shot of dry whisky. Namjoon stiffens, loosens the bandana around his face so he can see better.

Is that Runch Randa?

"Namjoon..." You hiss. "People are looking."

"Shut up." He grits, jaw tightening as Yoongi's lyrics cut through the tension like a serrated knife.

The way he moves across the stage like he owns it is exhilarating, makes the blood in your veins pump hot, limbs turning to lead as the crowd hangs off his every word.

He's good. Great, even. His lyrics give you goosebumps and you realise you haven't felt like this about a performance in a long time. Passionate. Yoongi is exhilarating to watch and it shakes you to the core.

It's then that it dawns on you. The reason Namjoon feels threatened is because there is a real chance that he might loose everything.

Gloss might take the trophy once and for all.

You only rip your eyes away from the stage when you feel Namjoon stand up beside you, his body disappearing into the crowd.

You get up too. "Leave him." You watch Jimin mouth. "He's just angry, he'll calm down—"

You don't care about Namjoon, not when the air is suddenly too thick, too heavy to breathe. Not when your hands sweat and you heave with a desire to run from reality and the suffocating smell of stale cigarette smoke that made your throat burn, like you can't get your body to breathe.

"Y/N? Where are you going?"

You swear you're floating, feet never seeming to quite touch the ground as you battle against the hazy dizziness that makes the room spin, ignoring Jimin's exasperated shouts of your name as you push through the gaps between bodies and pray your sense of direction is still intact enough to pull your outstretched arms towards the exit.

--

It's dark outside when you spill out of the exit, spluttering and heaving for air.

The brick is cool against your back when you slide down a nearby wall, hugging your knees.

A deep breath. In then out. Your chest loosens, lungs begin to feel full enough again.

Until a gravelly voice rings out into the night, clearer than the thump of unintelligible music from inside the club that makes your head pound.

"So it was you I saw back there. Good to know I'm not seeing things."

Even before you lift your face from between your knees you know who it belongs to. The single person you want to see least in the world at this very moment.

"Go away." You grumble but all that follows is a low chuckle as Yoongi slumps down next to you, ensuring to leave a safe distance between your crouched bodies.

It's funny. You had been preparing yourself to see him all night but now he's actually here in front of you, your mouth is dry.

He looks the same as he always did; dark eyes that burn hot as they scan your face, cocky smirk turning up the corners of his mouth. His brow looks wearier than you remember though, too weary for a man of twenty three. The only indication that time has passed since him and your brother were best friends.

"I assume Namjoon sent you here, then?"

The mention of your brother's name offers you the courage you need to look at him directly. His forehead still gleams with sweat in the dim moonlight, hair slicked back with a red bandana. There's a ring around his eye now, black and bruised. He must have taken off the black hoodie he donned on stage, left now in only a white vest which exposes his arms and to your dismay makes your blood run a little hotter.

"He's inside. I just came along because I had to." You mumble. "I'm not his spy, you know."

"Sure as shit seems like it." Yoongi spits with an amused chuckle, head lolling on his shoulders to face you. "He worried I might tell everyone about his little secret? Or was he trying to find his own leverage?"

A hot anger boils beneath your skin, rising all the way to your cheeks. Namjoon wouldn't do that would he? He didn't play that way. He didn't need to get an upper hand on Yoongi. He just wanted to see what he was up against.

"What's your problem, Yoongi?" The smirk on his mouth never falters, something glinting behind his eyes that tells you he wants to get a rise out of you. Even so, you can't help the way your voice raises, staggering to your feet. He chuckles darkly in response. "You get off on being an asshole or something?"

"You're too naive. What's so bad about telling the truth?" He closed the space between you until he's hovering above you, breath warm against your cheek. Your heart starts to race."What's so bad about taking back what is mine?"

Your breath hitches when his hand presses into the wall beside your head, effectively cornering you beneath his chest. "You could ruin his career."

Yoongi snorts. "What? Like he ruined mine?"

A few beats of silence. His eyes scan your face and it makes your stomach feel funny. You push at his chest, sucking in a shaky breath when he backs off a little and you realise part of you is weirdly disappointed that he did.

"Yoongi I don't know what happened between you and Namjoon—"

"No. You wouldn't know." He scorns, slinging his hands in his pockets, face darker now at the mention of his feud with your brother. "Because Namjoon loves secrets right? Namjoon likes to use people, Y/N. Just like he's using you now, to get to the top. And then he'll throw you away just like he did with me, sweetheart."

"Namjoon wouldn't do that." You bite your lip, the words leaving your tongue sounding a little less sure than you intend.

"Why? What makes you think you're any different?"

"He's my brother."

"I was his brother once too, remember?" He swallows, shaking his head in disbelief at your denial. "The only blood that matters to Namjoon is the blood shed to get him to the top."

You wrap your arms around your torso instinctively. Yoongi's words cut too deep. Maybe something inside of you thought Yoongi was right?

No. You came here to protect Namjoon yet here you were allowing his enemy to get inside your head.

"Fuck you, Min Yoongi." You spit, enjoying the way his eyes widen at the venom lacing your tone. "I made a mistake coming here."

Before you could brush past him and escape the heat  running through your blood stream which feels fuzzier than hatred should, a hand curls around your wrist.

"Shit. Looks like someone's on your trail."

A quick glance over your shoulder reveals none other than Jimin, face hidden by the visor of his black cap but recognisable none the less. He speaks a few words to the bouncer, probably asking if they saw you come out.

"Oh no."

The bouncer gestures in your direction. Jimin's eyes pause for a second as they skim across your form stood rigid with shock and your heart falls out of your ass when he starts in the direction of where you stand way too close to Yoongi unable to move a single muscle as you brace for discovery. To pay for your betrayal of your brother.

"You coming or what?" Yoongi snaps you back to reality with a tug on your arm, feet stumbling over each other as he drags you behind him further down the alley and around a nearly pitch black corner, too far away from the street lights to be basked in their orange glow.

"What the fuck, Yoongi?" You try to shrug out of his grasp, heart beating faster when you see the flat look on his face. "Let go of me!"

Yoongi comes to an abrupt halt. "Listen, I'm trying to save your ass here. You want to get caught? Go on then! Not my problem."

You nibble your lip, glancing one way at the dark alley and the other at Jimin pacing up and down the street with furrowed brows.

"Just trust me, Y/N."

Jimin's footsteps get closer and closer. It's now or never.

Tightening your jaw, you turn back to Yoongi and nod. The words feel foreign as they pass your lips. "I...trust you."

With that, Yoongi grabs your hand and breaks into a sprint

Turning the corner, the alley meets a dead end. The back of the club is just as run down as the front, littered with cracked beer bottles and cigarette stumps. The sign above the door labelled NO ENTRY doesn't offer any light and apparently Yoongi doesn't listen to directions because he fishes in his back pocket for a key, sliding the bolt and pushing on the bar to hold the door open with a small nod for you to go inside first.

With a deep breath, you do.

The door closes behind you with a jingle of chains, cutting off the slither of moonlight it provided and sending you into complete darkness. You hear Yoongi slide the bolt back across and then he fumbles for you in the darkness, your body pulled down next to his with a yelp so that you're out of direct view of the window which looks inside the room.

"I think they followed us." His voice is silk but there's an underlying insinuation. Be quiet.

Yoongi's eye level now, knees squeezed up against yours in the cramped space beneath the window ledge. Your eyes slowly adjust to the darkness, able to see the way he scans your face when he thinks you aren't looking. The way he grumbles and looks away when you catch him.

There's not time to dwell as you hear footsteps turn the corner, tracking all the way to the door where the bolt rattles, a sleeve wiping the window and pressing a cupped face to the glass.

"She's not here, man. You must have seen someone else."

It was Hoseok. You'd recognise his voice anywhere. Countless all nighters in the studio together does that to a person. Had Jimin called him all the way down here to look for you?

Jimin chimes in quickly. "I could have sworn it was her..."

The voices trail off as they retreat back down the alley, around to the front of the club.

A sigh escapes you, head falling against the wall in relief. When you open your eyes Yoongi is looking at you again. There's something pained in his expression, unspoken words visible in the way he bites his cheek to stop them from spilling out into the darkness.

His fingers are still wrapped around your arm, an electricity buzzing through your veins when you feel him lean in closer, pulling you towards him just barely.

His lips. Chapped and so close to yours. God. You think you want to kiss them. Just to know how it feels. You've never seen them up this close before. Not close enough to feel his hot breaths puffing against your forehead. Not close enough that if you just lifted your chin a little bit...

Yoongi lets out an embarrassed cough, jolting you out of your thoughts. "That was a close one, huh?" The spot where his hand resided feels cold when he rips it away.

Yoongi's face is wiped of any emotion again. He's not completely slick though as when he finally speaks again he sounds husky, the betrayal in his voice surprising even him.

"Are you okay?"

What were you supposed to say to that? I almost got caught with my brother's enemy and then thought about kissing said enemy. No, I don't think I am okay.

"Fine. Thanks."

Yoongi offers you a hand, getting to his feet and pulling you up after him before he leans across your body to flick on the lights.

The yellowish stream burns your eyes but allows you to take in the room around you. There's a keyboard in the corner, piles of sheet music strewn across the wooden desk beside it. A pair of speakers hooked up to a worn looking sound machine. A mic and a pair of headphones slung over the back of the mismatch wheely chair tucked beneath a desk.

A studio.

He must notice the way you look around with wide eyes, redness creeping up his neck as he busies himself by kicking some of the clutter on the floor behind the desk. "Wasn't expecting guests."

It definitely wasn't the high tech producing set up you were provided with back at Big Hit, no hifi system or fancy computer programmes. The furniture was mismatch, like someone had collected a bunch of spare puzzle pieces and shook them up in the box until they made a picture.

Somehow of the pieces still manage to seem somehow inherently Yoongi; the basketball tee with GLOSS on the back draped over his chair, even the empty water bottles overflowing in the trash can. The tiny framed picture of a younger looking Yoongi next to a woman you think you recognise but can't quite put your finger on.

"Genius lab?" You snort, nodding towards the sign hanging haphazardly above the monitor.

Yoongi shrugs. "What can I say? It's true."

"Confident." You muse.

You share a smile. It's strange. Familiar. The way his eyes crinkle and even the husk of the chuckle that follows reminding you of when things were good, back when you considered Yoongi to be a sort of friend. Before things got fucked up.

"You'll take it back when I win."

Old habits might not die hard but the rational part of your brain registers the implication of his words, even beneath his playful facade. The studio suddenly feels cold. Nostalgia dissipates. You remember why you're here.

"Why didn't you just let them find me?"

"You know as well as I do that Namjoon risks getting disqualified if Jimin causes a scene and gets himself caught snooping around here."

You huff an exasperated breath. For all Yoongi's talk of  having the upper hand he sure did seem reluctant to use it. "Isn't that what you want? What's stopping you? Want to drag it out or something?"

Yoongi lets out a breathy laugh, crossing the room and ducking into a drawer in the far corner. He returns with two glasses and a murky bottle of something strong, already a quarter empty as he pours some out. He offers the second glass towards you but you wave it away.

"Suit yourself." He takes a swig of the dark liquid, squeezes his eyes shut. "Because I want to win fair and square."

You shake your head. "All of this. Just for a stupid trophy?"

He eyes you over the rim of his glass, swirling the liquid with an overconfidence that makes you grit your teeth in annoyance. "So Namjoon knows how it feels to lose something he loves." He looks you up and down then, coughing and turning his head when you notice it. "Yeah. I guess it's for the trophy."

Yoongi is despicable, you think. Is he really so fame hungry that he will destroy anyone standing in his way to get it? Even Namjoon? Sure, your brother has his faults but if there is one thing you know it's that he loves being on that stage. What happened between them that makes Yoongi think he deserves it more?

"So its a revenge thing, then. And what if you lose, huh?" The way your voice raises makes you wince. Yoongi slams his glass down and flashes you an are you serious face.

"Y/N don't you see? I have nothing to lose. Namjoon already took everything. My life, my family, my fame. Everything. You know how it feels to have it all dangled in front of your face? And then get it ripped away like it was never yours to begin with?"

Yes. You'd never tell him that, of course. But you did know. You had to watch Namjoon perform your songs every night through a camera lens. Snapping shots of him in his element and wishing those picture perfect moments were yours. What did Yoongi know?

"I see him on the big screen, on stages I dreamed of. Crowds screaming his name. It was supposed to be me, Y/N. Meanwhile I'm sat here," Yoongi gestures to the shabby studio you find yourself in, liquid sloshing over the edge of his glass. "In clothes I printed myself, making music in a shitty club for free because nobody will even listen to my shit."

He's panting by the end of his spiel, knuckles pressed to his eyes as he tries to regain his composure before he lets too many of his weaknesses show. Something resonates inside you, softening the anger towards him with what you recognize as sympathy.

"Then why do you still do it? Make music?"

"Because it's the only thing that never left me alone."

You sigh. While you're collecting your thoughts something catches your eye — a Polaroid picture, tacked onto the plasterboard behind his computer. It's of a smiling Yoongi and much to your surprise, a smiling Namjoon, arms wrapped around each other like nothing could ever break them apart. You briefly wonder why he kept it, if he hated Namjoon so much.

You turn to him again.

"Don't make me regret saying this but you're good, Yoongi. Like really good. Your performance earlier it was...amazing. I mean that."

Yoongi's stern eyes soften with surprise. He almost seems pained, like the simple compliment means more to him than you expected.

"So, you don't have to do this. Big Hit has connections, I could get in touch with a couple record labels--"

He stiffens again. "What? Are you my manager now? As if any record label would take a chance on the biggest Mic Drop loser in history, Y/N, don't talk shit."

You trail off. It's true and you know it.

He swallows hard. "You know what I think? I think you're here because you know that I might actually win this thing. As much as Namjoon knows how to play dirty he doesn't have the talent. He never did! That's why he's using you to write his material." His laugh makes you shiver. "How can he even call himself an artist? It's pathetic."

That's all it takes for your patience to snap. Is the way your blood boils with a sudden and insatiable rage because of the way he bad mouthed your brother? Surely you didn't actually believe him? No, everything he said was a lie -- it had to be.

Your hand curls into a fist, anger spilling over as you charge at him full force. Yoongi barley flinches, his fingers deftly curling around your wrist before it can meet his jaw and pulling you into him at the waist so he can slot his bottom lip between yours.

"Fuck yo— hmf?"

Your eyes widen as you register his slightly chapped lips moving against your own, remnants of the amber liquid he poured down his throat earlier sour on your tongue, a surprised gasp leaving you when Yoongi flips your bodies and slams your back roughly against the wall, settling himself between your legs.

"Gonna finish what Namjoon started, sweetheart?" When he pulls back you're panting, eyes trained to his parted lips with wonder.

He kissed you. Yoongi kissed you. For real.

His warm breath still mingles with yours as you try to choke a response, anything. Yoongi's eyes have a dark glint to them and god you should hate him for winding you up like this but being this close to him just feels too good.

Then, before you can think better of it, you grab his collar with your free hand and smash your lips together in a tangle of teeth and tongue that makes your entire body burn with relief.

The groan he lets out against your mouth tells you he wants this too. "Fuck, couldn't help myself." He pants. "You're driving me crazy."

You feel a dampness throb between your legs when his hands tangle in your hair, lips never leaving yours as he pulls you across the room and drops into his chair.

A whimper is pulled from your lips when his palms cup the flesh of your ass beneath your dress, though it's not in protest, dizzy with desire when he pulls you into his lap and bucks his hips so that his half hard cock brushes against your clothed heat.

"See what you do to me?" He pulls back to smirk at your swollen lips, a much needed breath entering your lungs, filling you with another bout of restless desire as Yoongi's eyes scan your face hungrily. It feels too good even though it should be so wrong.

"W-we shouldn't." Your mouth is dry, words coming out a little unsure which gives away just how much you want to keep going. "What if--"

A particularly harsh thrust of his hips makes you moan softly, head falling into the crook of Yoongi's neck. He growls when he catches sight of the growing wet patch on the front of his jeans, testament of his effect on you as much as you hated to admit it.

"What if Namjoon finds out?" His hand shoots between your legs, pads of his fingers tracing your clothed core, the coarse lace of your panties adding a delicious layer of friction against your folds. The delicate touch sets your body alight, skin burning to let go and submit to the feeling despite the voice in the back of your mind screaming no!

"What if Namjoon finds out that I make you this wet?" Your panties are sticking to your heat by now so it would have been futile to deny it. He smiles smugly when your legs shake and you throw an arm around his neck to keep your balance.

"S-shut up." It's meek and it only makes him laugh darkly, the husky sound sending shivers down your spine as he leans in closer to nibble on the lobe of your ear.

If you didn't know any better you would think he was unaffected by this. Your chest heaves with desire and your hands itch with a yearning to touch him but Yoongi appears the epitome of composure, maintaining sinful eye contact as he pulls your panties to the side. The only give away is the way his cock twitches against your leg with each jerk of his hips, a funny sense of pride erupting in your chest knowing that he wants you too.

Open mouthed kisses drag down your jaw, lingering at your neck. His teeth nibble at the sensitive skin, tongue laving out to soothe the sting and it feels too good to worry about the bruises his sinful lips leave behind as a reminder of your weakness Namjoon could never know of.

"Look so pretty marked up, sweetheart." The pet name makes your clit throb, head throwing back as his mouth attacks the sensitive spot on your neck like he knew it was there all along. It's almost concerning how quickly he has you falling apart in his lap. How easily he turned you into a shuddering mess, barely able to form coherent sentences in between breathy gasps at the sensation of him making you his for all to see. "Show everyone that you're mine, hm?"

When Yoongi removes his hand from your core you slap a hand over your mouth to stop a whine of protest from escaping. Yoongi's eyes narrow, palming his bulge through his trousers as he watches you writhe in his lap with amusement, every twist of your hips falling short and providing no relief for your pulsing clit, already missing the feeling of his hand cupping your mound and considering how it would feel skin on skin—

Oh god. What am I doing?

You let out a groan, but not the good kind.

"What?" Yoongi seems to read your mind, snapping you back to reality when he pulls your panties to the side. He circles your entrance teasingly and you can't help the way you whimper. "Don't act like you don't want to sink down on my cock, Y/N. You could ride me right here and nobody would ever know."

"H-how can I trust you?" It would ruin Namjoon if he found out. He was already stressed, already growing distant from you. This had to stop before it went too far. Before there was no going back.

"Because I can make you feel like this." A lithe finger slides into your heat, easy because of how you drip over his hand. "Think about how much better my cock would stretch you out, hm?"

Each drag of his finger against your velvety walls has you squeezing your eyes shut. The sensation is overwhelming, and when he adds a second digit  you feel your repose crumble. Lust seems to crash over you like a wave, clouding your thought with a hazy desire to just give in and let Yoongi take you, uncaring about the repercussions now as you push down to meet his thrusts so he hits deeper than before.

"Fine." Your words are slurred, too busy chasing the feeling between your legs to see the way it makes Yoongi's eyes light up. "J-just hurry up and fuck me Yoongi."

"Well well," Yoongi settles back against the wall, looking between your bodies to watch the way his fingers disappear into your soaking cunt with an expression almost primal, his own breathing ragged now as he tries to resist turning you over and fucking you into tomorrow then and there. "Never thought I'd actually get to hear my name on your lips like this. Say it again."

A sharp flick of his wrist has you falling against his chest, pulsing around him. "Yoongi!"

