Wildlife Ranger! Reiner Braun x Visiting Researcher! Reader
summary: He's spent years alone on this reserve. She's here for one season to study the wolves he's spent his life protecting. A shared cabin, cold mornings, and neither of them quite able to say what they mean out loud yet.
wc: 8.6 k
You had heard, before you ever arrived at the reserve, that the ranger stationed there was a difficult man to work with. Whispers that he was territorial, standoffish, the kind of person who made visiting researchers feel like intruders on land he'd appointed himself sole guardian of. You braced for it the whole drive in, rehearsing polite, professional responses to whatever prickly reception awaited you.
What you got instead, stepping out of your truck into the fog of your own breath, was a tall, broad-shouldered man standing in the cabin’s doorway with a mug of something steaming in one hand. His thick flannel emphasized his frame, his dark blond hair was overgrown at the collar, and a shadow of stubble dusted his chin. He assessed you for a long, calm moment, not unfriendly, just watchful, before speaking. “You’re earlier than I expected. Good.”
"I try to be," you replied, surprised into honesty, your voice sounding small against the enormous quiet pressing in every direction. There was no traffic, no distant hum of anything man-made. It was just wind moving through the pines and, somewhere far off, a bird you didn’t recognize.
The tension in his posture softened. "Reiner," he said, offering a rough hand.
You took it, his grip firm and calloused, a brief, solid pressure before he let go. Glancing at the sky, he added in a tone that verged on apologetic: "Only cabin out here's the one I've got. Hope you don't mind sharing space. There's a second room, proper door and everything, but it's… it's not much."
"I've slept in worse than 'not much.' I'll survive."
"Good," he said again. He picked up your bag before you could protest, slinging it over one shoulder as if it were weightless. You followed him inside past a woodpile stacked with obsessive neatness along the porch rail. Each log was split to nearly the same size, silent proof of a man who had spent years mastering small, meticulous tasks to pass the hours.
The cabin's front room held the accumulated evidence of six years alone—a woodstove blackened with use, a battered leather armchair worn soft in the shape of a body, a wall given over entirely to hand-drawn maps in a cramped, careful hand, filled with custom symbols. Antlers, sun-bleached and found rather than hunted judging by the weathering, sat on a shelf beside a row of field guides with cracked spines. The whole place smelled of woodsmoke and pine resin and, underneath both, something warmer—coffee grounds, old paper, and the lingering presence of someone who truly lived here.
"It's not usually this–" he started, gesturing vaguely at a stack of field notebooks that had taken over half the kitchen table, their covers soft and curling from use.
"It's fine, Reiner."
"I'll clear a space for you. Should've done it before you got here." He was already moving the notebooks, stacking them with unnecessary care. Before he turned away, you caught the faint flush dusting the nape of his neck. A formidable, capable man clearly unsettled by having to share his cluttered space, his morning coffee, and his quiet routines.
You found it, against your better judgment, unbearably charming.
He showed you the second bedroom—small, plain, a narrow bed with a quilt gone thin at the corners, a window that looked out over the ridge where the light was already turning amber and long. The room smelled faintly of dust and cedar, untouched for months, with a single dead moth curled on the sill.
"Sorry it's not much," he said again, hovering in the doorway like he wasn't sure whether to keep apologizing or let it go, his frame nearly filling the narrow space.
"It's got a window facing the ridge. That's more than my apartment back home can say." You set your bag on the bed, and when you turned back he was still standing there, his expression difficult to read. "You okay?"
"Fine. Just… not used to having anyone else's stuff in this place." He said it plainly, without an ounce of self-pity, just an honest observation after six solitary years. "Good different, I mean. Just different."
"Good different," you agreed, a small smile on your face. He nodded, satisfied, and left to start dinner before the beat could drag out any longer.
✶⋆.˚
Breakfast became a routine within the first week, something that just happened. Some mornings you beat him to the kitchen; most mornings he was already there. Whoever reached the stove first cooked for two, an easy quiet settling between you without a word ever needing to be said about it. The kitchen window fogged with condensation each morning while the kettle heated, framing the ridge outside in soft gray until the sun burned it clear. The smell of woodsmoke, coffee, and slightly scorched eggs filled the small room before either of you had fully woken up.
"You don't have to keep doing this," you said, the third morning, watching him flip eggs with more concentration than eggs generally required, his forearms flexing where his sleeves were pushed up.
"I know."
"I could make my own."
"I know that too." He didn't look up from the pan, his ears turning faintly pink. "Just… habit of making breakfast, I guess. I mean.. cooking for one for six years, you get used to the quiet kitchen, but… now there's two of us. Kind of nice having someone to cook for again."
"That's a nice way to put it."
"Didn't mean it as a whole thing," he said quickly, setting a plate in front of you and very deliberately not meeting your eyes. "Just eggs. Don't read into the eggs."
"I would never read into the eggs, Reiner." Your amusement was obvious. The tips of his ears went a shade pinker still, and he busied himself with his own plate as if it were a critical task.
It became, without either of you naming it, the best part of your mornings. Him making coffee too strong and eggs slightly overdone, you teasing him gently about both, the two of you falling into an easy quiet at the small table that neither of you seemed to want to rush through. Some mornings he burned the toast entirely and pretended he'd meant to, and you let him have the lie because the way he set the blackened slice in front of you, chin up, daring you to comment, was somehow one of the most endearing things you'd ever watched a grown man do.
"This is inedible," you told him once, holding up a piece of toast that had gone from golden to charcoal somewhere in the last thirty seconds he'd been distracted watching you instead of the toaster.
"It's rustic."
"It's burnt, Reiner."
"Rustic," he insisted, entirely straight-faced, and ate his own equally ruined slice without complaint. You laughed so hard you nearly choked on your coffee, and for a fleeting second, he looked thoroughly satisfied with himself for catching you off guard.
✶⋆.˚
The actual work properly started the second week, once you'd both settled into the rhythm of sharing the cabin. Reiner spread a large topographic map across the kitchen table one morning, its creases soft from years of folding and refolding, and walked you through the reserve's boundaries with a finger that knew every contour line by memory.
"Pack's core territory sits here," he said, tapping a wide stretch of forest north of the cabin, "but they've been ranging further the last couple seasons. That's part of why the university wanted someone out here properly, instead of just working off satellite collar data."
"So my job's basically to figure out why the range is shifting."
"That's the short version. Long version's a lot of sitting still and writing down what you see." He glanced at you, offering a brief, sympathetic look. "Fair warning… it's slower than people expect. A lot of watching, not much happening, and then everything happening at once for about four minutes before it goes quiet again."
"I've done fieldwork before, Reiner. I know what watching an animal for six hours to get twenty seconds of usable data feels like."
"Good. Most people who come out here don't." He rolled the map up carefully, matching the old creases without seeming to think about it. "My job's mostly maintenance and monitoring… camera checks, den site surveys, keeping poachers and anyone else off the land. I know where they den, where they hunt, how the pack's structured. What I don't have is your kind of data… the actual analysis, the bigger migration patterns. That's the piece the university's after."
"So we're doing the same job from two different angles."
"Something like that." He seemed to weigh the thought, visibly pleased by it. "I keep them safe. You figure out what they're actually doing and why. Been doing the first half alone for a long time. Curious what the second half looks like with someone here to do it properly."
