Sooo I’ve never done anything similar to this so if its shit tell me it’s amazing because I had fun making it.
Trigger warnings: stalking, surveillance, mentions of murder, kinddddd of unconsented to touching but the reader is chill with it. (Dw it’s nothing crazy) no smut
This is a work of fiction and I don’t condone anything done by the characters.
Stalker!lohen who leaves little notes in readers house frequently. Sweet, complimenting comments such as, “you don’t know it but you’re very pretty when you sleep. Dream of me, okay?” Or even helpful and informative messages that are still emotionally observant like “that man who was checking you out had a girlfriend and she cried when she found his severed head in his toilet.” Lohen was hurt when the only note he ever got back was was a cold and unromantic
“Stop using my sticky notes Im running out and I need them.”
Stalker!lohen who likes leaving his mark on readers living space. Rearranging the pictures on the windowsill, taking her things, hiding her things, and even leaving mysterious stains on her clothing. However reader never praised him for his eye for interiors design. Only ever leaving a note on the fridge saying
“Stop messing with my shit. Ps. Clean up while you’re at it.”
Stalker!lohen who plays a little game called “where to put the camera.” Where he finds the optimal position to place his tiny cameras to catch the best angles of his reader. He thought himself a genius when he put one in her potted plant and on her lightbulb, but he was truly proud when he managed to replace her mirror with a 2 way one that she kept in her walk in closet. That’s why he was so surprised during mid stroke when he was watching his scantily clad reader posing in front of the mirror.
“Which dress looks better? I need your honest answer. It’s the red one, isn’t it?” She says straight into the camera.
Stalker!lohen who follows her wherever she goes. He puts much effort to remain discrete. He follows you undetected around the mall, or so he thought.
“Hey, if you’re going to just follow me, can you atleast help me hold my bags?” She says, turning abruptly after struggling with her purse, drink, and shopping bags. It’s a good thing he wore a mask and sunglasses, otherwise she would’ve seen how red his cheeks were.
Stalker!lohen was so grateful that she had a dead social and romantic life. All she did was go to work, go home, and rot in her house. It was like she had cleared her life just waiting for him to waltz in and fill it with color. Just because she wasn’t interested in others didn’t mean that they weren’t interested in her. Lohen took care of it though. He knew the care she took in avoiding social situations, so why not he just do it for her?
Stalker!lohen who had gotten brave enough to sneak his way into readers bed. Carefully he twirls her hair around his fingers. Then he tangles his entire hand in her hair. “What a deep sleeper” he thought. Then he felt hands wrap around his neck and pull him closer.
“It’s not fair that I’ve never seen your face before. You can’t run now.”
She pulls down his mask agonizingly slow. Taking in his soft features, mole, and striking colored eyes. All dimly lit under pale moons glow.
“You’re not half bad.” She says, resting her head back down on the pillow, still holding Lohen in her embrace.
first time doing a small freaky drabble tell me if y'all like it :3
cieo stared at the back of your head, day dreaming.
the first time cieo notices you, it’s because you yawn—just that. it was a sleepy little stretch in the middle of chemistry, the way your sweater rides up just a sliver over your hipbone, the soft sound you make when your jaw cracks. his pencil snaps in half between his fingers. he doesn’t even realize he’s done it until the lead stains his palm black like a bruise.
it’s not fair. it’s not fair how you chew on the end of your pen when you’re thinking, how your socks are always slipping down into your shoes, how you tilt your head just slightly to the left when someone’s talking to you like you’re really listening.
he wants to bite the curve of your ear. he wants to press his tongue between your molars and lick the hollow of your cheek until you gag.
cieo starts bringing extra underwear to school because he keeps ruining his. he’ll be halfway through history, staring at the nape of your neck where your hair’s a little messy from sleeping wrong, and suddenly his thighs are wet. he has to sit there, trembling, until the bell rings so he can bolt to the bathroom and stuff the soiled fabric into his backpack. he tells himself he’ll throw them away when he gets home but he never does. he folds them under his pillow instead and whines as he debates on sending them to your house as a gift <3
at home, his room smelled like sweat and slick, sheets tangled around his waist as he whined into his pillow. his fingers were always inside him, fucking in shallow thrusts, imagining it was you—your hands, your mouth, the way you’d probably furrow your brows like you were solving another impossible equation while he fell apart beneath you. “fuck,” he gasped, legs shaking, “fuck, fuck—” his hips jerked, chasing the ache, the sweet friction. he came with your name bitten into his wrist, teeth marks blooming purple.
it was pathetic. he was pathetic.
he knew it when he pressed his face into your gym shirt after stealing it from the lost and found, wet already just from the smell of you. knew it when he traced the shape of your drawn lips on his notebook, over and over, until the paper tore.
you lend him a pencil once. just once. your fingers brush against his and he has to excuse himself to the nurse’s office because he comes untouched in his pants like some kind of fucking middle schooler. he spends the rest of the day with his thighs sticky, the scent of his own spend thick in his nose, and he doesn’t even feel ashamed. he just presses the pencil between his teeth and imagines it’s your thumb.
cieo follows you home for the first time on a tuesday. he doesn’t mean to. he just—you take a different route than usual, and he’s curious, and then suddenly he’s ducking behind a tree as you unlock your front door. he watches you kick your shoes off through the window, watches you stretch your arms over your head, watches you scratch your stomach absently before wandering out of view. he comes so hard his vision whites out.
after that, it becomes a habit. he learns your schedule better than his own. you have a math test next week? he knows. you’re fighting with your mom about curfew? he knows. you found the barista at the coffee shop near campus cute? he knows, and he spends three hours crying in the shower about it before deciding it’s fine, it’s fine, he can share if he has to. (spoiler alert, he won't)
he starts stealing your things. just little stuff—a hair tie you dropped, a crumpled receipt from your pocket when you hang your jacket up in the hallway, a single sock from the laundromat. he keeps them in a shoebox under his bed and takes them out when he’s feeling particularly pathetic, rubbing his cunt raw with the heel of his hand as he presses your stolen belongings to his face.
it’s your fault. it’s your fault for existing, for breathing, for having hands and a mouth and a voice that makes his stomach twist into knots. he hates you. he loves you. he wants to crawl inside your ribcage and live there.
one day, he’s trailing after you like usual, biting his lip to keep from letting out a pathethic moan as he watches the way your ass moves in your jeans, when you suddenly stop walking. cieo freezes. you turn around.
“i know you’ve been following me,” you say, voice flat.
cieo’s heart stops. he just stares at you with wide, wet eyes, his breath coming in short little gasps.
you sigh. “come here.”
he’s on his knees before he even realizes he’s moved.
(it’s not the last time you catch him and it’s def not the last time he cries into your thighs, begging for your fingers, your tongue, anything you’ll give him. you don’t even have to ask—he’ll give you everything.)
The first time Light Yagami saw you, he knew he would either love you or kill you. There was no in-between, no gray area—just the sharp, suffocating divide between devotion and destruction. And for a long time, he wasn’t sure which one he wanted more.
Disgusting—everything about it was disgusting.
Currently, light’s room felt too clean for the kind of thoughts rotting inside it. The polished desk gleamed beneath the yellow glow of his lamp, books stacked with mathematical precision, pens aligned carefully beside papers filled with calculated lies and perfect grades and schedules that made him look like the ideal son.
Every inch of the room screamed discipline, brilliance, control. Yet sitting at the center of it all was the black notebook resting beneath his hand like a second heartbeat, ugly against the sterile neatness of everything else.
It was both corrupt and divine.
And Light stared at it with irritation tightening his jaw.
It wasn’t enough.
Names filled page after page in his precise handwriting, criminals dropping dead across countries while the world trembled beneath the shadow of Kira, yet the police were still breathing down his neck.
L was still alive, still prying, still sitting somewhere with those horrible dark eyes and sugar-stained fingers, pulling at threads Light had woven so carefully.
It annoyed him more than fear ever could.
Fear was for ordinary people. Fear was for criminals awaiting judgment. Fear was for those too weak to shape the world with their own hands.
Light was not weak, but he was tired.
His fingers tapped once against the cover of the Death Note, then again, slow and sharp. The room hummed softly with silence.
Outside, distant traffic muttered through the city, headlights occasionally slipping across his ceiling. He barely noticed it. His mind was moving too quickly, thoughts splitting apart and reconnecting like electric wires sparking inside his skull.
Kill more criminals.
Manipulate the task force further.
Control suspicion.
Control L.
Control everything.
And somehow, disgustingly, impossibly—
you.
His eyes narrowed faintly.
You drifted through his mind again without permission, sliding between calculations and murder statistics like something invasive.
You were like a splinter beneath skin, a uncleanable stain. He hated how easily it happened now. The thought of you arrived naturally, contaminating every moment he tried to devote entirely to becoming god.
Your name echoed through him constantly.
it had settled between his teeth and rooted itself into the soft flesh behind them, whispering every time he swallowed.
It irritated him in ways he couldn’t explain logically, because Light understood everything logically.
Human emotion was simple chemistry. Attraction was weakness. Obsession was pathetic. He’d watched criminals destroy themselves over desire countless times already. Lust, greed, jealousy—humanity was embarrassingly predictable.
Yet whenever you walked past him, his thoughts became ugly things he never bothered to peice together simply because of how complicated they were.
and you never even noticed, that was the unbearable part.
You’d scratch absently at the back of your neck while reading something, looking exhausted and distracted, and Light would stare too long at the exposed skin there, wondering stupidly what your pulse looked like beneath it.
He wondered what expression you’d make if he pressed hard enough to leave bruises.
Light leaned back slowly in his chair, fingers steepled beneath his chin. His expression remained composed, beautiful in the practiced way he maintained constantly, but his eyes were restless.
He imagined writing your name.
His gaze dropped toward the notebook immediately.
He could do it.
One movement, one neat line of ink, and you would die exactly as he commanded—the power thrilled him.
But instead of satisfaction, something unpleasant twisted in his chest at the image.
It wasn't guilt, never guilt, Light had transcended guilt long ago. This was different.
If you died, someone else might find you first.
Someone else might touch you.
Someone else might look at your face while your eyes lost focus for the last time.
The idea made his stomach tighten violently.
No, he thought coldly.
If you died, you should die infront of him, right where he could hold you and feel you pray his name into his warm palms—the thought came with horrifying ease.
Light exhaled softly through his nose, almost amused with himself. Human attachment truly was revolting. Look what it reduced people to.
Even now he could recognize the absurdity of these thoughts while still indulging them completely. You had become distracting in the worst possible way.
When he pictured the future, you appeared somewhere inside it now.
Ryuk’s voice broke through the silence beside him.
“Thinking about them again?”
The shinigami grinned horribly from where he crouched near the window, all teeth and shadows and amused cruelty. His eyes gleamed with the delight of someone watching a slow-motion disaster unfold.
Light didn’t answer immediately.
Ryuk laughed deeper.
“C’mon, Light,” he mocked lazily. “I thought you were better than that.”
Light’s expression darkened faintly.
“Didn’t you say humans like them were disgusting?” Ryuk continued. “That they’d taint you?”
The word taint scraped unpleasantly against Light’s pride, because that was exactly the problem, wasn’t it? You should’ve disgusted him.
Ordinary people always did eventually. Their selfishness, their stupidity, their noise—it all became unbearable.
Light stood above humanity now. He judged it, purified it, and shaped it with divine purpose while everyone else stumbled around blind and filthy beneath him, yet—
His grip tightened slightly around his pen.
“They can’t taint a god,” Light said finally, voice smooth and controlled.
Ryuk snorted.
Light’s gaze remained fixed ahead, unblinking.
“I’ll just cleanse myself,” he continued quietly, “until we are both clean.”
Light rested his elbow against the desk and pressed his fingers lightly against his lips, eyes half-lidded in thought.
Clean.
The idea fascinated him.
Humans were born rotten. Weak desires ruled them entirely. Society itself was diseased because people lacked discipline, lacked vision, lacked the courage to become something greater. That was why Kira had to exist. That was why Light had been chosen.
So perhaps what he felt toward you wasn’t corruption. Perhaps it was refinement.
You were careless, but maybe that simply meant you needed guidance. Maybe he could strip away every ugly human flaw until you stood beside him properly, purified beneath his judgment alone.
The thought soothed him immediately.
Because Light Yagami was nothing if not patient.
And gods, after all, were merciful.
would y'all like more small drabbles (I'll be posting more) or long chaps like this (it'll take longer) ?? <33 lemme know !! And I hope y'all enjoyed this rewrite bc I felt like the last one was very like funny and silly and while I love that vibe and be continuing to write like that I js wanted to see if I could expand more on how literally insane he is bc ik there's not a lot of light fics in the world ! <33
Zayne was an asshole to be frank—the type that made people tense the second he walked into a room.
He had that permanently irritated expression carved into his face like somebody had stitched his features together wrong—sharp eyes always narrowed, mouth twisted like he tasted something sour every time another human being opened their mouth.
He called everyone posers, called teachers government puppets, called football players meatheads and girls with dyed hair “factory made alternatives.”
He got into fights so often the vice principal stopped sounding surprised whenever his name echoed through the office speakers.
Half the time he came back to class with split knuckles and dried blood smeared beneath the silver rings on his fingers, slumping into his chair while blasting Pierce the Veil through one earbud loud enough for everyone around him to hear the static leaking out.
He was weird, not cute weird either. Just disturbing weird.
He bit his nails until the skin around them stayed raw and angry red, constantly pushed his side bangs back into place every few minutes because he hated when they separated wrong over his eye.
He smelled faintly like cigarette smoke even though nobody had ever actually seen him smoke. And he looked at people like he wanted them dead for inconveniencing him with their existence.
Nobody liked sitting next to him because he stared too hard. Nobody liked talking to him because he always had something cruel waiting on his tongue.
Yet somehow, with you, it got stranger because Zayne didn’t just look annoyed around you, he looked furious like your existence was a personal sin.
You’d catch him glaring from across the hallway with his jaw tight enough to crack teeth. During class he’d stare at the side of your head with this ugly intensity, fingers twitching against his desk like he was physically restraining himself from saying something awful.
Sometimes you’d turn around suddenly and catch him already looking—already studying you—and instead of glancing away like a normal person, he’d sneer like you were the one bothering him.
“You breathe too fuckin' loud,” he snapped at you once during chemistry when you leaned past him for a pencil.
Another time he scoffed because of the way you stood, literally just stood.
“Why do you stand like that?” he muttered darkly. “You look like a lost dog.”
You blinked at him. “What does that even mean?"
“Means you stand weird.”
jackass.
Everybody thought he hated you. Honestly, you did too. It was hard not to when he acted like every little thing you did crawled beneath his skin.
And maybe part of him did hate you.
Zayne couldn’t even tell anymore.
Whatever this thing inside him was, it felt more terrible than hatred. It sat inside his ribs like rusted nails because the same boy insulting you at school went home and carved your name into the wood beneath his bedframe with a pocketknife like a pretty altar he could come home and pray to.
The letters were uneven from how badly his hands shook.
He stared at them afterward for nearly twenty minutes in the dark, thumb brushing over your name over and over until the grooves dug splinters into his skin.
His room looked like a corpse of teenage boyhood. Black walls covered in band posters curling at the edges, clothes scattered everywhere, and empty energy drink cans littering his floor.
Lyrics and scribbled notes were also pinned to the ceiling above his bed because sometimes he liked reading them while he couldn’t sleep—but nowadays when he cant fall asleep he looks under his bedframe, sees your name, and his breath shakes.
His desk lamp barely worked, flickering weak yellow light over notebooks stuffed full of thoughts nobody else would ever read, thoughts and paragraphs about you.
You had ruined music for him, that was the worst part.
Music used to be the only thing that made him feel human. Before you, songs were escape routes, places to crawl into when home got too loud.
When his father started screaming downstairs again, when another plate shattered against a wall, when his mother cried behind locked bathroom doors—music filled the spaces where affection should’ve been. It swallowed him whole and let him disappear for a little while.
But now every song sounded like you somehow.
Every lyric twisted itself into your shape.
His headphones became torture devices.
He’d lay there at three in the morning with music crackling into his skull while thinking about the way your fingers curled around pens during class.
He remembered the way your voice dipped lower when you got tired and the way your shoes squeaked against polished school floors. They were tiny useless details that infected his brain like parasites.
It made him sick.
He hated how badly he wanted you because Zayne had never been soft for anyone before. He never cared enough to memorize somebody’s schedule, neither did he ever stared at a phone screen for an hour debating whether or not to send a text. And he for sure never switched jewelry because of another person.