"That's right," He licks his lips, free hand unzipping his jeans to relieve the pressure on his length. "Me. Yoongi." The way he mimicks your breathless tone makes a hot blush rise in your cheeks, aware of just how fucked out you must seem right now but too horny to care. "Been waiting for this. Ah shit!"

You take it upon yourself to hurry along the process by reaching into the waistband of his boxers to wrap a hand around the shaft of his cock. It pulses at your touch, the pace of Yoongi's fingers in your cunt stuttering as he flies forward, knuckles on the hand gripping your thigh turning white as he tries to regain some control while you stroke him firmly.

"Fuck your hands. Sinful. Knew they would be. God you're going to kill me if you keep this up, I swear." The worlds tumble from his mouth in one heaving breath as you twist your palm around his sticky head, enjoying the way his thighs twitch with a want to buck into your fist and his nose flares with the effort it takes to resist.

His cock feels girthy in your palm, hot and heavy as you help him shimmy his jeans around his thighs. When his cock slaps back against his stomach, impossibly hard and leaking with anticipation you feel your mouth water.

"Like what you see?" He almost taunts.

You bite your lip. "I don't think you're gonna fit."

It must have brushed his ego because the tip seemed to flush an even deeper shade of red. "Wanna sit on it and find out?"

A nod is all it takes for Yoongi to slide your panties to the side, slapping your hands away to grip the base of his cock and line it up with your entrance.

You both groan in unison when he pushes into your heat, the stretch burning with every inch, fingers clutching the fabric of his tank top at the sensation of finally being full.

"Fuuuck." You see his tongue snake out to wet his bottom lip when his hips finally join flush to yours, hair sticking to his already damp forehead as he allowed you to adjust. "So fucking tight for me, princess."

His cock throbs impossibly deep inside you when you unconsciously clench around it, feeling your face flush as you whimper for him to get on with it and fuck you already.

"Shh, patience." His thumb pulls at your bottom lip, setting it free with a pop. "Move."

At his command you do, bracing yourself on his shoulders. You raise up, feeling every ridge of his length until just the tip remains inside your heat. Then you are slamming back down and flushing at the groan which tumbles from his chest.

"Such a slut, taking my cock so well." His palms feel hot on your hips, dragging you up and down through the motion that has you panting.

Yoongi looks utterly amazed at the visual of you sinking down onto his length, unable to stop the satisfied grin settling into his features when you cry out after a particularly deep thrust. "Imagine if Namjoon could see you now. Falling apart on my cock?"

"Can we — hnng — not talk about my brother when you're in my fucking guts?"

"Why?" A whine leaves you when he slips out of your cunt, grabs you by the ass, and hoists you to your feet, roughly bending you over the desk until your cheek presses against the cold surface. Yoongi tugs your hands behind your back, cock already sinking back into your heat before you can protest at the emptiness. "Worried he'll think you're a slut for taking my cock when I'm the one whose going to fucking end him?"

"Yes!" You cry, unable to hold back now as you feel his cock hit deeper than before with every ram inside you that fills the room with the slapping sound of his pistoning hips, brushing your sweet spot each time and making the coil in your stomach tighten.

God, this is so wrong and you know it. You know it shouldn't feel so good when Yoongi's hands tangle in your hair, pulling you so that your back arches flush against his sweaty chest. Know how many people would be hurt if they knew how much you love it, how you push back into his thrusts, eager for more.

"Shit, you're squeezing so tight." His voice sounds strained now, thrusts turning sloppy as you feel him shudder. "Close, shit. Where can I—"

"Inside me. Want you to f-fill me."

"Holy sh— always wanted to hear you say that. Okay, fuck."

A few more pumps of his cock and he's spilling inside you, the feeling of his release coating your walls enough to have you falling over the edge unexpectedly too, vision turning black as you cum with a cry.

The only sound that fills the silence is your heavy breaths mingling with his as your arms give out. You're silently grateful, as much as you hated to admit it, for the strong arm around your torso that holds you to him when your legs turn to jelly.

Yoongi slips out of you, admiring the way his cum leaks down your trembling thighs. The emptiness makes you keen, clenching around nothing.

"Made such a mess of you, kitten."

The sound of his zipper makes your heart sink, stiffening as he tucks his spent cock back into his pants. For a second you think he's going to leave you like this, shame caressing your cheeks as you envision how fucked out you must look.

But then, Yoongi's palms are back on your thighs as he kicks the chair from under his desk and pushes you roughly onto the cushion. "Think you can go again for me, princess?"

"Wha--?" His swollen lips make you loose your words, the way his tongue tantalizingly caresses your bottom lip drawing a choked whine from your throat instead.

"Fuck, always thought you'd make such pretty noises." It's mumbled gruffly under his breath, like he's confirming it with himself rather than addressing you. He pulls back to stare at you spread out for him, lidded eyes widening at the visual of your skirt pooled around your waist, legs kept open by the rough grip around your thigh that exposes your swollen slit. The way your arousal drips down your inner thighs along with his own release has him swallowing thickly. "Like being filled with my cum, huh? Such a slut."

Yoongi traces his fingers up your inner thighs, thumb applying a gentle pressure to your clit, legs struggling to fall shut around his hand to escape the over stimulation. "P-please Yoongi, I can't."

"You will." It's growled against your neck, hot breath making you shudder. "I know you can take it."

A knee slips between your thighs, holding them open so his fingers can deftly continue their brutal attack on your sensitive folds. Each drag of his knuckle up your slit makes you whimper, the way the pads of his fingers rub firm circles into your clit making it pulse. The feeling is more intense than before, borderline agonizing as a warmth builds in the pit of your stomach again.

Eventually the pain starts to dissipate, turns into something closer to pleasure when you feel a single digit slip into your heat, the slide made easy by the fact that his cock had already stretched you out and his release lubed you up nicely. Each pump makes a lewd squelching noise that has you biting your lip to stop from groaning unabashedly, Yoongi's gaze fixed to the sight of his knuckles disappearing inside you.

When you buck up into his touch again, desperately circling your hips to try and grind your clit against the heel of his hand, Yoongi lets out a dark chuckle. The muscles in your cunt tighten, skin damp with sweat as you fuck yourself on his hand in search of a second high that burns ever closer.

"Look at you, all needy again from just one finger. All fucked out again even after I stretched you out."

With that Yoongi removes his hand from your heat all together, leaving you gasping and clenching around nothing as your release falls farther away, unable to resist the groan of frustration that passes your lips.

"Don't stop!" Your head lolls back against the chair, thighs trembling with desperation to feel his touch again. "I was so close--"

"Suck." Yoongi raises his fingers to your lips. You notice the way they gleam, sticky and white in the studio lighting. The pads of his fingers smear the wetness across your swollen lips as he pushes for entry which you gave to him eagerly, humming around the digits. "Be a good girl, hm?"

He all but groans when your eyes flutter open and lock with his, tongue swirling around his fingers teasingly, enjoying the taste of your own arousal mixed with the saltiness of his cum, almost in sensory overload at the thought of how much better his cock would feel in your throat.

"That's it." A knuckle drags down your cheek possessively, tucks a strand of hair behind your ear. "Good girl."

A sticky trail of spit follows Yoongi's fingers when they leave your mouth with a lewd pop, your breaths coming out shaky and desperate as you watch his eyes zone in on your aching core.

The sight of him dropping to his knees is enough to have you squeezing your eyes shut in anticipation, whimpering when his hot breath grazes over your throbbing clit. "Wanna taste you for myself."

And with that his tongue runs a rough stripe up your slit, eyes falling shut as he hums against your folds contentedly.

"Fuck Yoongi!" Your eyes roll back as he laps a few teasing licks across your bud, body turning to putty when his hands roughly pull you down the chair so that he can attach his mouth to your mound fully.

A guttural moan rises from his chest when you grind your core against his face, knuckles turning white as you clutch he chair like it's the only thing keeping you grounded, stopping you from floating away and losing yourself to the feeling of Yoongi's tongue teasing your already wrecked hole. An impatience rises in your stomach every time his nose grazes your clit, pushing your hips more forcefully to chase the relief it brings.

"So eager." You knew he'd have a smirk on his face if his lips weren't already occupied, wrapping around your clit and sucking with just the right amount of pressure to have your fingers tangling in the blue locks that spill loose from his bandanna now, holding him to your core so that you can rock against his tongue easier.

"Close sweetheart?" The way your chest heaves and little gasps spill past your lips as you chase your high must give away the effect he is having on you. You nod breathlessly and to your surprise Yoongi places a chaste kiss to your folds before pulling back all together, leaving you writhing and desperate for him to make cum for the second time. "Did I give you permission?"

Your heart beats furiously as your release slips away once again. Yoongi only stares at you intently. His lips glisten with a mixture of both of your releases and the thought alone makes your core ache. A loose shake of your head makes his eyes darken, licking some of the dampness from around his lips. "Gotta use your words, baby. Did I say you could cum?"

Dizzy with arousal, your words sound slurred and alien to your own ears. "N-no."

"Good. Now ask nicely."

"Please." It comes out whinier than you anticipate but Yoongi's hands twitch against the flesh of your thighs, giving away the fact that he likes it despite the way his mouth presses into a tight and unforgiving line. "Can I cum? Please?"

A deep laugh leaves his bitten lips. "I don't think you deserve it." His head dips back down between your legs, sloppy kisses pressed to each of your thighs as he edges ever closer to your dripping core. "I want you to count, okay?"

"O-oh, okay." He attacks your clit again, tongue swirling where his teeth graze across the pulsing bud. You're so sensitive that you're sure just the light brushes of his lips will send you over the edge if he keeps going.

"G-gonna cum if you--"

"Don't." The authority in his voice makes you gasp. "Didn't I say to count? One."

"Fuck!" Hot tears streak your cheeks when he pulls back so just his hot breath ghosts across your glistening folds. "I..I was so close!"

"Hey, hey." His hand reaches up to stroke your cheek, a strangely gentle action in comparison to the bruising grip on your thigh. "You're doing so good. Trust me, okay? Wanna make you feel good."

For the second time that night you nod, putting all your trust into him for reasons you are too fucked out to dwell on there and then.

When his tongue snakes out to tease your clenching hole again it draws an agonizing cry from you, the coil already tightening in your belly. You shut your eyes.

"Don't" The hand on your chin tightens, forces you to look down at where his face is buried between your legs, authority lacing his words again. "Keep your eyes on me."

As soon as you lock eyes he gets to work again, humming out a "good girl" before you're losing yourself again to his tongue and he has to plant your feet down roughly to stop your hips from bucking too much.

Before you know it your clit's throbbing again and you're about to fall over the edge but before you can even let Yoongi know he's pulling back with a pant, practically gasping for air but still flashing you a shit eating grin. "Didn't think I was going to let you, did you sweetheart?"

"Two." You manage to breathe. "Two!"

By now you're sick of the teasing, a hand coming between your own legs to finish yourself off, ready to come undone whether Yoongi likes it or not. Before you can get your way, Yoongi's swatting your hand away. "Desperate slut. Wanna cum that bad huh?"

"Please!" You practically whimper.

That seems to do it for him, his eyes glazing over with what you recognise as lust. As if the last of his self control just snapped. Anticipation makes your blood run hot.

"Then make it to three and we'll see if I'm feeling nice."

"Shit!" Yoongi's tongue plunges into your heat with a new found eagerness, thrusting in and out like a man deprived. You manage to maintain eye contact this time, falling apart at the way he groans in appreciation when he tastes himself, fucking your hole with his tongue mercilessly like he wants to get every last drop of his cum.

His thumb finds your clit and the coil in your lower belly tightens too rapidly for you to comprehend, tugging on his hair as you cry out. "Yoongi!"

"Cum for me."

His permission is all it takes to have you falling over the edge into a shattering orgasm that makes your vision turn black, mind wiped of any hesitation and guilt and replaced with a single word, over and over again: Yoongi.

When you finally take a gasping breath, he's there, rubbing encouraging circles into your hips and leaving kisses across your stomach that makes something in your chest warm, heart beating a little faster and not just from your orgasm.

"So fuckin' pretty when you cum." You're sure that's what he murmurs against your damp skin. "Can't believe I had to wait this long."

You furrow your brow. Yoongi sits back against his heels, wiping your arousal from his mouth with the back of his hand and flashing you a lazy but satisfied smile, looking awfully pleased with himself. Like this was his biggest dream come true.

It dawned on you that it probably was in someways -- what better way to get back at an old friend than by fucking his sister?

You suddenly feel like an idiot for letting him charm you, guilt washing through you, flying forward when your chest aches with regret.

Yoongi notices how you pale. "Are you okay? If that was too much then I'm really sorry--"

"Too much?" You suddenly feel exposed beneath his gaze, shuffling around to pull your skirt around your thighs, eyes roaming the room hurriedly for your panties so you can get out of here and quick. "This is all too much, Yoongi."

"What?" He puts a hand on your shoulder to stop you as you brush past him but the way you jolt at the touch makes him rip it away like he touched a live wire.

"I...shouldn't have come here. This was a mistake."

Namjoon's face was embedded in your mind. The way his eyes would crumple with betrayal if he found out you came here at all -- let alone let Yoongi take you so intimately. And you hadn't even tried to stop yourself from falling into him, gave in to your emotions too easily and allowed Yoongi to use you as a swipe at your own brother.

"Why? Didn't seem so upset when you were coming on my tongue." The scoff in Yoongi's voice makes you freeze.

"I can't stop you from hurting Namjoon," Your lip quivers and you have to press your nails into your palms to stop the tears spilling over. "But do you really have to hurt me, too?"

"Y/N, wait--"

Your hands shake as you grab your bag and head for the door. "Shit happened between you and my brother, I get it. But we were friends once, Yoongi. Doesn't that mean anything to you? We can't see each other again."

Your tears are warm in contrast to the cold evening air as you take off into a run, needing to get as far away from Yoongi and the evidence of your own betrayal as possible.

By the time you stumble back into the Big Hit company building, the studio is empty. To your surprise, words seem to flow out of you easier than they ever had before, a heart shaped stain appearing on the formerly empty page of your notebook.

--

Sleepless nights were becoming your norm. You had barely slept a wink since that night, not when every thought was plagued with guilt, the same name running circles around your mind, the same dark eyes and swollen lips and messy hair tauntingly appearing in your mind whenever your head hit the pillow.

Yoongi.

That night with Yoongi felt something like a dream, a hazy memory, the only evidence of it being real the fact that every time you closed your eyes you could feel the way Yoongi's hands burned your skin, how his lips moved perfectly in sync with your own.

As much as you knew it was a mistake, something that should have never happened, you couldn't help the way your heart throbbed every time you replayed it over and over in your mind, repeatedly, until you felt like you were going insane with guilt. It was eating you alive. But sometimes you would remember the way you felt when he was pressed up against you and every ounce of regret felt worth it.

You hated yourself for it, and you knew your brother would hate you to, if he ever found out.

He could never find out.

So, you take to avoiding Namjoon altogether. It wasn't that hard really, you knew his schedule well enough to be a step ahead of him at all times, and it wasn't as if he was enthusiastic about your company to begin with.

Of course sometimes your paths have to cross, but you still can't look Namjoon in the eyes when you slip into one of the Big Hit practice rooms where you know you'll inevitably find him.

The music hits before you even open the door. Namjoon is dressed in casual clothes, cap pulled down low over his face as he raps into a mic, the way his voice husks a tell tale sign that this was not the first time he'd gone over the same verse.

He seems stiffer than usual, all elbows and knees as he scrutinises his own form in the wall to floor mirror. You've seen him perform this choreography flawlessly hundreds of times so your brow furrows with confusion each time his feet miss a beat or his knees literally buckle under the pressure.

On the far side of the room sits a row of men and women in formal suits. Investors, brought in to bet on the contestant most likely to win. They watch Namjoon with intent eyes, some shaking their heads in disapproval, others whispering insults below their breaths.

Is that really Runch Randa? Pfft, he'll never win with footwork like that.

Jimin stands close by, hopping from one foot to the other and wincing with every mistake Namjoon makes. He's been making desperate phone calls for the last week, pleading with any investor he could get ahold of to take a chance on Namjoon which was hard to come by after the royal media fuck up the other day at the after party.

This was Namjoon's only chance at a do over — he needed their money if he wanted to win this thing. The judges were expecting a show from him. Smoke machines and good lighting are expensive, after all.

Namjoon, however, only seems interested in the reactions of your parents sat in the back row, expressions grave. He's chastising himself, self loathing evident in his eyes every time he stutters over a lyric. He knows how hard they worked to establish Big Hit and the disappointment in their eyes as it slowly slips through Namjoon's fingers like sand makes even you feel jittery with nerves.

For a brief moment you're grateful that you are practically invisible in this room, no eyes even glancing your way as you join them. You're glad that Namjoon takes the brunt of the pressure. You never were the strong sibling after all.

The music cuts, Namjoon coming to a stand still. He crumples at the knees, forehead pressed against the polished linoleum floor as he tries to catch his breath.

Jimin slumps into a chair, head in hands. That tells you all you need to know.

Investors leave the room, some sending apologetic looks towards Jimin with a shrug. Others deposit their cheque books back into their briefcases, taking pity on the pleading smiles and firm handshakes from your parents when they apologise for Namjoon's lacking performance. One even pats Namjoon on the back, following the small crowd as they leave the room. "Take a break, buddy."

Nearly everyone has filtered out before Namjoon gets to his feet shakily, slumping down into a seat beside you. You don't acknowledge him, afraid of what you might let slip if you do, fiddling with your camera as a distraction.

It's him who breaks the silence.

"How's the song coming along?" He seems disinterested, clicking his knuckles with no real intention of listening to your response.

"Fine." Another lie. It wasn't coming along at all, really, but now is probably not the best time to tell him when his nerves are already heightened by his failure to gain any crucial investments.

His eye is still slightly swollen from the fist fight a few days ago, a permanent line forming at the bridge of his nose that wasn't there before. You almost didn't recognise him. He stares at his own broken reflection in the steamed practice room mirrors vacantly, like he doesn't  even recognise himself.

A few moments of uncomfortable silence pass. Namjoon's heavy breathing slows to a regular pace.

"I know you went to see him."

It echos menacingly through the room and you stiffen, clutching the floor beneath you for support. Namjoon's hard eyes still don't look your way but you see him analysing your reaction in the mirror. The way your mouth gapes speechlessly tells him everything he needs to know.

"Not even gonna try and deny it?" His head shakes in disbelief.

You throb with guilt. "H-how did you find out?"

"I have people everywhere keeping an eye on him, Y/N. You're lucky the paparazzi didn't catch you, because it sure as shit looked shady. My own sister," He scoffs around the word, as if it tastes bad in his mouth. "Siding with him?"

You place a hand on his forearm, surprised to find him shaking beneath your touch. "I'm not siding with him, Namjoon."

"Then what are you doing?" He roars, ripping his arm away.

What was I doing? You don't even know yourself.

It takes everything inside you to keep the expression on your face neutral, to wipe away the regret and the sadness and the fear that makes your voice wobble.

"We just talked." You had to avert your gaze, scared that somehow your disingenuous eyes would give away what really happened with Yoongi — a little more than talking to say the least.

"About what?"

"The secret, okay? I wanted to protect you—"

"Protect me?" Namjoon pinched the bridge of his nose. "How is meddling in business that doesn't even concern you protecting me, Y/N?"

"Have you forgotten that what you're — we're — doing is against Mic Drop rules? That you could be disqualified or...worse! Get your trophy revoked?"