Reiner walked you out to the first survey camera that same afternoon. He skipped the basics, he already knew you could read a fresh track or identify a tuft of shed winter coat, and focused instead on the land’s specific rhythms. He showed you the hidden game trails the pack preferred over the official map routes, pointed out a ridge shortcut that looked fast on paper but was a nightmare of loose gravel in practice, and walked you through the quirks of the camera housings themselves, which needed a firm nudge to seal against the rain.
"This unit sits right near their secondary scent mark," he explained, adjusting the angle of the camera slightly. "Pack usually comes through from the west around dawn, but if the wind flips, they’ll loop wide around the trench. Check the memory card from the side so you don't leave your scent right in their main sightline."
You took notes as he talked, cataloging camera locations, sightlines, and terrain quirks, and he kept glancing over at your notebook with a kind of surprised approval that he didn't bother hiding.
By the third camera check, the glancing had become its own kind of habit, one he clearly hadn't noticed he'd picked up. Reiner would finish resetting a housing, straighten up, and his eyes would drift sideways to your notebook before he caught himself and looked away again—the same motion, small and repeated, like a man checking a pot he didn't quite believe was actually coming to a boil.
You noticed his gaze, somewhere around the fourth site, and decided to have a little fun with it. Between two legitimate entries, a track measurement, a note on wind direction, you sketched a tiny, deeply unserious wolf in the margin, all disproportionate paws and an expression of profound unbothered smugness, and underneath it wrote, in your neatest handwriting, Hazel (Subject 4) appears to be judging the ranger's map-reading.
You didn't say anything. You just kept writing, waiting.
He leaned in at the fifth site, seemingly checking the camera angle, and his eyes caught the page mid-glance the way they had every time before. Except this time he actually stopped, blinking at the little wolf for a full second before a short, surprised laugh escaped him, more of a bark than anything dignified.
"Is that supposed to be one of them?"
"That's Hazel. She's not impressed with how long it took you to find this camera."
"She's got no legs."
"She's got four legs. They're just proportionally accurate to how little I care about wolf anatomy in the margins of a field notebook."
He laughed again, properly this time, shoulders shaking, and reached over to tilt the notebook further toward himself without asking, studying the drawing with far more attention than a stick-figure wolf reasonably deserved. "This going in your official report?"
"Absolutely not. This is going in my personal collection of evidence that you make a very specific face when you're pretending you knew exactly where you were going."
That got him—a flush climbing up from his collar, half laughter and half genuine, caught-out embarrassment, and he ducked his head the way he did when a compliment landed somewhere he wasn't braced for, even dressed up as a joke. "I don't have a face."
"You've got a whole face, Reiner. Hazel agrees."
He didn't ask to see the notebook again for the rest of that afternoon, but you caught him, more than once, biting back a smile at nothing in particular, and later, packing up the gear, he paused at your open page long enough to add, in surprisingly careful handwriting for someone with hands built for splitting firewood, a small addendum beneath the doodle: Hazel has never once doubted my navigation. Slander.
You laughed so hard you nearly dropped the camera housing, and he looked, watching you laugh at something he'd made just to make you laugh, entirely, helplessly pleased with himself.
✶⋆.˚
Reiner taught you things beyond the wolves, in those early weeks. Small, practical pieces of a life built around this land that he seemed to enjoy passing on more than he'd expected to.
You'd taken to lighting a small fire outside most evenings once the day's fieldwork wound down, less out of necessity than habit. Although the cabin's woodstove kept the inside plenty warm, there was something about sitting outdoors, with the ridge going purple and the pines creaking as they cooled, that neither of you wanted to trade for four walls just yet.
You were, by any honest measure, terrible at it.
"You're doing it wrong," Reiner said, one such evening, watching you fail for the third time to coax more than a stubborn curl of smoke out of a pile of kindling that seemed determined to resent you personally. The smoke stung your eyes and did nothing else useful, and the light was already slanting low and orange through the pines, the temperature dropping fast, cold enough that your bare hands had gone a little clumsy around the matches.
"I'm aware."
"Here." He crouched beside you, close enough that his shoulder brushed yours, the warmth of him cutting through the evening chill. He adjusted the kindling with quick, sure hands, calloused fingers moving with a routine of motion that came only from years of repetition. "Smaller pieces first. You're trying to build a house before you've got a foundation."
"I don't remember signing up for a metaphor with my fire-starting lesson."
"Free of charge," he replied, grinning, and struck the match, cupping the small flame against the breeze with practiced ease. The kindling caught on the first try in a way yours hadn't in ten. "See? Foundation first."
"Boy Scout."
"Something like that. Wasn't actually a Scout, for the record… just spent enough summers doing this that it stuck." He glanced at you, firelight catching gold in his eyes, something warmer under the joke. "Six years out here. Better be good at something. Glad it's useful for more than just impressing you, though that's a nice side effect."
"Is that what this was? An attempt to impress me?"
"Might've been a little bit that," he admitted, ears going pink again in the way you'd started to find entirely predictable, and entirely wonderful. "Worked, though. You look impressed."
"Don't let it go to your head."
"Too late," he said, and nudged your shoulder with his.
You'd brought supplies out with you that evening: a bag from the pantry he hadn't thought to question, marshmallows and a broken-cornered box of graham crackers and a slightly stale chocolate bar you'd found tucked behind a row of canned beans. You whipped the supplies out once the fire settled into good coals, watching his face light up with genuine delight. It was an open, unguarded look that had nothing to do with tracking or work.
"You're kidding."
"Found the ingredients. Figured a man who's this competitive about kindling deserves a reward."
"Nobody's made me s'mores out here in six years." Reiner said it plainly, but there was a note underneath it that gave the whole thing away. Some old, small joy he hadn't let himself expect to feel again, out here, alone, doing the same evening ritual by himself for so long it had stopped being anything but maintenance.
He was, predictably, extremely serious about the process. He insisted on toasting his marshmallow to a precise, even gold rather than the fast-charred method you preferred, holding the stick out at an exact distance from the coals with the same careful patience he brought to reading tracks.
"Says the man who serves me burnt toast every other morning and calls it 'rustic.'"
"That's different."
"How is that different?"
"Toast is supposed to be crisp. This is a delicate process." He held his marshmallow out at the same distance as before, unmoved by the hypocrisy of it, and you laughed so hard you nearly dropped your stick into the fire. He watched you laugh, his face so open and unguarded that he wasn't even trying to hide what it meant anymore.
"You have zero standards for toast and extremely specific standards for marshmallows. That tracks, somehow."
"I contain multitudes," he said, echoing a line you were fairly sure he'd used on you once before, and you laughed again, and he looked, in the low firelight, entirely pleased with himself for landing the callback.
You ate in a comfortable, sticky-fingered quiet after that, the fire popping low and steady, the first stars beginning to needle through the darkening sky above the ridge, close enough that neither of you moved away, both of you in no hurry at all to let the evening end.
✶⋆.˚
Everything had been smooth sailing until six weeks in. You were a few hundred yards out, jotting notes near a camera site, when a sharp, strangled noise cut through the trees. By the time you reached him, Reiner was pressing his hand hard against his palm, blood welling dark and fast between his fingers. It stood out startlingly red against his pale knuckles—the result of a jagged branch catching him wrong while he cleared brush near a survey camera.
Seeing it hit you with a cold, fast lurch of fear that no basic field training could have prepared you for. There was so much blood soaking into his cuff, his jaw set pale as he tried to wave you off like it was nothing. It was the sudden, unsettling vulnerability of it—watching someone so steady and capable get caught off guard like that.
"It's fine," he said, already walking toward the cabin at a pace that suggested it very much was not fine. "I'll clean it up and throw a couple stitches in it myself. I've done it plenty of times."