But now the ring on his finger wasn’t his initial anymore, it was yours.
He’d bought cheap metal letter charms online at two in the morning after spiraling for six straight hours thinking about you laughing with somebody else in the cafeteria. When it arrived he locked himself in his room and replaced the old charm immediately, fingers trembling the entire time. He told himself it was just something he could laugh at later when he regulates his system again.
But afterward he sat there staring at it with burning ears and a racing heart like he’d just gotten married in secret.
God. He was disgusting.
He memorized your schedule and learned which hallways you preferred, which friends annoyed you, what flavor energy drinks you bought from the vending machine. Sometimes he lingered near classrooms just to hear your voice for five more seconds before going home.
And he still acted like he hated you because if he didn’t, he thought he might actually lose his mind.
One rainy afternoon he followed you home from three blocks away, hood pulled over his head while his heartbeat pounded violently against his ribs.
He told himself he was only making sure you got home safe. But even he knew that was bullshit. He knew it when he watched you through rain-soaked streets like something starving, and he knew it when he stood outside your neighborhood for ten whole minutes after you disappeared indoors.
He could’ve left, but istead he stared at your bedroom window until the lights turned on.
Then he went home and wrote six pages about you.
His poems weren’t romantic in the normal sense. They read more like confessions somebody would find beside a dead body, messy black ink pressed hard enough to tear paper apart.
He wrote about your throat constantly, about how pretty your pulse looked beneath skin, about how your hand would look wrapped around his neck “like a chain he’d gladly choke on.”
He wrote about wanting to unzip his ribs and crawl inside your bloodstream just so he’d never have to be away from you again. About how your voice made his insides feel “gooey and rotten sweet.” About how every time you smiled at someone else he imagined peeling his own skin off because jealousy physically hurt"
He hated everyone around you.
Especially guys, guys zayne knew he could never compete with.
Whenever somebody flirted with you, Zayne spiraled for hours afterward. His chest got tight, and his vision got all blurry. He'd bite his nails bloody trying to calm down while imagining their hands touching yours. Sometimes he got so angry he punched walls until his knuckles split open again.
Then he’d feel ashamed, then angry for feeling ashamed, then obsessed all over again.
It became this endless cycle of self-destruction.
At school he only grew meaner because kindness felt too vulnerable now. If he spoke softly to you even once, he thought the entire terrifying truth might spill out of him all at once. So instead he glared harder, mocked you more, hovered around you with this nasty tension simmering beneath his skin.
But there were cracks sometimes, tiny ones.
Like the day somebody shoved you in the hallway accidentally and Zayne snapped so fast it looked almost animalistic. One second he was leaning against a locker half asleep, next he had the guy slammed against the wall by his collar.
“Watch where you’re fucking going,” he hissed.
The guy blinked in shock. “It was an accident—”
You remember how strange his face looked afterward. Angry, yes. But scared too. Like seeing you get hurt triggered something unstable inside him. He released the guy abruptly and stormed off before you could even thank him.
That night he replayed the moment obsessively, you touched his wrist for half a second trying to calm him down—just half a second and he thought about it for three weeks.
Sometimes Zayne scared himself. Especially late at night when everything got quiet and the obsession stopped feeling romantic and started feeling diseased. He’d stare at his ceiling with hollow eyes while your favorite songs played softly through his headphones, wondering why his chest physically ached whenever he imagined you leaving someday.
You weren’t even his.
That was the insane part.
You barely tolerated him yet his entire existence had started orbiting around you anyway.
One night he sat cross-legged on his bedroom floor surrounded by crumpled notebook pages, exhausted eyes fixed on your initial hanging from his ring.
His house downstairs was loud again—his father yelling, something crashing, his mother crying quietly afterward—but he barely heard it anymore. He only heard your laugh trapped inside his skull.
He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes until colors burst behind them. He wanted relief, wanted one single moment where you weren’t tangled around every thought he had. But even now his fingers moved automatically toward another notebook.
Another poem.
Another page.
Another pathetic confession nobody would ever read.
He wrote about your eyelashes this time, about wanting to pin every expression you ever made against the inside of his skull forever, about how terrifying it was that somebody as ordinary as you somehow became the center of his entire miserable life.
Then he stopped writing halfway through because his hands were shaking too hard.
Zayne tilted his head back against the wall and stared blankly upward. The ceiling above him was covered in taped-up lyrics and scribbled thoughts and pieces of you. Your name appeared so many times it looked ritualistic like worship.
Maybe that’s what this was.
Not love.
Not really.
It was just something consuming waiting for him to finally let his guard down and kill him for good.
And still—if you asked him for anything, he’d give it to you, if you smiled at him gently even once, he’d probably spend the rest of the night trembling over it like a wounded animal finally being touched kindly.
Because despite the snarling and insults and dirty looks, despite the bitterness dripping from every word he threw at you—zayne was hopelessly, violently in love with you.
And it was killing him alive.
emo that would carve ur name into his thighs and touch himself to the smell of ur hair wow drools
That was the universal truth about Evan, whispered like a shared secret between girls in the back rows of classrooms and over sticky cafeteria tables.
He would sweep into a girl’s life like a summer storm, letting her believe, with absolute, unwavering certainty, that he loved her.
And then, the moment the calendar turned, he would suddenly become the most distant person on the planet.
It was a pattern so precise it was almost mechanical.
The love-bombing was just the bait. But once he had someone hooked, the real Evan crawled out.
He was the type to casually "forget" anniversaries, to scroll through his phone while you were pouring your heart out, and to make you feel completely insane for expecting the bare minimum.
Worse, he was a chronic, unapologetic cheater.
His eyes were always wandering to the next girl before the ink on his current relationship was even dry.
He would text his exes late at night, flirt with your friends right in front of you, and gaslight you into believing you were just being "insecure" when you caught him.
He would drain a girl of her confidence, strip away her self-esteem, and then discard her like a candy wrapper when he got bored.
He was like a damn vampire, a boy who took and took until there was nothing left, and he deserved every single ounce of bad karma coming his way.
Which brought you to the bet.
It started out as a joke between you and your friends over an iced coffee on a Tuesday afternoon.
Someone had brought up Evan’s latest victim—a sweet girl from the track team who had been crying in the girl's bathroom all morning—and the conversation quickly turned into a critique of his predictable routine.
"I bet he uses the exact same script on every single one of them," your friend had scoffed, swirling her straw. "It’s so transparent. I give it three weeks before he pulls the vanishing act."
You had laughed, leaning back in your chair. "It’s not even that hard. The guy is practically a machine. You just input a little attention, and the love-bombing protocol starts automatically."
"Oh yeah?" your other friend challenged, a dangerous gleam in her eye.
"Prove it. Thirty bucks says you can’t get him to do the whole routine for you. Let's see how he actually love-bombs when someone is looking for it."
Thirty dollars wasn't life changing money, but enough to get you some fastfood so of course you agreed ! (lmao)
Besides, it sounded entertaining. Evan was in your English and your PE class, meaning he was practically served to you on a silver platter.
You accepted the bet with a laugh, fully aware that it was going to be a walk in the park.
And it was.
It was actually..almost embarrassingly easy.
Literally all you had to do was start talking to him.
You began by lingering after the bell in English, asking him stupid questions about the reading assignments you already understood.
In PE, you’d walk the laps next to him, laughing a little too loudly at his shitty jokes and tossing your hair over your shoulder when the sun hit it just right.
You gave him a few lingering looks, a handful of playful nudges during warm-ups, and a bit of calculated flirting that left just enough unsaid to keep him hungry.
You didn't even have to give that much effort because Evan was a boy validated entirely by female attention, and you were throwing him a bone.
And predictably, he bit down hard.
You got his number by the end of the first week under the guise of "needing help with the essay."
By the third week, right on schedule, he cornered you by your locker after school, his eyes wide and brimming with a desperate, practiced intensity.
He confessed his feelings with a speech that sounded like it had been plagiarized from a bad indie romance novel, his voice trembling as he asked you if he could be your boyfriend.
You smiled, the perfect picture of a flattered girl, and said yes.
The thirty bucks was practically in your pocket.
Dating him, however, quickly turned into an exercise in pure exhaustion.
You hated the boy. Watching his routine from the inside was infinitely more repulsive than watching it from afar.
You could tell, with absolute clarity, that he was love-bombing you. It was a performance that felt entirely manufactured and completely overdone.
Every morning, he was waiting at your locker, hovering like an anxious puppy.
He was constantly trying to kiss you, to wrap his arms around your waist in the middle of the crowded hallways, and to hold your hand so tightly your fingers went numb.
He would smother you with grand, empty gestures. He started buying you cheap, silver-plated rings from those little boutiques downtown, sliding them onto your fingers with a reverence that made you want to roll your eyes.
If your shoelaces came untied, he would aggressively drop to both knees right there on the dirty linoleum, tying them with a dramatic flourish as if he were a knight in shining armor performing a holy duty.
But the worst part was the way he looked at you. It wasn't sweet, it was intense to the point of being suffocating.
He looked at you like he wanted to eat you whole, his dark eyes tracking your every movement, devouring every expression on your face as if he were trying to memorize your soul.
It was too much.
It was entirely too attached, entirely too fast, and completely different from how he had treated any of the other girls he had dated.
With them, he had been a charming man. With you, he was a frantic, clinging mess.
And by the time the relationship hit the three-week mark, the novelty had completely worn off. Honestly, it was becoming incredibly boring.
You and your friends would sit at your usual lunch table, and you’d show them the latest cheap ring he’d bought you, laughing as they groaned at his pathetic antics.
"He’s suffocating," you complained, picking at your food.
"It was funny for the first ten days, but now I can’t even breathe without him texting me 'what are u doing?' It’s so tiring."
Your friends completely agreed.
The bet had been won, the point had been proven, and the entire charade had become a massive, irritating chore.
It was getting genuinely annoying the way he always clung onto you, the way his name would flash across your phone screen thirty times an hour, the way he would pout if you wanted to spend lunch with your friends instead of tucked under his arm.
Everything about him was irritating.
So, you planned to break it off.
You figured it was time to give him a taste of his own medicine.
You’d show him exactly how it felt to have the rug pulled out from under him, to be treated like an absolute afterthought by someone who had claimed to adore you just days prior.
You started ignoring his texts for hours, replying with dry, one-word answers.
When he tried to put his arm around you, you’d seamlessly step out of his reach to grab something from your bag.
You watched him flounder, watched the confusion bleed into his eyes, and you felt a cold, vindictive sense of satisfaction.
He deserved it.
You called him out to the bleachers after track practice on a Friday afternoon to finally end it.
The air was cooling down, the sky a bruised shade of purple, and you stood there with your hands shoved into your pockets, ready to read him his eviction notice.
Except, you hadn't anticipated one crucial, horrifying detail.
Evan wasn't faking it.
"We need to stop doing this," you said, your voice flat, cutting through the quiet hum of the empty field. "I’m breaking up with you, Evan. It’s over."
You expected him to sigh, maybe look a little annoyed that his game had been cut short, and walk away with his hands in his pockets to go text his next target.
Instead, the world seemed to violently fracture right in front of you.
The color drained from Evan's face so fast it looked like he had been struck.
His jaw slackened, his eyes widening in a look of such raw terror that you actually took a half-step back.
For a second, he didn't breathe. And then, the tears came.
It wasn't a quiet, dignified single tear, either. Evan started crying like a absolute baby.
A harsh, choking sob tore out of his throat, his shoulders violently shaking as his entire composure crumbled into dust.
Before you could even register what was happening, he dropped to his knees on the cold metal of the bleachers.
He reached out, his hands trembling violently, and grabbed onto your leg, burying his face against your denim-clad knee.
He held on for dear life, his fingers gripping your jeans so tightly his knuckles turned stark white, as if he were a drowning man and you were the only piece of wood left floating in the ocean.
"No, no, please, please don't do this," he sobbed, his voice cracking, completely ruined.
He lifted his face, and he looked entirely pathetic—his nose red, his eyes bloodshot and streaming with heavy, frantic tears, his chest heaving as he gasped for air.
"Please, just tell me what I did wrong. Was I too loud? Did I do something stupid? I’ll change, I swear to God I’ll change. Whatever you want me to be, I’ll be it. Just don’t leave me. Please, please don’t leave me."
You stood frozen, looking down at him in sheer disgust and shock.
"Evan, get off me!" you said, trying to pull your leg away, but his grip only tightened, his body shaking with another wave of hysterical sobs.
"I love you," he choked out, the words spilling out of him like a confession of a crime, raw and bloody and horrifyingly real.
"I've never felt like this before. I swear I'm not lying to you. I can't sleep, I can't eat, I just think about you every second of the day. Please, don't do this to me. I'll do anything. Just tell me how to fix it."
And in that agonizing, pathetic display, the truth finally clicked into place, sharp and cruel.
For the first time in his miserable, narcissistic life—the idiot had actually fallen in love.
He hadn't been playing a game with you.
The love-bombing, the suffocating attention, the cheap rings, the tying of your shoes, the hungry, desperate looks—it hadn't been his usual manufactured routine.
It had been the clumsy, overwhelming reality of a boy who had finally been struck by the lightning bolt he had spent years pretending to wield.
And unfortunately for him—it happened to be with the one person who never loved him back.
You looked down at him, at his tear-stained face, his desperate hands clinging to your clothes, and you didn't feel a single shred of pity.
You remembered the track girl crying in the bathroom. You remembered the countless other girls whose hearts he had chewed up and spit out without a second thought.
He was experiencing, for the very first time, the exact flavor of agony he had dealt out as a hobby.
"Let go of me, Evan," you said, your voice entirely devoid of warmth, cold as ice.
You wrenched your leg out of his grasp with a sharp, forceful tug.
He stumbled forward, his hands hitting the cold metal of the bleacher where your foot had just been, a fresh sob breaking from his lips as he realized he couldn't hold on.
He stayed there, on his hands and knees.
You didn't look back as you walked away down the steps, leaving him entirely alone in the ruins of the first and last thing he would ever truly care about.
Evan the type to rub his bulge over his phone that's open to a pic of u 🫡
and then Evan grew up to be Yan ex
No bc real shit I hope none of u hoes feel bad for him bc he's a bad person and #hatemen #hatecheaters !!!
Yandere Bruce Wayne x Soulmate Reader (Smut warning: Masterbation)
The countdown had never meant much to Bruce Wayne.
As a child, it had simply existed.
A cluster of glowing numbers etched into the skin of his inner wrist, ticking steadily downward with each passing second.
It wasn’t unusual. Every person in the world was born with some form of soulmate bond. Some shared pain, some shared dreams, some found words appearing on their skin, written by hands they had never touched. Others heard thoughts not their own, glimpsed flashes of memories, or carried matching marks that mirrored one another across continents.
There were countless variations. Entire scientific fields had been built around studying them.
Bruce’s happened to be a countdown.
Nobody knew exactly why soulmate bonds manifested differently. Decades of research had produced theories but few answers. Genetics and geography didn’t determine it. Neither did bloodlines or upbringing. Soulmate bonds simply… were.
For Bruce, that meant a simple promise written beneath his skin.
When it reached zero, he would meet the person destined for him.
As a boy, he had imagined it the same way every child did.
His soulmate would appear one day. They would laugh together. Grow old together. Build a life together.
A future.
The sort of future his parents had possessed.
The sort of future that had died alongside them in an alley behind the Monarch Theater.
After that night, the timer became little more than background noise.
The glowing numbers continued their steady descent while Bruce attended funerals, inherited a fortune he never wanted, and watched Gotham consume itself one crime at a time. They ticked downward while Alfred patiently pieced together the shattered remains of a grieving child. They ticked downward while Bruce buried himself in studies, martial arts, criminology, forensics, and every discipline that might one day help him wage war against the city that had taken everything from him.
Years passed.
The timer remained a constant. Unchanging. Always moving. Always counting.
Sometimes he caught himself staring at it during long flights between countries. During sleepless nights spent training until his knuckles split. During lonely evenings in unfamiliar cities where he could almost pretend he was just another wealthy young man wandering the world in search of purpose.
The numbers never stopped.
And despite everything, a small part of him still wondered.
Who were they?
Who was waiting at the end of that countdown?
The thought felt dangerous.
Hope always did.
By the time he returned to Gotham and donned the cowl for the first time, Bruce had long since convinced himself that soulmates were a luxury he could not afford.
Batman had no place for dreams. No room for futures. And he certainly had no room for someone he might one day love.