"Pfft. Yoongi won't say anything.."

"What makes you so sure?"

"It's me he wants to hurt. I know him, Y/N. He'd never forgive himself if you—" He eyes you carefully. "If anyone else got dragged into this. It's between me and him, that's it."

Your head is spinning. You remember a time when things weren't this way, back when Yoongi and Namjoon were friends. Partners. What happened between them that made them so hell bent on destroying one another?

"There are things about Yoongi that you will never understand, Y/N. Things he did that can never be forgiven."

It briefly crosses your mind that if Namjoon could cut Yoongi, his best friend, out of his life, just how easy it would be for him to do the same to you if he found out just how unforgivable your betrayal was. A funny feeling pools in your stomach, a distance settling between you and Namjoon as, to your dismay, you realise just how much you have in common with your brother's enemy.

"But what about you, huh? Why should he forgive you? You took everything from him! I'm not surprised he's back to kick your ass. If you ask me it's him who should be holding a grudge—"

Namjoon's hands clamp onto your shoulders and you recoil from the contact. You're breathing hard, the tears welling in your eyes threatening to spill over any second.

"Listen to me. He's trying to get in your head. You need to stay away from him Y/N. He's bad news."

"Tell me why! Help me understand!"

Namjoon's face is grave. "Some secrets are best kept that way. It'll only make it worse if I tell you."

Before you can protest he's striding across the room and hitting the play button on the boom box in the corner, music blasting from the speakers again.

"Joon—"

"Just stick to taking pictures and stop getting involved in business that doesn't concern you."

Then his body is twisting across the room in time to the music with an intensity he didn't possess before. Like a machine on autopilot.

You shove your camera into your bag and let the door slam shut behind you.

--

"We were a mistake."

The cursor flashing on the empty document on your computer screen feels like it's taunting you.

"Please don't tell my brother what we did."

You've been like this for the last week. Holed up in one of the tiny studios at the Big Hit company building, head swimming with beats and melodies and lyrics that just won't seem to fit together. Not when your mind is preoccupied with a more pressing issue.

"Are you thinking about me as much as I'm thinking about you?"

Yoongi.

God, how are you supposed to write this song for Namjoon when all you can think about is his enemy?

You don't know why you're still so hung up on Yoongi. It's not as if what happened between you meant anything. It was just a spur of the moment mistake. You were both tense and needed someone to help blow off some steam. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Right?

You'll never admit that deep down, a part of you wants to see him again. To check that he's real and that you didn't imagine the whole thing. To see if he is going as crazy as you feel.

That's when the answer hits you. The only way to make this right is to end things once and for all. Tie up all your loose ends and tell Yoongi that you and him were a one time thing. Make sure you were on the same page.

Then maybe you'll be able to concentrate on helping Namjoon beat his ass.

A sudden confidence grips you, standing up abruptly from your desk, alerting the attention of Hoseok who up until now has been quietly engrossed in the track he's producing.

"Where are you going?" He asks.

There's an address burning at the forefront of your mind. You have the route committed to memory. How long it'll take to get there. How long it'll take to get back before anyone else at Big Hit notices your absence.

The only place you knew where you might find Yoongi.

"I won't be gone long. Cover for me if anyone sees I'm gone, 'kay?"

Hoseok eyes you curiously and pulls his headphones to sit around his neck. "O-okay but don't you think you should take an umbrella? It's raining and you might catch a cold — oh."

You don't hear him, the door already slamming behind you.

--

In hindsight, Hoseok was probably right. You're soaked before you even get half way to Yoongi's studio.

Not that you care. Not when there are so many things you want to say to Yoongi. So many questions only he knows the answer to.

Not when you're about to see him again and you're giddy and nervous and scared of the way your heart feels like it's about to bust out of your chest.

You don't really know why you're doing this. For Namjoon's sake? To ease your own guilty conscience? Both?

You shake your head before your confidence can deflate and focus on putting two feet in front of the other instead, trying to take your mind of your destination by focusing on your surroundings. You always liked this part of town, with it's bustling roads and street vendors and buskers. Here it's easy to forget, to just close your eyes and let the buzz of cars and the melody from a nearby street guitarist and the torrent of ice cold rain whisk you away, like life is operating at double the speed but you're too caught up in your own thoughts to care.

So caught up in your own thoughts that you don't spot the guy handing out flyers on the side of the street until your face is colliding with his shoulder.

"Shit, I'm so sorry!"

The guy lets out a groan as you helplessly watch his flyers flutter to the ground like autumn leaves, disintegrating on the rain dampened street.

"Does nobody look where they're going any more? My boss is going to kill me..."

The guy gets to his knees and starts grabbing as many flyers as he can by the handful.

"I'm so sorry, at least let me help?"

You hear him sigh deeply but he doesn't stop you when you drop down beside him.

You stamp on a flyer before it can be whisked away by the breeze. It's ruined. The rain makes the ink bleed into a black blotch in the center of the sodden paper, but if you squint you can just make out the barely legible print.

Live Classical Piano - 7:30 - 9:30 Every Wednesday At The Coffee House!

A throat clears, shaking you back to reality, and a nimble hand thrusts towards you, palm up, waiting for you to deposit the pile of flyers you collected.

"Just gonna stand there all day, sweetheart? Some of us have a job to do."

Shame heats your cheeks. "I wasn't looking where I was going, I'll pay for these —"

Its then, as you let your hood fall down, that the boy stiffens. You look up slowly, meeting a widened pair of piercing grey eyes for the first time. The very same eyes you haven't been able to get out of your head all week.

"Wait...Yoongi?"

It's him. He's here? A coincidence surely but it sure as shit doesn't feel like one.

Just seeing him knocks the breath out of your lungs.

Yoongi blinks a few times, eyes wide with disbelief. Then he's ripping the flyers from your slackened grip and grabbing you by the wrist, dragging you behind him to the side of the street where you're just out of view from passerby's.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" He deadpans.

You take in the way his mint hair clings damply to his forehead, shirt darker in places where droplets of rain soak into the fabric. He's wearing one of those traditional pianist outfits with the funny tuxedo jacket and a little black bow tie strung around his neck that looks like it came from a bad Beethoven Halloween costume. It catches you off guard. No wonder you didn't recognise him before. Not exactly hip hop.

"What are you doing here?"

Yoongi glances over his shoulder warily. "Look, you can't tell anyone you saw me here okay? Did Namjoon send you?"

"What? No--?"

"Just leave, Y/N. Before someone sees you here and tells your precious brother that you've been hanging around with scum like me." He spits, drops your arm and starts in the direction he came from.

"Yoongi, wait!" You blurt, throwing your hands up in frustration. He freezes."Can we...can we just talk?"

Yoongi nearly does a double take. He's usually full of jibes but this catches him off guard. "Talk?"

He backtracks, though you notice the way he keeps a safe distance between you. It feels silly considering how much...closer you were just a few days ago. You wonder, as his eyes look you up and down, if he's thinking about it too. If you crossed his mind as much as he crossed yours.

"Listen, I don't have time for this, I need to go get some more of these flyers..."

Your heart drops, embarrassed for even entertaining the idea that he would want to see you again.

"Please?"

He hesitates. You're sure he's going to blow you off again but then his eyes fill with something scarily close to concern. "Shit, you're shivering."

Your hair hangs in heavy tendrils around your face, droplets of cold rain caressing your cheeks. Your knees knock, arms wrapped around the damp hoodie clinging to your torso to retain some warmth.

Yoongi shrugs off his jacket, despite the way his own teeth chatter. "You're going to catch your death dressed like that."

You stand there dumbly as he holds it out to you. He kicks a stone with the toe of his sneaker awkwardly when you finally wrap it around your shoulders.

"I thought you didn't want to see me again." It's almost accusing but you're sure you hear a trace of a pout in his voice.

"I...I didn't want to." Yoongi looks up. "But I think we should talk about you know...us."

Yoongi bites his lip, like he's having an inner debate. Like he's about to do something he knows he shouldn't.

"Fine. Let's talk. I, uh, guess I have some things I need to say to you too." He scratches the back of his neck. "But not here. Could I—would it be weird if we got coffee or something?"

Definitely weird. That's what you should say. But you don't.

"Okay."

You don't miss the way Yoongi's cheeks turn a little red.

--

The coffee shop Yoongi takes you to is a quaint little place, definitely not the sort of establishment you expected rough-around-the-edges Min Yoongi to frequent with its exposed brick walls and mint green espresso mugs with smiley faces on the side that give it a somewhat cosy appeal.

"I work here," He explains when he sees your eyes roaming. "Needed some extra cash."

You nod. Makes sense. The smell of pumpkin bread and coffee beans is still a welcome relief from the bitter chill outside.

The guy at the counter nods in greeting when Yoongi approaches, already grinding up coffee like he knows his regular order. Yoongi flashes him a tight smile. You figure they know each other, not that Yoongi seems the type to mingle within barista social circles but then again he is full of surprises today.

They share a few hushed whispers, staring not so subtly in the direction of where you sit hunched in one of the corner booths, but you just ignore it by watching a rain drop crawl down the window with rapt attention.

Words barely pass between you and Yoongi until you're both seated, him with a coffee you learn he takes black and you with a much too sugary frappe which you take to stirring with your straw nervously, chin in palm.

It's Yoongi who finally breaks the silence.

"What are you thinking?" He looks at you expectantly over the rim of his mug. For some reason it makes you nervous.

Guilt niggles at your repose. The cafe is alive with indistinguishable chatter, a coffee machine whirring loudly nearby. In reality, you merely blend in to the hubbub. But as you watch Yoongi fiddle with the rings on his fingers in anticipation of your response it's like a hush has fallen and all eyes are on you. Judging, like they know how wrong it is for you to be here.

He's been the only thing on your mind all week but now you're here in front of him it's like your mind is blank.

"Did you tell anyone?"

Yoongi blinks. "Namjoon's secret? I said I wasn't going to say anything—"

"No. Our secret. Us..." It feels foreign, referring to Yoongi and yourself as a unit. You hate to admit it makes your heart beat a little faster. "Namjoon knows."

Yoongi's coffee cup clatters to the table and words rise like bile in your throat, everything you've been bottling up inside tumbling out before you can stop it.

"Namjoon knows! He found out about us somehow and now everything has gone to shit and...I shouldn't even be telling you this! God I'm an idiot! I just don't know what to do—"

Your wailing is interrupted suddenly by a warm hand covering your own. Yoongi's hand. The touch is gentle, comforting, something about the squeeze of reassurance it provides calming your hyperventilating. It feels right.

Why does it feel right?

Yoongi must misinterpret the puzzled look you flash him as a warning he's crossing a boundary because he retracts his arm jerkily, a flush creeping up his neck.

He glosses over the weird moment hastily.

"Slow down, go back. He knows?" There's a lilt of surprise to his voice. Either he's a really good actor or he is just as panicked as you by this news. "And you think I told him?"

"Well, not exactly. He knows some of it — not everything! — he thinks that I just spoke to you after the show...I assumed you would have filled in the blanks by now."

Yoongi laughs breathily. Relieved. It flummoxes you. Shouldn't he be satisfied that his plan to get under Namjoon's skin was a success?

"Y/N, there were hundreds of people at the gig, anyone could have seen us. Jimin and Hoseok probably told him. You act like I tried to seduce you just to get revenge, or something." He gulps back the last of his coffee and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand before his expression suddenly turns serious. "You don't think that right?"

"Isn't that exactly what you did?"

Say no.

Yoongi opens his mouth and then shuts it again. He doesn't deny it.

Something in your chest twists with disappointment. It scares you shitless and you know you have to end this — whatever this is — before there's no turning back.

"Look, it — we — were a stupid mistake okay? I need to know that you're not going to use this against him. It would kill him."

"Mistake?" Yoongi's face drops. "Didn't I say you could trust me?"

It sounds somewhat pained, like he wasn't expecting you to think so lowly of him. His eyes soften with a certain gentleness now and you almost feel bad for thinking they could ever look at you with sinister intentions.

"Do you regret it? What we did?"

You hesitate. You want to say no so badly. But that's not why you came here.

Pull yourself together!

"Yes."

He raises an eyebrow. "You really believe that?"

"Do you regret it?"

"No." His eyes glint. You can't breathe. "Which is exactly why I'll never say a word. I don't play that way. Fair and square remember?"

You're speechless. All you can get out is a measly oh as you stare at the coffee in your cup and process.

"What did Namjoon say anyway?"

Your fingers find the patterns carved into the surface of the wooden table top, feeling the grooves as a distraction from the embarrassment flushing your cheeks. "He told me not to come back and find you."

A wry smile creeps across his face. "But you did?"

Even Yoongi is accusing you now? God, you played right into his hands. He's probably enjoying this. That you broke Namjoon's trust again, all for him.

The worst part is that you can hardly bring yourself to care. Sitting with Yoongi still feels deliciously indulgent — seeing his face again, feeling the heat of his body where your knees brush under the table finally satisfying a craving that had been growing inside you since that night in his studio.

"He doesn't control me."

He just nods. "I get that." His fingers tap in time with the sickeningly happy radio tune that plays overhead, eager to change the subject, like he's aware that he already said too much. "How is Namjoon anyway? You written him a song yet?"

Not allowed. If any information gets leaked about Namjoon's Mic Drop stage the first person he'd blame was you. You had to keep your lips tightly sealed.

You shrink back into your seat. "You know I can't tell you that."

"Okay, then." Yoongi throws his arms over the back of his chair, a cheekiness in his voice, like he's testing the waters to see how you'll react. "Ask me something instead. I'll tell you whatever you want to know. Shoot."

That's allowed, right? Where's the harm. If it doesn't involve Namjoon then it can't hurt him...

"Okay..." You purse your lips, eyes travelling around the dimly lit coffee shop. "Why do you work...here?"

Yoongi nods to the stack of damp flyers beside him. Live classical piano. "I play piano here sometimes." He scratches the back of his neck awkwardly. It's kinda cute. "Needed some spare cash and this was the only place that could take me at such short notice."

"You play piano?"

He nods and you follow his gaze to the grand piano stood unoccupied in the corner. You imagine how Yoongi would look bent over the keys. How his fingers would move across the instrument with concentrated precision. How the tune would mingle with the warmth of the coffee shop on a cold evening.

"I didn't know you like classical music?"

"I don't. Not really." He cocks his head, finding the right words. "Namjoon has investors right? People who just throw money at him?" You nod, somehow ashamed. "Teaching me to play piano was my mom's investment in me. She always said it might come in handy some day."

You nod. "And do you have to wear that stupid costume every time?"

"This?" A snort leaves you when he shoots you a look, a shy smile finding the curve of his lips. "Don't mean to brag but it's a huge hit with the older ladies."

You can't help but laugh when he smugly tugs at the bow tie around his neck, unable to miss how his eyes light up. You share a smile that makes you feel light headed.

"I'd have to see it to believe it."

"Well, you know where to find me if you're ever bored and need a good laugh on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Friday evening." He shifts in his seat. "Or you could just come back to my place, y'know if you wanted to —" You frown, the easiness that had settled between you dissipating as you both sense the inappropriateness of his suggestion. "I know I shouldn't ask, it's just I have a piano and—"

For some reason the rational part of your brain taps out and your heart says fuck it.

"I'd love to."

--

"So, where do you live?" You ask when you finish your drink and nervously copy Yoongi who is already getting to his feet.

"Oh about that...I live in the apartment upstairs actually." He chuckles sheepishly."Cheap rent, you know?"

It takes you by surprise but you don't press.

"Oh. Right."

Yoongi extends a hand towards you. The thud in your chest gets faster when you slide your palm into his and he pulls you behind him to the foot the stairway you had disregarded upon entry, the distressed baby blue door at the top labelled RESIDENTS ONLY seeming strangely inviting.

Yoongi gestures for you to go first and you've barely ascended three steps before a voice rings out behind you, making you freeze like a child caught in a mischievous act.

"Use protection you two! And close the door so that Odengie's innocence isn't compromised this time!"

The barista from before rounds the corner, a tray of empty mugs in his left hand and a cloth for wiping down tables in the other.

You suppress a laugh. "Odengie?"

"His goddamn sugar glider—" He says it more to himself rather than in response to your query, flashing the tousled haired boy an exasperated look. "Really, bro?"

The other man either doesn't notice or doesn't care. "What? He's too young to learn how baby sugar gliders are made." His eyes suddenly flit to you and, as if remembering his manners, he deposits the cloth onto a nearby table and reaches a damp hand through the staircase to shake yours with a friendly smile. "I'm Jin, by the way."

You take it cautiously, wiping your now wet hand on the back of your jeans. "Nice to meet you?"

"Come on," Yoongi is flushed red as he pushes you up the rest of the stairs with a pressure at the small of your back. "We'll be back down in a minute, chill okay?"

Yoongi shoulders his way into the apartment, pulling you across the threshold alongside him, but not before you catch a glimpse of Jin's teasing grin poking around the staircase, words reaching your ears before Yoongi could slam the door shut in time.

"Oh, so it's a quickie? Have fun!"

A laugh escapes your lips, Yoongi pressing his back to the door with a sigh of relief. "Sorry about him. He's my roommate. Kind of came with the apartment, you know?"

You glance around at the small maisonette that unfolds before you curiously. It feels more like a dorm room, a mismatch pile of shoes piled at the entry way, a pair of beanbags substituting a couch surrounding a small gaming set up littered with empty pizza boxes you presume belong to Seokjin.

"Ah. He's part of the furniture then."

The other corner of the room is littered with an assortment of vinyls strewn out beside a pair of speakers and a record player, the needle still hovering over the grooves of an album by an artist you don't recognise. Yoongi's touch to the decor, you suppose.

"Guess you could say that. He's not so bad once you get over the uh...small rodents."

You trail behind Yoongi into what you assume is his bedroom, if the frameless mattress which lay on the floor in the corner beneath the window with sheets unmade and strewn across the floor messily was anything to go by.

He flicks on the set of fairy lights tacked to the wall, a surprisingly homely touch that makes you think Yoongi isn't as cold as you believe him to be.

Yoongi approaches a clothes rack stuffed with a variety of stage outfits. "Here." He pulls an oversized hoodie from one of the hangers, throwing it at you from across the room. "You're clothes are still wet. Wouldn't want to catch a cold. You can wear this until they dry."

"O-Okay." You stand there dumbly. He isn't expecting you to strip right in front of him, is he?

He seems to sense your hesitance, turning around so his back is to you with wide eyes. He plays it off by grabbing a selection of clothing for himself, shuffling past you with eyes trained to the ground. "I'll use the bathroom. Tell me when you're done."

You are soaked through to your underwear but you leave them on since Yoongi probably didn't have a spare pair of panties laying around you could borrow. The fabric of his hoodie is soft and warm when it slips over your otherwise bare skin and you breath in the woody scent that seems to embrace your entire body, ignoring the way it makes your head dizzy, and roll up the large sleeves to free your hands before calling to him that you are done.

When he re-enters the room, pulling a grey beanie over his head haphazardly to match the much more Yoongi appropriate outfit of a simple white tee and sweats, his breath hitches at your bare legs peeking out from the bottom of the garment. His lingering stare makes you hug your torso self consciously, eyes never leaving you even as he grabs the pile of sodden clothing you discarded earlier and lays them neatly over the radiator to dry.

You practically hear the way he swallows awkwardly when his eyes lock with yours, caught in the act. He's quick to lighten the mood.

"Well...here she is."