"You are not stitching your dominant hand with your left," you snapped, matching his hurried pace before grabbing his elbow to wrench his focus onto you. "Look at your sleeve. You're bleeding straight through your fingers. Stop arguing and let me do it."
He opened his mouth to argue, realized the absolute impracticality of stitching his own right hand, and fell silent—which told you more than his words had.
Back at the cabin, the evening light had gone flat and gray through the windows now. You had him sit at the edge of the kitchen table while you dug out the first aid kit, hands not quite steady with the leftover adrenaline of the walk back.
"Give me your hand," you demanded.
You stepped right into the space between his knees as he sat perched on the table's edge, bringing you undeniably close. The heat radiating off him was immediate, his broad frame towering over you even while seated, boxing you into his space. He let his legs part slightly to accommodate you, a stubborn, prideful tension still lingering in his shoulders. But the moment his palm settled into yours—big, calloused, and trembling faintly—his breath hitched. The feel of his hand in yours sent a sudden, sharp tightness through your chest.
You cleaned the wound slowly, the antiseptic sharp and clean against the coppery smell of blood. Standing so close between his thighs, every shift of his breathing pressed against the atmosphere between you. As you rolled back his sleeve to keep it clear, your eyes caught on a thick, jagged silvery line along his inner forearm—an old, poorly healed scar where the skin had pucker-stitched unevenly, clear evidence of a man who had stubbornly forced a needle through his own flesh one-handed years ago and called it good enough.
Yeah, you thought, he's definitely not doing this one himself.
You were aware of every point of contact—the warmth of his legs framing yours, the rise and fall of his chest just inches from your shoulder, how carefully he held himself still under your touch. His hand was warm despite the blood loss, rough with years of outdoor work, and it curled slightly, instinctively, around your fingers whenever the antiseptic stung—not gripping hard, just holding on.
You worked the first stitch in with neat, practiced precision. Reiner’s eyes stayed locked on your face, ignoring the needle and his bleeding palm entirely. From his slight height advantage, he took in the unblinking focus in your eyes and the quiet concentration set in your jaw from mere inches away. A subtle shift went through him, his initial stubbornness melting into something softer—pleasantly surprised by how light and sure your hands were, and utterly captivated by the sight of you taking care of him.
"You're... actually really good at this," he said, his voice a little tight, though a faint, admiring trace of a smile touched his lips as he looked down at your face. "A hell of a lot better than I am, judging by my own past attempts."
"Basic field training. Plus, I actually care if this heals without looking like a butcher worked on it," you replied softly, keeping your eyes on the thread, needing the task to keep your hands from shaking despite how acutely aware you were of his knees resting against your hips. "Hold still. Last stitch."
He held still. When it was done you didn't step back out of his space, and he didn't pull his hand away. The adrenaline of the last half hour slowly drained out of the room, leaving a quiet, heavy warmth holding the two of you anchored together at the table's edge.
"You were scared," he said, quiet, his eyes searching your face at close range.
"You were bleeding a lot."
"I've had worse. Wasn't going to die from a branch." Reiner said it gently, trying to ease whatever worry still sat in your eyes, his thumb moving, absent and slow, against the side of your hand where it still rested against his. "I'm used to just patching myself up and moving on. But it's… it's been a long time since anyone looked that scared on my account. Kind of forgot what that felt like, having someone care enough to step in."
"Get used to it," you said, softer than you meant to, lingering right there in his space. "I'm not planning on stopping."
A soft, unguarded quiet fell over him. Neither of you moved as the daylight faded into blue outside, your bodies close, his hand warm and steady in yours.
✶⋆.˚
As the weeks wore on, the cold nights became worse than either of you had planned for—a stretch of unseasonable temperature drops that turned the cabin's old stove into an unreliable ally, and turned the two spare blankets you'd each been allotted into something closer to a running joke about whose turn it was to actually be warm.
"You're freezing," Reiner said, one such night, the two of you posted at the far ridge overnight to track a den site, huddled under a single properly warm blanket he'd insisted, gruffly, that you take. "Your teeth are actually chattering. Come here."
"I'm fine–"
"You're not fine, you're turning blue. Come here, I mean it." He held the blanket open, an invitation delivered with far more awkwardness than the actual gesture required, like a man who wanted very badly to seem casual about something that didn't feel casual to him at all.
You moved closer, tucking yourself against his side under the shared blanket. The wool was scratchy but warm, and the solid heat of his body was a welcome shock against the cold. Next to you, Reiner went rigid for a second—startled by his own decision, his arm hovering uncertainly before settling, hesitant and careful, around your shoulders as if waiting for you to tell him it was too much.
"Better?" he asked, voice a little rough.
"Much." The heat radiating off him was steady and real, his heartbeat a slow, solid thrum where your head rested near his chest. Something in you swelled with a sudden, warm affection. He was holding himself almost completely still, taking extreme care not to break the spell or admit how much he wanted to keep you there.
"Your face is red," you whispered, after a while, glancing up at him in the dim moonlight.
"It's cold out. Everyone's face is red."
"It wasn't red a minute ago."
"Wasn't sitting this close to you a minute ago," Reiner admitted, quiet, and then seemed to hear himself say it, and went, if possible, even redder. "That's… I didn't mean…”
"I know what you meant," you said gently, and let your head rest against his shoulder, and felt him slightly relax, the tension easing out of him like a held breath finally released. The two of you sat together in comfortable, blushing silence, the wind moving faintly through the pines below the ridge, watching for movement at the den site neither of you were really watching for anymore.
That became its own kind of ritual after that—cold nights, shared blankets, the two of you finding excuses to sit closer than the actual work required. He started timing the overnight watches for the coldest nights specifically. It was a subtle habit you didn't call him out on right away, mostly because you looked forward to them just as much as he did. But you caught him red-handed one frigid evening when he checked the truck radio’s forecast with far more attention than a simple weather report usually earned.
You didn't say anything. You just came and stood a little closer than strictly necessary while he checked it, close enough that your arm brushed his, and watched, out of the corner of your eye, the way his focus on the radio faltered entirely the moment he registered how near you'd gotten—the report forgotten mid-sentence, his hand going still on the dial, a slow flush creeping up from his collar that had nothing to do with the cold at all.
Neither of you said a word about it. You didn't have to.
✶⋆.˚
Over the following weeks, the wolves became a shared language between you. They gave you an excuse to stand close together at the treeline in the pale early light, frost still silvering the grass underfoot. When Reiner leaned in to whisper an observation, his breath would stir the loose hair at your temple—his voice dropping to a low, gravelly rumble that felt warmer than the morning air against your skin. It was so close you could feel the soft vibration of it in his chest before you even registered the words. More than once, you’d reach for the binoculars at the exact same moment, ending up with hands overlapping on the worn leather strap, neither of you willing to pull away first.
One such morning, lowering your own binoculars to jot a note, the pack already melting back into the shadowed treeline, you caught him out of the corner of your eye. He wasn’t watching the pack at all. Instead his eyes were on you, utterly unaware he'd been seen, an expression on his face so open and undefended that it stole something in your chest before you'd decided how to feel about it.
You let the silence hold. Speaking felt like it would break a delicate spell before it had finished casting. Instead, you turned your gaze deliberately back to him, meeting his eyes head-on.
You watched the exact moment realization hit—his whole face going through a fast, helpless sequence of surprise, embarrassment, and something far warmer underneath both. Yet neither of you looked away. His breath hitched faintly, his gaze locked firmly onto yours as the quiet between you stretched, taut and thick with everything left unsaid.