The city came first.
It always would.
Gotham demanded sacrifice, and Bruce had made his choice years ago.
If his soulmate existed, then they deserved better than what remained of him.
So he stopped thinking about it.
Or at least he tried to.
The timer continued to count.
Days.
Months.
Years.
Seconds.
Its steady descent accompanied him through every chapter of his life.
It was there when Dick Grayson crashed into his world beneath a circus tent, a furious and heartbroken child whose pain mirrored Bruce’s own in ways neither of them fully understood. It remained when Dick became Robin, when he became family, and when Bruce made the selfish decision to love someone enough to let them stay.
The numbers continued falling.
They were there when Jason Todd stole the tires off the Batmobile, and somehow stole a place in Bruce’s heart soon afterward. They ticked downward through every argument, every proud moment, every hard-earned smile.
And they’d kept counting when Jason died.
Bruce remembered that night with painful clarity.
The rage. The guilt. Helplessness. The suffocating certainty that he had failed.
Even then, amidst grief so profound it threatened to hollow him out completely, the timer continued. As though fate cared little for the tragedies of ordinary men.
Years later came Tim.
Then Damian.
A family assembled from broken pieces and impossible odds. One that Bruce never intended to build and could not imagine living without.
The countdown remained through it all. A quiet presence beneath his skin. Easy to ignore, impossible to forget. Even whilst hidden from sight beneath the bulky steel of his jaeger-lecoultre reverso.
Sometimes, on particularly difficult nights, he found himself fiddling with the watch strap just enough to see the edges of it.
Not because he expected anything or believed he deserved whatever waited at the end, but because the idea lingered. A tiny, stubborn thing buried beneath decades of grief and responsibility.
The possibility that somewhere out there existed a person uniquely his.
Someone who might understand. Who might see every ugly, fractured piece of him and choose to stay.
Someone who might look beyond Batman.
Beyond the billionaire mask. Beyond the failures. And simply see Bruce.
It was a foolish thought. An indulgent one, really. The sort of fantasy he rarely allowed himself to entertain.
Yet it persisted all the same.
Perhaps because he had spent so much of his life alone. Not physically. Never physically. The Manor was full. The Batcave was full. His life overflowed with people he loved.
But loneliness and solitude were not the same thing.
Bruce had learned that lesson long ago.
For most of his life, every meaningful relationship had begun with loss.
Dick had lost his parents. Jason had lost everything. Tim had nearly lost himself trying to save Batman from his own grief. Damian had been raised as a weapon before he was ever allowed to be a child.
Every person Bruce ever loved carried scars.
All because they had stepped into his world.
And if fate truly intended to place another person in his life… What then? What kind of future could he possibly offer them?
Late nights spent waiting for him to return home alive? Hospital visits? Funerals? The constant threat of becoming a target simply because they mattered to Bruce Wayne?
No.
His soulmate deserved better.
Deserved normal.
Far away from Gotham and everything it touched.
A sensible conclusion. A logical conclusion. One he repeated to himself countless times.
The problem was that logic had never succeeded in silencing the small traitorous part of him that still watched the countdown.
Nobody truly knew him. Not completely. Not the way a soulmate supposedly could. The way destiny promised.
So the timer remained tucked away in the back of his mind.
A breath caught before it could fully form. A dream he never allowed himself to finish imagining.
And still it counted.
Drawing closer with every passing day to a future Bruce Wayne had stopped believing would ever matter.
Until the day it finally reached zero.
The countdown on your wrist had never inspired the same fascination it seemed to in everyone else.
As a child, you remembered classmates comparing bruises during recess, eagerly conspiring about how old they’d be when they finally met the person fate had chosen for them. Entire conversations revolved around it. Predictions. Theories. Daydreams.
You had participated, of course.
Mostly because everyone else did.
But even then, you never quite understood the obsession.
Perhaps it was because your bond felt so distant.
Unlike those who shared pain with their soulmates or dreamed through another person’s eyes, your countdown offered nothing tangible. No connection. No glimpses into another life. No indication of who your soulmate might be beyond the vague promise that one day, eventually, you would meet them.
It was difficult to become attached to someone who felt entirely theoretical.
The numbers counted downward. Life continued.
School became university. University became work. Friendships came and went. Apartments changed. Jobs changed. Entire years disappeared before you even noticed them passing.
The timer remained, steadily ticking away in the background.
Yet strangely unimportant.
Not because you disliked the idea of soulmates. Quite the opposite.
You supposed it was comforting to think there was someone out there destined specifically for you. Someone whose life would one day intersect with your own in a way no one else’s ever could.
But you had never been particularly fond of building your future around things you couldn’t control.
If your soulmate appeared tomorrow, wonderful. If they appeared twenty years from now, that was fine too.
Either way, life would continue.
You had plans. Goals. Responsibilities. A future that existed independently of whoever happened to be waiting at the end of that countdown.
Which was probably why you never developed the habit of checking it.
Weeks sometimes passed without you looking at the numbers.
Months, if life became particularly busy.
Your friends found that strange.
Most people tracked their bonds religiously.
You couldn’t remember the last time you had cared enough to calculate how much time remained.
Not that it mattered. Fate would arrive whether you watched the clock or not.
The thought made you smile slightly as you adjusted the sleeve of your outfit.
The invitation resting on your kitchen counter immediately drew your attention once more. Embossed gold lettering gleamed beneath the overhead light.
You had considered declining several times already.
Charity galas were not your thing.
Neither were crowds of wealthy socialites, politicians, celebrities, and Gotham’s elite pretending to enjoy one another’s company while discussing donations over champagne.
Unfortunately, declining wasn’t really an option. Your company had spent the past month preparing for the event.
Attendance was expected. Mandatory, according to your supervisor.
The memory earned a quiet sigh.
Tomorrow evening.
Wayne Foundation Annual Renewal Gala.
You stared at the familiar name printed across the card. Wayne.
One of the most recognisable names in the country. Perhaps even the world.
Bruce Wayne’s name seemed to exist everywhere in Gotham. On buildings, hospitals, scholarships, charities.
A billionaire philanthropist.
A notorious playboy.
A man whose face appeared so frequently in magazines that most of Gotham could probably identify him from memory.
You had never met him. Never expected to. Tomorrow would likely be no different.
You would attend the gala, smile politely, make small talk, and stay for the required amount of time.
Then return home and forget the entire evening ever happened.
The gala was exactly as exhausting as you had expected.
By the end of the first hour, your cheeks already ached from smiling.
The grand ballroom of Wayne Tower glittered beneath enormous crystal chandeliers, every surface polished to a shine so perfect it almost felt artificial. Waiters drifted through the crowd carrying silver trays loaded with champagne flutes and carefully arranged hors d’oeuvres. Laughter rose and fell throughout the room, blending into the soft music drifting from somewhere near the stage.
The entire event felt less like a fundraiser and more like a carefully choreographed performance.
Not that anyone seemed to mind.
Around you, Gotham’s elite mingled effortlessly. Politicians exchanged handshakes. Business executives traded stories. Reporters circulated like sharks scenting blood in the water.
You had spent most of the evening attached to a cluster of coworkers, nodding politely through conversations that ranged from quarterly profits to real estate investments and subjects you suspected nobody genuinely cared about.
You smiled. Shook hands. Made pleasant conversation. Repeated the process.
By the time you escaped toward the refreshment table, you were fairly certain your social battery had died an hour ago.
“Not enjoying yourself?”
You glanced toward the voice. One of your coworkers smirked knowingly.
You laughed. “I think I’ve had enough networking to last the rest of my life.”
“Careful. That’s practically blasphemy at events like this.”
“Then pretend I said something about synergy and market growth.”
The resulting laugh eased some of the tension in your shoulders.
Around you, the crowd continued to swell as more guests arrived. And inevitably, conversation shifted toward the man hosting the event.
Bruce Wayne.
The name surfaced repeatedly throughout the evening. Sometimes with admiration. Sometimes amusement. Occasionally frustration.
Everyone seemed to have a story.
A charitable donation. An embarrassing tabloid headline. A disastrous date. A surprise act of generosity.
The more stories you heard, the more curious you became. You had never met Bruce Wayne before.
Nobody in your social circles had.
People like him existed in an entirely different world.
The sort of world most people only glimpsed through magazine covers and news broadcasts.
Yet somehow, despite his wealth, despite his status, despite his reputation for arriving late and disappearing early, people genuinely seemed to like him.
It was strange. Most billionaires inspired resentment. Bruce Wayne inspired affection.
You found yourself wondering what he was actually like. The real version. Not the carefully polished public image. Not the headlines. Just the man.
Your gaze drifted toward the entrance more than once throughout the evening.
The subtle change spread through the crowd like a ripple through water. Conversations paused. Heads turned. Attention redirected.
You didn’t need anyone to tell you why.
Bruce Wayne had arrived.
The realisation swept through the ballroom almost instantly.
You found yourself looking too. Just like everyone else.
Oh. For a moment, you understood the fascination.
Photos had never quite captured him properly. Perhaps because photographs couldn’t capture presence.
Bruce moved through the crowd with effortless confidence, greeting donors and board members with easy smiles. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Impossibly handsome in a way that felt almost unfair.
The sort of face people built careers around. One that belonged on magazine covers. Yet none of that was what held your attention.
It was the way he carried himself. Comfortable. Natural. As though the attention of hundreds of people barely registered.
You felt oddly nervous.
Which was ridiculous. You weren’t even planning on speaking to him.
You simply found yourself watching from across the room.
Then your hand drifted unconsciously toward your wrist. Your thumb brushed the skin hidden beneath your sleeve. The countdown.
A habit more than anything.
You weren’t even sure why you checked.
Maybe because events like this always sparked conversations about soulmates. Or because seeing Gotham’s most famous bachelor had stirred old childhood fantasies you’d long since outgrown.
Whatever the reason, your fingers lingered there.
Tracing the familiar shape beneath the fabric. Feeling the steady pulse of your own heartbeat.
You smiled faintly to yourself. Foolish.
Then Bruce Wayne turned, and looked directly at you.
Everything stopped.
Your breath caught. Heart stumbled. Because beneath your fingertips.. The countdown had reached its end. 00:00:00:00.
The familiar sensation disappeared so suddenly that for a terrifying second you thought you had imagined it.
Your eyes widened.
Across the ballroom, Bruce Wayne was still looking in your direction.
No. Not your direction.
At you.
For a moment, neither of you moved.
The countdown had stopped.
Your fingers remained pressed against your wrist, your pulse hammering so violently that you could barely feel the skin beneath them.
And for one impossible, terrifying second, the rest of the gala disappeared.
The music faded. The conversations blurred. Everything narrowed to those blue eyes. To the man standing twenty feet away. To the realization crashing through your chest with enough force to steal the air from your lungs.
Him.
Every second. Every minute. Every year. All of it had led here.
You couldn’t stop smiling.
A laugh escaped before you could catch it.
You felt ridiculous.
You felt ecstatic.
You felt fourteen years old again, lying awake at night and wondering who waited at the end of your countdown.
Your soulmate.
Bruce Wayne was your soulmate.
The thought was absurd.
Wonderful.
Terrifying.
And before you could think better of it, your feet were already carrying you forward.
You barely remembered crossing the ballroom. Only that one moment he was across the room.
The next you were standing in front of him. Close enough to speak. Close enough to see the faint lines at the corners of his eyes. Close enough to finally meet the person fate had spent your entire life leading you toward.
“Mr Wayne-” You stopped yourself. God, that sounded stupid.
You laughed nervously. “Sorry. Bruce. I just-”
The words tangled together. There were too many of them. How exactly were you supposed to tell someone they’d just become the most important person in your life?
How did anyone start a conversation like this?
“Hi. We belong together.”
“Hi. Fate says you’re mine.”
“Hi. I’ve waited my entire life to meet you.”
The absurdity almost made you laugh again. Instead, you found yourself smiling. A genuine one. The kind that slipped free before you could stop it.
“I think-”
Bruce looked at you. His eyes flickering over your face, your clothes, the event badge hanging around your neck.
Recognition never appeared.
Nothing softened.
Nothing changed.
It was the look people gave strangers who had interrupted them in public. Nothing more.
His gaze shifted immediately beyond your shoulder. Toward someone else.
Someone important.
Someone he actually wanted to speak to.
“I’m sorry.” The words were automatic. Polite. The sort of apology people gave when they weren’t sorry at all.
“I don’t have time right now.”
For a second you simply stared.
Still smiling.
Still trying to catch up.
“Oh.”
Bruce nodded once. Already moving.
Already done.
“If you’ll excuse me.” And then he brushed past you.
There was no cruelty. No emotion whatsoever. You hadn’t mattered enough for that.
The crowd swallowed him almost immediately.
One moment he was there and the next he was gone. Laughing with donors. Shaking hands. Moving through the room as though nothing had happened.
As though you had never existed.
As though the most important moment of your life had been a forgettable inconvenience in his evening.
You remained where you were. Frozen. The smile slowly slipping from your face.
Around you, the gala continued.
A waiter passed carrying champagne. Someone laughed nearby. Music drifted through the ballroom. Normal. Everything was painfully, horribly normal.
Your stomach twisted.
The excitement that had filled your chest moments ago curdled into something ugly. Something embarrassing.
Heat crept up your neck.
God. How stupid. How unbelievably fucking stupid.
Your hand rose to your wrist again. To the skin where the countdown had sat for your entire life.
Where it no longer moved.
You stared at it, waiting for the joy to return. For the excitement. For the certainty that this meant something.
Instead you felt sick. Because for one awful moment, you’d believed it.
You had looked at Bruce Wayne and allowed yourself to hope. Allowed yourself to think fate had chosen you.
That maybe all those stories people told were true.
Instead you’d received the same polite dismissal he would have given any stranger who got in his way.
Your throat tightened. Fuck, you felt like you were about to cry.
The hurt wasn’t coming from Bruce. Not really.
It was coming from yourself.
From the realisation that some small part of you had still believed after all these years, after all your indifference, all your insistence that fate didn’t matter, a part of you had still secretly hoped there would be magic in this moment. Something special. Worth waiting for.
And now that part of you was dying. Right there in the middle of a crowded ballroom.
The countdown had reached zero.
And for the first time in your life, you wished it hadn’t.
Two and a half months later.
The night had offered nothing unusual.
The Batcave settled into its familiar rhythm as everyone returned. Dick had claimed a corner of Tim's workstation and was ignoring increasingly pointed requests to move. Jason, having appeared midway through patrol without warning or invitation, was drinking Alfred's coffee. Damian sat nearby with a stack of reports, making notes in the margins.
Bruce stood near the medical station, removing the Batsuit piece by piece. The cowl came first, then the cape. He set the gauntlets aside and reached for the fastening at his wrist.
"Father."
Bruce glanced up.
Damian was looking at him with a faint frown. “You never informed us that your countdown had ended.”
He’d barely reacted. “What are you talking about?”
Damian looked mildly annoyed, like Bruce had forgotten something obvious.
“Your soulmate.”
Dick straightened immediately. Tim turned away from his monitor. Jason gave a short laugh.
"Wait. Seriously? You found them?”
Their Dad frowned. “What?”
Damian pointed.
Bruce followed the gesture to the inside of his wrist. The timer had stopped.
For a second, he simply stared.
Beside him, Dick grinned. “So that’s why you’ve been weirdly private.”
Jason scoffed. “Please. Like he’d tell us.”
“I assumed you were waiting until the relationship became serious,” Damian said matter-of-factly.
Tim nodded. “I figured you already had a file on them.”
A few years ago, Bruce might have responded. Might have denied it. Instead, he continued staring at his wrist.
00:00:00:00
The timer wasn’t moving.
It should have been.
For as long as he could remember, it had always been moving. Always counting. Now it sat completely still.
A strange feeling settled low in his stomach.
“When did this happen?” The words escaped before he could stop them.
The cave went silent.
Bruce looked up. Every member of his family was staring at him.
Dick’s smile vanished first.
Tim slowly lowered his tablet.
Jason blinked.
Damian narrowed his eyes.
A long moment passed. Then, “what do you mean, when did it happen?”
Bruce’s jaw tightened. His gaze dropped back to the timer. “When did it reach zero?”
Nobody answered immediately. Because the question itself was wrong.
Dick stared at him blankly. “…You don’t know?”
Tim sat up, picking at the cuticles on his hands. “When was the last time you checked it?”
Bruce opened his mouth. The answer should have come easily.
Instead, nothing.
Weeks? Months? Years?