You turn as he moves across the room to the piano occupying the opposite wall, wood stained dark but bleached slightly in places by the stream of sunlight which washes its surface from the opposite window. The stool beneath it scrapes against the scuffed floor boards when Yoongi makes enough space to seat himself on top of the blue velour cushion.

"I know it's not much — nothing like you're used to I mean, but it makes music just the same."

He must take the way you hang back near the door frame as a sign of your distaste which couldn't have been further from reality; it's simply to allow you to study the way Yoongi sits with his back perfectly straight, fingers lingering over the keys like he knows the piano as well as an old friend. And, though you'll never admit it, the way your heart thumps at the thought of being in Yoongi's most private space.

"Where did you get it?"

"It was my mother's." The breath you suck in is slightly too harsh. "Like I said earlier, she liked to play, before she..."

Died. The word never passes between his lips but it sits heavy in the air like a weight.

Yoongi's eyes avert yours so you don't press any further, instead focusing your attention to the pattern of scratches embedded into the piano's lid, unable to help the way your fingers trace the coffee cup rings littering the surface like rugged halos. "It's beautiful."

The side panel is littered with lines, carved deeply into the wood with a penknife; a makeshift height chart like the one you had on the back of your bedroom door as a kid. Your drop to your knees to squint at the nearly illegible words scrawled next to the markings that ascend almsot to the top of the instrument.

Yoongi aged 3...Yoongi aged 4...Yoongi aged 5...

All the way until Yoongi aged 7 where they stop completely.

You frown but he lets out a soft laugh, somewhat pained. "That's when she got sick. I grew up quickly after that."

Straightening up, you swallow thickly, unsure what to say, so you just settle for changing the subject instead.

"So, what can you play?"

Yoongi fiddles with the open sheet music book on the piano stand. His fingers tremble slightly as he turns the worn pages before finally settling on a sheet that is lightly crumpled and ripped around the edges and coffee stained and ferociously dog eared at the corners. Tell tale signs that he had played this piece before, over and over again.

His favourite, you perceive.

Sure, he had literally fucked you into next week already but your hands get clammy at the knowledge that Yoongi feels comfortable enough to share such an intimate tidbit about himself with you. Music means a lot to him after all. Anyone can see that.

You catch a glimpse of the piece over his shoulder.

Romeo and Juliet - Love Theme.

Yoongi notices how you raise a brow at his choice.

"I know I said I don't like classical music but this arrangement is different. You know the story right?"

High school had given you enough general knowledge about Romeo and Juliet for you to nod in confirmation.

"It's like you can feel the passion they have for each other in every note, you know? Like nothing could ever come between them."

His words are so earnest they make your heart ache. You hadn't put him down as the hopeless romantic type.

"I mean not really. They still die in the end." You counter. He frowns.

"But only because of their fucked up families. It's their feud that comes between them in the end. This piece comes before all the shitty parts. If you play it over and over again it's like they never stop loving one another."

His hands fold in his lap and he sucks in a bashful breath, nose scrunching with embarrassment at his dramatic outburst. "It's stupid. I know. Forget I said it."

"No, no I understand completely. Maybe if they weren't so busy fighting they could have listened to their hearts. Right?"

"Right." He scoots across the piano stool, patting the empty space beside him with an encouraging look. "Sit."

Like a magnet you find yourself drawn to his side, shivering when his shoulder brushes yours. His arms hover over the piano, poised and relaxed, concentration etched into the hard lines of his face.

"Ready?"

You can only nod. And then he starts to play.

Yoongi's fingertips eagerly caress the keys of his piano, eyes lifting from the sheet music to gauge your reaction while his hands carry the melody on autopilot, the pretty silver rings he dons glinting with every movement. His neck is bent slightly, allowing his head to bob and sway along with the rise and fall of the rhythm, eyes screwing shut as the composition reaches its most pivotal sequence.

He's practically raking the keys now, pure passion and violent emotion splashing every inch of the room. You shut your own eyes, hands clutching the bottom of the stool until your knuckles whiten, like you might float away with the beautiful tune if you don't ground yourself.

When he said you could feel passion with every note he wasn't wrong. You could feel his passion clear as day.

Slowly, he comes back down from his high, wrists coming to a standstill. All he can do is take in heaving, ragged breaths, body slumped down, spent with the sheer effort expelled in his performance. Oxygen is lodged in your own lungs as you take in how how his bangs stick to the beads of sweat prevalent on his forehead

You recover before he does, unconsciously fumbling around in your tote bag, hands curling around the Polaroid camera you bring everywhere just in case a photo opportunity arises.

They never usually do. Until now.

"Stay like that." The viewfinder raises to your eye and you snap a shot of him with precision, the soft click that emanates through the room making Yoongi's eyes snap open.

The picture dispenses from the camera, black square fading out to reveal a hazy image as you shake it back and forth. Yoongi, face relaxed, lashes pressed softly to the tops of his cheeks with a lazy smile.

It's the Yoongi you remember. Your Yoongi.

He smirks when you slide it into the back pocket of your jeans, cheeks glowing with a contentedness you hadn't seen for a long time. "You always did like taking pictures of me."

"Shut up."

When your hand tentatively closes over his where it still rests on the piano, it's his turn to shoot you a curious look. With a shaky breath you flip his palm, slotting your fingers together perfectly, and lean across the piano to press your lips against his.

His mouth is softer than you remember, not attacking with the rich taste of lust but rather caressing your lips gently, sweetly. Taking your time to commit each tickle of breath against your nose, each slide of his bottom lip between yours, to memory. Everything other than the dizzying sensation of his tongue tracing your bottom lip disappears. All your worries, reluctances, regrets,  just dissolving like the setting sun.

Everything feels safe here with him. Everything feels right.

It barely lasts a minute, not much more than a delicate brush really, but when he pulls back you are already breathless, immediately starved of the satisfaction that came from finally feeling him against you again, tasting the spearmint mixed with something so inherently Yoongi you didn't quite realise how much you were craving.

Yoongi sighs blissfully. You need more.

Your hands tangle in the front of his T-shirt but before you can pepper his mouth with a series of further eager kisses, his free hand plants on your shoulder and pushes you back carefully.

"About what you said the other night." His eyes are wide with concern, trained to your lips, resisting the urge to capture them again with all his self control. It made your heart flip. "I don't want to hurt you Y/N. We don't have to do this—"

"I want to. So bad." His thumb caresses your knuckles. "I trust you."

In that moment, it's true. You trust him more than you've ever trusted anything in the world.

"But Namjoon..."

His words fade out when you lean in for another reassuring peck. Namjoon's name falling from Yoongi's lips doesn't make your skin crawl like it usually did. In fact you feel nothing at the mention of your brother.

"To hell with Namjoon. I'm a big girl. I know what I want."

Yoongi grins, hand coming to cup your cheek tentatively, eyes crinkling with what you could only describe as liberation. "And what's that?"

Your eyes narrow in on his parted mouth again.

"You."

His eyes darken and then his hands are tangling in your hair and pulling your chest flush to his in a kiss that is far rougher than before. No more beating around the bush. Just passion as you crawl into his lap and kiss him like it's the first time — or perhaps, more accurately, the last time. Like the world will end if you part for a single breath.

Fingers find the hem of his shirt and you're pulling it up his torso greedily, heart beating a little faster when you feel his warm skin beneath your fingertips. His chest is softer than you expect, a perfect contrast to the strong arms wrapping around your waist to pull you back to his lips.

It's not long before you feel his pants fill out underneath you. The feeling is all too familiar, reminding you of how it felt to be above him like this in his studio. That night feels like a life time away as his hands grab your hips and press you roughly down onto his crotch.

You both groan out at the feeling, something intense, something primal, heating up between your legs as you circle his clothed length, want and need blending into one as your core dampens with every twist of your hips.

Yoongi breaks away from your lips with a gasp when your fingers reach between your body and find the sensitive head of his cock, a wet patch forming on his sweats. His eyes are shut, head thrown back against the piano top as he bites into his thumb to stop little moans tumbling from his swollen lips.

He shoots upright when you slide down his torso, hardwood cold against your bare knees, fingers fumbling with the strings of his pants. When you finally get them open and slip your hand beneath the waistband, Yoongi all but groans at the feel of your cool palm grabbing his hot cock skin on skin.

You shimmy his sweats around his thighs, mouth practically watering as you eye up his pulsing length, unable to resist stroking it firmly with your fist. A hand covers yours.

"Wait!" A strangled noise of agony rips from his chest when your grip loosens, desperate to buck up into your touch but managing to stay firmly planted to the stool in favour of gaining your consent. "Are you sure?"

You scoff teasingly. "Would I be on my knees if I wasn't?"

His laugh is breathy, half a moan as you pick up your pace again. "Just nervous — ah!" A soft kitten lick to the reddened tip of his cock has him flying forward, knuckles white as they grip your shoulder.

"Min Yoongi gets nervous?" The precum that coats your tongue is salty, makes you itch to take him into your mouth fully.

"Shut up." His breathing is ragged, hands hovering over your hair. "Didn't think this would happen again. Needs to be perfect — holy fuck Y/N."

You give no warning before you sink down on his length, his hands finally tangling in your hair and tugging lightly when your nose presses to his pubic bone, groaning around him when you feel the head of his cock pulsing in the back of your throat.

"So warm, shit."

You come up for air, lips wrapping around his head and enjoying the way his thighs trembled when your tongue runs teasingly along the underside of his cock. His hand pushes at the back of your head, forcing his length further down your throat than you're expecting until you gag around his girth.

"Shit, sorry."

The groan that follows doesn't sound very apologetic though. The visual of your drool coating his painfully hard length mixed with the sensation of your warm mouth engulfing him whole nearly has him blowing his load then and there, utterly fucked out and oblivious to the string of groans leaving his lips when you finally come up for air. Tears streak your cheeks and Yoongi wipes them away with his knuckle tenderly.

"God, look at you." He's breathless, amazed. "C'mere."

A hand cups your elbow, pulling you to your feet so he can connect your lips again, humming when he tastes himself on your tongue. His hands are all over you now as he wraps you in his arms and stumbles backwards your back is pressed to the mattress in the corner. It dips in the middle when he crawls over you, tucking away strands of hair that fan around your face like a halo before his mouth is on you again like he can't quite help himself.

A series of open mouthed kisses caress your jaw, then your neck, all the way down your chest. Yoongi's eyes flick up to watch your face, lips parted with want as his hands fiddled with the hem of his own much too big hoodie swaddling your body.

"Can I?"

Your hand threads into his hair encouragingly. "Please."

A gasp passes his lips when he finally pulls the fabric over your head, eyes following his curious calloused hands as they explore the expanse of skin exposed to him now you're left in just your bra and panties.

"So beautiful." He traces his fingers down your shoulders, down the valley of your breasts, across your stomach. The light and delicate touches have you shivering, writhing for more. Almost as desperate to feel him everywhere as he is to worship every inch of you.

His touch stops at the hem of your panties. You're already working on the clasp of your bra, a violent nod the only permission he needs to drag the fabric agonisingly slow down your legs, unhooking them from your ankles carefully.

When he looks back up you are completely bare, laid out beneath the stream of half-sun-half-moon bathing the room.

Yoongi pounces, lips wrapping around one of your nipples greedily, tongue swirling around the hardened bud until you're gasping his name over and over.

"Can't believe you're letting me see you like this."

Hands wrap around your thighs, legs falling open, the way he licks his lips as he takes in your glistening heat not going unnoticed.

Yoongi's head shakes in disbelief, mumbling words which sound an awful lot like so pretty and fucking gorgeous as his head dips and he continues his trail of earlier kisses, tongue laving over your inner thighs and edging ever closer to your aching core.

"W-wait." Yoongi freezes and comes up to meet your face. His breath is hot against your cheek, eyes scanning your face for hesitation.

"What is it? Are you okay?" He's frantic, swallowing nervously as his palms cup your face. "Want to take care of you this time. What is it? Tell me."

"I'm fine. More than fine." You brush your noses together. It makes him smile. "Just want to feel you, that's all. Now."

Yoongi lets out a dramatic sigh, voice high and whiny. "But I've been dreaming about how you taste for days, Y/N. Literally. Dreaming about it."

You don't mention how you've been replaying the visual of his lips wrapped around your clit and edging you over and over again since it happened, just stroke his cheek in mutual understanding.

"Too bad. You'll just have to wait until next time." His features light up at the promise of a next time. Another moment like this, just you and him.

His face falls into the crook of your neck, nibbling the sensitive skin teasingly as a hand trails between your legs. When the pads of his fingers circle your entrance you whimper, clit throbbing with want when his hand pulls away nearly as quick as it came.

The want only intensifies when he brings two of his arousal coated digits to his mouth with closed eyes, guttural moan vibrating your flush chests when he savours the taste of your arousal coating his fingers.

"Next time." He hums and you are sure you nearly came untouched.

"Need you. Now."

He wastes no time taking his achingly hard cock into his fist, placing a supportive hand on your hip as he lines himself up with your entrance. You whine when he drags the tip up and down your slit, giving some brief but much needed stimulation to your clit.

Before he can push inside though you place a hand on his chest to stop him. He doesn't have time to dote on you again though because without further ado you're whipping off the beanie that still sits snugly around his head, throwing it across the room with a smirk.

His eyes glint fondly. "Whoops."

The room has grown darker by now, only lit by the gentle sparkle of the fairy lights and Yoongi has to feel around in the sheets to find your hand. In the same moment he tangles your fingers together beside your face, he pushes inside with a gasp.

Unlike the first time in his studio, Yoongi is in no rush. He wants to savour it. He fills you slowly, so that you can feel every ridge of his length dragging against your velvety walls. When he finally bottoms out and your hips press flush together, you squeeze his hand. Tight. It's this small action that tells him everything he needs to know. Explains the funny feeling in your chest without ever saying the words.

Your legs wrap around his back automatically when his hips begin to rock, angling your body so that he hits so deep with every thrust it steals the breath straight from your lips. Arousal drips from your heat down onto the bed sheets, making each slide deliciously smooth.

"Yoongi I.." It almost slips from your lips. The deepest, darkest secret that you haven't quite admitted to yourself yet.

Yoongi just ups his pace, exchanging words for actions to show you he feels the same. Fucking you a little harder, a little deeper. More sincerely. It compensates for the words neither of you know how to say.

"I know." You feel so full, so warm when he places his forearms at either side of your head to press you into the mattress. "I know."

All the yearning inside you disappears. All that matters is you and Yoongi now, nails scratching up his back, his forehead pressing to yours so that your moans mingle together until you can't tell whose was whose any more.

With a fucked out moan against your lips he's spilling inside you, sending you over the edge with him, hissing as you clench tightly around his cock.

All thoughts are wiped from your mind. Apart from the sensation of his cheek pressed to your chest, hot breath against your collar bone. How you can't believe you lived in a world without Yoongi in it. How you never want to go without him again. How you don't think you can deny how Yoongi makes you feel anymore even if you tried.

The stars behind your eyes fade, and when you come back down, Yoongi is hovering over your body, lips parted and eyes blown out, mesmerised. He's sweaty and smiling and you can feel the way his heart beats in time with yours.

"You okay?"

"Never better." His smile stretches into a grin when your words slur together. "—'m so happy."

A soft, chaste kiss is pressed to your forehead and before you know it Yoongi is tangling your legs together and wrapping the sheets around your bodies, entwined as one.

Me too. You knew that's what he meant. You'd dwell on it another time. For now your eyes are falling shut, satisfied as you inhale Yoongi's scent on the sheets...

Before a blissful slumber could take you away, you're interrupted by a series of knocks against the bedroom door. Both you and Yoongi shoot upright, exchanging a puzzled glance.

"I thought you said it was gonna be a quickie. Come on man, I need to use the bathroom!"

Yoongi groans into the pillow.

"That's it. I'm getting a new roommate."

--

As the weeks go by you start spending less and less time at the Big Hit office, turning up late to your shifts or clocking out before they were up. The perks of being employed by your parents is that they can't fire you in good conscience, you suppose.

Instead you increasingly find yourself at Yoongi's apartment, writing lyrics at the piano when he was around (sometimes even when he wasn't) or down in the coffee shop, helping yourself to hot chocolate refills on your work breaks. Jin joked that you'd need to start paying rent soon.

Just like how you were able to pick apart each of the boys' influence on the apartment the first time you went there, your own presence was becoming ever apparent.

In the way you spilled sugar on the counter when making tea and always forgot to clean it up, much to Jin's dismay. How some of your own hoodies and pyjama pants had begun to smell like Yoongi's washing powder, ending up folded neatly in his laundry basket and stowed away on his clothing rack like they belonged there. The way his piano top was littered with open notebooks filled with your messy scrawl and pens with the caps lost and half empty mugs stained around the rim with your chapstick.

Yoongi seemed wary at first, cautious to let you get too comfortable around him, dropping you home late at night once the lights in your house switched out and you knew it was safe to go inside.

But eventually he started to crave the little things that reminded him of you, unable to stop the smiles which crept onto his face as he loaded the dishwasher with the mugs and carried you to bed when you fell asleep at the piano stool.

Your bed. That's what you'd taken to calling it now.

Yoongi hated to admit that he was weak. When he got up on stage he was Gloss, hard faced and brazen and ruthless. But here with you, the facade he tried to uphold seemed to crumble into nothing. And the worst part was that he loved it.

Even when he was performing at the club or practicing for the competition, his thoughts always ended up wandering back to you. There were times when your schedules clashed or it was too risky to see each other or times you were simply too exhausted once you got home, falling into bed as soon as you crossed the threshold. But the knowledge that you were always there waiting for each other became the only safe place he knew and that was enough.

Of course you still had to oversee Namjoon's Mic Drop stage, it was your job after all, but that never seemed to come up when you were together. Just watching movies on his laptop or laughing at ungodly hours while you filled each other in on anecdotes that happened in the time you were apart, retreating beneath the sheets when Jin banged on the wall because it was four in the morning so would you please shut the fuck up.

For the first time in a long time you felt happy. Like you belonged somewhere that was all your own. No more answering to Namjoon or your parents. Just your own heart. And it always seemed to lead you back here to Yoongi, straight into his arms.

And as much as you hated yourself for it, you could feel your resentment for Namjoon growing. You'd be damned if you let him take this away from you, like he'd taken everything else.

Eventually, you stopped crawling through your bedroom window like a goddamn teenager and your parents stopped questioning why you never came home anymore. The cracks between you became a chasm. And right now, Yoongi was the band aid holding you together.

--

When Yoongi returns home later than usual, he's not even surprised when he ascends the stairs and find you and Jin laid out on the bean bags, already tipsy on red wine and giggling at his disgruntled expression.

That is until you take in the weary lines that had etched their way into his forehead, how his eyes look sunken and puffy. How his hands tremble against your waist when you pull him into your arms, body swaying back and forth lightly in your grasp like he could topple over any second.

You know what overworked looks like — after all, you had tended to Namjoon plenty of times when he refused to stop at his limits, barraging through them instead, a habit Yoongi also seemed to possess.

Ordered to stay on bed rest, Yoongi slumps face down into his pillow, letting out a long groan of relief when the mattress cushions his aching limbs.

You're already tucking him in, half way to the door to prepare him a hot cup of honey and lemon to soothe the husk in his throat from rapping too aggressively when his arms loop around your waist and pull you down to snuggle into the crook of your neck contentedly.

"Yoongi, let me go." It's futile, his grip is firm and he is already kicking the sheets over your body and pressing his cheek to the left side of your chest where you're sure he can hear how your heart races, a pout evident in your voice. "I want to take care of you."