Without moving your eyes from his, you gave a tiny, slow nod toward the shadowed treeline.
"The wolves are that way," you said softly, offering him the out if he wanted it.
Reiner didn't take it right away. His eyes stayed held in yours for several long, unhurried seconds—long enough for your heart to hammer against your ribs—before he finally, reluctantly, tore his gaze away to look back toward the trees.
"Right," he said, his voice a little rough as he cleared his throat. "Wolves. Right."
The two of you walked in silence for a few paces, the quiet between suddenly much thicker than it had been ten minutes before.
"You've got egg on your sleeve, by the way," Reiner said, keeping his eyes fixed resolutely on the trail ahead. "From breakfast. Been there an hour."
"You could've told me an hour ago."
"Could have. Didn't want to stop looking at you long enough to mention it." He offered the line casually, but a second later, a deep, glorious flush crept up the back of his neck at his own boldness. He ducked his head to hide it, making you laugh out loud—a bright, delighted sound that startled a bird from the nearby brush.
✶⋆.˚
There was a particular evening when a sudden rainstorm caught the two of you a mile from the cabin with no cover in sight. The sky opened without warning, heavy gray clouds bruising the horizon as the temperature plummeted. Cold, stinging rain filled the air with the sharp scent of ozone, soaking through your layers within seconds. Beneath your boots, the packed dirt trail dissolved almost instantly into slick, dark mud.
"Run!" Reiner shouted over the suddenly deafening roar of the downpour.
A startled, breathless laugh broke from him as he clamped his hand firmly around yours, his large fingers lacing securely through yours so you wouldn't get separated. The two of you bolted down the sloped path, the forest blurring around you into streaks of pine needle green and wet bark. Cold streams of water plastered your hair flat to your skull and ran down the back of your neck. Every few paces your boots would lose traction, sending up wet sprays of mud as you balanced each other out—hauling each other forward, shrieking with laughter that was far more delighted than urgent.
Then your toe caught the slick, exposed knuckle of a tree root hidden beneath a puddle.
The ground rushed up to meet you with terrifying speed. You gasped, your momentum carrying you down—and because Reiner’s grip on your hand was unbreakable, you pulled him right down with you. He made a low, surprised noise as his footing gave way, his massive frame tumbling sideways to cushion your fall as best he could.
You hit the earth with a wet, heavy thud, landing in a graceless, tangled heap of limbs in the sodden grass just off the trail. Mud splashed high across your legs and clothes, cold water instantly seeping through your jeans. For a second, all the air was knocked clean out of your lungs, the torrential rain hammering mercilessly against your faces.
Then the absurd shock of it hit, and you both burst into helpless, wheezing laughter.
"You just took down a grown man," Reiner panted, flat on his back in the mud, one forearm slung over his eyes while the rain streamed off the sharp line of his jaw.
"You were holding my hand! That was a team effort!"
"Terrible teamwork. Worst partner I've ever had," he retorted, a massive grin breaking across his face as he hauled his arm back to look at you, his eyes bright and squinting against the downpour.
"Come on, get up before we drown," you laughed, trying to find leverage on the slick grass.
Reiner rolled onto his knees first, mud clinging to his pants, and extended a big, steady hand to haul you up. You took it, pulling yourself to your feet, but the moment you were upright, your boot slid again on the slick bank.
You stumbled forward right into his space. Seeking leverage, your hands instinctively grabbed the thick lapels of his heavy canvas work jacket as you went down. Reiner caught you effortlessly by the waist, his strong arms wrapping around you to anchor you against him—but between your weight pulling at his coat and his quick save, his soaked jacket got dragged halfway off his shoulders, tangling awkwardly around his forearms.
"Gotcha," he muttered, his chest heaving against yours as he held you steady on your feet.
You quickly let go of his jacket once you found your footing, but the damage was done—the heavy, waterlogged canvas was pinned around his elbows, binding his arms. Cursing softly under his breath at the unwieldy fabric, Reiner let go of your waist just long enough to unzip the dripping coat, peel it off his shoulders, and fold it over his arm.
That left him standing in just a plain white undershirt.
The heavy downpour had turned the thin cotton instantly, completely transparent. It plastered to every line of his torso like a second skin, water running in thin, glistening streams down the deep ridges of his chest and abs. Without the bulky layers of flannel and canvas hiding him, the sheer breadth of his shoulders and the solid, carved strength of his physique were suddenly, starkly bare right in front of you.
Your eyes darted down—taking in the cut of his muscle and the heat radiating off him despite the freezing storm—before you forced yourself to look back up at his face a half-second too late.
Reiner caught it.
He froze mid-breath, his grip tightening slightly around the heavy coat in his hand as his eyes locked onto yours, registering the exact trajectory of your gaze. The playful banter died on his lips. The rain kept hammering down around you, cascading through his wet hair and over his broad shoulders, but the silence that fell between you felt suddenly massive, hot, and electric—far larger than the joke you had both been laughing at a moment before.
"We should–" you started.
"Run," he agreed, his voice rougher than it had been. You didn't look directly at each other again until you'd both stumbled—soaked, shivering, and laughing in a slightly different, charged key—back through the cabin door into the dim, dry warmth inside.
"We look ridiculous," you said, collapsing onto the rug just inside the door, water pooling around your boots.
"Speak for yourself. I look great soaking wet." He said it with such straight-faced confidence that you laughed again, though the memory of how true that statement actually was sat warm and distracting right behind your ribs. "Here… you're going to freeze standing there. Towels are–"
"I know where the towels are, Reiner, I live here now."
The words sat in the air—live here now—easy and unthinking. Reiner went quiet, a subtle softness settling over his features as water dripped steadily from his blond hair onto his shoulders.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "Guess you do."
You both retreated to your respective rooms to peel off the heavy, rain-drenched clothes, scrubbing towel after towel over your damp hair before returning to the main room. The woodstove crackled back to life, filling the cabin with a deep, comforting heat. You’d already burned through your last clean sweater earlier that week and were severely overdue for a laundry run into town, leaving you shivering slightly in a thin, dry shirt.
Noticing you rubbing your arms, Reiner reached into his own wardrobe and handed you a thick, heavy-knit wool sweater.
When you pulled it over your head, you practically drowned in it. The shoulders slumped halfway down your arms, the hem fell past your thighs like a tunic, and the long sleeves completely swallowed your hands until you had to fold the cuffs back twice just to find your fingers. It was massive, but the warmth was instantaneous.
More than that, it smelled overwhelmingly like him—woodsmoke, cold pine, cedar, and something clean and warm underneath. It was the specific, unplaceable scent you’d come to associate with safety, and you found yourself burying your chin into the thick collar, breathing it in far longer than simply putting on a sweater required.
"Looks better on you than it ever did on me," Reiner said softly. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, watching you with an expression he didn't try very hard to hide, the orange firelight catching gold along the side of his face.
You looked down at the swallowed sleeves, smiling as you smoothed the heavy wool over your lap. Hearing him say that, you decided right then that you weren't in any hurry to give the sweater back.
✶⋆.˚
The isolation of the place, which Reiner had described early on as something you learned to live with, started feeling different for both of you as the weeks went by—less like an absence, more like a shared condition neither of you was experiencing alone anymore.
"Can I ask you something?" you said, one evening at the cabin, the two of you sitting on the porch steps watching the last light fade over the ridge in long bands of orange and violet, a thermos of coffee between you gone lukewarm without either of you minding enough to refill it, the first owl of the evening calling somewhere off in the dark treeline.