A knot formed in his stomach. He couldn’t remember. At some point, the countdown had become part of the scenery. Like a scar. Like an old piece of furniture. Something so familiar that he no longer saw it.
Damian rose from his chair. "How is that possible?"
There wasn’t accusation in the question. Only bewilderment.
Bruce understood it.
If anyone else had presented him with a mystery this significant and admitted they had ignored it for years, he would have found it equally incomprehensible.
A soulmate was information.
Information mattered.
Yet somehow he had allowed this particular fact to drift past unnoticed.
Dick dragged a hand through his hair. "Okay. So if it's been at zero for a while..." He trailed off.
Nobody finished the thought. Bruce didn't need them to.
The timer had stopped.
Which meant they had already met.
Somewhere, buried beneath years of galas, investigations, crime scenes, interviews, witnesses, victims, allies, and strangers, there was a person connected to him in a way he had never bothered to investigate.
The thought irritated him immediately. Annoyed by his own oversight.
Bruce Wayne missed very little. Batman missed even less.
And yet he had apparently overlooked something that had been written on his own skin.
His gaze returned to the frozen digits.
Who?
The question settled into place with uncomfortable ease.
Who had it been?
A civilian? A witness? Someone from a charity board? A doctor? A journalist? A stranger he had passed on the street and forgotten by the next morning?
His mind was already moving through possibilities, assembling timelines, searching for patterns.
The investigation had begun before he consciously decided to start it.
And long after the others had gone upstairs, long after the cave had emptied, he’d remained alone before the Batcomputer.
His wrist rested against the desk, the countdown sat motionless beneath the glow of the monitor.
For decades, he had convinced himself the timer didn’t matter. That soulmates were irrelevant. That whatever waited at the end of the countdown belonged to a future he would never allow himself to have.
Now, for the first time in his life, the future wasn’t theoretical. It was real. It had been real for years. And somehow, impossibly, he’d missed it.
He stared at the timer, jaw clenched. Then opened a new search window and began looking.
Bruce had always believed that every mystery possessed an answer.
The answer might be buried beneath layers of deception. It might require months of investigation, thousands of hours of work, or sacrifices most people would never willingly make. But it existed.
Every crime scene told a story.
Every missing person left traces.
Every lie fractured under enough pressure.
Answers existed. The challenge was finding them.
Which was why the frozen numbers on the inside of his wrist irritated him more than they should have.
A lifetime reduced to eight zeroes.
For decades it had been counting.
Now it wasn’t.
Entire criminal organisations had collapsed because of details other people overlooked. Murders had been solved because Bruce noticed a footprint half a millimeter deeper than it should have been. He built contingency plans for gods.
And yet somehow he had allowed this to happen.
Somewhere, at some point, his soulmate had entered his life. And he had failed to notice.
The oversight bothered him in a way he struggled to articulate. Not because he had spent years longing for his soulmate. He hadn’t. Or because he suddenly believed fate held some profound importance. He didn’t.
But because he had missed something.
Something connected to him. That should have been obvious.
His gaze drifted back toward the timer. A person.
For most of his life, the soulmate waiting at the end of the countdown had existed as an abstraction. A hypothetical future. A distant possibility.
Now they existed beyond the realm of his mind on particularly needy nights.
Living somewhere in Gotham. Or perhaps outside it. Going to work. Paying bills. Existing. Breathing.
Perhaps completely unaware that Bruce Wayne had finally noticed them.
The idea settled heavily in his chest.
Because that wasn’t entirely true, was it?
If the countdown had stopped, then they already knew.
The moment one timer reached zero, so did the other. Meaning somewhere out there was a person who had already experienced that moment. A person who had looked at their wrist and realised they had found the person fate intended for them.
Bruce’s fingers stilled against the keyboard. A strange feeling moved through him. Difficult to define.
Because unlike him, that person would have noticed.
Normal people would have probably watched their countdowns. Would have known exactly how much time remained. Anticipated the day it would finally happen.
He imagined someone checking their wrist. Watching the final seconds disappear. Feeling the weight of a lifetime’s anticipation finally come to an end. And then what?
Had they looked around for him?
Had they searched the crowd?
Had they recognised him immediately?
The questions arrived uninvited. More troublingly, they refused to leave.
Bruce leaned back in his chair. The cave hummed softly around him. Banks of monitors cast pale light across the stone walls.
Above him, thousands of tons of earth separated the cave from the sleeping Manor. None of it held his attention.
For perhaps the first time since Damian had pointed out the frozen timer, Bruce found himself thinking not about the investigation. But about the person.
Who were they? What kind of life did they live? What had they thought when they realised? Had they been happy? Afraid? Disappointed?
The last possibility lingered.
Bruce frowned. Disappointed. The word shouldn’t have bothered him. Yet it did.
Because he knew exactly what the public thought of Bruce Wayne. The billionaire. The celebrity. The perpetual tabloid fixture.
To some people, finding out Bruce was their soulmate would be exciting. To others it would be a nightmare.
A lifetime of reporters. Paparazzi. Public scrutiny. Danger. Every enemy Batman had ever made.
Bruce knew better than anyone that proximity to him carried consequences.
The evidence sat framed across the Manor.
The thought darkened his expression. Whoever they were, they deserved better than that.
And then Bruce paused. His eyes slowly narrowed. Because that thought implied something else. Something he hadn’t consciously acknowledged until now.
It didn't matter.
That lie was what kept you going after the gala. It wasn’t grief. Grief implied loss, implied that you had possessed something to begin with.
You hadn't. Bruce Wayne had never been yours.
And yet, something inside of you had still died that night.
You still went to work. Still paid your bills. Still answered texts. Still laughed when friends made jokes.
From the outside, nothing had changed.
Inside, however, there was a deep hole where something important used to live.
Hope, perhaps.
Or whatever foolish thing had survived all those years beneath your indifference.
You had spent your entire life insisting that the countdown didn't matter. That fate didn't matter. That your soulmate was merely a possibility waiting somewhere in the distance and not the center of your universe.
Then the timer reached zero.
And you discovered exactly how much you had been lying to yourself.
Because if it truly hadn't mattered, then seeing Bruce Wayne across that ballroom wouldn't have hurt the way it did.
If it truly hadn't mattered, then his face wouldn't still appear in your nightmares. The sight of his name wouldn't make your stomach twist like someone had reached into your chest and grabbed hold of your ribs.
Yet it did. Every time, without fail.
Three days after the gala, you stopped in front of a coffee shop on your way to work.
A newspaper sat in the display window.
BRUCE WAYNE ANNOUNCES THE EXPANSION OF FOUNDATION PROGRAMMES.
The headline wasn't even particularly large, just another article among dozens. A perfectly ordinary thing.
Yet the moment your eyes landed on it, nausea rolled through you so violently that you nearly turned aroun and walked home.
You stood frozen on the sidewalk, just staring blankly. You hated yourself for pausing.
Because there he was.
Photographed beneath bright camera flashes. Smiling. Beautiful.
Shit, he was beautiful.
It would have been easier if he wasn't. Easier if fate had chosen some ordinary man. Someone forgettable, whose face wouldn't follow you everywhere.
But Bruce looked like something sculpted rather than born.
Like whoever had created him had started with every impossible standard of beauty and decided they still weren't enough.
Even frozen in grainy newsprint, he seemed unreal.
Dark hair falling perfectly despite the cameras. Strong jaw, sharp cheekbones, those impossible blue eyes. The kind of watercolour people wrote poetry about. The kind that belonged to summer skies and oceans and things too beautiful to touch.
You remembered looking into those eyes across the ballroom. Remembered your heart stopping. Thinking, absurdly, that of course fate had chosen someone beautiful.
Soulmates were supposed to be extraordinary. And Bruce Wayne was sure as hell extraordinary.
Broad shoulders beneath perfectly tailored suits. Strong hands. Easy smiles. A laugh that seemed capable of convincing entire rooms to laugh with him. Not merely attractive. Handsome. Beautiful in the way ancient gods were described. The sort of beauty that made people stare before they realised they were staring.
He carried himself with the effortless confidence of someone who had spent his entire life being admired. Someone who had never needed to wonder if people found him desirable because the answer had always been obvious.
And somehow fate had looked at him, then looked at you, and declared that you belonged together.
You left the coffee shop without buying anything.
After that, you started noticing him everywhere.
It felt cruel. As though the universe had developed a sense of humor specifically to torment you.
Wayne Enterprises logos decorated entire buildings. Wayne Foundation advertisements appeared on buses. Charity campaigns featured his photograph. Magazine covers displayed his face near checkout counters. Televisions in waiting rooms played interviews. Articles appeared online. Photographs surfaced endlessly. Everywhere you looked, Bruce Wayne existed.
You couldn't escape him. Couldn't erase him.
The worst part was that everyone else saw those images and reacted normally.
Nobody understood what you saw. Nobody knew what it felt like.
Your coworkers saw Gotham's favourite billionaire. Your friends saw a celebrity. Strangers saw a philanthropist. You saw your soulmate.
You saw the man whose timer had stopped when yours did. The man who had looked directly at you, then dismissed you.
Sometimes you found yourself staring at the pics longer than you meant to.
Your eyes refused to look away. Despite everything, some awful traitorous primal part of you still recognise d him. Still instinctually saw him as yours.
The slight curve of his smile. The shadows beneath his eyes. The way his expensive suits felt designed to emphasise the width of his shoulders. The way his presence somehow dominated photographs even when surrounded by dozens of other people.
You hated that you noticed. Hated that your heart still reacted. That attraction remained long after hope had died.
Because Bruce Wayne was beautiful. Painfully, unfairly, devastatingly beautiful.
The kind that made the stinging rejection feel worse.
If he had been cruel, you could have hated him. If he had mocked you, anger could have replaced the hurt. But he hadn't done either.
He’d made living unbearable.
Bruce hadn't rejected you because he disliked you. He hadn't rejected you because you were unworthy. He hadn't even rejected you at all.
To reject someone required acknowledgment.
Bruce Wayne simply hadn't cared enough to notice. You had been forgettable. An interruption. A stranger in a crowded room.
It was fucking humiliating.
To everyone else, your countdown had finally reached zero. A happy occasion. A miracle. A dream-come-true.
People congratulated you. Asked questions. Smiled knowingly.
You learned to lie.
"Oh, I haven't met them yet." "Maybe we crossed paths without realizing." "I'm not really focused on it."
Easy answers. No one ever suspected the truth.
Didn’t know that every mention of soulmates felt like someone digging a knife into an already sore bruise.
That fate itself had started feeling so incredibly cruel.
No one knew that your countdown had ended beside crystal chandeliers and champagne glasses and the most beautiful man you'd ever seen.
Hw could you explain to anyone that he had walked away?
How could you describe the experience of finding the person the universe created specifically for you, only to discover that your existence wasn’t even important enough to remember?
There weren't words for that.
Every morning you woke up, and every day Bruce Wayne's name appeared somewhere.
On buildings. Headlines. TVscreens. Charity banners. A constant reminder. A monument to something you desperately wished you could forget.
You never admitted how much it affected you. Not even to yourself.
Instead you learned to look away. To change channels. To scroll past articles. To cross the street rather than walk beneath buildings bearing his name.
Small, pathetic things.
Yet necessary.
Because every glimpse felt like reopening a wound that refused to heal.
And somewhere deep down, beneath the humiliation and hurt and anger and disappointment, existed a truth you hated even more.
You still thought he was so disgustingly beautiful. Remembered the moment he looked at you. Could still feel the countdown reaching zero.
And no matter how hard you tried, some part of you still mourned the future that had died before it ever had the chance to begin.
Finding you should have taken longer.
Bruce expected months. Years, maybe. The list of possibilities was absurd.
A countdown bond narrowed the search considerably compared to shared pain or dreams, but it was still thousands of people. Tens of thousands, depending on the timeframe. Every person he'd spoken to. Every person he'd stood beside. Every handshake. Every conversation. Every fleeting interaction that had seemed insignificant at the time.
Ordinarily, that would have made the investigation difficult.
Instead, it became embarrassingly simple.
Because unlike other soul bonds, a countdown created a very specific moment. A beginning.
Bruce only needed to determine when his timer had stopped. Then identify everyone he'd interacted with during that period. The rest was elimination.
He discovered quickly that he had a significant advantage.
Over the past five months, Bruce had only personally interacted with nine people who possessed countdown bonds.
Nine.
One was a long-time business partner whose timer still had three years remaining.
Two were married.
Another had met their soulmate publicly several weeks prior.
The remaining names disappeared one by one beneath scrutiny.
Until only one remained.
You.
The file sat open on the Batcomputer. Bruce stared at it for a long time.
Name.
Age.
Employment history.
Education.
Address.
Nothing remarkable. Nothing that should have caused his pulse to stumble the way it did. Yet it did.
Because beside your photograph sat a timestamp. Wayne Foundation Annual Renewal Gala.
Two and a half months ago.
Bruce went still. The gala.
He couldn’t remember you at all.
He remembered the event. The schedule. The donor meetings. The practiced speeches. The endless boring conversations. The uncomfortable sensation that accompanied the recollection made his stomach tighten.
Because if the countdown had ended that night, then you had been there. Somewhere inside that ballroom.
His soulmate had stood within arm's reach, and he hadn't known.
Bruce leaned back slowly.
The photograph remained illuminated on the monitor.
You looked ordinary. Not in a bad way. Just real. A person.
His person.
The thought appeared uninvited.
His gaze lingered longer than necessary. Memorising details.
The shape of your smile in the employee photograph attached to the company website. The slight tilt of your head. The way your eyes seemed brighter in candid images than posed ones.
Ridiculous, meaningless observations.
Yet he continued looking.
Eventually, Bruce opened the gala guest registry. Cross-referenced attendance records.
Security footage. Photographs. Anything.
Everything.
He found you four hours later.
Camera seventeen. Ballroom east entrance. Timestamped twelve minutes before the countdown likely reached zero.
The footage was silent.
You stood speaking with coworkers. Laughing at something. So… bright.
Unaware that he even existed beyond headlines and magazine covers.
He watched the clip so many times that domething uncomfortable settled beneath his ribs.
He knew what was about to happen.
Your timer was about to reach zero. His timer was about to reach zero.
You found him.
You’d crossed the room.
And he walked away.
Hell, he hadn’t even properly looked at you.
Bruce stared at the paused frame.
For the first time since beginning the investigation, a deep nausea rolled through him.
He remembered that interaction vaguely now.
A stranger approaching. A voice trying to get his attention. A laugh. An interruption between meetings.
Nothing important or memorable. Nothing-
His jaw clenenched.
No.
Not nothing.
You.
It had been you.
His soulmate.
The person fate had spent decades leading toward him.
The person whose existence he had secretly imagined during sleepless nights and lonely flights and moments of weakness he never admitted to anyone.
Bruce rose from his chair.
The cave remained silent around him. Cold. Empty without his boys.
The monitor focused on your face. He couldn’t pull his eyes away.
For two and a half months, you had known.
You'd known exactly who he was.
And if Bruce understood people half as well as he believed he did, then you had probably interpreted that encounter exactly the way anyone would.
You thought he'd rejected you.
Bruce found himself imagining it despite having no desire to.
You walking across that ballroom. Excited. Hopeful. Nervous. Only to be brushed aside.
His stomach twisted.
You had spent your entire life moving toward him. And he'd made you feel unwanted.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. No. Unacceptable.
You belonged to him.
Bruce had spent most of his life convincing himself he could survive without a soulmate.
Now he found himself staring at your photograph at three in the morning, unable to look away. Unable to stop imagining your reaction when you learned the truth. To stop thinking about the hurt he had unknowingly caused. And most concerning of all, unable to stop wanting.
Not merely to meet you.
To keep you close.
Safe.
Where nothing could take you away before he had the chance to make this right.
You were halfway through answering emails when your manager appeared beside your desk.
"Got a minute?"
You looked up. "Sure."
"We've had a request come through."
That wasn't unusual. The company received requests constantly.
You nodded for them to continue.
"They specifically asked for you."
That was unusual.
Your brow furrowed. "Me?"
"Apparently." Your manager sounded just as confused.
You accepted the folder they handed over, then immediately wished you hadn't. The logo printed across the front was impossible to miss.
Wayne Foundation.
Your stomach dropped.
For a moment, neither of you spoke.
Your manager misread your expression immediately. "Good news, actually."
Good. Right.
You’d almost forgotten that normal people didn't feel like they were on the verge of breaking down every time they saw that name.
You forced a smile. "What's the project?"