"Mmf you are.." Words already slurring with the beginnings of sleep, he smiles groggily when you fall slack in his grasp and press your cheek to the top of his head in defeat. "Stroke my hair please?"

As soon as your fingers tangle in his blue locks he lets out a sigh of relief, like he'd been waiting to feel the touch all day.

Watching his face relax as he drifts off, you bask in the warmth of fulfilment singing your very nerve ending and silently wish that you can stay like this forever.

Just you and Yoongi against the world.

At some point your own eyes fall shut.

--

You're awoken by the sounds of muffled sobs.

The dark room momentarily disorientates you, heart quickening as you realise you're not in your own bed. Eventually your eyes adjust to the blackness, taking in the piano stood sturdily in the corner, breathing in the scent lingering on the pillow beneath your cheek and you're washed with a wave of comfort.

"Yoongi?" You croak.

The sheets are ripped from your body as Yoongi's form shoots upright. His bare back is damp with sweat, visible in the moonlight creeping through the slanted blinds, mattress rocking slightly with every sob that wracks his frame.

"Go back to sleep." His voice is gruff , but forcibly so and you hear the tremor lurking below the surface.

You sit up beside him. His face is buried in his palms. The sight makes your heart ache.

"Are you okay?" You're still new to this. Sure you're tangled up in his sheets most nights but you're still learning the ropes, unsure how best to comfort him. You settle for gently patting his shoulder, wincing at how cold and distant the action feels.

"I said go back to sleep." When his face emerges from between his hands you see the tell tale tracks of tears streaking his cheeks. Even when he wipes his face with the back of his palm there's a steady stream of them dripping down his chin.

"Is that what you really want?"

Yoongi presses his mouth together in a tight line, eyes black and empty as he tilts his head back and takes a shaky breath. That's when he crumbles. "Please stay."

"Oh, Yoongi." It's barely a whisper, afraid that if you speak too loud he'll shatter into a million pieces. He's like a scared kid, knees hugged to his chest as he wipes the hot tears from his eyes with a hard rub of his knuckles.

Yoongi stiffens when you fumble under the sheets to find his hand. You think he might pull away as you link your fingers with his but to your surprise he pulls your interlocked palms into his lap and squeezes so hard you feel the circulation in your fingers cutting off. The way he chokes back another sob stops you from complaining though, already cupping his cheek and tilting his face towards yours with your free hand.

"Why are you doing this?" His eyes squeeze shut, fresh tears sliding down his face and doing nothing to hide the slight tinge of red beneath them that tell you he's embarrassed to be seen like this. Vulnerable, so unlike the hard faced Yoongi you had come to know.

"Because I want to." You squeeze his hand and feel him squeeze back weakly. "You can tell me anything, you know."

Pressing his forehead to yours, Yoongi leans down and captures your lips between his own. I know, it says.

This is different to the way he usually kisses you. There's no hunger, no hands on your neck and your thighs that set you alight with desire. Just a sense of yearning, like he wants to be closer to you, the plump flesh of his lips slotting between yours like a perfect puzzle piece, slightly salty from his tears. It makes you ache all over, like you're somehow connected and sharing his pain.

He pulls away, sharp exhales tickling your face as he scans your eyes for any sign of hesitation, any sign that you're going to leave him here alone. This is side of Yoongi that you have never seen before. He always said he isn't good with words and you know better than anyone that he hated admitting that he needed someone. This was is his way saying he needs you.

And in that moment you feel a piece of your heart flutter into his hands.

"Nightmares." He mumbles, swallowing thickly and tipping his head back against the headboard, expression pained "Just nightmares."

"Want to talk about it?" You sit back next to him, and when he rolls his neck to face you. He looks unreadable again. Eyes void. You half think he's going to push you away, turn over and fall back asleep and leave you to stare at the ceiling alone with the silence.

But he doesn't. Instead he lets out a deep sigh, shaking his head at himself as he pulls you into his arms, stroking your cheek fondly when your head comes to rest on his chest, burying his nose in your hair.

"Why can't I say no to you?"

"Guess I have that affect on people."

He snorts lightly, the first proper reaction he'd given you and you're pleased at his amusement. Pleased you were able to comfort him somewhat.

Unspoken words cloak a heavy silence for what feels like hours, just tracing mindless patterns on his arm and listening to the way his heart slows to a normal pace beneath your cheek, grip around your torso never faltering. When his breaths dwindle to soft puffs against your temple you think he's already drifted off.

Until, "Do you remember when I convinced Namjoon to sign up for Mic Drop the first time. The day after my mom died?" His voice is gravelly, both with sleep and a sign of his withheld tears.

"Of course I do." You swivel in his arms to blink up at him curiously. Sure you remembered. After the funeral, your parents had taken Yoongi in — a repayment they called it. For helping Namjoon achieve his dreams. Of course, that was before you realised just how much Yoongi would help.

Yoongi became a part of the family for a short while. An extra seat at family dinners. Another pair of shoes by the front door. Another bed in Namjoon's room.

"Back then, I was too trusting. I thought that they wanted to help me...I thought that they saw me as their son." He spits the word with the bitterness of a man who was stripped of the title of 'son' before he knew what it really meant.

You think back to how Namjoon and Yoongi used to be. Joined at the hip, everyone used to say. Brothers.

"I think they did—"

"No." He stiffens. You bite your lip. "Namjoon never cared about me. He just saw me as a way to get to the top. And it worked."

You feel a pang in your chest.

"I'm sorry, he's your brother. I shouldn't be talking about this with you."

Yoongi almost turns away but you stop him by pressing your lips to his briefly. Telling him its okay. You understand.

"The nightmares." You say with an eagerness to change to subject before you could dwell on it too hard. Before you could admit to yourself that Yoongi was right. "You didn't say what they were about?"

"I'm getting there." He lets out a strained chuckle and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear. The action makes you shiver.

"The last time I saw my mother she said that she wasn't scared to die. She was just scared that she'd miss seeing me on the stage. She was the only one who believed in me." The next words come out choked. "She said that if she couldn't be there to see it then I needed to make as many goddamn people watch me lift that trophy as I could."

Mic Drop was never about the fame for Yoongi after all. It always ran deeper than that; a need not a want. A vulnerable promise left unfulfilled.

The realisation makes you blanch. All this time, all these years, you hadn't been able to see the real greed right in front of your eyes; your own brother.

The image of Yoongi, crumpled and broken on that fateful day all those years ago makes its way to the forefront of your mind.

The same anger flashes across his face now. "Namjoon took that from me. I don't care about the fans or the money or the trophy — none of that shit! He took my dream Y/N. Do you understand how that feels?"

You find yourself nodding, slowly at first and then with vigour as the dam inside you breaks and your own tears flood. "I do. I understand."

And you do. You understand why Yoongi is so determined to win Mic Drop. You understand why he hates Namjoon as much as he does. You understand how it feels to always fall second best to Namjoon, to be outcasted.

"I keep forgetting her face. I can't hear her voice in my head anymore." Yoongi's crying again now, heavy sobs no longer able to be contained. "But in the dreams she's so clear. The disappointment in her eyes, its so clear, Y/N." His words are interrupted by hiccups that leave him gasping.

"I'm sorry." You whisper once he calms. It's all you know how to say.

"Not your fault." He flashes you a watery smile, wiping away the tear on your cheek with his knuckle. It makes your heart flutter, even despite the guilt weighing on your shoulders.

You feel useless. It wasn't your fault directly but you couldn't help but feel like you wronged Yoongi. All of this happened right in front of your eyes but you were too blinded by Namjoon's broken promises to see it. All this time you had let Namjoon make you think Yoongi was the enemy.

"I'm here now." Hands plant on either side of his face, eyes meeting his. "I believe in you."

He doesn't need to say anything. The way he kisses you speaks louder than words.

All you can do now is hold him, tangling your legs with his and pulling the covers over your intertwined bodies, stroke his cheek with your thumb and pepper kisses to his strained forehead which relaxes beneath your affections.

"I'll make this right." You whisper into his hair after his eyes flutter closed and the sun starts peeking through the window, watching dust particles floating in a stream of light in the room's golden glow through lidded eyes. "I promise."

--

"I like this." Jimin nods enthusiastically along to the track playing through the headphones Namjoon placed over his ears. "Sounds like a hit to me."

Namjoon's face contorts into a scowl. He disagrees, obviously, if the disgusted shake of his head is any indication.

Mic Drop is just a few days away and Namjoon had decided to scrap his entire stage after Jimin scored a couple big last minute investors who suggested he do something new, something exciting. Something that pushed Runch Randa's limits.

It was a bold move, this close to the big day. But Namjoon was cocky, said that he had enough experience in the industry to win in his sleep. Practice was a waste of time anyway.

"Next one." He waves his hand, barely even glancing in your direction as you press a button that cuts off the track and makes another one start playing.

The bass is louder in this one and it makes Jimin startle backwards, the headphone jack slipping loose so the music plays through the speakers instead.

"Hoseok and I still need to put the finishing touches on this one but it's pretty catchy—"

Namjoon cuts you off with a sharp no, it was too upbeat for his Mic Drop performance. Said he needed something with grit, something that would make the judges feel something.

"Let me see that." He gestures for you to get up, slumping down into the chair you occupied and slotting himself beneath the studio desk to scroll through the open folder on the computer screen.

He skims through countless tracks, demoed and ready to be recorded at Namjoon's disposal — you were something of a writing machine, always scribbling down lyrics on receipts from the store or on the back of your hand and paired with Hoseok you were a dream team; he always seemed to find a beat that fit perfectly. Unfortunately Namjoon's straight face gives away his disinterest in any of them.

"None of these will work." Namjoon throws the keyboard down with a force that makes you wince, jaw tightening as he presses his knuckles to his eyes in frustration. "I'm going to fucking lose."

You are about to tell him to write the fucking track himself like everyone else if none of yours were good enough for him but Jimin flashes you a glance. Don't make things worse.

You settle instead for a hand on his shoulder. He tenses at your touch. It had been a while since you'd been in the same room for longer than ten minutes and when you take in the gauntness of his cheekbones you briefly wonder if he's been eating properly. He always did forget when you weren't around to remind him.

You suck in a breath to give you strength. "There must be one that you like."

His lips purse and he disgruntledly goes back to scrolling again, clicking on a couple titles that draw his interest. You and Jimin let out simultaneous sighs of relief.

"What's this?" Namjoon's eyes narrow as he presses play on a track that sends you flying forward, heart in your mouth and colour leaving your face as a song plays that you swore to never show to anyone.

Yoongi's song. The one you wrote after that night in his studio. Probably the best song you had ever written.

"That's not — I was supposed to delete that one." The heat in your cheeks as you push him aside roughly to wrestle with the pause button has you hiding behind your hair, as if he would somehow know this wasn't just an ordinary song. That it was a song about his enemy, for god's sake.

Namjoon's slaps you away from the computer, head bobbing to the beat and you fall back into your seat in defeat, fingers crossed behind your back that he would hate it as much as the others.

"I love it."

Oh no.

"This is the one!"

Shit shit shit!

"A-are you sure?" You're rambling now, words slipping out way too fast and Jimin seems puzzled at your lack of elation at Namjoon's decisiveness. "I'm sure I could write something much better if you just give me some more time—"

Namjoon's arms pull you into a tight embrace before you can finish, your nose ending up smushed against his chest as he practically vibrates with excitement. Your body goes stiff, hands dangling at your sides awkwardly. Considering Namjoon's coldness towards you as of late his sudden display of affection takes you by surprise. Mostly because despite your physical closeness it only makes you feel even more distant from your brother.

A sigh of relief escapes when he finally sets you free, only to be replaced with pure horror as you watch him stick a USB drive into the computer and load up the song before sliding it in his back pocket with a grin while you have no choice but to stand there helplessly.

"I'm totally gonna win!" His change in attitude is abrupt but seems to soothe Jimin who nods enthusiastically. You feel sick. "I can't wait to see the look on Yoongi's face when he hears this shit."

The smirk on his face washes you with dread. If only he knew.

Yoongi was right. Secrets always find a way to come and bite you in the ass.

--

Every rap of your knuckles against the run down studio door seems to echo ominously through the alley like an omen.

"Y/N?"

As soon as the bolt wrangles across and the wooden panel flies open to reveal a disgruntled Yoongi, a warmth seems to thaw through the icy evening chill that, along with your nerves, is making your knees knock together.

His chest is warm against your cheek when he pulls you into his arms, the smell of cologne and black coffee consuming your senses. It's enough to make your tense limbs fall slack, curling into his firm frame instinctively. Finally. You can breathe again.

"Hey." He mumbles sweetly against your temple, a trace of a smile in his voice like he was happy to see you. You silently wonder if he'll still be so happy once he hears what you have to say.

The studio is basked in darkness, the contours of his face barely visible in the blue glow emanating from his desktop monitor. There's a dent in the cushion of the adjacent chair, Yoongi's hair sticking up at the back where the pair of headphones slung around his neck had sat moments ago.

"I can go if you were working, wouldn't want to interrupt." As the words are leaving your lips you cross your fingers, selfishly hopeful that he would send you away and you could avoid the conversation that was about to follow. Blame it all on circumstance, leave saying that you at least tried.

But that would be keeping a secret. It would make you just as bad as the rest. And the thought of him finding out from someone else was enough to make your palms sweat and enough to keep your feet planted against the carpet determinedly.

Yoongi's hands find you like he can't bare to keep them away, dragging you across the threshold without hesitation. "S'fine. Work better with you here anyway." He smiles and you try to return it but your lips are pressed into a permanent line, like they're scared the daunting words you have to say will come spilling out before you were ready -- if you ever would be ready. As you slump into a chair and watch him wheel another one around to face you with his arms slung lazily over the back, you realise there is no going back.

Considering the countdown to Mic Drop was nearing its end, less than twenty four hours to go before Yoongi would be stood opposite Namjoon on stage in front of thousands, he looked the epitome of relaxation, unlike the nerves in your chest making you jitter.

"Jin's on his way with takeout, I would've asked him to get more if I knew you were coming but I'm sure we can share— babe, are you alright?"

Babe. The endearment had started slipping from his lips frequently recently. At first he tried to cover it up with nervous laughter but now he was brazen, enjoying the way the word tasted on his tongue. It would be so easy to force a smile, to push "the right thing" to the back of your mind and let the selfish part of your heart accept his affections, even knowing you're about to hurt him.

But the clock ticking away on the wall sounds deafening with every beat of silence that follows, twisting the rings on your fingers until you could no longer distinguish the sound from the sinister thrum of your heart.

You can't hold it in any more.

"I need to tell you something." It comes out a hoarse whisper, nearly unintelligible beneath the stream of hip hop from the hifi system in the corner.

"What is it?" Yoongi's concerned eyes never leave you as he reaches over to switch it off, the room now draped in a shroud of quiet. The reality of the situation seeps into every dark corner and right into your bones.

"It's about us. Kind of."

Yoongi rolls closer, stopping your teeth from nibbling your cuticles by slotting his fingers between yours like a perfect puzzle piece. It seems to ground you, like you're filled with helium and he's the weight stopping your feet from floating off the ground. For a second you think everything will be okay. Nothing, not even this betrayal, could come between what you had.

"Did Namjoon find out?" Even in the dim light you see the panic stricken raise of his brows. When your head shakes in a violent negative they smooth back down, relieved, as if nothing you could say next would be worse than that. No matter how hard you try to meet his eyes you can't.

His hand squeezes gently then. You muster up the courage to squeeze back. Perhaps it would soften the blow that was about to follow.

"His song. The one I wrote for Mic Drop...it's about you. I thought you should know. Before you hear it for yourself."

Nothing but an immeasurable silence followed. "Oh."

Yoongi is unreadable, almost as if he didn't hear the words hanging like heavy storm clouds over your heads. You expected him to be angry, to shout -- even cry, maybe. Not knowing how he was feeling was even worse than any scenario you had imagined. Made you feel like you were back to square one and he was shutting you out of the window into his soul you'd worked so hard to wriggle through.

For a second you think the sudden cold against your palm is a result of the numbness coursing through your veins like you were dunked in ice water, but then you see his hand retreat to his lap, eyes wide and staring at it in disbelief like he'd been scalded.

"I...I don't understand." He sounds choked, face contorting with pain. Like it does when he wakes thrashing in the night with a bad dream. Unlike those times though, he doesn't levitate towards you for comfort, just stares at you vacantly like he's far, far away despite being physically close enough for your knees to brush.

"It was written after the first time we...y'know...here--" You glance around, convinced your mind is playing tricks when you see a vision of you in Yoongi's lap across the room, lips attached like nothing else in the world mattered. It feels far away and out of reach when the real Yoongi gets to his feet, creating a distance between you that is foreign, his form staggering across the room so that you could see the way his back tensed beneath his t-shirt when he grips the edge of his desk for support, processing.

"I don't understand."

"I was emotional. It just happened--"

"No. What I don't understand is why you're letting him perform it?" Fists send a stack of sheet music flying to the ground. His lip trembles, face red, with anger or affliction, you can't tell which.

"Yoongi--" You reach for him, fingertips barely grazing his arm before he's smacking you away with a violent shake of his head. He'd never resisted you before. Not even in the beginning.

"You expect me to just sit back and listen to Namjoon of all people rapping the lyrics my girlfr-- that you wrote dissing me? This has to be a fucking joke."

"It's not that kind of track!" You hug your body pitifully. It's the only thing you can do to stop yourself from falling apart as his mouth spits a venom that makes your heart shatter. His eyes fill with one thing. Betrayal. "I'm sorry. I just...I can't keep choosing between you anymore, Yoongi. He's my brother."

"And what am I, huh?"

Every second that passes, every stutter or attempt at explanation that leaves your mouth makes Yoongi crumple. You see it in the way his adam's apple bobs, how his shoulders slacken.

For some reason you can't open up. Tell him he means more to you than anyone ever had. That you thought your heart might really break and bleed out on the carpet if he didn't feel the same way.

Instead you settle for, "Why are you so mad? It's my job! I had no choice."

Without warning he's rushing at you, trembling palms capturing your face and pressing his forehead to yours. His breaths shake, chest heaving as he battles internally with the words flying from his lips like a ghostly breath across yours.

"Because I fucking love you, Y/N! Can't you see it? I fucking love you and your bastard of a brother always finds a way to ruin things between us!"

His admission stuns you, the tears welling in your eyes spilling over in a silent stream down your cheeks.

He loves you. He loves you.

"Yoongi--" Words just won't come. Nothing feels right.

Because you love him too. It had taken you this long to admit it to yourself but it was clear now. Every breath, every beat of your heart, every fucking song you would ever write was for him. It scared you before but now, stood here in front of him, you know it's true.

Something hopeless niggles at the back of your head, stops you from spilling everything to him. If he loves you, how can he expect you to choose?

If words couldn't make him see the truth then you'd just have to show him the only way you knew how. Straight from your heart.

You're crying as you dig around in the bottom of your bag to retrieve a USB, pressing it into his curled fist firmly and begging him with your eyes to understand. "Just listen to the song. Please. It'll explain everything. I promise."

You begin to back up and his hand shoots out to stop you, pulling you roughly into his chest which only makes you cry harder, tears creating a wet patch on his T-shirt.

"Please don't leave me. Not again." It's a fragile whisper.

It's all too much.

"I can't choose any longer, Yoongi. This has to end."

With one last look at his crumpled face you flee from his studio with eyes just as watery as the first time you'd walked down this very alley. Except this time it takes all of your strength to resist running back into his arms.