"Go ahead."
"Why this? Six years alone out here, when you could've taken a job somewhere with actual colleagues, actual company. What made you choose this instead?"
He was quiet for a long moment, turning the thermos cap over in his hands. "Had a life before this that was a lot louder. Team sports, actually… competitive stuff, a lot of noise and people around all the time. Got hurt eventually, in a way that ended it faster than I was ready for. Spent a while after that not knowing what to do with myself, if I'm honest. Found my way out here almost by accident, and something about the quiet just… fit. Felt like the first thing that made sense after everything else stopped."
"Do you miss the noise? The people?"
"Some days. Not as much as I thought I would, though. Turns out I like the quiet more than I ever expected to. Just took someone showing up who could share it with me to realize how much better it is that way, instead of just tolerable." He glanced at you, something open and a little vulnerable in the admission, the darkening sky reflected faintly in his eyes. "You asked me something honest. Feels only fair I ask you something back. Why wolves? Why this specific kind of research, out here, alone for a season?"
You thought about it for a moment, the question landing somewhere you didn't usually let people reach either. "Grew up somewhere without much wild space left. Wolves always felt like the thing that represented everything missing from where I was from… untouched, unmanaged, living according to their own logic instead of anyone else's. Studying them felt like the closest I could get to understanding what that kind of freedom looks like. Guess I wanted, for one season at least, to be somewhere that logic still applied."
"Feels like it applies to you too, out here," Reiner said quietly. "You've settled into this place faster than anyone I've had out here before. Like you were always going to end up somewhere like this eventually."
"Maybe I was," you admitted, and the quiet that followed felt like something settling into place between you, the last color draining from the sky above the ridge, stars beginning to needle through overhead one by one.
By this point the air between you had a different weight to it most evenings—something taut and unspoken, both of you finding excuses to close small distances, to let a hand linger a beat too long passing a mug, to hold eye contact one second past what plain conversation required. You noticed it most on the porch, in the last of the evening light, when neither of you was quite talking about the thing sitting so plainly between you, and both of you were entirely too aware of exactly how little space was left on the step you shared.
"You keep looking at me like that," you whispered, when his gaze had settled on you for a beat too long again.
"Like what?"
"Like you want to say something."
He was silent for a moment, jaw working, the porch light catching the color rising in his face. "Maybe I do," he admitted, low. "Just haven't figured out how yet."
"Take your time," you said, though your own heart was going faster than the calm delivery let on, and the two of you sat there a while longer in that charged, unresolved quiet, crickets starting up somewhere in the dark grass below the porch, both of you feeling the exact shape of what neither had said yet.
✶⋆.˚
The night that finally tipped things over was an ordinary evening—dinner at the small kitchen table, the stove working properly for once, the smell of woodsmoke and something simmering on the stovetop filling the small room, both of you tired and content after a long day of fieldwork that had gone unusually well, the pack having led you to a new stretch of territory neither of you had mapped before.
"Can I tell you something?" Reiner asked, turning his water glass slowly between his hands, not quite looking at you.
"Always."
"I've been trying to figure out how to say this for about three weeks now. Every time I get close, I lose my nerve and end up talking about the wolves instead." He huffed a small, embarrassed laugh. "Which… you've probably noticed. I bring up wolf behavior any time I'm nervous. It's a terrible tell."
"I noticed," you said, gently, letting him get there in his own time.
"I like sharing this cabin with you. More than I probably should admit, given you're only here for a season. I like the eggs in the morning, and I like when you steal the good blanket, and I like the sweater looking better on you than it ever did on me, and I like–" He stopped, exhaled, started again, more direct. "I like you. A lot. Been trying to say it properly for weeks and kept losing my nerve, because I haven't wanted anything this much in longer than I can easily remember, and it's a little terrifying, wanting something that much again."
"Reiner." You reached across the small table and took his hand, watching the color rise in his face again, watching him hold very still like he wasn't sure what to do with being touched on purpose instead of huddled together for warmth. "I like you too. Have for weeks. Every morning you make eggs like it's nothing, and every night you give me the warm blanket and pretend you're not freezing yourself, and every time you time the overnight watches for the coldest nights on purpose and think I haven't noticed… I've noticed all of it. I've been hoping you'd say something before the season ran out."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He fell silent, a rare, unshielded mix of hope and vulnerability crossing his features. Slowly, deliberately, giving you every second to draw back if you wanted to, he began to lean across the narrow wooden table that had sat between you all these weeks.
You closed the remaining space between you, your fingers tightening around his hand as you leaned in to meet him. When your lips finally met his, a soft breath caught right in his chest.
The kiss was gentle at first, a sweet, testing touch that carried the quiet weight of two people who had spent weeks circling each other. It was a little clumsy—the angle of the small table awkward, his large frame carefully adjusting so he wouldn't crowd you—but it was entirely unhurried.
Reiner brought his free hand up to cup the side of your jaw, his broad, calloused palm warm against your skin. His thumb brushed over your cheekbone with unbelievable gentleness, as if still stunned by the reality of touching you like this. The tension that had held his broad shoulders tight for months melted away all at once. The kiss deepened naturally, tasting faintly of sweet coffee and woodsmoke, a slow, deep press of mouths that felt like finally coming home after a long journey in the cold.
When you finally pulled back just an inch, his hand lingered against your cheek, his thumb trailing over your lower lip. He was smiling in a way you had never seen before—completely unguarded, a little dazed, the careful reserve he usually carried wiped clean away.
"Your face is red again," you teased softly, resting your hand over his where it still held your jaw.
"Your fault," he said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp.
He leaned in again, capturing your lips in a second kiss—shorter this time, but firmer, a lingering press just to reassure himself that this was real, that he was allowed to have this.
"Worth it, though," he murmured against your mouth before finally letting you go. "Every single bit of it."
That night, Reiner lingered by your bedroom door longer than he needed to, some flimsy excuse about checking the woodstove already used twice, the hallway between your rooms dim and narrow, lit only by the last orange glow through the front room window.
"It's supposed to get cold again tonight," he said, third excuse, rubbing the back of his neck. "Colder than the stove really handles, in your room especially, it's further from the–"
"Reiner."
"Yeah?"
"Just ask."
He huffed a soft, embarrassed laugh, some of the tension easing out of his shoulders at being caught. "Would it be too much to ask if you wanted to stay in my room tonight? Just… for the warmth. No expectations. I just liked having you close, on the ridge those nights, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since."
"I'd like that," you said, simply, and watched relief and something warmer both cross his face at once.
He was careful with you that first night, almost hesitant. It was like he was handling something he still couldn't quite believe was his to hold. Once you were under the blankets, his arm settled around you, pausing to test the weight before he fully relaxed against your back. You could feel his unsteady breath against your neck, right up until you reached back to lace your fingers through his, silently dissolving the last of his hesitation.
"Okay?" he murmured, voice rough with something that wasn't quite sleep yet.
"More than okay," you said, and felt him exhale, slow and full, against your shoulder, some old, careful tension finally letting go of him entirely as the whole cabin settled into the same quiet, safe warmth.
He got braver about it, slowly, over the following nights. The hesitant, testing weight of his arm around you becoming something surer, something he no longer checked and rechecked before settling into. A week later, he no longer bothered for an excuse.
"Stay," he said, simply, one night, when you'd made a token gesture toward your own room out of habit rather than any real desire to leave him. "Don't need an excuse this time. Just… stay."
"No cold weather to blame it on tonight."