"A community outreach initiative. They've been reviewing applicants from several companies."
It was like the name seemed determined to follow you everywhere.
"Apparently someone on their end requested you specifically."
The confusion in your manager's voice mirrored your own.
"Have you worked with them before?"
"No." The answer came too quickly. You cleared your throat. "Not personally."
Your manager nodded. "Well, whoever reviewed your profile liked something."
Maybe. Or maybe fate simply wasn't finished laughing at you yet.
You waited until they left before opening the folder.
The proposal itself looked normal. Professional. Routine. Yet a strange feeling settled low in your stomach.
Because your name appeared throughout the documentation.
You stared at the pages for several seconds then shook your head. Paranoia. Nothing more.
Bruce Wayne didn't know who you were. The Wayne Foundation employed thousands of people. This was coincidence. It had to be.
Yet later that evening, as you prepared to leave work, you found yourself looking at the folder again.
Reading your name.
And wondering why the uneasy feeling refused to disappear.
←↓→↑
The project itself was harmless. Boring, even.
Several meetings. A handful of planning sessions. Far too many emails. Just.. normal stuff.
And yet you found yourself running into the same problem repeatedly.
People always seemed to know who you were.
Not coworkers or clients, it would probably hurt your feelings if they didn’t know your name.
But Wayne employees.
The first time it happened, you ignored it. The second time, you thought about it for a bit before shaking it off. The third time, it became impossible not to think about.
A woman stood beside the refreshments table wearing a Wayne Foundation identification badge, smiling like she knew you as she called out your name.
You glanced up from your coffee, offering a polite smile. "Yeah?"
Her expression brightened immediately. "Oh good."
Good?
You waited.
Instead, she simply smiled. "Sorry. I've heard nice things."
Before you could ask from whom, someone called her name from across the room.
The conversation ended there. Leaving you standing alone holding a paper cup and feeling vaguely unsettled.
She'd heard nice things.
From who?
About what?
Then you’d received an email. Then another. And another.
Nothing inappropriate or personal. Just opportunities. Projects. Invitations. Networking events. Requests.
All connected to Wayne Enterprises or one of its countless subsidiaries.
The attention made no sense. You weren't exceptionally qualified. You weren't particularly influential. There were hundreds of people with better resumes. Thousands.
Yet somehow your name kept appearing.
Each coincidence felt harmless on its own.
Together, they felt deliberate.
There was only one explanation your brain kept returning to, and it was ridiculous.
Bruce Wayne didn't know who you were.
Bruce Wayne had never known who you were.
The memory still hurt. Less than before, but enough.
You shoved the thought away and focused on work. Unfortunately, work wasn't cooperating.
"There's a gala next month."
You nearly choked on your drink.
Your coworker blinked. "...You okay?"
"No."
You set the glass down.
"Sorry. What?"
"A gala."
Absolutely not.
The immediate response rose so quickly that you nearly said it aloud.
Your coworker laughed.
"That's about the reaction I expected."
"No."
"That's not even what I asked."
"No anyway."
The laugh grew louder. "It's mandatory."
Of course it was. You dropped your forehead onto the table.
Somewhere above you, your coworker continued speaking.
Words blurred together.
You caught Wayne Foundation. Charity initiative. Attendance expected.
Absolutely wonderful.
You closed your eyes. The universe hated you. That was the only reasonable explanation.
Because apparently surviving one Wayne gala hadn't been enough.
Now fate had scheduled a sequel.
That should have been funny. Instead, dread settled heavily in your chest.
Bruce Wayne probably wouldn't even be there.
And if he was?
He wouldn't recognise you. Wouldn't remember you. You would simply become another face in another crowd. Again.
The familiar ache returned. Duller now. Older, but still present.
You hated that even after everything, some pathetic part of you still cared.
Wondering about what could have happened if things had gone differently.
If he had looked at you. If he'd smiled. If he'd given fate even a single chance.
The thought followed you all the way home. Followed you into the shower. Followed you into bed.
And somewhere across Gotham, entirely unaware of the damage he was causing, Bruce Wayne was doing exactly the same thing.
Thinking about you.
Constantly.
Obsessively.
Unable to stop.
While you lay awake staring at the ceiling, Bruce sat alone in his study surrounded by photographs, reports, schedules, and information he absolutely should not possess.
The file on his desk had grown significantly over the past two weeks.
The silence of the study was suffocating, broken only by the rhythmic, heavy thrum of Bruce’s own heartbeat. It was a sound he usually controlled with meditative precision, but tonight, his pulse was erratic, driven by a hunger that felt less like desire and more like a fever.
His fingers, scarred and calloused from years of a life lived in the shadows, trembled slightly as they hovered over the glossy surface of the most recebt photograph.
In the light of the single desk lamp, your laughter looked almost tactile. He wanted to reach through the paper, to catch the warmth of your skin, to feel the vibration of that laugh against his own chest.
He didn't just want to see you. He wanted to own the air you breathed.
A low, jagged exhale escaped his throat as he reached for the fastening of his trousers. The silk of his shirt felt abrasive against his skin. He wasn't a man of whims, he was a man of purpose.
As he freed himself, his gaze never left your eyes in the photo.
He began to move, his hand wrapping around his length with a grip almost a little too tight, a little too desperate. He wasn't looking for a gentle release, he was looking for a way to drown out the ache of your absence. He hadn’t even met you properly yet.
Every slide of his palm was a silent prayer, a demand whispered into the empty room.
You, he thought, his eyes darkening until the blue was almost black. Only you.
He closed his eyes for a second, and the darkness behind his eyelids was filled with the phantom sensation of you. He imagined your hands replacing his own.
He imagined the way you would look at him if you knew. If you knew that he had mapped out your entire existence, that he knew the number of alarms you needed to wake up, the drinks you preferred, the way your eyes crinkled when you were truly happy.
A groan, deep and primal, tore from his throat as he increased the pace. The friction was intense, bordering on a delicious sort of pain. He pictured you in this very room, stripped of your defences, looking at him with that same devastating smile. He imagined pinning you to this very desk, marking you so thoroughly that the world would know you belonged to the Batman, to Bruce, to him.
"Mine," he rasped, the word a vow and a command. "You have to be mine."
He was spiraling, losing his composure to the sheer, unadulterated need to possess the person in the photograph.
As the tension coiled in his gut, he leaned forward, pressing his forehead against the edge of the desk, his breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches. He wasn't just chasing a climax, he was chasing the ghost of you. And as he finally broke, his body shuddering with a violent, lonely release, the only thing he could think about was how much longer he could stand being a stranger to the only person outside of his family who truly mattered.
He stared at the splotches of his own mess, his eyes settling back on your frozen, laughing face.
His patience was running out. And soon, he wouldn't just be looking at pictures. He would be looking at you.
The morning of the gala arrived faster than expected.
You spent most of it trying not to think about where you were going later. Work helped.
Emails needed answering. Reports needed reviewing. Deadlines continued existing regardless of personal problems.
By six o'clock, however, distractions became harder to find.
The Foundation building stood illuminated against Gotham's skyline when your taxi pulled up outside.
For a moment you remained seated. Watching people enter through the front doors. Watching security direct arrivals. Watching expensive cars arrive one after another.
The driver glanced at you through the mirror.
"You getting out?"
You sighed. "Unfortunately."
The lobby was already busy.
Employees moved through the space carrying folders, tablets, and the sort of purposeful expressions people adopted when responsible for coordinating large events.
You followed the signs toward registration.
The man at the desk smiled immediately.
"Good evening."
"Hi."
You offered your name.
Something flickered across his expression. "There you are." The words slipped out so naturally that he didn't seem to realise he'd said them.
Your brow furrowed. "What?"
His smile widened. "Nothing. Sorry."
He handed over your badge.
"Conference hall B. Someone will show you where to go."
The interaction lingered in your mind as you crossed the lobby.
There wasn't anything strange about it.
You reached the elevators just as a man wearing a Foundation lanyard stepped out.
His eyes landed on your badge. Muttering your name under his breath.
You stopped. "Yeah?"
His expression brightened. "Right this way."
You stared at him.
The conference hall was directly ahead. Visible from where you stood. So was the sign. So was every other person entering without assistance. Apparently, you were the only one receiving a personal escort. The thought made you irrationally suspicious.
"Thanks."
The man spent the walk making polite conversation.
The conference hall occupied most of the floor.
Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked downtown Gotham. Round tables filled the space beneath hanging lights. Staff moved between displays making final adjustments while attendees gradually filtered inside.
You recognise d a few people from previous meetings and wandered over.
Conversation came easily enough.
Work topics. Office gossip. Complaints about deadlines. The familiar rhythm settled some of your nerves.
Eventually, someone handed you a drink. Someone else told a story about the mate documentary they were watching the night before. Laughter spread around the table.
For the first time all evening, you found yourself relaxing.
Maybe this wouldn't be so bad.
You could survive a few hours, shake a few hands, then disappear before anything unpleasant happened.
A movement near the entrance drew your attention.
The change happened gradually. A few heads turned. Then a few more.
You knew who it was before you looked.
For a brief moment, you considered keeping your eyes fixed firmly on the table.
But curiosity won.
It always did.
Bruce Wayne stood near the entrance speaking with several board members.
The sight of him harder than expected.
Four months had passed, yet he remained exactly as you remembered.
Tall. Confident. Effortlessly composed. The kind of person who never seemed out of place regardless of where he happened to be standing.
You watched him laugh at something one of the board members said. Watched him rest a hand briefly against someone's shoulder. Watched him move through the crowd with practiced ease.
The memory arrived before you could stop it.
Crystal chandeliers. Champagne glasses. The countdown reaching zero beneath your fingertips.
Your gaze dropped immediately. Heat crawled uncomfortably up the back of your neck.
This had been a mistake.
All you could think about was how little had changed for him.
Somewhere between the gala and now, Bruce Wayne had probably attended dozens of events just like this one.
Met hundreds of people.
Forgotten hundreds more.
Meanwhile, you still couldn't walk into a Foundation building without remembering the worst conversation of your life.
The thought was embarrassing enough to make you take a long drink.
Across the room, entirely unaware that you had already looked away, Bruce Wayne finally spotted you.
↑→↓←
You forced yourself to look anywhere else.
The city beyond the windows. The drink in your hand. The conversation happening beside you. Anything except him.
It felt childish.
Embarrassing, honestly.
You were an adult. Bruce Wayne wasn't some ex you were desperately trying to avoid at a party. He was a stranger.
A stranger who happened to be your soulmate.
Someone who happened to have accidentally shattered every stupid childhood fantasy you'd ever had about fate.
"So then the guy spends hours explaining how the patterns along his wrist connected-"
"What?"
Your coworker laughed. "The documentary."
"Oh." You blinked.
Right. The documentary.
Apparently the conversation had continued without you.
You offered what you hoped looked like a convincing smile.
No one seemed to notice.
People drifted between groups. More guests arrived. Staff circulated carrying trays of drinks and appetizers.
The event settled into a comfortable rhythm.
Exactly the sort of evening you'd expected.
Which was probably why it took you a moment to notice something was wrong.
The conversation around your table had started stuttering. Small pauses appearing where they hadn't before. People glancing toward something behind you.
You ignored it initially.
Then someone stopped speaking halfway through a sentence.
"...Oh."
You frowned. "What?"
Nobody answered immediately. Slowly, unease crept up your spine.
You knew that feeling.
The awful certainty that something embarrassing was happening and you simply hadn't caught up yet.
Your grip tightened around the glass.
Please don't be me.
Please don't somehow be me.
Carefully, you turned. And nearly dropped your drink.
Bruce Wayne was walking toward your table.
The room seemed to tilt.
No. That wasn't right. There were other people here. Important people. Board members. Executives. Foundation staff.
Bruce Wayne had absolutely no reason to be approaching you.
Yet each step brought him closer, your pulse hammered painfully. Maybe he wasn't.. Maybe-
Then Bruce smiled. Carefully. Almost hesitant.
"Hi."
→←↑↓
Your pulse thundered traitorously.
After spotting him near the entrance, you had gone out of your way to avoid him. And apparently, he'd made no effort to stop you.
He talked briefly with the accountant at your table before passing.
You felt stupid all over again.
You knew better than to expect anything.
No shit he wasn’t coming over to talk to you.
By the time the evening finally began winding down, your social battery had been thoroughly exhausted. Guests filtered toward the exits in small groups while staff quietly began dismantling displays around the edges of the room.
You offered your goodbyes, accepted a few last-minute business cards you would probably never use, and escaped.
Or tried to.
Halfway down the hallway toward the elevators, you changed direction.
Bathroom first.
Then home.
The corridor was blissfully empty compared to the crowded ballroom behind you. Soft lighting reflected off polished marble floors. The distant murmur of conversation faded with every step.
You were almost done. Almost free.
"Leaving already?"
You stopped so abruptly your feet nearly slipped against the floor.
The voice came from behind you. Low and warm.
Dangerously familiar.
Your stomach dropped.
Slowly, you turned.
Bruce Wayne stood at the opposite end of the hallway. Alone.
For a second, neither of you moved.
Gone was the effortless social charm he'd worn all evening. Without the crowd surrounding him, he seemed larger somehow. Broader. More imposing.
His eyes were fixed entirely on you. Watching. Like he'd finally found something he'd been searching for.
A strange tension settled between your shoulders.
"Mr. Wayne."
His expression tightened immediately.
"Bruce," he corrected softly.
The familiarity felt inappropriate.
You swallowed. "Bruce."
Something in his gaze darkened at the sound of his name on your lips.
Satisfaction.
The hallway suddenly felt much smaller.
You forced a polite smile. "I didn't realise you were still here."
"I was looking for someone."
Your heart stumbled. The answer came too quickly. Too directly. And for one awful second, hope tried to rear its ugly head again.
You crushed it immediately. "You found them then?"
The words were meant as a joke.
Bruce didn't laugh. Instead, his gaze softened.
"Yes."
The answer landed with uncomfortable weight.
The air felt thick.
You shifted your weight, suddenly aware of every inch separating you. Or rather, how little distance there actually was.
"You wanted something?" you asked carefully.
Bruce stared at you.
It was unnerving. Most people glanced away eventually. They blinked. Looked around. Got distracted.
Bruce seemed incapable of doing any of those things.
His eyes moved slowly across your face as if committing every detail to memory.
Four months ago, he couldn't spare you two seconds. Now he was looking at you like he couldn't bear to look away. It didn't make sense.
Nothing about this made sense.
"I owe you an apology." The words caught you completely off guard.
You blinked. "What?"
"The first gala."
Your breath stopped. Every muscle in your body locked.
Bruce's jaw tightened. "You approached me."
The memory flashed through your mind with brutal clarity.
The countdown.
The humiliation.
"I remember." It was a lie.
You knew it was a lie. You could hear it. He hadn't remembered. You'd seen his face that night. Seen the complete absence of recognition.
But he looked genuinely upset now.
"I handled it badly."
A laugh escaped before you could stop it. Small. Bitter.
Bruce's eyes narrowed.
"You don't need to apologize."
"Yes." His answer was immediate. "I do."
Something sharp flickered across his expression. Self-directed anger. Regret. Maybe even guilt.
You didn't understand it at all.
"You didn't know me." Your voice came out quieter than intended. The admission hurt. Even now.
"You didn't owe me anything."
Bruce went completely still. The silence that followed felt wrong. Dangerous.
His gaze dropped briefly to your wrist before returning to your face. A muscle jumped in his jaw.
Then he took a step forward.
Yet your pulse reacted like he'd crossed the entire hallway.
"I should have known you." The words came out rough. Almost painful.
Something shifted beneath the surface of his composure. You could feel it. Like cracks forming beneath ice.
And for the first time all evening, genuine unease curled through your stomach.
Because suddenly it felt less like Bruce Wayne had happened to stop you in a hallway. And more like Bruce Wayne had been waiting there. Waiting specifically for you. Waiting for the moment you would be alone. When there would be no audience. No escape.
A shiver ran down your spine.
Bruce's eyes immediately tracked the movement.
His expression softened. Like even that tiny movement meant something precious to him.
And somehow that frightened you far more than if he'd looked angry.
"Can I walk you to your car?" he asked quietly.
The question sounded harmless. Polite.
But there was something underneath it. Something hungry. Something that made it feel less like a request and more like a man trying very, very hard not to demand.
When you hesitated, Bruce's gaze darkened harshly.
You got the overwhelming impression that Bruce Wayne was not accustomed to hearing no.
And that whatever was looking at you from behind those impossibly blue eyes had already decided how this interaction would end.