Yoongi can only stand there and watch you go, the USB hot against his hand.

This has to end. The words make his chest burn and he hates it. Hates feeling weak. You always make him feel so fucking weak.

If he can't have you then he had no choice but to do everything in his power to make sure he got the next best thing.

Suddenly it all seemed clear. Yoongi knew what he had to do.

--

The arena is almost desolate when you creep inside.

Just a sea of empty seats stretching out from both sides of you where you sit in one of the stands, nibbling the skin around your thumb and watching Namjoon pace the stage below.

It's gone midnight by now. Most of the crew went home hours ago. Not Namjoon though. He stayed to practice some more. Said he couldn't get the choreography quite right.

You tried going home but you couldn't get the fight out of your head. Everything reminded you of Yoongi and your thoughts started to wander. Did he hate you? Was he listening to the song right now? Why hasn't he called? Why is your own bed not as comfy as the one you shared with Yoongi?

It all got too much eventually. Something told you that you weren't welcome at the apartment so you ended up heading towards the only other place you knew, surprised to find your brother had the same idea.

A single spotlight illuminates the stage as Namjoon twists his body in time with the one, two, three, four he unconsciously mumbles under his breath, face contorted with a stark concentration that flits to impatience when his foot slips and he misses the beat. Again. It just about sends him over the edge.

"I can't do this anymore!" A microphone squeals and hits the ground with a thump. It reverberates through the arena, your hands flying to your ears as you watch Namjoon let loose all his anger on an innocent amp stand before collapsing into a heap at the edge of the stage. "Fuck this shit!"

You're flying down the stairs to his aid before he can do any serious damage to the stage equipment — or worse, to himself.

Namjoon scoffs when he hears the stage creak under your feet. "Nice of you to show up."

It stings. You snap.

"What happened to you, Namjoon?" You look at his sunken cheekbones, his curled fists, the blackness behind his eyes. "I don't even recognise you anymore."

He just sniffs and says nothing. The distance between you feels bigger than ever.

"Can I tell you a secret?"

A secret? Since when did Namjoon abide by a policy of honesty?

He takes your shocked silence as a yes.

"I'm calling first thing and dropping out of the competition."

Your world stutters to a standstill, breath knocked out of your lungs.

Dropping out?

"Shit Joon...if this is about Yoongi—"

He waves you off.  "No. This is about me."

You can't breathe. This can't be real. "I don't understand..."

"I've made up my mind. I can't do this any more. I used to love being up here you know?"

You follow his gaze, out over the empty arena. The last time you were here every seat was filled. You were down there, part of the crowd, packed into the cramped space with barely enough room to breathe.

Imagining how it must feel to be up here comes easy. If you close your eyes you can hear the screams, feel the body heat. Smell the sweat and the anticipation. See thousand faces looking up in awe. At you. It makes your blood run hot.

You much prefer being up here, you decide.

Namjoon brings you back down. "Now it just feels like a chore. I look out and all I see is disappointed faces. I can't pretend for them anymore."

"People travel miles to see you Joon! No one is disappointed."

"Not the fans. They love me. Well, Runch Randa, at least." He cracks a half smile. "It's me whose disappointed. In Kim Namjoon."

You always thought your brother was sure of himself. He's cocky, confident and above all fearless. It's his biggest strength (and his most irritating quality sometimes) but it's what you always admired most about him.

Clearly you didn't know your brother as well as you thought you did.

You bite your lip. "Why?"

He turns to face you, leaning back into his arms while he searches for the right words and, little to your knowledge, gathers the courage to confide in you.

"Because I re-entered Mic Drop for all the wrong reasons. I just wanted to prove myself, you know? Win for real this time, not just by default." He swallows. "But then I saw Yoongi perform. And to be honest? I saw you. I saw how much you care about the music. How you come alive when you're writing lyrics or when you're in the studio." His smile is woeful. "Im supposed to feel like that. But I don't. I never did. It's like I'm always asleep, y'know?"

You did know. Every time you lifted a camera. Every time you pressed the shutter and snapped another shot of Namjoon on stage you felt your soul grow exhausted.

It makes the distance between you and Namjoon close a little. For once you understand each other and you don't have to hide how you feel any more.

"I can't stop thinking that it's your name the fans should be screaming. Not mine. They deserve better than me."

"But you're the best performer I know!" You rush. It always seemed like he wanted to keep you out of the spotlight at all costs. "Why now?"

He lets out a deep sigh. "I'm a selfish person, Y/N. I thought I was protecting you from... all this." He gestures around him. "The late nights and the paparazzi and the criticism and a fucking manager on your back all the time." His eye roll makes you snort, sharing a brief smile at the image of hardworking Jimin mumbling into his headset like a man posessed.

He's quickly serious again though. "Fame comes with a price. But I realize now that the price is worth it if your hearts in the right place and...what I'm trying to say, Y/N, is that mine never was."

You let your chin fall into your palm. Huh. "So that's the big secret?"

"Actually...there's something else." He shifts nervously. "I know about you and Yoongi."

You freeze, scrambling to your knees with wide eyes. "Wait, Joon, let me explain—"

"Let me finish!" Namjoon brushes you off with a breathless laugh, nodding to himself, as if finally coming to a solid conclusion about coming clean when his eyes meet yours. "He's in love with you."

This time it feels like the whole world goes into overdrive. You forget how to breathe.

"What...how...huh?"

It's Namjoon's palm squeezing your knee reassuringly that brings you back down.

"He always was. Even back before things got messed up." A deep breath. Something was coming, you could tell by the way his eye twitched nervously. "That's why me and Yoongi fought. That's why I...I lied and said that I wrote the song the night of the Mic Drop final...accused him of plagiarism—" Your mouth gapes. "I know! I know. Don't look at me like that. I can see the irony."

It all makes sense now. She's a part of this, Namjoon, whether you like it or not.

The reason Namjoon sacrificed his best friend wasn't for fame but for your sake?

You want to fly at your brother, scream at him for keeping this from you for so long. For turning you against Yoongi. For keeping you from the only person to make you feel safe. Feel Happy.

But his eyes are void of anything other than regret and you can tell his betrayal had been playing on his mind all these years.

"Point is, I didn't want you to get hurt." He shuffles awkwardly, not knowing what to do with your silence. "That's not an excuse, I know. Do you hate me?"

"No." Your voice sounds small. His chest heaves with relief. "I just wish you had been honest with me before. Saved us a ton of trouble."

"I thought I was doing the right thing. But I was a shitty brother in the end anyway."

It's strange. Even after all the fights and the resentment and the goddamn secrets, you don't think Namjoon is a shitty brother. Sure, his actions and intentions were shitty there was no denying it. But now it's like the puzzle pieces finally click into place and the full photograph comes into view, crystal clear.

All this time, he just wanted to protect you, when you should have been protecting him. He was hurting too, you just never knew it.

"It's not too late, Joon. Just be happy for me okay? I think..." If Namjoon plucked up the courage to tell you his secrets then it was only fair that you did too. "I love him too."

A pinkish tinge caresses your face when you finally admit it, both out loud and to yourself.

You love Yoongi. And now all the cards are on the table there's nothing holding you back from it.

Now you just need to tell Yoongi.

"I know. You think I don't know who that song is about?" The grin that spreads across Namjoon's features is sincere."And I am. Happy for you, I mean."

Now the truth is out in the open it feels like your wounds are already beginning to heal. You place your hand over his and squeeze it tight. It was time to forgive.

A thought suddenly strikes you. "So what are you gonna do now?

Namjoon fumbles in the back pocket of his jeans, thrusting something towards you. A polaroid picture. The same photo you'd seen at Yoongi's studio.

He kept it, too?

"This kid." His finger jabs at the innocent face of a younger Namjoon, arm wrapped around the shoulders of his best friend. "I didn't get enough time to live as him before I became Runch Randa. I think it's time to just live as Namjoon for a while."

"But what about Big Hit? It'll fall apart and mom and dad will kill you—"

"No it won't. They have you. I already talked to them, in fact. There's a stage with your name on it right here." He pats the ground. "If you want it, that is."

You blink, stunned. You? "I...I don't know if I can."

"I believe in you." Namjoon says. "And I'll be cheering you on from the front row."

You'd have to think about it long and hard but you can't help the grin that appears on your face. Things were going to be okay.

An urge rises in your chest to tell Yoongi this news. To see the way his face would light up as you started the journey to following your own dreams, like he always said you should.

You and Yoongi were going to be okay.

"Hey! Maybe I should try photography now I have some free time." Namjoon tugs at the camera strap around your neck, lifting his eye to the viewfinder and laughing when you cover the lens with your hands. "Damn I'm kinda good!"

You bump his shoulder teasingly, the belly laughter that spills into the arena feeling like the most natural thing in the world.

You're only interrupted by approaching footsteps. Jimin bursts into the arena.

"Namjoon," he pants. "I have some bad news."

--

It's compulsory for all competitors to attend the crowning ceremony. Even those who get disqualified.

RUNCH RANDA BLACKLISTED FROM COMPETING IN FUTURE HIP HOP COMPETITIONS AFTER PLAGIARISM SCANDAL SURFACES.

Just one of the devastating headlines that hit the media after the judges panel received an anonymous tip in the form of a USB stick that exposed Namjoon once and for all. The same USB that you pressed into Yoongi's hands just hours before Namjoon's disqualification.

RAPPER GLOSS TO SNATCH MIC DROP TROPHY IN SHOCKING REVENGE FOR HIS BRUTAL DEFEAT.

Namjoon reads it aloud in the back of the car. He laughs at the end but it does nothing to lighten the mood.

The windows are tinted but you can still see the hoards of fans lining the streets, eyes steeped in betrayal.

You should hear the way they boo as your brother drives past. You should hear the way they chant his name instead.

Yoongi! Yoongi! Yoongi!

But you don't. You don't hear anything. You don't feel anything. All you can think of is the same three words, throbbing in your chest over and over again.

I love you.

Did he mean them at all?

"Y/N? Did you hear me?"

"Hm?" You look up. Namjoon's staring at you with concern.

"Your phone's ringing again."

It's no surprise when you pull out your phone and see a contact picture of yourself and Yoongi gracing the screen. He's been calling all morning. It takes every strength inside you to tap the red decline button.

"Aren't you gonna talk to him?"

Another call lights up the screen.

"Not like this."

With trembling fingers you shut your phone off all together.

--

Paparazzi cameras flash brazenly as you step out of the black company car, following Namjoon with your hood pulled tightly round your face. A hoard of body guards usher you through a back door to the arena. The main entrance is reserved for notable guests only, you learn.

While Namjoon's presence usually makes the room buzz with an electric energy, there's no excitement when he enters now. An awkward hush falls like a shroud as he elbows his way past pitiful stares. It's like someone died. In a way it's true; there's no trace of Runch Randa in Namjoon's hunched stance. Here, the dead still walks for everyone to see.

Jimin's waiting by the stage door. No words are exchanged as he slips passes into your hands. Namjoon's has a big red strike through the word TALENT, "guest" scribbled all too generously below it to match your own.

It's nearing show time. They're just waiting for you to take your seats, Jimin says, though you barely hear him. You're too busy imagining what you would do if you bumped into him right now, heart pounding whenever you catch a glimpse of blue or hear a laugh you're convinced you recognise.

Deep down you know exactly where you have to go to find him. To find Yoongi.

"I'll join you in a second, okay?"

Namjoon looks nervous, the first time you've ever seen him with such a severe case of the jitters. His smile is empty when you rub his forearm reassuringly. "Don't be too long. If I'm gonna do this I want you by my side."

You manage a smile. "Always."

With that, Namjoon takes a deep breath and pushes out into the life of the arena and you find your feet numbly carrying you down back corridors you know by heart until you reach his dressing room.

Your heart is blind, you think. Even now the shattered fragments ache for him, beat a little faster knowing he's just behind this door.

Why can't you go back to hating him, just like you did before? Deep down you know it's because you never really hated Yoongi. You don't think you ever could.

Forgiving him, though? Some wounds never heal, no matter how badly you want them to.

You pause outside the door. The stupid gold star that used to be there has been scraped off, replaced with a new name tag. Gloss. You put your ear to the wood. Nothing.

A deep breath and you find the handle. Should you burst in and give him a piece of your mind? Knock and enter politely? You can't help but scoff. Shouldn't he be the one coming to find you?

He calls your name before you can do either.

"Y/N?"

Fuck. Is hearing his voice supposed to hurt this bad?

You don't know what you're expecting when you turn around. Something different about him perhaps. A sign that he isn't the person you had grown to know. Grown to love.

But there he is. All messy blue hair and bitten lips and eyes a little red around the edges. Your Yoongi.

Your arms curl around your body like a band aid, holding you together. You can't crumble. Not now.

He looks stony but his eyes flicker with tender remorse when he sees the tears staining your cheeks.

His hands reach for you instinctively. The same hands that make love to his piano in the shitty apartment above the coffee shop. The same hands that could make you fall apart with even a delicate touch. You want to run into them so bad it hurts. But now they're stained red with betrayal and he chokes when you recoil.

Seconds feel like hours as you just stand there taking each other in like it's been years. It's only been a day or two. Maybe three? You can't remember. They all rolled into one meaningless blur of angry tears and insomnia.

You had a whole speech prepared for the moment you finally faced him again. But there are no words that feel right. You just need to know. If he meant every touch and every inside joke and those three words that make your heart soar despite how badly you want to hate him. And there's only one way to find out.

"Why did you do it?"

Your voice sounds timid and scared, like you feel. He winces.

"Y/N, let me explain—"

"Explain what?" Your voice raises shakily."How you lied to me? How you used me?"

He rushes towards you and it takes all of your strength to draw back, especially when his eyes look so frantic, so desperate. Like he's having one of his nightmares. It tugs at your heart because this time the nightmare is real and you're living in it.

"It's not like that—"

"Did you ever even want me? What about all that fair and square bullshit you told me huh?"

"Of course I wanted you Y/N...want you." His eyes fill with pain. "This wasn't meant to happen. I know how this looks but I just panicked!"

You rush at him, fists curled like that day in his studio except this time he doesn't stop you when you start hitting his chest, vision blurry.

"He was going to pull out! Namjoon was going to let you win! So that I could -- we could be happy!"

"What I...I don't understand?" His mouth gapes, processing. "But you didn't..." He swallows, like remembering is painful. "When I confessed, you didn't say it back. I thought we were over! I thought I had nothing to lose, Y/N. He had already won..."

You remember your words. I can't do this anymore. A misunderstanding that would never have happened if he just—

"Did you even listen to the song?"

His face drops at the mention of the song. "No." He looks like he might cry. "I was angry! I...I acted impulsively. I never got the chance..."

You bared your soul in that song in ways you never thought you could. He wasn't supposed to find out how you felt about him this way. Not here, when you're falling apart and there's nothing you can do to stop it. But it all comes tumbling out before you can change your mind.

"I wrote that song because I love you, Yoongi!"

Silence. He has to grip the wall to steady himself.

"Y-you love me?"

"I love you." The words feel indulgent on your tongue and even now as they hang heavy in the air and you're overcome with an indescribable combination of grief and longing, you mean them with every bone in your body.

You rush at him. You can't help it. Can't resist how your head falls into his chest and how you cry harder when you breathe in his scent one last time, sobs muffled by his hoodie. But he hears them, you know he does, because his hands are trembling when they pull you closer like you're fragile enough to break.

"I love you. So fucking much it hurts, Yoongi."

You're weak. You're so so weak.

You don't know why you do it but you grab his face with both hands and then you're kissing him. Showing him how much you need him, how much you mean your words. His hand cups your jaw like always and his lips press back with a tender desperation and you believe him. You believe that he loves you. Whole and true. Because in that moment, with his lips on yours, everything is okay. He's your Yoongi and you're his Y/N and he loves you.

But then you pull back and he's crying too and everything's broken and your heart goes numb.

"I'm sorry. God, Y/N I'm so sorry. If I could take it back I promise I would."

You muster up all the strength you can. You know what you have to do.

"I'm giving you a choice, Yoongi. You go out on that stage and pick up that trophy and we're over. For real."

He tries to kiss you again, grabbing at you frantically when you turn your cheek.

"Y/N, don't do this. We love each other. That's all that matters right?" He musters up the closest thing to a smile he can manage, like he's convincing himself more than he is you. "You don't have to—"

"No." You pull away from grip. It feels cold and wrong. "I have to do this. If you love me like you say you'll...you'll understand."

You turn but he grabs your wrist, pins you in place.

"I can't lose you to him again, Y/N. I...I already lost you once and I don't think I..."

The hard faced Min Yoongi you once knew is gone. All that's left is the vulnerable man in front of you who holds your heart in your hands with a grip so tight it scares you.

"He can't win...please."

You suck in a final breath.

"Please what? Don't make you choose between me and that stupid fucking trophy? You did this to yourself, Yoongi." You turn and this time he lets you. "The only person pushing me away is you."

"Y/N please, wait!"

You don't dare turn to look at him as you walk away. Not even when he pleads or you hear him fall to his knees, a strangled sob echoing down the hall. You're scared you might run back to him if you do.

You don't let yourself break down until you turn the corner. Yoongi doesn't follow.

--

"I'm okay." You assure Namjoon as you take a seat beside him inside the arena. It's a lie, of course. No amount of cold water splashed on your face in the bathroom could prepare you for this moment.

You're just in time. The ceremony is already starting. The host is taking the stage and the lights are dimming but you're too numb to care.

You go out on that stage and pick up that trophy and we're over.

Your decision is final. There's no going back. You've cried all your tears. You've said all that needed to be said. All you're left with now is a sickly feeling in your stomach as you look down at the trophy sat in a display case center stage.

We love each other. A slither of hope tugs at your heart strings. You barely manage to suppress it.

"Sorry! Excuse me!" The empty seat to your left sinks under the weight of Hoseok as he clumsily stumbles into the arena, late as always.

He offers you a smile which turns to a frown when you only stare past him vacantly, straining your neck to keep an eye on the stage.

A hand covers yours. You freeze at the contact, only relaxing when you peer through the darkness to find Hoseok staring at you gently. His voice is a whisper. "Whatever happens I'm here for you, okay?"

A wave of emotion crashes through you and you think you might cry again. You can't make your lips sound out a response but Hoseok understands and you feel a little stronger when you turn your attention back to the ceremony knowing you have someone by your side.

"As you all know there have been some...complications with this year's finalists." The host coughs and fiddles with his tie awkwardly. "But we are glad to announce that we do in fact have a winner here with us today!"

The crowd chants Yoongi's name again. Namjoon stiffens. Your free hand grabs his and he squeezes it tight.

"So without further ado, I would like to welcome this year's winner, Gloss!"

The crowd goes wild but the sound is drowned out by a ringing in your ears. It's like you're underwater, holding your breath as you wait and wait for him to take the stage and all the oxygen to slip away.

One...two...three...

You get to ten seconds, then twenty seconds and then thirty and by the time you get to forty you feel yourself break the surface, take a heaving breath.

You're floating. He chose you.

He loves you! Yoongi loves you! He—

No.

You're seeing things. You must be. That can't be Yoongi's face lighting up every screen in the room. That can't be him crossing the stage and taking the trophy from the hands of the host with a smug grin. That can't be Yoongi holding it up in the air like a martyr.

That can't be your Yoongi. This is a stranger.

You crash back to reality when Namjoon wraps his arms around your waist and you realise your sobbing. Sobbing so hard it hurts your chest and your lungs burn with misuse and you're sure the tears will never stop.