"Don't need the cold anymore," he said, low, pulling you back against him with a confidence that hadn't been there the first night, pressing an unhurried kiss to your shoulder. "Just want you here."
You stayed. It became, without much discussion, simply how things were—his room, his bed, his arm settling around you each night with an ease that had grown out of the same hesitant care from that first night, transformed now into something sure and easy and entirely unafraid.
✶⋆.˚
The weeks that followed passed in a warmth that had nothing to do with the stove finally getting fixed—mornings that started with eggs and ended, more often than not, with him finding some small excuse to kiss you before you both headed out for the day's fieldwork, the pines outside the window still silvered with frost; nights that no longer needed the excuse of cold to end up tangled together, his arm around you, both of you watching the stars instead of the den site, the whole ridge gone silent and vast and entirely yours.
Reiner got braver about small affections too, slowly—a hand at the small of your back while you both crouched at the treeline, a kiss pressed to your temple over breakfast before he could think better of it, small unhurried gestures that still, occasionally, made him blush like it was the first time all over again.
"You still go red every time," you teased, one morning, watching the color rise in his face after he'd kissed you good morning without quite meaning to announce it first.
"Some things don't wear off, apparently."
"I hope they never do."
"Yeah," he said, soft, pulling you in against his side for a moment before the day's work called both of you outside. "Me too."
✶⋆.˚
Near the season's end, on one of the last cold nights before the weather properly turned, you found yourselves back at the same ridge where you'd first shared a blanket months before—not on watch this time, no work reason at all, just two people who wanted one more quiet night under the stars before everything changed shape again. The pines below the ridge had gone black and silent against a sky thick with stars, the air carrying the first true bite of the coming winter, and somewhere far below, faint and answered a moment later from the opposite ridge, the pack began to howl.
"You'll go back to the university eventually," Reiner said, chin resting against the top of your head, his arm warm around your shoulders, not with worry so much as quiet acknowledgement.
"I will. Season ends, I write it up, all of that."
"And then?"
"And then I come back," you said, simply, "because there's a lot more wolves to study, and a ranger out here who makes terrible eggs and gives away the good blanket every single night, and picks the coldest nights on purpose so he has an excuse to hold me. I'm not in any hurry to give any of that up."
He laughed, soft and real, the sound of it rumbling against where your head rested on his chest, and pressed a kiss to your temple. Something in his chest seemed to finally, fully settle, six years of careful solitude giving way to something he hadn't let himself hope for in a long time.
"I'd like that," he whispered in your ear. "More than I probably know how to say properly."
"You've said it fine," you told him, and the two of you sat together a while longer in the quiet dark, no longer counting down toward an ending, simply glad, for once, not to be facing the long winter alone.
Formula Racing! Jean Kirstein x Team Engineer! F. Reader (oneshot)
summary: You are the lead race engineer for a mid-tier team clawing its way up the standings. Jean is the driver everyone underestimated. Too aggressive, too mouthy, written off after a bad rookie season with another team. You're the reason his races improve.
notes: all my knowledge about this stuff is from quick research and Gran Turismo (the movie). also first oneshot I’ve ever written for Tumblr. please be nice. also all of the art above belongs to the rightful creators I found on pinterest.
The first time you spoke to Jean Kirstein, you told him his exit from the fourth turn was costing him three tenths a lap, and that he needed to stop fighting the car through it.
He's looked at you like you'd insulted his mother.
"I'm not fighting anything," he replied, arms crossed, still sweating through his balaclava from the session. "The car is fighting me."
"It's not a wrestling match, Kirstein, it's a braking zone." You tapped a knuckle against the tablet screen. "You're lifting half a second early into the fourth turn, burning your exit speed before you even turn the wheel. You're fighting a problem you are creating yourself."
He stared at the display for a long moment. Then at you.
"Who hired you?"
"Same person who hired you. Ymir brought me in to catch the details Rico's group missed." You leaned back slightly against the workstation. "You've got the speed to qualify near the top. I'm just here to make sure you actually stay there on Sunday instead of dropping back by lap ten."
"You always this friendly?"
"I'm not paid to be friendly. I'm paid to make you finish races."
That had been eleven months ago, in a garage in Bahrain that smelled like brake dust and stale coffee, and it was the last time either of you had been anything close to formal with each other.
By the sixth race of the season you had a rhythm. You called strategy, he executed it... mostly. He argued on the radio more than any driver you'd ever worked with, a running commentary of are you sure and I don't like this and, once, memorably, if this undercut doesn't work I'm blaming you specifically, by name, in the post-race interview. And then he would do exactly what you told him anyway, because somewhere over the past months he had started trusting you more than he trusted his own hands on the wheel.
Having him trust your calls without hesitation was a career high. But in the quiet hours between sessions, when it was just you and a screen full of lap times, that trust started feeling heavy in a completely different way.
You pushed it aside. You had a championship on the line.
The team was fourth in the constructors' standings, closing on third, and Jean was somehow fourth in the drivers' championship despite driving for a team that had finished ninth the year before. Some of that was the car. Most of it, though nobody official would say it out loud, was the two of you-- his hands and your numbers, six years of him being told he was too aggressive to be reliable finally getting turned into an asset instead of a liability, because you were the one deciding when aggressive was allowed to happen.
"I can hear you overthinking from three tables away," Jean said, dropping into the booth across from you. He pushed a plate of pasta around with his fork, wearing that distinct, edge-of-his-seat impatience that meant Monza was coming up.
"It's called working, Kirstein. You should try it sometime." You pointed to the screen. "Monza's a low deg circuit, which means every strategist on the grid is going to lock themselves into a boring one-stop. I want to know if we can make a two-stop work anyway."
"Why would we want a two-stop at a one-stop track?"
"Because everyone else is going to be on the same strategy at the same time, which means everyone else is going to be stuck in traffic at the same time. If we're not exactly where they are, we're not fighting them for position."
He looked at you for a second, a considering look he gave you sometimes that you had learned to associate, uncomfortably, with him thinking about you instead of about racing. "You know you scare the shit out of half the garage."
"Good."
"Not me, though."
You finally looked up, "No?"
"I've seen you cry over an undercut that didn't work in Miami. You're not scary. You just make it sound like you are." He said it easily, like it wasn't a small intimacy, like he hadn't just told you he'd noticed something about you that most people missed entirely. "It's kind of the same thing I do, actually."
"You don't hide caring. You are the loudest person here."
"I hide the caring that matters." he said it and then seemed to hear it, the way it landed somewhere past the joke he'd meant it as, and looked back down at the pasta instead of at you. "Anyway. Monza. Two-stop. You'll tell me when."
"I'll tell you when."
He didn't leave, though. He sat there, pushing his pasta around in his bowl while you built a strategy model. And you let him, neither of you saying anything about why that felt like it mattered.
Monza went perfectly, which was its own kind of problem, because perfect races made it very easy to forget you were supposed to keep a professional distance from the person you'd just helped win.
The two-stop played out exactly as predicted. While the rest of the field got tangled up in traffic on worn tires, Jean cut through the grid like he was in a league of his own. On fresh rubber for the final stint, he picked off three cars in rapid succession and crossed the line in second, the team's first podium at Monza, and his best finish of the year.
The radio afterward was chaos, the whole garage on its feet, and Jean's voice cut straight through the noise, still breathless from the in-lap but his smile audible: "Say it! Say it over the radio right now. You were right. Go on, tell me 'I told you so,' I know you want to."