The silence stretched, thick and suffocating. You looked at him, searching for the playboy you had seen on the news, but he wasn't there. In his place stood a man whose very presence felt like a gravitational pull, heavy and inescapable.
Your heart was a frantic thing in your chest, caught between the instinct to run and the soulmate bond that hummed under your skin, screaming that this was where you were supposed to be.
"I... I can manage, Bruce," you said, trying to inject a note of independence into your voice. You didn't want to be another person he was simply 'handling' or 'managing.' You wanted to be seen as an equal, not a charity project or a fleeting interest.
"It’s a long walk to the valet, and you have guests to attend to."
You made a move to step around him, but you didn't get far.
Before you could even clear his shadow, Bruce’s hand shot out. He didn't grab you roughly, but his fingers curled around your upper arm with a terrifying, singular purpose. It wasn't a casual touch, it was a tether. His palm was hot, even through the fabric of your clothes, and the sheer strength in his grip made your breath hitch.
"The guests are gone," he said. His voice had lost its social lilt. It was now a low, gravelly command that seemed to vibrate in the very marrow of your bones.
"They don't matter. Nothing in that room matters but this."
He stepped into your space, forcing you to tilt your head to maintain eye contact. The hallway felt like it was shrinking, the walls closing in until the only thing left in the universe was the scent of him, like the coming of a storm.
"You think you can just walk away?" he murmured, his eyes searching yours with a desperation that bordered on the frantic.
You frowned, your confusion overriding your unease. "After everything? Bruce, we haven't even spoken for more than five minutes.”
You let out a quiet broken laugh. “You don't even know me."
A dark, humorless sound escaped his throat, one that sounded more like a growl. "That is where you are wrong."
His grip tightened, making it clear he wasn't letting go.
His gaze dropped to your lips, then back to your eyes, his pupils blown wide until the blue was just a thin, electric ring.
"I know the way you tilt your head when you're thinking," he whispered, leaning so his breath fanned across your cheek.
"I know the exact shade your eyes turn when you're startled. I know the schedule of your life better than you do. I have spent every waking moment since that night trying to find a way to apologise for a sin I didn't even know I had committed."
Your heart hammered against your ribs.
How? How could he know these things? The sheer impossibility of his words should have made you laugh, or call for security, but the soulmate bond was reacting to his intensity, pulling you toward him like a moth to a flame.
It was a terrifying, beautiful pull.
A part of you wanted to demand answers, to push him away for his madness, but another part, the part that had been lonely and aching for months, wanted to collapse into him and let him devour you.
"You... you're obsessed," you breathed, the words slipping out before you could think them through.
Bruce didn't flinch. He didn't deny it. Instead, he leaned closer, his forehead touching yours, his expression one of raw, unadulterated devotion.
"I am," he confessed, the admission sounding like a vow.
"I am completely, utterly undone by you. And if you walk out of this hallway tonight without letting me make it right, I think the world might actually end."
He looked at you then, not as a billionaire looking at a guest, but as a man looking at his entire world, his eyes burning with a terrifying, beautiful hunger.
"Please," he pleaded, the word a jagged edge of vulnerability.
"Don't make me watch you walk away again. Let me take you home. Let me show you that you were never just a face in a crowd. You are the only thing that has ever been real."
He wasn't asking anymore. He was begging, and as he stood there, looming against you with a possessiveness that felt like a honeyed trap, you realised with a jolt of both fear and exhilaration that you didn't want to say no.
In the months that followed that night at the gala, the "coincidences" had stopped being coincidences and had become a reality.
You no longer had to wonder why a certain restaurant always had your favourite table reserved, or why your career seemed to accelerate with a sudden, inexplicable momentum.
You knew. You knew that every promotion, every unexpected gift, and every "chance" encounter was a thread in the web Bruce had woven around you.
And the most frightening part was how easily you had let yourself be caught.
The initial shock of his obsession, the way he looked at you as if you were a miracle he was afraid might vanish if he blinked hard enough, had slowly melted into a deep, intoxicating security. You were no longer a face in the crowd. You were the center of his universe.
You sat on the edge of the massive, silk draped bed in the master suite of Wayne Manor, watching the moonlight spill across the floor.
The room was silent, save for the distant, rhythmic sound of the Gotham rain against the glass.
A door clicked shut. Heavy, purposeful footsteps crossed the rug.
You didn't need to turn around to know it was him. You could feel him. The soulmate bond, once a source of lonely longing, was now a constant, thrumming connection that acted like a second pulse.
Bruce stepped into the light. He had shed the armor of his tuxedo, wearing only a dark shirt left partially unbuttoned.
He looked less like a billionaire and more like the man you had met in the hallway.
He approached you, his presence filling the room until there was no air left that didn't belong to him.
He sank onto the bed behind you, his large, warm hands sliding around your waist to pull you back against his chest. He buried his face in the crook of your neck, inhaling deeply. A low, contented sound vibrating against your skin.
"You're thinking again," he murmured, his voice a deep, velvet caress. "I can feel it."
"Just thinking about how much has changed," you whispered, leaning your head back against his shoulder.
You reached up, lacing your fingers with his. "How much you've changed."
Bruce tightened his hold, his arms circling you like a fortress. "I haven't changed. I've simply finally found the right reason to exist."
He turned you in his arms, forcing you to face him. His eyes were dark, swirling with that familiar, beautiful madness. Devotion so absolute it felt like a physical weight.
"Do you still feel like you're in a trap?"
You looked up at him, searching the face of the man who had studied your every breath, the man who had turned his entire life into a pursuit of you.
You thought of the fear you had felt, the unease at his intensity, and the way he had practically begged for a chance to belong to you.
Then, you thought of the way he held you now as if you were the most precious thing in existence, as if your very survival depended on his touch.
A slow, knowing smile touched your lips. You reached up, cupping his jaw, your thumb tracing the line of his lip.
"No," you admitted softly, the truth settling comfortably in your chest. "It feels like home."
Bruce’s expression broke, a flash of pure, unadulterated relief crossing his features before it was replaced by a hunger that made your breath hitch.
He leaned in, his lips hovering just a fraction from yours.
"Good," he rasped, his gaze dropping to your mouth. "Because there is no going back. You are mine. And I am never, ever letting you go again."
As he pulled you into a kiss that tasted of desperation and promise, you realised that the universe hadn't hated you after all.
It had simply been waiting for the moment that you finally stopped running and let the storm claim you.
Please comment and reblog! :)
11K+ Words, 69K+ Characters, 1K+ Sentences, 900+ Paragraphs, 42 Minute average reading time, 1 hour and 6 minute average speaking time.
EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT CALEB’S IN HIS FEELINGS AND HE CAN’T GET OUT OF IT…
Sypnosis: Caleb x non!mc — you find out he only used you in this marriage of three, and only had a child with you to prove to the world that he, Caleb Xia, had moved on. 7k words. Warnings: HURT NO COMFORT no seriously, x reader is a stretch. mentions of pregnancy, birth and cheating. selfish caleb. i like exploring his ego. A/N: Sorry for the wait. I smoked 7 cigs in the process of writing this (working through my 8th now as I do the formatting). this stemmed from a little ask that was just too angsty to write a simple blurb on. highly suggest listening to mitski while reading this/earrings by malcolm todd (of which the title originates from) for the maximum angst experience.
There were three of you in this marriage, so naturally, it was a bit crowded.
Part of you felt unbelievably happy to be at the altar with Caleb Xia, yet another part of you couldn’t ignore the nudging feeling that something was very wrong with your husband-to-be.
To the spectators of the wedding, Caleb seemed perfectly composed. Not that most of them would know him any better than you did of the man you were about to dedicate the rest of your life to. The audience of the simple wedding at the courthouse consisted of your family and friends, and for Caleb…well, the only three people who he invited were Gideon and…
And her. MC. Of course.
You’ve always had an idea of who she was. It was hard not to acknowledge the woman your husband was obsessed with, is still obsessed with. You knew how much MC weighed on Caleb’s heart, and you could only guess how much that weight doubled when MC, instead of marrying him, married some cardiologist friend of hers. And you could piece together that you were nothing more than a trophy of proof for Caleb to show that he had moved on.
Yet, you still naively believed that, just like any good fairy tale, Caleb would eventually fall in love with you.
But one look into his empty, loveless eyes, as he signed your marriage certificate, told you otherwise. The chaste, brief kiss you exchanged felt like more of an obligation to show to the wedding guests rather than a genuine embrace of a husband and wife.
But then again, you didn’t think you expected much more.
In fact, Caleb looked happier when after the ceremony, MC bounded up with him with a grin, patting his hair and congratulating him for getting married and finally, finally moving on. To which he blushed and replied to her with something inaudible to you.
So from the very beginning, there’s always been three there has always been three in the spaces you occupied with your husband, three at the altar (you wondered if Caleb had imagined it was MC standing in your place on your wedding day), three in the bed (you could even imagine MC lying in empty space inbetween you and Caleb as you slept, and three at the table (at first before Caleb had learnt more about you, the dishes he served were all reminecent of MC’s favourites). You knew MC haunted, haunts, your marriage. But like any good wife, you looked the other way and hoped for the best.
Although it was not that you expected for Caleb to start acting like your husband right off the bat (you told yourself he needed time to heal). Not that you expected him to treat you like MC. Not that you never stopped praying that the underdog (you) of the story may prevail eventually. Yet the silence in his cold, gray penthouse, the lack of physical touch between the two of you, the meals consumed in harrowing conversation (you’d have to give it to him for always trying to ask you how your day was everyday), the nights spent so far away from each other, was slowly convincing you that this marriage was nothing but one of convenience. All you did was try your best to keep holding onto the hope that maybe things would change with Caleb for the better.
About two years into the marriage, Caleb surprised you by asking if you could have a child together.
You were shocked he was the one to ask.
Your remembered first attempt at intimacy had gone miserably. You could freshly recall on your wedding night when Caleb had loomed over you in the darkness of the bedroom, his chest heaving - though he hadn’t moved to do anything, anything at all - with spots of tears forming in the crease of his eye. After ten minutes of silence, he rolled off you.
‘I— I’m sorry…I- I can’t.’
You had told him it was okay. And you never mentioned it again, so you were coloured surprised when Caleb meekly asked you, as if he thought you might get upset, to try for a baby.
Fortunately for him, it only took about three times before you presented him with a positive pregnancy test. Fortunately for you as well, since each attempt was very awkward, terrifyingly so. You had no idea where you should have out your hands, your legs, if he even wanted your hands on him— and neither did Caleb know what to do with his touch. You’d think he didn’t want a baby by how hesitant he was acting. However, eventually when you did hand him that test with two pink lines, Caleb’s face practically glowed. You had never seen your husband, in all these years of marriage, look so…happy, so much more like his actual age than the cold, gloomy colonel you were married to. For the first time, you saw the sunny Caleb that you only got to know through photos stuck in dusty albums in the corners of your home. He hugged you, kissed you, and laughed in relief.
Relief?
Honestly, you were somewhat relieved too. Usually, Caleb would be away for prolonged periods of time, always muttering about something to to with the fleet, a mission, training, before departing for sometimes weeks at a time, but ever since you got pregnant, Caleb cut back on prolonged duties and stayed by your side if he could. There was one thing you could never complain about him, was that when it really came down to it, Caleb was not a bad husband by the books. He constantly cooks, cleans, cares and caters for you, and even more so now, he’ll drop whatever is on hand at moment’s notice to come running to you if you said you felt the slightest bit of discomfort. Plus, with all the baby essentials Caleb had purchased, they had really livened up the house much more. You watch as he assembles them without the need to look at the instructions whilst sitting on the floor of the living room. As he fusses about with you taking the right supplements, about getting enough sleep…it’s cute. It’s the closest feeling you’ve ever experienced to having a real husband, despite being married for well over two years now.
On a muggy afternoon, you inched out of Caleb’s grasp (he has now found it in himself to sleep closer to you with one hand usually over your stomach if you allow it) and wobbled your way to the walk in closet for some airier clothes. As you sifted through the racks, you accidentally knocked out a few photos from Caleb’s colonel service coat, which fluttered down to the bottom of the closet. Crouching down (whilst you still could), you inspected the photos.
Oh.
It was a laminated photo of your baby’s ultrasound. Not just that, but on the edges of the photo, written neatly in his handwriting in pen, were the words: [name]’s ultrasound appointment on xx/xx/xxxx.
Adorable, you thought, that Caleb carried this around with him. You privately wondered if he would proudly show it off to his co-workers or his underlings. You hoped he might, maybe even boast a little about how lucky he and his wife was. You couldn’t help but smile to yourself, wondering if this marriage was finally taking a step into the right direction.
But right next to that photo was that necklace. When U Come Back. You knew very well the story behind that necklace, how MC had given it to him before he left for the aerospace academy. How he used to wear it, 24/7, but had at least the decency to stop wearing it at all times and only keep it on him, after he married you. Yes, at least he had the decency to now never take off your wedding bands. Your eyes glazed over the necklace again. Bitterly, you wondered if he’d ever want to carry a photo of him and you someday.
Nevermind. You dried your eyes quickly. At least in this marriage, both he and you, are getting something that you both wanted, something that you will both cherish more than anything.
A bouncing baby girl.
He wanted your baby. He needed your baby. He wanted to be a father, because he wanted to be a father, a nurturing, loving figure, right? And not for any other reason? Right?
Right.
Two weeks later, whilst tidying up the kitchen, your hand bumped against a bright yellow lunchbox patterned with little apple stickers, long forgotten beneath a pile of documents and papers. Fondly, you picked it up.
In the very earliest days of your marriage, you had done the domestic, wifely thing of making your husband a lunchbox before he departed for work every morning. And he had returned an empty box everytime, down to the last grain of rice being picked clean. You still remember the fuzzy feeling of seeing Caleb smile at you, thanking you for such a delicious meal, how his subordinates had all fawned over the presentation, how delicious it was, how lucky the colonel was to have such a lovely wife…
So why not do it again? You thought merrily, after all, you haven’t made him a packed lunch in a while. Maybe showing up at his work with a delicious lunchbox might perk him up. Excitedly, you got into your car and made your way down into central Skyhaven.
Entering the fleet HQ, you were immediately guided to your husband’s office.
You were about to turn the handle and step in - usually there weren’t much visitors in his office in the middle of the day - but a chorus of loud voices stopped you.
“And to Caleb! The newest dad-to-be!”
“The first of all of us to be a father, actually.”
You heard a round of clinking cups. It must be Caleb, inviting his flight school friends to celebrate the impending birth of your child. At his office though…strange. But it must be because he’s been so busy, he hardly had any time to go anywhere except his workplace and his home.
“Woah…no, no more.” You recognised that as Caleb’s voice. You could imagine his hand gliding over to cover the surface of his glass.
Drinking? In the middle of the day? Seriously? You snorted, hand going down on the handle again, But at least it’s to a good cause. Caleb being a new dad and all.
“But seriously. Here’s also to your marriage not being a total disaster!”
Your stopped before you could push against the door.
“It’s not. A total disaster.” Caleb said, his voice a bit slurred though not completely drunk.
“Yeah, yeah…we all know you had the hots for MC, but she ended up marrying that sexy doctor instead of the big bad colonel, didn’t she, oof—!”
A thud. Caleb had probably slammed whoever said that against the wall. A series of ‘ooohs’ followed.
“Kidding, kidding…”
“You better be.” Caleb dusted his hands off, sinking back into his seat. “I’ve long moved on from MC. I even have proof.”
“Oh yeah? Don’t tell me it’s—”
He pulled out the ultrasound picture that he kept in his uniform pocket, showing it to everyone in the room.
“I had a child with my wife. Can’t you see how much I’ve moved on already? I can have a child with someone who’s not MC. See?”
Tears stung your vision.
So thats what he was using that picture for.
Not for a happy memory’s keepsake, no. But to show the world that he, Colonel Caleb Xia, the yearner, the lover, the oh-so-perfect man…has moved on from his sweet MC.
…
You quickly threw the lunchbox you made away, and fled the building. You needed to get away from him, in that moment. You didn’t want to linger on in this kind of feeling anymore.
…
Time passes a lot quicker, you found, when it wasn’t just you in the house all day. With Caleb by your side (more or less constantly in the final few months of your pregnancy) the days had quickly passed. And before you knew it, there was a living, breathing infant in your arms.