"It's okay! Shh."

Nothing is okay. Nothing.

Yoongi's face is still blown up on the big screens in painful detail. The smile on his face falters when he looks out into the crowd and spots you instantly. Sees you crumple.

There are two things Min Yoongi ever loved in this world.

His music and you.

The trophy feels cold in his hands. The crowd gasps as he rushes to the edge of the stage and calls out to you.

"Y/N wait! I'm sorry—"

You hear his voice through the speakers but it's too late. You're already running.

Yoongi's mic drops to the ground.

--

Yoongi's nightmares are back. Except this time they're different.

When he closes his eyes you're there. Smiling and laughing like you used to. His heart warms and he reaches for you...

And then he realises it's not you. Just a picture, blown up on the big screen as you cross the stage at the front of the room he's suddenly aware he's in.

He glances around at the indistinguishable people around him, all smiling and clapping ferociously. Why isn't he happy?

The bottle in his hand is half empty. He's realises he's screaming. So hard his throat burns and his lungs beg for air but you don't even look his way. He screams your name, over and over again. Nobody seems to hear him.

Namjoon's there too. Bouncing a baby on his knee, maybe one or two years old if he has to guess.

"That'll be you one day," He whispers, but its deafening to Yoongi. "Only the very best for my niece." The baby giggles up at him, stubby fingers wrapped around his thumb.

She has your eyes. The very same eyes Yoongi would look into like they held everything in the world. The very same eyes Yoongi saw fill with pain on the last day he saw you before things got messed up.

She has Hoseok's nose. And his mouth, too, small and heart shaped. The resemblance is uncanny as Hoseok appears beside Namjoon, takes the baby girl into his arms and places a sweet kiss on her forehead.

Then there you are. The same old Y/N. The same smile that makes your eyes crinkle and the same laughter than makes his heart melt. The same girl who used to love him.

Though it's clear that that much is no longer true. Not when you lean up to kiss Hoseok on the cheek, Namjoon drawing you into a hug when you present the trophy in your hands to them with an elated laugh.

A family.

It feels like he's been punched in the stomach.

Yoongi always thought winning Mic Drop would mean he had everything. Fame. Money. Glory.

He didn't need family. He always got by on his own.

It took holding the whole world in the palm of his hand to realise none of it meant anything if he didn't have you by his side.

You were his everything. But he was too stupid to see it and he let you slip away.

It's too late now.

A hand appears on his shoulder. It's cold, grip bruising. The voice that comes next gives him chills every single time.

"So was it worth it?" Namjoon asks.

Yoongi tries to answer but his vision is blurred with hot tears now and he's on his hands and knees and he's screaming.

And when he wakes up at ass o clock, sweaty and gasping for air, he still finds himself reaching for your warmth beside him.

But all his fingers find are cold sheets and bitterness.

extended a/n: okay so if you have reached this far then you are a TROOPER. a trooper who i love and appreciate endlessly for reading 30k of my waffle lmao im so sorry <3 ksksksk so this fic has been in my head for the longest time and in my drafts for almost five months so im super attached to it and putting this out is like the scariest ever?? i really put my heart into this piece, like y’all don’t understand how many times it’s cropped up in my dreams and I’ve woken up like MUST WRITE. it’s far from perfect but i tried my best!! i can’t tell you how many scenes had to be rewritten until i was happy enough with them bc this fic is literally my baby in every sense of the word and i wanted to get it right :( although that just made the ending even more SOUL DESTROYING to write for me ugh i had the ending set in my mind before i even started writing but there were moments where i jus wanted yoongi and oc to be happy ever after :( but alas, I feel like this ending was far more realistic for them and i couldn’t go against my gut sigh. there may be a few drabbles planned in the future tho to make up for the angst :) Anyway!!! I’ll stop rambling. Thank you for reading this far, if anyone has. TROOPER. love you <3

updated 12/01/19: drabble #1 | drabble #2 | drabble #3 

#ksmutclub #bts #bts smut #yoongi smut #yoongi fanfiction #yoongi imagine #btswriterscollective #btsguild #kwordsmiths #thebtstown #yoonkooknetwork #yoongi scenario #my writing #fic: mic drop #love yourself collab

[beemusik]

How David Bowie Invented Ziggy Stardust

Jason Heller’s book Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded is the story of how science fiction influenced the musicians of the Seventies. Out now in hardcover via Melville House, Strange Stars also examines how space exploration, futurism and emerging technology inspired the sometimes-cosmic, sometimes-mechanistic music the decade produced. In this section, Heller delves into the creation of Bowie’s most-famous alter ego, Ziggy Stardust.

A small crowd of sixty or so music fans stood in the dance hall of the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth, a suburban neighborhood in southwest London, on the night of February 10, 1972. The backs of their hands had been freshly stamped by the doorman. A DJ played records to warm up the crowd for the main act. The hall was nothing fancy, little more than “an ordinary function room.” The two-story brick building that housed it – “a gaunt fortress of a pub on the edge of an underpass” – had played host to numerous rock acts over the past few years, including Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, and Fleetwood Mac. Sci-fi music had even graced the otherwise earthy Toby Jug, thanks to recent headliners King Crimson and Hawkwind, and exactly one week earlier, on February 3, the band Stray performed, quite likely playing their sci-fi song “Time Machine.” The concertgoers on the tenth, however, had no idea that they would soon witness the most crucial event in the history of sci-fi music.

Most of them already knew who David Bowie was – the singer who, three years earlier, had sung “Space Oddity,” and who had appeared very seldom in public since, focusing instead on making records that barely dented the charts. His relatively low profile in recent years hadn’t helped his latest single, “Changes,” which had come out in January. Despite its soaring, anthemic sound, it failed to find immediate success in England. But the lyrics of the song seemed to signal an impending metamorphosis, hinted at again in late January when Bowie declared in a Melody Makerinterview, “I’m gay and always have been” and unabashedly predicted, “I’m going to be huge, and it’s quite frightening in a way.” Bowie clearly had a big plan up his immaculately tailored sleeve. But what could it be?

Before Bowie took the stage of the Toby Jug, an orchestral crescendo announced him. It was a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, drawn from the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange. To anyone who’d seen the film, the music carried a sinister feeling, superimposed as it was over Kubrick’s visions of grim dystopia and ultraviolence. Grandiloquence mixed with foreboding, shot through with sci-fi: it couldn’t have been a better backdrop for what the pint-clutching attendees of the Toby Jug were about to behold.

At around 9:00 p.m., the houselights were extinguished. A spotlight sliced the darkness. Bowie took the stage. But was it really him? In a strictly physical sense, it must have been. But this was Bowie as no one had seen him before. His hair – which appeared blond and flowing on the cover of Hunky Dory, released just three months earlier – was now chopped at severe angles and dyed bright orange, the color of a B-movie laser beam. His face was lavishly slathered with cosmetics. He wore a jumpsuit with a plunging neckline, revealing his delicate, bone-pale chest, and his knee-high wrestling boots were fire-engine red. Bowie had never been conservative in dress, but even for him, this was a quantum leap into the unknown.

Then he began to play. His band – dubbed the Spiders from Mars and comprising guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Bolder, and drummer Woody Woodmansey – was lean, efficient, and powerful, clad in gleaming, metallic outfits that mimicked spacesuits, reminiscent of the costumes from the campy 1968 sci-fi romp Barbarella. The Jane Fonda vehicle had been a huge hit in England, and it became a cult film in the United States, thanks to its titillating portrayal of a future where sensuality is rediscovered after a lifetime of sterile, virtual sex.

In the same way, Bowie’s new incarnation was shocking, lurid, and supercharged with sexual energy. Combined with his recent admission of either homosexuality or bisexuality, as he was then married to his first wife, Angela, Bowie’s new persona oozed futuristic mystique, which Bowie biographer David Buckley described as “a blurring of ‘found’ symbols from science fiction – space-age high heels, glitter suits, and the like.”

But what bewitched the audience most was the music. Amid a set of established songs such as “Andy Warhol,” “Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud,” and, naturally, “Space Oddity,” the Spiders from Mars injected a handful of new tunes, including “Hang On to Yourself” and “Suffragette City,” that had yet to appear on record. Propulsive, infectious, and awash in dizzying imagery, this was a new Bowie – cut less from the thoughtful, singer-songwriter mold and more from some new hybrid of thespian rocker and sci-fi myth. These songs bounced off the walls of the Toby Jug’s no-longer-ordinary function room. The audience, whistling and cheering, was entranced. A show eye-popping enough to dazzle an entire arena was being glimpsed in the most intimate of watering holes.

Although the crowd was sparse, people stood on tables and chairs to get the best possible view. The stage was only two feet high, but it may as well have been twenty, or two million – an elevator to outer space designed to launch Bowie into an orbit far more enduring than that of Major Tom in “Space Oddity.”

At some point, amid the swirl and spectacle of the two-hour set, Bowie announced from the stage the name of his new identity: Ziggy Stardust.

Like an artifact from some alien civilization, Bowie’s fifth album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, was unveiled on June 16, 1972. By then, Ziggy had become a sensation. After the Toby Jug gig in February, concertgoers embraced Bowie’s new persona in music venues around the UK. Attendance swelled each night, as did a growing legion of followers who dressed themselves in homemade approximations of Bowie’s outlandish attire.

Just as the album was released, he and the Spiders appeared on the BBC’s revered Top of the Popsprogram, performing the record’s centerpiece: the song “Starman.” For many of a certain age, watching Bowie on their family’s television that evening was tantamount to the Beatles’ legendary spot on The Ed Sullivan Show in the United States eight years earlier. “He was so vivid. So luminous. So fluorescent. We had one of the first color TVs on our street, and David Bowie was the reason to have a color TV,” remembered Bono of U2, who was twelve at the time. “It was like a creature falling from the sky. Americans put a man on the moon. We had our own British guy from space.”

Musically, “Starman” was an exquisite and striking slice of pop songcraft, exactly what Bowie needed at that point in his career. Lyrically, he smuggled in a sci-fi story that centers around Ziggy Stardust, who was both Bowie’s alter ego and the fictional protagonist of the Rise and Fall concept album, as loose as it was in that regard – it is more a fugue of ideas that coalesce into a concept. Through the radio and TV, an alien announces his existence to Earth, which Bowie describes in lovingly rendered sci-fi verse: “A slow voice on a wave of phase.” The young people of the world become enchanted and hope to lure the alien down: “Look out your window, you can see his light /If we can sparkle, he may land tonight.” But that alien is reticent, and his shyness makes him all the more magnetic.

Bowie sang the song on Top of the Pops clad in a multicolored, reptilian-textured jumpsuit, which Melody Maker called, “Vogue’s idea of what the well-dressed astronaut should be wearing.” In that sense, “Starman” is a self-fulfilling prophecy: before he could truly know the impact the song would have, he used it to describe its effect on Great Britain’s young people in perfect detail. He was the starman waiting in the sky, and the kids who saw him on TV soon began to dress like him, hoping to sparkle so that he may land tonight.

If Bowie intended “Starman” to be an overt reference to [Robert A.] Heinlein’s Starman Jones, the book he loved as a kid, he never publicly confessed to it. But the admittedly sketchy story line of Rise and Fall parallels another Heinlein work: Stranger in a Strange Land, the novel that had influenced David Crosby in the ’60s and, later, many other sci-fi musicians of the ’70s. The book’s hero,Valentine Michael Smith, comes to Earth from Mars; in Rise and Fall, Mars is built into the title. And both Valentine and Ziggy become messiahs of a kind – androgynous, libertine heralds of a new age of human awareness. Bowie claimed he’d turned down offers to star in a film production of Stranger in a Strange Land and had few positive words to say about the book, calling it “staggeringly, awesomely trite.” Be that as it may, he clearly had read the book and developed a strong opinion of it – perhaps enough for some of its themes and iconography to seep into his own work.

The opening song of Rise and Fall, “Five Years,” elegiacally delivers a dystopian forecast: the world will end in five years due to a lack of resources, and society is disintegrating into a slow-motion parade of perversity and moral paralysis. It’s a countdown to doomsday, with the clock set at five years. The song’s ominous refrain, “We’ve got five years,” is sung by Bowie with increasing histrionics, his voice sounding more panicked and deranged as he repeats the phrase. “The whole thing was to try and get a mocking angle at the future,” Bowie said in 1972. “If I can mock something and deride it, one isn’t so scared of it” – with “it” being the apocalypse.

“Five Years” set a chilling tone, but Rise and Fall didn’t entirely wallow in it. The coming of an alien rock star named Ziggy Stardust is relayed in a multi-song story that’s equally melancholy and ecstatic, tragic and triumphant. On tracks such as “Moonage Daydream,” “Star,” and “Lady Stardust,” Bowie wields terms such as “ray gun” and “wild mutation.” He also claims, “I’m the space invader,” as though he were channeling the ideas of his sci-fi heroes Stanley Kubrick or William S. Burroughs, particularly the latter’s 1971 novel, The Wild Boys.

As Bowie explained, “It was a cross between [The Wild Boys] and A Clockwork Orange that really started to put together the shape and the look of what Ziggy and the Spiders were going to become. They were both powerful pieces of work, especially the marauding boy gangs of Burroughs’s Wild Boys with their bowie knives. I got straight on to that. I read everything into everything. Everything had to be infinitely symbolic.” The photos of the Spiders from Mars inside the album sleeve of Rise and Fall were even patterned after the gang of Droogs of A Clockwork Orange; Droogs are mentioned by name in the Rise and Fall song “Suffragette City.” Furthermore, Bowie posed on theback cover of the album, peering out of a phone booth – just as though he were that other cryptic British alien who regularly regenerates himself and is often seen in a phone booth (specifically a police call box), the Doctor from Doctor Who.

Bowie also drew from work of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Born Norman Carl Odam, the Texan rockabilly artist released a twangy, oddball 1968 single titled “I Took a Trip (On a Gemini Spaceship)” that Bowie wound up covering in 2002; it was from Odam that Bowie borrowed Ziggy’s surname. And after going on a record-buying spree while touring the United States in 1971, he bought Fun House by the Michigan proto-punk band the Stooges, whose outrageous lead singer was named Iggy Pop. He jotted down ideas on hotel stationary while traveling the States, resulting in a name that was a mash-up of Iggy Pop and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Ziggy Stardust was a fabricated rock star, one whose sleek facade flew in the face of the era’s reigning rock aesthetic of laid-back, unpretentious authenticity. Instead, Bowie wanted to puncture that illusion by taking rock showmanship to a previously unseen, self-referential extreme.

When it came to Bowie’s urge toward collage and deconstruction, Burroughs remained a prime inspiration. A pioneer of postmodern sci-fi pastiche as well as the literary cut-up technique, in which snippets of text were randomly rearranged to form a new syntax, Burroughs straddled both pulp sci-fi and the avant-garde, exactly the same liminal space Bowie now occupied. Rock critic Lester Bangs accused Bowie of “trying to be George Orwell and William Burroughs” while dismissing him as appearing to be “deposited onstage after seemingly being dipped in vats of green slime and pursued by Venusian crab boys” – a description that sounded like it could have been cribbed straight from a Burroughs book.

In 1973, Burroughs met Bowie in the latter’s London home. The meeting was arranged by A. Craig Copetas from Rolling Stone, and the resulting exchange was published in the magazine a few months later. In the article, Copetas observed that Bowie’s house was “decorated in a science-fiction mode,” and that Bowie greeted them “wearing three-tone NASA jodhpurs.” The ensuing conversation ranged across many topics, but it circled around science fiction – and in particular, the similarity Bowie saw between Rise and Fall and Burroughs’s 1964 novel Nova Express, a surreal sci-fi parable about mind control and the tyranny of language.

In an effort to convince Burroughs of the similarity, Bowie offered one of the most revealing analyses of Rise and Fall as a work of science fiction:

“The time is five years to go before the end of the Earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of a lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have all lost touch with reality, and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock & roll band, and the kids no longer wanted to play rock & roll. There’s no electricity to play it.”

Bowie went on:

“[The environmental apocalypse] does not cause the end of the world for Ziggy. The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I’ve made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole onstage.”

Curiously, it took him another twenty-six years before casually revealing in an interview that a sci-fi song called “Black Hole Kids” was recorded as an outtake during the sessions for Rise and Fall. He called the song “fabulous,” adding, “I have no idea why it wasn’t on the original album. Maybe I forgot.”

But Bowie dropped the biggest revelation about Rise and Fallin the 1973 conversation with Burroughs. Ziggy Stardust, according to his creator, is not an alien himself; instead, he’s an earthling who makes contact with extra-dimensional beings, who then use him as a charismatic vessel for their own nefarious invasion plan. But like Frankenstein’s monster being erroneously called “Frankenstein” to the point where it seems senseless to quibble with that usage, Ziggy Stardust continues to be widely considered the alien entity of Rise and Fall. Considering the shifting identity and gender of Bowie’s most famous alter ego, that ambiguity may well have been his intention. Talking to Burroughs, he ultimately labels Rise and Fall “a science-fiction fantasy of today” before reiterating its similarity to Nova Express, to which Burroughs responds, “The parallels are definitely there.”

Rise and Fall has always been as fluid as Bowie’s facade itself. Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion cast a shadow over Ziggy Stardust, especially the glammy incarnation of the many-faced character known as Jerry Cornelius – who was adapted to the big screen in 1973 for the feature film The Final Programme. It coincided with Ziggy’s own ascendency, not to mention the New Wave of Science Fiction and its preference for fractured narratives and multiple interpretations over linear stories and pat endings.

During their mutual interview, Burroughs brought up the then-current rumor that Bowie might play Valentine Michael Smith in a film adaptation of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Bowie again dismissed it. “It seemed a bit too flower-powery, and that made me a bit wary.” For his part, Bowie’s fellow sci-fi musician Mick Farren of the Deviants later admitted he always thought Michael Valentine Smith was a major influence on Ziggy Stardust. “I was certain someone would call him out for plagiarism,” Farren said. “Nobody did.”

Bowie may have denied his affinity for Stranger in a Strange Land by his boyhood go-to author Heinlein, but he was not shy about professing his love for one of the authors Lester Bangs compared him to: George Orwell. Almost as a footnote, Bowie told Burroughs, “Now I’m doing Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four on television.” That project would never come to pass, but it would lay the groundwork for his next, less famous sci-fi concept album – a jagged, atmospheric song cycle that plunged Bowie into the darkest extremes of dystopia.

#David Bowie #Ziggy Stardust #article

[thetorturerwrites]

Lamb: Ch 2 - Someone Like You

***This amazing artwork was gifted to me by @elmidol​​. Please do not re-use or re-post it without permission from them and/or myself. Don’t be a dickbag.

Previous Chapter

Summary:  “You need someone in the middle—not dead, not alive.” You arched upwards, trying to get even a bit of slack, just enough to speak. “Someone like me.”

C/N:  Look - If you’re new here, this is adult shit. If you’re not new here, you know what my C/Ns are about. Be warned. 

Word Count: 3.7k

A/N: Did I ever think I would be writing about Kylo and babies? No. No, I did not.  Am I writing about Kylo and babies? Maybe.  Its a crazy, crazy world, y'all.

Special thanks to @kylorengarbagedump for helping me edit this asshole of a chapter.

***

“Retribution.” 

The word sounded ludicrous on his lips, infantile and irresponsible. Abruptly, you had a clearer picture of what was happening. In this mesmerizing nirvana, his encapsulated kingdom, you were a child, stumbling into an adult’s arena to demand attention.