You pressed your comms button, a laugh escaping before you could stop it because it was such a Jean thing to demand, forcing his engineer to gloat over an open broadcast on the best finish of his career.
"P2, Jean," you said into your headset, keeping your voice as steady as you could manage. "I'll save the 'I told you so' for the debrief."
He found you right after the podium in the debrief room, still in his race suit, hair a damp mess from the champagne spray, practically radiating post-race adrenaline. The moment he saw you, a massive, uncontained grin split his face. He crossed the room in three quick strides and scooped you up into a sudden, breathless hug, lifting your feet clean off the floor as he laughed against your shoulder.
When he set you back down, he eased his grip just enough to look at you, his hands resting easily on your waist to keep you anchored right in front of him.
"You were right!" he said, the triumph still bright in his voice, like saying it over the radio hadn't been loud enough.
"I know."
He rolled his eyes with a fond, teasing smile, his thumbs brushing lightly against the sides of your waist. "You could at least pretend to be humble about it."
"I could. I'm choosing not to." You reached down, closing the lid of your laptop with one hand while keeping your gaze locked with his, then let your hand rest casually on his wrist where it sat against your hip. "You drove it well, Kirstein. The strategy only works if the execution's clean, and yours was."
His grin softened into something a little warmer, a little closer, his gaze dropping to your mouth for a fraction of a second before meeting your eyes again. "Careful. That almost sounded like a compliment."
"Don't get used to it." You raised an eyebrow at him, attempting a dry delivery, though the attempt was completely ruined by the smile still tugging at the corners of your lips.
Neither of you pulled away. With the rest of the crew trickling out into the hallway, the room settled into a quiet, charged silence, leaving just the two of you, the hum of leftover adrenaline, and a working relationship that had quietly crossed a line neither of you could undo.
His hands slowly slid down from your waist, his fingers lingering against your hips for a beat before dropping to his sides, though he stayed right where he was, refusing to fix the distance between you.
"Kirstein--"
"I know," he said, before you could finish whatever sentence you'd been about to build. The sensible one, the one about the contract, about the team, about the version of this that stayed uncomplicated. "I know what you're going to say."
"Do you."
"You're going to say there's a clause. Technical staff, drivers, fraternization, all that." He said it like he had looked it up. Like he'd looked it up more than once. "I read it too."
"And?"
"And I think about it a lot less than I think about you telling me I overcorrect on entry like it's the sexiest thing anyone's ever said to me." He said it lightly, like a joke, except his eyes weren't playing along. They were doing something steadier, something that had clearly been building for longer than tonight. "I'm not going to do anything about that. Not without you wanting me to. I just... Monza. Best finish of my career. And every good thing I do lately, first thing I want is to know if you thought I did it right. That's not... that's not just a good working relationship anymore. I don't think it has been for a while.
You should have said something about the clause. You should have said something about the stakes of the championship, about sixteen weeks left in the season, about the very specific and real risk of complicating the one part of this sport that had finally started working the way it was supposed to.
What you said was: "You didn't overcorrect on entry once tonight."
"I know," he replied, quiet now. "You would have told me on the radio."
"I would have."
"So."
"So," you agreed. You left the rest unspoken. It didn't need to be stated out loud... the agreement was already made in the quiet, charged space of that empty debrief room, clear as any contract.
Neither of you crossed that line that night. You told him, and convinced yourself, that Monza was the wrong backdrop. There were too many eyes in the paddock, too much lingering post-race chaos, and too high a risk of making a decision fueled by adrenaline rather than intent. Jean, to his credit, just nodded and let it rest.
But the dynamic had fundamentally changed, and there was no returning to how things were. The shift bled into every hour of the race weekend, caught in the small, dangerous margins of contact neither of you avoided anymore.
He started showing up at your workstation twenty minutes before his first practice run just to drink his coffee in silence, his elbow resting against yours as you both stared at the tablet. Passing each other in the narrow corridor between the garage and the hospitality unit, his hand would linger on the small of your back as he guided you past a swarm of mechanics-- a gesture polite enough for onlookers, but held a second too long to be professional.
You stopped ignoring the details you’d trained yourself not to see: the way his knuckles went white on the steering wheel until your voice came through his earpiece; the quiet, conspiratorial grins he’d shoot toward the pit wall during roll-outs; the brief, grounding press of his fingers over yours when you handed him his driver notes before a session. And, most of all, the way he’d begun slipping your actual name into his radio confirmations instead of a dry "copy" whenever a strategy call paid off-- a habit small enough for the broadcast to overlook, but impossible for you to miss.
Three races later, in Singapore, under lights, on a strategy call so tight it came down to the final lap, a gap in the cars you'd told him would open with eleven laps to go, and it opened with eleven laps to go, and he took it, and he won. Jean Kirstein won his first race of the season by three tenths of a second, the exact margin you'd told him he was losing on the fourth turn eleven months and a lifetime ago.
He found you in the garage after the podium, after the interviews, after the team had mostly cleared out to celebrate somewhere that wasn't a concrete bay full of tire warmers and spare front wings. Still in his race suit, unzipped to the waist, champagne-damp, hair a mess from the podium spray and the helmet. You were alone, packing up the last of the strategy tablets, telling yourself you'd stayed late for work reasons and not because some part of you had known he'd come find you.
"Hey," he said, and his voice had none of the usual joking edge.
"Hey yourself. Congratulations. That was--"
He took two slow, deliberate steps toward you, his eyes fixed on yours, before stopping just a couple of feet away-- close enough that you could feel the heat radiating off him from the race, but far enough that he wasn't touching you. The restraint was obvious in the tight set of his shoulders and the way his jaw worked, holding himself back from reaching out and pulling you flush against him right then and there.
"Come here," he said, his voice low, refusing to close that last arm's length of space himself.
He was waiting, the exact same way he'd waited in the debrief room in Monza-- asking without asking, holding all that wanting in check, and handing you the choice every single time instead of assuming it.
You put the tablet down on the workbench and crossed the remaining distance. When you stepped into his space, his breath hitched, and the composure he was fighting so hard to keep visibly fractured. His hand came up to cup your jaw, his fingers warm against your skin, and you leaned into the touch instead of stepping back.
"I've been thinking about doing this since Monza," he said, his thumb tracing a slow, steady path along your cheekbone, his voice dropped to a rough whisper. "Longer than that, if I'm honest."
"You overthink off the track, too," you whispered.
"Only when it comes to you." His hand slid down to the back of your neck, his fingers tangling into your hair as he tilted your face up. "I kept telling myself to wait, to be responsible about the team, about the contract..."
"And?"
"And I really don't want to stop," he whispered against your lips, and then he kissed you-- and eleven months of careful professional distance went up like a fuel spill catching a spark.
He kissed like he drove-- committed, a little reckless, like holding back had never once occurred to him as an option worth taking. Your hands found the open front of his race suit, the damp cotton of the shirt underneath clinging to his chest, and he made a low sound against your mouth that you felt more than heard.
"We shouldn't," you said, not pulling away, the words pressed directly against his lips.
"Tell me to stop and I will."
You couldn't bring yourself to tell him to stop.
He backed you up until your spine hit the tall metal storage cabinets lining the garage wall, the cool steel a sharp contrast to the heat radiating off him. His hands slid down your sides, fingers digging firmly into your hips before slipping lower, cupping your rear to pull you flush against him until there wasn't an inch of air left between your bodies. He groaned into your mouth at the friction, heavy and undoing, his hips pressing into yours as if trying to ground himself.