The birth was easy, and again, you were grateful for Caleb’s support (he never left your side in those six hours, plus you’ve heard far too many horror stories of baby daddies bringing their Xbox, or not showing up at all…) though admittedly you swore at him multiple times and eventually snapped at him to wait outside. However, part of you feared he might react to an actual baby, his and your baby, with regret and hesitation. You couldn’t shake the fear that Caleb might feel prejudiced against a baby you made with him instead of one borne from him and MC. But those fears quickly evaporated when you saw Caleb crying, sniffling, holding the little pink bundle in his arms.
Both Caleb and you were overjoyed, though also albeit scared, naturally like most first-time parents. He was seriously dedicated at every step. Again, you’d have to give it to him for being a good dad.
After returning from the hospital, he never allowed you to get up in the middle of the night to soothe the baby. He never complained about doing the messy work that came with babies, often willingly taking care of all her wants every day as if trying to prove a point. He now even tries to come home earlier and go on less long-distance fleet missions to spend more time with the baby, something he’s never done for you in the time you were married. You watched as he poured his whole heart into being a good dad for a tiny little girl. A perfect masculine figure. Ever so sensitive to what she needed.
But what about what you needed?
Sometimes when you come home after a day out with your friends or a solo trip somewhere, the moment you open the door to your home, you feel as if your entire world is behind that doorway. That despite all the freedoms Caleb has given you in this marriage (the financial freedom, ‘you can go anywhere you want’ , you can do whatever you wish), your world had drastically shrank to the man sitting in the grey parlour, who wasn’t even facing you.
On other days, he wasn’t even there.
Gone to MC’s. Emergency.
….you weren’t exponentially surprised by the reason. Caleb frequently rushed to MC’s house to deal with her emergencies. At this point, you simply shrugged it off and continued on as you usually would. Only that when you went to the nursery to check on your daughter…
The crib was empty.
Your heart dropped. You had frantically dialled his number. No response. You racked your head for thousands of possibilities. Did someone take her? Did he mention he was taking her anywhere? Did he…did he take your child? Taking off with MC to a place where you’d never find him again? Did Caleb pack up and leave altogether? With your baby?
You told yourself it couldn’t be true. That he’d never do something like that. He wouldn’t. That Caleb is a good, kind man. But to what distances he would go for MC, you had no idea. All you knew was that you’d like it to be you instead of her.
Ten minutes later, you were banging the front door of MC’s house.
Surprisingly, it was her husband, Zayne, who answered.
“[name]? What are you doing here?” Zayne asked, surprised.
He didn’t even get to answer before you shoved past him, calling Caleb’s name.
“Caleb, Caleb?!” Your mind flashed with possibilities of where he could be. Maybe he was already gone. Maybe he took MC and drove up to the airport already. But surely not, his car was parked outside, and, and…
There he was. In MC’s backyard, sleeves rolled up, that stupid grin on his face as he…tacked a nail into a piece of plywood, MC hovering over him with a tray of lemonade. You stopped in your steps where the stone of the house met grass, calming down, as you watched your husband beam up at MC, sweat glistening down his muscular arms, droplets forming on his healthy skin, a damp V soaking the top of his t-shirt. Time seemed to slow as Caleb reached up, took a sparkling glass, smiling at MC gratefully, a smile so bright you’ve never seen in all those times you ever offered him something.
“Caleb!” You snapped, finally loud enough that he whipped his head around, MC too. “Caleb! Where’s our daughter—“
Before you could even hear his reply, a beaming MC gasped in delight and smothered you in a hug.
“[name]! You’re here too! That’s perfect, you should stay and have dinner! Ooh, I’ll tell Zayne to set an extra space at the table.” She spun around, shouting into the open patio doors. “ZAAAAAYNIIIIEEEEE?”
She talked at such a fast pace, you barely even got to get a word in on how you didn’t really want to stay for dinner, how you just wanted to demand where your daughter is and go home. In that moment, you didn’t even really care if your husband went home with you. But just as you opened your mouth…
“Aw, pips, there’s no need, I’m almost done with building this part already.”
MC pouted, that little, pathetic, faux-childish pout she always made at her dear gege.
“C’mon, Caleb, staying for dinner is the least you could do for me, after rushing over on such short notice to build Zachary’s treehouse.” She said, referring to hers and Zayne’s son. She turned to you and smiled, dropping her voice to a whisper, “Zayne is so useless when it comes to things like this, and my gege is the best!”
She turned back to Caleb. “And bringing your adorable little daughter too! I’ve been dying to meet her. You know I’ve asked you so many times already.”
You paused. “Wait a minute. You…asked Caleb to…to bring…”
“Yes!” MC replied, “I know she’s only a few months old, but all I’ve been asking Caleb is to let me meet my adorable niece!”
It was almost laughable. The ‘emergency’ that required Caleb’s immediate attention was the construction of a treehouse for MC’s son. You couldn’t help but wonder how many other of these such trips to her house that Caleb took were also something else, something less significant but labelled as an ‘emergency’.
You turned to Caleb, absolutely pissed.
“You. You took my daughter just like that? You took her without asking me?”
“I told you I was going to MC’s—“
“You didn’t tell me you were taking her!”
“I thought you would have assumed—“
Right. Like you should assume, like every other little bit of your marriage, you should have assumed that Caleb’s judgement was right. That your husband is doing his best for you. For this marriage. That you should assume every step he did, he was thinking of you first, and not MC. You should always assume. You’d be happier off that way.
But obviously, you were much more headstrong than Caleb let on. You were no longer the nervous blushing bride that had once optimistically stood by his side.
“You have no right to take her and tell me, her mother, to just assume anything about the safety of her own child.” You replied, in a tone that surprised Caleb so much, that he wasn’t sure how to reply.
MC, caught in the middle, immediately pushed in to diffuse the tension.
“Aw, don’t be like that, my sister-in-law.” She smiled, holding onto your arm. “Don’t blame Caleb, it’s my fault. I asked him to bring the baby.”
“No, no.” Caleb cut in, standing up and putting a hand onto MC’s shoulder. “Don’t blame yourself.”
He turned to you, frowning. “[name], I think we’ve just blown this way out of proportion. No one’s been hurt and you’re acting if I’ve kidnapped someone!”
“You know that’s not what I—“
“Come on.” Caleb gently took your hand, herding you towards the house. “Our daughter’s fine. She’s asleep upstairs.”
He led you past the living room, past the kitchen where a frazzled Zayne stood, wordlessly watching as Caleb led you up the staircase and into the nursery, familiar with the layout as if it was his own house, to where your daughter was sleeping peacefully in their son’s old crib.
“See?” Caleb sighed, “Nothing’s wrong. You got all worked up over nothing.”
You wanted to yell and him and tell him that this wasn’t nothing. That somehow ‘nothing’ always seemed to be associated with his behaviour with MC, and that none of what happened concerning MC in your marriage could just be swept under the rug like that. Maybe that’s how he preferred it, you thought bitterly.
“I want to go home.” Was your only reply.
Caleb’s shoulders slackened. “C’mon, let’s just stay for dinner…”
“I want. To go. Home.”
Your husband seemed to give up this case, and sighed. “Alright.” He replied, “Let me get my jacket.”
Suddenly, both of your heads turned, as you heard MC rap her hand against the nursery doorframe.
“Caleb…can I just speak with you for a second before you go…?”
You wanted to question if she had been lurking outside, listening, but Caleb cut in front of you.
“Of course.” He replied.
He took MC by her shoulder“We’ll just be a minute.” He called to you.
“You don’t mind, do you?” MC asked graciously.
“Sure.” You replied evenly. “I’ll just be in here. Come get me when you’re done, okay? I’ll dress our daughter to leave.”
You saw Caleb nod, before escorting MC down the stairs. You made sure they both saw you close the nursery door.
You mad good on your promise to stay in the nursery and dress your fussy little daughter (who was looking more like Caleb by the day). Five minutes later, gently creaking open the nursery door, you snuck outside, thinking they’d finished their conversation already. But you realised they hadn’t gone far. As you stood on the stairs with your back against the side of the wall, you could clearly hear Caleb and MC talking in the living room behind the staircase.
Their words made your heart beat out of your chest.
“Is your wife always so…uptight?” You heard MC mumble, her voice suddenly sultrier than before.
“No, she’s just…” You heard Caleb began.
I’m just what, Caleb?
“…she’s just emotional, that’s all.”
You heard MC snort. “Emotional? Hardly. I seem to remember that at your wedding, she was ever so meek and crittery, so nervous, so deferent, so grateful to marry the big strong colonel…” She sighed, “And I thought that, y’know, hey! She might do a lot of good for you. She’s like a squeaky mouse, just like another version of me, how I was your ‘pipsqueak’…” Her voice suddenly dropped to a whine.
“I thought maybe you found a better replacement.”
You heard sounds that indicated that Caleb stepped forwards to hug her.
“MC…nothing and nobody could ever replace you.” Caleb said gently.
They were silent for a long time. Wetness had began to gloss your eyes.
“Well…on that happy note…” MC mumbled, “I have some news for you.”
“Hm? What is it?”
“I’m…” She giggled, “I’m expecting.”
“You’re what?!” You heard Caleb exclaim.
“Shhhh! I said I’m expecting. I’m going to have another baby.” MC replied hushedly.
“Oh wow…congratulations!” Caleb laughed. “Guess I’m ready to be uncle to another mini-zayne, huh?”
MC let out a small happy sigh. “Not quite.”
“What do you mean? Do you think this baby’s going to look more like you, or—”
“No, no…”
A pause. MC gazed up at your husband, clasping his hands.
“Caleb…the baby is yours.”
…
You couldn’t bear to hear the rest of the conversation. You sprinted back up the stairs, going back into the darkness of the nursery. You hated yourself for it, but you couldn’t help but sob, sob over this marriage which you’ve always held hope to, this marriage which, admittedly, up to that moment you were still clinging onto the hope that things may turn to the better, that your fate might change, that this wasn’t all a mistake, that your marriage wasn’t just a helpless fantasy on your part…
But look at you now.
Crying on the floor of the house which belonged to the woman who your husband was obsessed with. Crying with a baby that was only born into the world to prove a point for your husband, to prove that he had moved on. Or worse, your poor baby daughter wasn’t even born to prove a point anymore, she had only served to prove a lie, a lie that was quickly unravelling at the hands of the man who demanded her existence.
Caleb…oh, Caleb.
Your tears stopped when you heard someone coming up the stairs. Immediately, you dried your eyes and stood up, trying to slow down your breaths and calm yourself down. You refused to face your husband like this. You refused to make a scene. Not now, anyway.
“Ready to go?” He asked, pushing the door open.
You didn’t turn for a second. In that moment, time seemed to stop.
Slowly, you turned to him, your daughter held tightly in your arms.
“Sure.” You smiled, “Let’s go home.”
…
Home. Such a funny word.
As you watched the glowing skyscrapers pass you in the passenger seat, you suddenly felt very calm. The air was wet from rain, and a cool summer breeze had began to sweep through the night. You thought you might feel rage, or resentment, but instead…all you felt was a strange sense of sereneness. You were disappointed at Caleb, sure, but not as surprised as you thought you’d feel.
Which felt worse than being angry.
You’d rather feel that rush of adrenaline, make a scene, throw something at his face and scream at him and cry and slap him, maybe, but no, no, all you felt was a churning pit of emptiness in the pits of your stomach. Your belly empty, while MC’s swelled with life. His life.
“What do you want to have for dinner when we get back home?” Caleb asked you, breaking the silence.
You shrugged, wondering when, or if that all, he was going to confirm for you what you had overheard.
“Don’t be like that.” He nudged you with a half smile, “You can pick anything. Anything at all to eat, it’s up to you.”
You didn’t want to eat with him. Even the thought of sitting at the same table, across him, made you feel sick. The thought of your mouth wrapping around the utensils that once touched his mouth, his mouth that once warmed MC’s tongue. Biting into food prepared by his hands, his hands that once traveled across MC’s naked skin. A sickening scene.
You didn’t want anything to do with him.
“I’d rather you decide.” Came your firm reply. “Since you seem to decide everything that goes on around here.”
Caleb sighed, a long heavy drag. “[name], I don’t know what you want me to tell you.” He spun the wheel, pulling into the familiar street. “So can we please just drop the attitude?”
“What attitude?” You asked, fluttering your lashes as often MC did when she wanted to appease her dearest gege, “I really don’t mind what we eat. Why would I?”
“[name].” He said more seriously, “Please. I don’t want a scene. Our baby’s asleep in the back and I’d really like to keep it that way.”
Right, so you’d be fine having an argument if our daughter wasn’t here. Speaking of children…
“MC’s looked glowing today, don’t you think?” You mentioned, sliding out of the passenger’s seat almost the second Caleb rolled the car into the driveway.
He shot you a strange look as he unlatched your daughter from her baby seat in the back. “Yes…she did. Why do you ask?”
You shrugged innocently, unlocking the front door, “Nothing, I just meant that motherhood agrees with her.”
Caleb said nothing in reply. You watched as he carried your daughter inside, not a muscle in his face giving away a single hint of suspicion or anxiety. You knew what kind of man your husband was. It wouldn’t be so easy to gauge out the truth from him, or any semblance of emotion he didn’t want to express for that matter. But you were expecting this.
“Do you think she’s going to have another one?” You said coquettishly, shrugging off your coat.
He couldn’t help it this time. You watched from behind as his shoulder twitched, ever so slightly, for not even half a second.
“I wouldn’t know.” Caleb replied, his tone ordinary, “I wouldn’t be surprised if she did. She and Zayne are a happy couple, after all.”
Your husband would have made a great actor, you thought humorlessly. You wondered if he was tearing himself apart inside.
“Actually.” You raised your hand, smiling. “I don’t want dinner.”
Caleb turned, cocking an eyebrow at you. “What? But you—”
“I’m not hungry anymore.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” You nodded, one foot on the stairs. “I’m going to bed early. It’s been a long day.”
“But it’s only—“
“Goodnight, Caleb.”
“…goodnight.”
…
Weeks had passed. You’ve continued to act as if nothing had gone wrong. Caleb went to work, came back from work, cooked, played with your baby girl (who was now crawling all over the place) and went to bed. The only aspect that he felt…off, about, was how pacified you acted now.
You didn’t pepper him with questions about his day anymore.
You weren’t there to ask if he was feeling alright the moment he came home.
You couldn’t even bring yourself to stand closer to him.
It was as if the marriage had undergone mitosis and split itself in two, as if the straining cell it had once been has finally pulled away from the other half. All that remained was two individuals, standing inches apart in the kitchen, sitting a meter away in the living room, sleeping in beds that felt miles away from each other at night.
Your scents didn’t even mingle together anymore. The air in your home felt stagnant. You were sure that if you hadn’t got used to it, if you weren’t you for a second and you had visited your current home for the first time, you would assume that there were no inhabitants in it at all.
You could imagine it now. The edge of the scissors pulling the winding umbilical cord into a taught triangular shape in the sterile air, about to snap shut, about to separate the two entities, mother snd baby, to deliver individuality and freedom to both…there just needed to be a little push. A little force. Just a little more, and you would be able to forever sever this rotting chord that ties you to this marriage .
Every day, Caleb would come home and wonder what changed your demeanor so much. And you’d wonder when your husband would grow the balls to tell you that MC is pregnant with his baby.
He didn’t on week one. Or two. Or three. Or four. And as you can guess…
He didn’t speak a word when MC posted a gender reveal (week 19) online, the cutting of the triple-tiered cake revealing flamingo-pink insides. Caleb liked that post, you saw.
He also didn’t mention a word when MC announced a baby shower (week 28), which you were also invited to (the gall. can you imagine the audacity?). You had acted perfectly amicable, presenting MC with a hug and a basket of gifts. Caleb had gone to congratulate Zayne. You couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony.
By the time the date hit 30 weeks after you overheard their conversation, you had had enough.
If Caleb was going to be a coward about it, then you would force him to confront the truth.
…
Week 34 was fast approaching. You knew a normal pregnancy would end at about 37 weeks to 40, so when Caleb, suddenly, in the middle of your morning shot up from his seat after answering a call, you were surprised.
“What’s wrong?” You asked.
“MC had th—her baby.”
“Already?” You hummed. “It’s a bit early, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Caleb gasped, practically sprinting to put on his jacket hanging by the bannister, “That’s why I need to go see her. Now.”
“No wait!” You stood up, grabbing his wrist. “I’m coming too.”
“No.” He replied. “You shouldn’t. Someone needs to stay home with our daughter. And I won’t be long.”