Your senselessness laid bare, you stared at him, adrift in the gleam of irises that never settled on one color. The pregnant moon overhead framed him, adorning his breathtaking face with a perfect, glowing halo. He was unnaturally beautiful, the kind of king women wept for. 

“Father...”

He met your whisper with a sneer, and you recoiled. He, too, thought your trek here was juvenile; you were just a witless woman wrestling with her emotions. Your heart sank at his judgment, disappointed that he thought you naïve.

Ashamed, you fixed your eyes upon a creeping succulent. You traced thick, tear-shaped leaves and winced at inch-long thorns. You could all but feel the phantom pinpricks. The red and pink blooms made for a variegated shroud to decorate the otherwise plain shrine.

It was lovely in its lethality, a fitting summation of this place.

“The Resistance slaughtered my planet, my ENTIRE family.”

You licked your lips and tugged at his sleeve, pulling yourself up to sit. Recognizing what you had just done, you wrung your hands, as though he was a walking electric current. Even so, he was the only bit of warmth in this melancholy vale, and you subconsciously leaned into it.

“You’re a fool.” He rose to an obscene height and moved away. “I care less than a whit for your holy wars. You murder on fantasy, not truth.”

The absence of his body was nearly as painful as his lack of understanding, and the resultant shout erupted before you could stop it.

“IT WAS NOT OUR WAR!”

Your exclamation bounced off shedding trees to die away in spongy, mossy hills. Sniffling, you pressed the heels of your hands into exhausted eyes. Yelling at men was an awful idea; yelling at this specific man was the epitome of lunacy.

How were you going to explain the hole in your soul to a creature who had none? To Ren, your mourning and loss were just specks in eternity, but he didn’t spend his days loving the living only to lose them. If your grandmother's stories were true, he had been this walking void since his creation.

And the brothers made themselves a land with a great vault separating light from dark. In their wisdom, they decreed the living would gather under golden sun, and the dead would gather under silver moon.  Grandfather Sky Walker gave his blessing: Let them rule over these lands through all ages. Let there be day and night, and let them usher in The Balance.

He was here. It was true.

That cast his indifference into an unusual shade of acceptance. Like this place, he existed outside of the universe’s organic stream. It wasn’t a lack of feeling; it was one colored by millennia of demise.

You were struck by the understanding that he made everything here in his image, all of it immaculate, alluring, and fatal. Just as he was.

“The Resistance decimated my planet on a rumor—a rumor that we were a First Order cult.”  Your voice was steadier than you expected. “But my family, my friends and everybody I knew...We were just ordinary people.”

You lifted your eyes and found him examining you, a curious look playing across his striking features. You huffed a pained breath and looked away again, fearing you would shatter under his scrutiny.

“My grandmother believed in the Balance, not in some notion of wiping the Galaxy clean of Soloists.”

His silence was deliberate, aimed to unnerve, and you crumpled forward, bending as though you could implore his aid into reality. When he moved, it was to stalk a circle around the altar.  His head cocked to assess your every angle.  Captured prey, you could do nothing but watch, wait, wonder.

“Belief in the Balance will not return your family. Nor will I.”

His glorious voice had bite; but where there should be an echo, there was none. Every lilting tree, every swaying vine, even the very air enveloped him, moved with him, absorbed his energy.  

Hugging yourself, you fought down your apprehension.

“No, it won’t.”

You looked past him to fat carmine leaves and marveled at how they turned their faces towards The Ren, their master. 

He only understood in terms of the absolute. 

“I came to ask you to kill them—the people who murdered my family. The Resistance.”

His circuitous pacing ended at your front, and he speared you with such a look you felt conquered. If he was the next crusade, the holy war renewed, you would fight for him, lay down and die for him. 

His long fingers slid you to the altar's precarious edge. So near to him, your comatose heartbeat increased, thudding against ribs his knuckles skimmed.

“All of them?”

You nodded, meek and uncertain. He stepped in, spreading your legs wide just by his body’s substantial design. He was the epitome of domineering, his shape meant to terrorize the weak, to endure immortality. 

Uncertain if you were allowed to put your hands on him, you braced against the slab, leaning slightly away.

The scent of this place, misty and piny and richly floral, was powerful, distilled to purity in his body. It seeped from his pores, the sumptuous belladonna curling around you like tainted tendrils.  He obscured what scant light there was and blotted out your senses, filling your light head with dread and longing.

With one finger under your chin, he lifted your face and beckoned you into such a trance you didn’t notice how he lazily caressed your outer thigh. One by one, he tugged upon the plum, plump bows keeping the rest of you hidden. 

“What price are you willing to pay for genocide, lost lamb?”

It was hypnotic—the timbre of his voice, the delicate dance of his fingertips, the starry shine of his eyes.  You blinked at his question, too caught up in the slow drag of his knuckles along your sternum and down between your breasts.

Your lips worked feebly, discarding every suggestion your brain made. What could you offer a being such as this? Prayers? He would condemn them. Offerings? Paltry trinkets. Blood? You’d already given it. Pleasure? You weren’t sure he was capable. 

It was a cruel game, and the realization burst over you like icy water, flooding your addled mind and shocking you back from stupidity.

You had nothing. Purposefully divested of everything, you sojourned here a destitute fool. 

“There it is.” He brushed a thumb across your lips, smirking. “She understands now that she has nothing, is nothing, of value with which to bargain.”

He collected your silent tears and fed them to you, salt in the wound. Chidingly, he wrapped stiff fingers around your quivering neck and squeezed until you felt your supernaturally sustained pulse drumming in your ears. 

“It is as I said. The dying lamb has no value to the shepherd.”

Fear licked at your nape, clamoring into the rational parts of you. Your mind whirred, desperately trying to unearth some kernel that would serve your purpose. There had to be something.

The memory struck you suddenly and at full velocity.  Careening, your breath stopped. The lineage of Soloists was a pastime for your brother, who made you sit through innumerable sessions and lectures.

And Solo took himself a wife, making her flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone. Their union was prosperous, and she begat him many sons, the first being...

Your body shot into motion, vacating all self-preservation. You grasped his hand and pulled it to your chest. You were even so bold as to thread your smaller fingers through his. On instinct, both legs wrapped around his hips, heels digging into his legs in a feeble hold. 

You were unwilling to renounce your argument without a fight. Hastily, the words spilled out, a wishful wine you weren’t sure he would drink.

“NowaitIcanbeyourvessel!”

A perfectly sculpted black brow rose over his eye. He untangled his fingers from yours, scoffing. Your face burned, impossible beads of sweat forming at your pounding temples. Not knowing what to do with your hands, you pressed them to your flaming cheeks and tried to calm yourself.

“Choose your next words carefully.” 

Entertained by the toddler, he was indulging your delusions, but there was a limit to his patience. Sturdy hands slid beneath your thighs, parting and lifting them so he could draw your hips further into his. You couldn’t argue; you were the one who stopped him from leaving. 

Was that an erection you felt there? Was this proof to your curiosity? The possibility sent goose flesh tingling to every inch of your skin.

“Your brother... Ah!” 

Athame in hand, he gouged the tip into your unblemished thigh, raising a lone drop of blood. 

“Your brother has many children; does he not? There are stories about his prolific family.”

Out sized, you spiraled into anxious desire. When he tired of your nonsense, pulverizing your bones would be little more than a snap of his fingers. Yet, here he was, still wedged between your thighs and feeling a lot like a man who could make you forget your name. 

“Reminding me of my brother is not the way to make your case, lamb.”

He dragged warm lips over your pulse, lathing it with his tongue. His wide palm wrapped around your generous hip, and every single thought fled on bated breath. He was woefully seductive, a wolf in shepherd's clothing.

You licked your lips and shook your head, trying to agree and clear away cobwebs, but his hands and nipping kisses befuddled you so much you could only sputter half-formed words. Switching your concentration to the blade, you valiantly tried to keep track of it and tied yourself to it's path like a lifeline. 

“But you don’t.” You splayed your fingers out wide, palms flat on the altar. "Your seed will kill a living woman, yes? But a woman already crossed over cannot carry a child."

You were about to launch yourself from the proverbial cliff. Regardless of what came next, you would be a splatter at its bottom.

“I- I can.” You begged the endless midnight sky to strengthen your resolve. “You can have me.”

He had been rubbing you up and down his rigid length, your body no more than an instrument to appease his ardor; but at your declaration, he gripped your hips painfully tight and bit your shoulder. 

Attuned to his mood, the stars dimmed to a faint radiance. It was the one detail your brain could latch onto, the way even the greatest of them conformed to his will. 

“You think that’s a novel gesture? That you’ll be the first person I’ve fucked here?” His voice was low but no less edgy. “How many would you wager have died screaming at the end of my dick?”

A pathetic whimper escaped your open mouth, and hunger set it to watering. The idea of him fucking you here, in this open clearing under his meticulously curated twilight, was salacious, tantalizing.

“Countless.” You couldn’t stop yourself from rolling your hips, trying to jump start his back into rhythm. “But I would wager very few of them have been willing to bear your children.”

He growled, a vicious, threatening promise. His soft touch turned angry, coiling into your hair and yanking your head back. Your throat seized, elongated by his grip and fully bared for execution. What had been a grazing scratch of your blade turned again to a harsh point dug into the skin. 

You could hardly speak, reduced to gaping at his flashing onyx eyes. They blazed with a fiery hatred, and you knew it was because you were right. It wasn’t easy for him like it was his brother. He had spent eons alone whereas his brother wanted for nothing.

It infuriated him.

“You need someone in the middle—not dead, not alive.” You arched upwards, trying to get even a bit of slack, just enough to speak. “Someone like me.”

He curved around you so tight you could smell the deadly nightshade on his breath, every single part of him designed to snuff out life. You chewed the inside of your cheek, wondering how each part of him tasted. 

“Someone like you?” He spat the words, fingernails digging into your scalp. “Impure? Spoiled by how many men in your lifetime? Cowed by a little death and stupid enough to make demands of me?”

He was so close to snapping your neck, and you itched for it. You would gladly die at his hand, reunite with your family. All of these morose colors blended with the sorrow in your heart, and you pictured your bones rotting to dust, anchoring you here forever.

But he held off, glaring down at you in barely-checked contempt. 

Caught between wanting to die and wanting to murder, your breathing tilted into erratic, skirting panic so closely a fallen eyelash would detonate the bomb in your chest. 

He looked at you in such a way, though, that your apprehension settled. He was angry because he didn’t know how to feel things. He was intended, to his very marrow, to only ever take. Anything else was uncomfortable and worthy of destruction. 

You nudged his nose with yours, a mirror to his earlier gesture.

“Someone willing.” It was less than a whisper, barely a breath. 

His calculating gaze roamed your face, judging the depth of your commitment. In seconds, the pointed extension of his anger sliced down your supple thigh, cutting open a large gash.  

But pain wasn’t his target.

His aim was true. The rogue missile was expertly guided. And when the thing forced into your cunt, you screamed in unmitigated horror.

“I’m no gentle lover, and this is not your marriage bed. Willing or not, the lamb is meant to be slaughtered.”

You splintered into a wrecked and blubbering mess, heaving and howling. You clung to his shoulders, gouging little crescents into his neck. You had expected to die today but not by the blade cleaving apart your pussy. Offering him your womb seemed to make him only want to carve it from your body, a trophy to mark your idiocy.

“You should not offer things that don’t belong to you, lamb.” The vibration tickled your earlobe, drawing you down from your mania. “Your body was mine the moment you crossed into my land.”

You felt it then, the shift and nudge inside your cunt. Where you were certain there had been a sharp edge, there was only an ornately ridged column, handcrafted and safe.

It was the hilt. 

The wave of frenzy crested, and you opened puffy, red eyes onto a lucent, luminous moon.

He had buried the knife’s handle into your cunt and was pumping it slowly. He held the traitorous blade without even a single red cell shed. 

You wailed a halfhearted objection because this was a profane corruption of a consecrated relic. A particularly long drag of the makeshift phallus countered and shook loose a vulgar moan, and you squeezed tight around it.

It was shameless and sacrilegious.

And it felt so, so good.

You whimpered when he licked your lower lip, barely making contact. Your thighs splayed wide, eager, and an appreciative noise rumbled in his throat. He rewarded your responsiveness with another slow, deep plunge of the weapon, and your head lolled back.

“How is your religion serving you now, lamb?”

He shoved the handle as far into you as the guard would allow and worked it back and forth, rubbing the ridges and pommel against the sensitive spots inside. You moaned sinfully loud, and grasped at him. 

He was ruthless, prodding the elusive bumpy patch until you bucked against his hand and watching you float through this immoral delirium.

You wished it was him. His mouth, his fingers, his cock. Anything but this false idol ramming into your pussy.

Your whimpers turned to pleasured cries. Your calves tensed and shook. Looking down on his blasphemous claim, you yelped and pushed at his arms, the torrent of blood splashed over your thighs and sex wrenching you from your high.

In your hysteria, you’d forgotten that he’d sliced open your leg. 

“Father, please…”

He dug his thumb firmly into the wound, gripping nearly your entire thigh in the one tremendous hand. For a moment, the throb in your pussy traveled up to swirl around the intrusion, and you writhed to get away.

“If you call me that again,” he bit your jaw, raising a welt, “I will slit you open from cunt to crown.”

He played in the plasma, coating his fingers with it. You whined and grimaced, caught between salvation at your cunt and persecution at your leg. When his tacky thumb connected with your clit, you shouted, wracked with tremors. Like a savage, he masturbated you with your own blood, rubbing fast circles.

Rapture barreled down the length of your spine, working its way through every extremity. You were going to cum for him, at the end of your family's treasured athame, and there was nothing you could do to stop it. 

It was indecent, and you drowned in it. You collapsed back onto the altar, arching up into a delicious bow. Your knees drew up higher, and your hips worked for him, chasing what he dangled but never quite delivered. Your fingers scrambled against the uneven stone and fisted the velvet garment.

Your insides coiled, churning terror and thirst together until you couldn’t tell one from the other. Inching closer and closer to that crack of lightning, your cries built, a tumultuous, hoarse crescendo.  You thought he would make you tow that line forever, so close to bliss but never allowed to feel it.

But finally, mercifully, it came.

A blistering exaltation slid over your every nerve. Your cunt clenched and quaked, gushing a lewd prayer. The knife in his hand was the center of all gravity, and every part of you swiveled around it, rolling and bucking and shaking. You hurled a string of curses no priestess should ever know, earning a derisive chuckle.

“Such filth from that pretty mouth.”

Spent, your back finally met the slab beneath, and you fought for breath, chest stinging and throat crackly. A pained whine escaped when his torture implement departed from your slick center, but he gave you only a brief reprieve. 

He climbed above you, dropped his heavy knee onto your sensitive mound, and shoved the sullied hilt into your mouth. Your eyes flew open, but he captured your jaw and kept it in place, ensuring that you held the thing upright. 

Copper tang pooled on your tongue and wafted under your nose. On a muffled whinge, your eyes rolled back into your head. Automatically, obediently, you rocked your hips under his trap. 

“No less than you deserve.” He was all spite and venom. “Swallow.”

You couldn’t look at him, the stars in his eyes daunting and demonic.  Your tongue moved around the hilt, licking away the remnants of your vulgar display. You curled your fingers into the hem of his shirt, exhaled slowly through your nose, and complied, gulping the taste down. 

A timid glance found him studying you, but you didn’t know what he was seeking. Obedience? Passion? Reverence? The gravity of the moment was inescapable. He was deciding if you died here and now, and he gagged you from making any further entreaty.

Lithe for his size, he slid from the perch and pulled the athame from your mouth. Silently, he lifted you from the slab and dropped you on the ground. Not knowing if any of the flora was poisonous, you squealed, shot to your feet, and clutched the abused blade to your heart. A second later, you nearly impaled yourself with it when he threw the hefty book at you. 

Grateful that he didn’t destroy your remaining link to your family, you sunk to the ground and dug aching fingers into the dirt. It was cool and soothing, and you wanted nothing more than to lie down in it and die. 

Instead, you watched, benumbed and mute, as he punched a large hole straight through the center of the altar.  It should have been alarming; the crash of rubble should have scared you, but your senses were far past overstimulated.

Silently, he manipulated a chunk of the altar into a slender loop. 

It was astonishing. He was literally creating something from stone that should have been unyielding. Crouching beside you, he pushed your chin up to lengthen your neck. It was then you understood what was happening.  The thing he was fashioning out of the imbrued marble was for you.

Without a word, he molded it around your neck, cementing it with a pinch of his mighty fingers.

His masquerade as a man fell away. That shrine had stood for a thousand years, likely more, and he demolished it as though it was parchment. He had desecrated the altar to enslave you, spinning an infinite bondage into existence with his very will alone. 

The strength, the unfathomable power unleashed a yearning you weren't prepared to address. He was something wholly beyond what you'd been taught. He was profound, unknowable.

You ran your fingertips along the jagged edges and discovered his collar was perfectly measured to your size.  His fingers would fit between it and your skin, but nothing more.

Every story you ever heard about this place rang in your ears, a raucous chorus of warnings. The living could not stay here, nor could they take anything from here. 

But it was too late.

By your own hand, you now existed between life and death, trapped here by this pillaged, obsidian tether and it's king.

You didn’t know if he would do as you asked or if he would make you bear his children.

You did know that you would never be leaving.

#kylo ren #kylo ren imagine #kylo ren x reader #kylo ren smut #kylo x reader #lamb

[bumblebaubles]

 i rank lisas solos/ lilifilms

Malumente[]

Swalla (ver 1)[Arena tour 2019 leg 1]: the thing with this solo is that it never really impressed me. I dont hate it its just that when it came out im like yay new lisa solo then I watched it and i didnt like it as much as the other dances shes done. version 2 however-

Mushroom chocolate [Lilifilm 3]:once again the dance style just isnt my taste even though its fun to watch. I love watching lisa slither like the snake that tempted eve sure but I tend to have a bias towards hiphop

Good Thing/Senorita[Payday dorm tour]: The same way I felt about swalla except it has chair choreography. obviously it was ranked higher

Faded[Arena tour 2018]: this one I actively like, but I liked it least out of my favorite dances. Does that make sense? its my least favorite favorite.The parter choreo, the floor portion. Chef kiss. 

Cravin[Lilifilm]: The first part of the dance is forgettable, the second part though, now thats what broke the internet. That combined with the song being catchy

Attention[Arena tour 2018]: Yeeeeees, gives me sass, gives me energy I love itttt. Her stage outfits were cute to I cant  lie. 

Swalla (ver 2)[Arena tour 2019 (leg 2)]: Yes swalla ver 2 is higher than swalla ver 1. I said that swalla 1 originally didnt catch my attention as much as her other dances, that didnt mean it wasnt good. But the small changes she made to the choreo I liked more than the original. That and she had Swavorski shorts

Tomboy [Lilifilm The Movie] if i was grading strictly based on choreography this would be first, cinematography and color grading were also amazing oh my goodness. 

I like it[Lilifilm ]: The song still slaps in my opinion, and once again the choreography and vibes were overall immaculate

Lemon[Arena Tour 2018]: Lemons my favorite because its been my favorite for so long. This is the strongest presentation of hiphop lisa and she bodies. this is kind of a trend with me, her more sensual dances arel lower on the list. I just really love seeing her do hip hop, that and the choreo is solid too

#wow the gifs are bad but whatever #lisa #lisa manoban #lalisa