The kiss deepened-- reckless and demanding, his tongue sliding against yours with a desperate, heavy heat that made your head spin. Every breath tasted like champagne and adrenaline. Your hands tangled in the short, damp hair at the nape of his neck, pulling him closer, matching the rhythm of his mouth until both of you were gasping against each other's lips.
He trailed open-mouthed kisses over the curve of your jaw, down the sensitive line of your throat, his hands tightening on your hips as you arched into him. The heat between you was overwhelming, eleven months of restraint evaporating against the cold steel lockers.
Driven by a sudden, restless impatience, Jean lifted you off your feet, carrying you the few steps over to set you back down on the edge of the workbench.
He backed you against the workbench, one hand braced beside your hip, the other cradling your jaw like you were something he'd wanted to touch for eleven months and was still checking he was allowed to. "You have no idea," he murmured against your throat, "how many times I sat in that car listening to you talk me through a corner and thought about this instead."
"That's... incredibly bad for your lap times."
"Worth it," he said, and dragged the zip of your jacket down, and you decided, somewhere in the part of your brain that still ran strategy calculations even now, that the garage door was closed, that the team had gone, that this had been building for eleven months and a three-tenths margin and you were done running the numbers on whether you should.
"Jean--"
"Yeah." His mouth against your jaw, your ear, the line of your throat. "Yeah, I've got you."
Your jacket hit the floor of the garage. His race suit followed, shrugged the rest of the way off his shoulders so it hung loose at his waist, and the shirt underneath came off next, and then it was skin against skin in the cool concrete air, his hands mapping you like a corner he'd been given the fastest line through and intended to take at full commitment.
"Tell me if I'm going too fast," he said, low, against your collarbone, one hand working the clasp of your bra with more patience than you'd expected from him.
"You've never gone too fast in your life."
"First time for everything." But he grinned against your skin when he said it, and when the bra came away and his mouth found your breast, any joke either of you had left died fast.
You arched into it, hands braced behind you on the workbench, and he took his time there-- unhurried in a way that felt deliberate, like he was making up for eleven months of not being allowed to want this out loud. His hand slid up your thigh, under the hem of your skirt, and when his fingers found you already soaked through your underwear he groaned like it undid him.
"Fuck. You're-" He didn't finish the sentence. He pulled the fabric aside instead and touched you properly, slick fingers dragging slow over your center before sinking two fingers deep inside you in one smooth, unhurried push.
You gasped, your hips instinctively hitching into his hand, and you had to bite down on the sound that wanted to come out of you because the garage door, closed or not, wasn't soundproof.
"Jean-"
"I know." His voice had gone rough. "I know, I've got you, just-" and he curled his fingers just right inside you, his thumb finding your clit at the exact same time, and you forgot what you'd been about to say entirely.
He worked you like he approached every corner you'd ever given him data on-- precise, attentive, adjusting to what your body told him the same way he adjusted to what your voice told him on track, his fingers pumping slow and deep while his thumb kept up a relentless rhythm until you were shaking against his hand and his mouth was back on yours swallowing every sound you couldn't keep quiet.
"Need you," you managed, when his thumb found the right pressure and your hips rocked forward into his hand without your permission. "Jean, please-"
"Yeah." He pulled back just enough to shove the rest of his race suit down, hands not quite steady, and you reached for him too, palm closing around him and drawing a groan out of his chest that echoed off the concrete. "Fuck, okay-- condom, glovebox, there's a-" a half-laugh, disbelieving, "there's a first aid kit in here somewhere too, I know there's-"
You found it before he did, some absurd corner of your brain still functioning enough to locate the emergency kit in the garage inventory you'd catalogued yourself, and he laughed against your mouth at the fact that even now you were the one who knew where everything was.
"Efficient," he said, rolling it on, hands finally steady again once he had a task in front of him. "God, I love that about you."
The word love landed and neither of you flinched from it, which told you everything about how long this had actually been building.
He lined up and pushed in slow, watching your face the whole time like your reaction mattered more than anything the numbers had ever told him, and when he bottomed out, you both went still for a second, foreheads together, breathing the same air.
"Okay?" he asked.
"Move," you said, "before I change my mind about the whole clause thing," and he laughed, breathless, and did.
He set a pace that started controlled and didn't stay that way, the same commitment he drove with, easing off exactly when your breath caught and then giving you everything again the second you asked for it, one hand braced on the workbench beside your hip and the other gripping your thigh hard enough to bruise. The garage was empty and dim and smelled like rubber and fuel and both of you, and every sound either of you made bounced back at you off concrete and steel, and neither of you cared.
"You have no idea," he said against your ear, hips snapping harder when you clenched around him at the words, "how long I've wanted this. Every race. Every time you told me I was right and didn't smile when you said it."
"I smiled plenty."
"Not enough. Wanted-" a groan, his rhythm stuttering, "wanted you to smile at me like this instead."
You dragged him down by the back of the neck and kissed him hard enough to bruise, and he answered by hitching your leg higher over his hip and driving deeper, and the next several minutes were less conversation and more the kind of wordless, desperate give-and-take that eleven months of careful professional distance had been building toward the entire time.
You came first, his name breaking on your tongue, back arching off the workbench, and the sight of it, you unraveled because of him, finally, after everything, was what took him over the edge right behind you, hips stuttering, face buried in your neck, his whole body going tight and then loose all at once.
For a long moment neither of you moved. The garage lights hummed. Somewhere outside, faint, the last of the podium celebration was still going.
"So," Jean said eventually, into your hair, voice wrecked and warm, "about that clause."
"We'll deal with the clause."
"Worth it, though. Whatever happens."
You thought about eleven months of strategy and radio calls and a four-tenths margin that had somehow turned into this, and found, for once, that you didn't have a strategy for what came next-- and didn't especially mind.
I've seen a lot of bad faith critiques of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Genuinely, how do you expect a show to demonstrate internal monologues in a 3rd person narrative. You show it through dialogue, and suddenly, there's "too much talking." You dont show it enough, and "the kids are way too smart and jumping to conclusions without any reason." Im not saying these aren't valid criticisms by any means, but some people clearly wanted to hate this show before it even came out.
It’s officially 24 hrs until me and the rest of the luke apologists r fighting for our LIVES (and enjoying some of the best edits we’ve seen since the show started, probably)
I thoroughly enjoyed the pjo show. Sure there was some bad writing, some scenes may have been rushed (and ofc other things). But at the end of the 8th episode I was smiling and am excited for the direction it’s going in.
Nothing is going to be perfect and people need to get that into their heads. Let’s just enjoy the show for what it is.
casting lin manuel miranda as hermes in the new pjo adaptation was actually a genius move bc it makes luke's motivation COMPLETELY understandable. if lin manuel miranda was my dad i would also start killing people
y’all: peter was able to stop bucky’s fist in civil war bc bucky heard peter’s voice, realized he was a child, then weakened his punch bc he was so worried about hurting a child uwu
me, eating pistachios: y’all know peter can canonically lift up to 75 tons, right. y’all know bucky’s fist is easy as hell for peter to block, right. y’all know bucky didn’t know shit about peter being a child and was just shocked that someone was able to so easily block his punch, right. y’all know that, right.
naw fuck that bucky’s punches aren’t easy to block, it’s WAY funnier if peter blocked a full force punch from bucky, who only a few seconds later realizes he’s a kid as soon as peter opens his mouth
that’s the face of a man who went from “holy shit he blocked my punch?” to “holY SHiT a 12 YEARoLD BLOCKED mY PUNCH???” in 3 seconds flat.
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