“No, no!” You chirped merrily, picking up your daughter from her high chair. “Let’s bring our baby. After all, she should get to know her new half-sister.”
You enjoyed watching the colour suddenly bleach from his face.
“What?” His tone was chilling, shaken, almost boyish.
“You heard me.” You fished out the car keys from the little ceramic dish near the front door. “Come on.“
“[name]—“
“I thought you were in a hurry to go.”
“[name].” Firmer, now.
“So let’s go.”
“[NAME]!” Caleb yelled. It was the first time he had yelled at you.
“What is it?” You blinked back.
Caleb’s eyes were bloodshot. His shoulders heaved.
“How long…have you known?”
“I think the better question is, Caleb,” Your face, he thought, was frighteningly unreactive. “When were you planning on telling me?”
He threw his hands down, turning away from you. “I was going to tell you today. After the baby was born.”
“So you can force me to face the consequences of your actions? If I like it or not? Is that why?”
“No! Don’t put words in my mouth.” He faced you again. “I was going…I was going to…”
“To what?”
“To work something out.”
“And how was that going to end?”
“I—“
“I’ll tell you how that was going to end, Caleb Xia.” You stabbed your finger against his solid chest. “It would end in me having to make sacrifices. It would end up in me in pain, over and over again, just to cope with how you’ve decided to treat me! I will be the one at a loss while you, you will get what you’ve always wanted. Every decision you’ve made was never for me. It was always either for you or for MC! I don’t believe a word that comes out of your mouth when you tell me that you’ll ’work something out’. I know you’ll give me the short end of the straw. You already have, for every day we’ve been married. Yet you never realise, because of course in the end whatever happens would work out for you, because it always fucking does!”
“[name].” Caleb breathed, “Calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to—“
“I’ll be home as quick as I can.” He said, pulling on his shoes at the door. “And then we’ll settle this.”
You laughed.
“Oh, Caleb.”
You watched as he glanced at you from the corner of his eye.
“I’m sure you’ll find yourself right at home.” You said with a smile.
…
“Caleb, come quick!” MC giggled, waving her hand to usher him in. “I just sent Zaynie to go out to the cafe to buy me some lunch.”
Caleb looked over at the bassinet, where a tiny wriggly baby wrapped in white lay. His lips broke out into a smile, a little wider than when he had first met his daughter with you, before gently, very gently reaching into the blankets, prying them apart, to reveal the scrunched up face of his new daughter.
He instantly folded, a finger stroking her wrinkly cheeks.
“Hey there, sweetheart…” Caleb cooed, as the baby made an uncommitted sound.
She was tiny. Wrinkly. But to Caleb, she was one of the cutest things he’s ever seen. She was part of him, and part of MC, after all.
Caleb took an awed breath in, as she fluttered her eyelashes, opening her eyes to reveal…
Big, green eyes.
Her eyes were green.
A bright, mocking, hazel.
Just.
Like.
Her father’s.
Zayne.
…
“What the fuck?” Caleb spun to MC, “You said—“
“Well…” MC smiled devilishly, a telltale sign that she knew the entire time, “I assumed wrong, I guess.”
“But you told me it was from that one night when—“
“There’s no way I could have conceived her with you from just one night, compared to how many times I’ve fucked Zayne around the same time.” She noticed Caleb wince in uncomfort at the mention of her activities with her husband. “You were right. Aren’t you always, gege.”
“But—“
“Caleb, the baby isn’t yours.” MC snapped.
He stood by the beside, shellshocked.
She exhaled out of her nose, smoothing out her blankets. “There is no ‘but’ to it.”
Caleb let out an exasperated breath. “I can’t believe you lied to me. You lied to be about something this important!”
“I had to!” Suddenly, her voice turned an 180 and became a pitiful, little cry.
“Gege…I was trying to help you…you married [name] and seemed to be so upset all the time, so I had to think of a way to get you out of that marriage. And see, now…” She smiled, “She’s out of the picture and will never bother you again.”
“You don’t understand!” Caleb shook his wrist out of her grasp, “I would never have…have put [name] through all this if it wasn’t my child to begin with.“
“Come on, Cay, you’re just being selfish now.” MC picked at her nails, “It’s all for the best. You didn’t enjoy being married to her in the first place anyway. I can’t believe you went through all the trouble of having a kid with her just to prove that you were over me. You’re so pathetic, gege.” She chuckled.
Caleb felt as if he could not move. MC’s voice seemed to become a distant echo, until…
“Gege?”
He snapped back into reality. Caleb frantically began pulling on his jacket, turning his back to MC, his shallow breaths filling the room.
“Gege, don’t go.” She said softly, “It’s all for the best. You’ll still be an uncle to the baby. To our family. We’ll be together again, aren’t you happy about that?”
Caleb’s hand tightened on the door. He turned to look at MC, with the most hollow look in his eyes she’d ever seen him possess. Emptier even than the time she renounced him as her gege.
“No.” He replied curtly, pushing the door open.
“Caleb Xia.” MC barked. “Xia Yizhou!”
For the first time, Caleb didn’t look back to her.
…
Caleb wasn’t sure how many speed limits he broke while making his way home, but from the look of the bumper, he should be expecting a few tickets soon.
He was in a daze as he got out of the car, almost stumbling to the front door of the house, unlocking it.
He was ready. To apologise. To kneel before you and beg for forgiveness.
Anything at all.
To go back to the beginning. To make things right, as they should be between a husband and his wife.
To be a family. You, him and your precious baby, that you gave him.
He opened the door.
The house was silent.
Almost empty.
Empty…
The empty table. The empty living room. The empty bedrooms. The empty nursery. It was as if the house had reversed to its first day Caleb had moved in, where every inch was shrouded by plastic wrap and packed in cardboard. When no life had been breathed into his home.
A home without love is just a house, after all. How long had Caleb been trying to change that?
How long had he stayed, in denial, that his goal had actually been long fulfilled?
Where are the people who made his house a home?
“[name]?” Caleb called out. “[name]? Where are you?”
A prickling feeling creeped up against his spine as Caleb made his way back into the kitchen, where you had the fight just before he left. The plates had been cleared away, leaving only a sticky note taped onto the table.
You finally got your dream. I hope you can be happier with MC and your family with her. It’s all for the best. Love, [name] :)
Caleb fell to his knees.
A choked cry echoed through the house.
What dream? What family?
What had he forsaken to chase after his selfish needs?
˚ʚ♡ɞ˚ THAT ONE TIME I STARTED READING A BUNCH OF STORIES FILLED WITH CLICHE TROPES, BUT WAIT... WHY ARE THEY ACTING WEIRD !? - DIZ-EAZE FOLLOWERS CELEBRATION EVENT MASTERLIST ˚ʚ♡ɞ˚
; in which cliche wattpad tropes are taken with a lovesick twist.
; yandere, all fem reader this time, specific warnings will be listed in each oneshot itself, updates are sporadic.
⋆˙⟡♡ DISCLAIMER; the characters in the following works are not indicative of their canon personalities whatsoever. it revolves around wattpad tropes and yandere, OOC behavior is bound to happen.
𖹭.ᐟ Mirror. (Best friends with Columbina)
; columbina, your best friend, is practically a copy of you. she wears the clothes you have in your closet, she eats the same food you love, and she likes the shows you watch. you don't see anything wrong with it for the most part.
𖹭.ᐟ Abhorrently. (Marriage of Convenience with Flins)
; the man you were promised to since you were both children turns out to be a bit of a creep. it's in your hands if you want to sever this marriage through divorce, or lean into his all-consuming obsession.
𖹭.ᐟ Gameboy. (Brother's best friend with Dan Heng)
; you've known dan heng growing up, watched as he protected you from mean boys with his imposing presence. he's always one call away or just outside the living room playing another competitive game with your brother. in a way, dan heng's like another brother, too.
𖹭.ᐟ Petticoat. (Not like other girls with Furina)
; many consider you to be an outlier. while other girls go out to clubs and get their faces done with immaculate makeup, you stay cooped up in your room blasting your favorite tv shows. boys your age don't go after girls like you. but furina does.
𖹭.ᐟ Moneybags. (Billionaire boss with Arlecchino)
; working as a secretary for a strict CEO takes years off your lifespan at the end of every shift. you go home with unfinished work, you're required to attend to her out of shift, and she always needs her morning coffee at 7:30 AM sharp. at the very least, the pay is good.
𖹭.ᐟ Springtime. (Push-and-Pull with Phainon)
; becoming enamoured with phainon is an inevitability that you had no chance of ever resisting. but it stings how he'll never see you beyond a dear friend from kindergarten. the moment you move on, however, begins a shift in your dynamic with him -- he wants you back, desperately so.
𖹭.ᐟ Propellant. (Bad boy with Scaramouche)
; resident campus troublemaker scaramouche is bad news, everyone knows that, including you. but a drunken shared conversation with him starts to tempt you into getting involved in his life. there is something deeply wrong with him, but maybe you can be the cure to that. your father always taught you to fix rather than discard, after all.
Katsuki has already turned seventeen by the time you wake up from your coma. Despite the late nights he spends at the hospital by your side, when you wake up, he is inevitably, at school. You wake up to Mitsuki Bakugo holding your hand.
Tags/CW: Bakugo x fem! Reader, high school sweethearts, estab! relationship, hurt/comfort, mentions of injuries, reader in a coma after the war, class 2-A is a soft menace, mom (in law lmao) Mitsuki is mothering, spoilers for season 8.
Despite it being hard to accept at the state you find yourself in, or even realise it at first, Mitsuki is the one by your bedside when you wake up.
For a second you’re convinced you’re dreaming. The room is too bright, the sheets too stiff, and Katsuki’s mom is sitting there like she fought her way past three nurses and a steel door just to sit and stare at you. Which, knowing her, she probably did.
Her arms are crossed, but her foot is tapping like she’s been waiting a long time. Like she’s been worried. And that solemn look on her face is screaming an apology you don’t recognise yet.
“’Bout time,” she mutters, voice sharp but thin around the edges. “You scared the hell out of us, kid.”
Your throat tightens as you glance, puzzled, around the room. It’s empty, aside from Mitsuki's chair, your bed, and the iv attached to the tender inside of your elbow. No friends, no parents, not a begrunting boyfriend… just Mitsuki and a hospital room you don’t recognise.
In a swift movement, she clasps your hand inside her palms. “I’m sorry sweetheart. Your parents couldn’t make it to Japan yet.” she says and you blink at her.
The lump in your throat starts bubbling in pain. Your lip quivers next, eyes watering at the fraction of a second. The moment you try to move, the dull ache in your ribs reminds you why you’re here in the first place.
“I’m so sorry,”
You try to speak, but find your lips feel like they’re glued together. It hurts when you pry them and it hurts even worse when you try to speak.
“Ka–”
Panic ensues at the sound of your voice. How long have you been here? You don’t even recognise your own voice. Where you could hear softness, you now hear raspiness, broken sounds that can’t form a word.
But still, you want to ask—The last thing you remember is watching Katsuki fall to the ground with his chest torn, you lurching towards Shigaraki with all you had and white hot pain everywhere in your body.
“Kats–Kaah–”
Mitsuki’s eyes flick to your abdomen, the monitors attached to you, then back to you again. Softer, barely “Katsuki? He usually doesn’t leave until he passes out sitting up. Brat’s got stubbornness.”
“Miss—Mitsuk—Mitsuki, my m—mom,”
The sound rips out of you like gravel dragged across concrete, and Mitsuki is already moving— one hand on your shoulder, the other hovering like she wants to fix something she can’t reach.
“Hey, hey— don’t force it,” she says, voice dropping into that hushed, frantic register only mothers have when something hurts their kid. Or a kid who might as well be theirs.
She reaches for the small cup of ice chips on the tray next to your bed, scooping a few with the spoon and pressing it gently to your lips. “Just this, sweetheart. Slow.”
The cold hits your tongue, sharp and clean, and for a moment it’s the only thing keeping you together. Everything else feels like it’s drifting —your memories, your breath, the distant echo of Nejire screaming your name before everything went dark.
Mitsuki watches you swallow, her jaw tight, eyes shining with things she will never say out loud.
“You’ve been out for a few months,” she adds quietly. “Masaru is trying to get ahold of your folks, along with the doctors but… you know how time zones are. And… circumstances.” Her mouth twists like she hates how uptight she’s being. Like practiced softness physically pains her. “We didn’t want you waking up alone.”
Your chest pulls tight. It shouldn’t mean as much as it does. But it does.
Your fingers clutch weakly at the blanket. “K–” The name falls apart in your throat again.
Mitsuki seems to understand anyway.
“He’s alive,” she says firmly. “He’s at school and he’s healing, but he’s alive. Stubborn little shit tried to pretend he wasn’t feeling okay just so they wouldn’t kick him out of your room last night. He’s been visiting everyday.”
Your breath shudders. Relief hits so hard you feel dizzy.
“And— just so you don’t freak out later—” Mitsuki adds, rubbing your hand with her thumb in a rare, almost guilty motion, “he might start crying a lot.”
That makes you freeze.
Mitsuki sighs, leaning back in the chair like the confession took something out of her. She stops herself from telling you the doctors had announced to everyone that you would probably not make it, not too long ago.
“Don’t tell him I said that. He’ll yell at both of us.”
She glances toward the door, then back at you. “He’s gonna be pissed you woke up without him here. Believe me. But, we’ll tell him after classes are over. You okay with that sweetheart?”
You nod, or at least you think you do. Your head barely moves, just a slow dip that makes the world tilt a little. You’re not sure if you’re agreeing or just reacting to the tenderness in her voice — something you’ve never quite heard directed at you like this, so softly, before.
“Good,” Mitsuki murmurs, like she was bracing for you to argue. Her hand squeezes yours gently, thumb brushing over the back in a slow, steady rhythm that feels like it’s meant to keep you anchored.
You swallow again, rough and painful. The word “classes” sticks in your mind like a burr. Katsuki is… at school. The school is alright if that’s the case, and maybe, your friends are too, your teachers, All Might. There’s so much you want to ask, but such little strength inside you.
Mitsuki watches your face carefully. “He wanted to skip,” she says, rolling her eyes as if the memory frustrates her. “Said he didn’t care about his damn education if you were—” She cuts herself off. Too sharp. Too honest.
Another small, guilty sigh. “Anyway. We made him go. The teachers insisted. Kid was a wreck. No sleep, no food… I swear he almost blew up a vending machine because someone told him to ‘keep his chin up.’”
Despite the pain, a weak ghost of a laugh bubbles in your chest — a tiny sound, but it pulls at your ribs like something tearing.
Mitsuki immediately notices. “Easy. Easy, sweetheart,” she whispers, leaning in, steadying you with a hand on your shoulder. “You don’t have to talk yet. You don’t have to do anything yet.”
But you want to. You want to ask what happened, how bad it was, whether Katsuki’s really okay or just putting on a front because that’s what he does when the world is falling apart around him.
You try again, voice scraping out of you like rough smoke: “H–how…?”
She shakes her head fast, stopping you before the sentence can hurt you more. “Later. When Katsuki’s here.” Her voice softens, unbearably so. “He deserves to hear you first.”
Your breath stutters, the weight of that landing somewhere deep and tender.
Mitsuki reaches up and brushes a loose strand of hair from your forehead. The gesture is so gentle it barely feels real.
“We’ll tell him after school,” she repeats softly. “He’ll come running the second he hears. And he’s gonna be loud, and dramatic, and probably hug you too hard. But he needs this. He needs you.”
Her voice cracks just a little on that last word. Barely noticeable, unless you’re looking for it. And you are.
“Rest now,” she adds, settling back into her chair but not letting go of your hand.
______
Later that evening, the hallway outside your room is louder than it should be for a hospital — muffled bickering, restless footsteps, a sharp whisper that’s definitely Kaminari complaining he’s been standing too long. With your eyes barely opening from your earlier slumber, you can hear Kirishima gently shushing him. Someone — Mina, probably — keeps insisting they should “just peek in real quick because what if she’s awake?”
You also catch the hissed argument that’s delivered as a response “Dude, stop— she might be asleep again!” and “I’m not stopping, you stop!”
Their silhouettes shuffle under the doorframe’s faint light, shadows overlapping like they can’t decide whether to crowd closer or bolt down the hall.
You blink slow, the world tilting for a moment, and the ceiling swims into focus. Your throat is dry. Your body feels like it’s made of bandages and cement. But your brain? Your brain catches up just enough to realize:
They’re here. All of them. A soft exhale escapes you— barely a sound, but apparently loud enough for the enhanced senses of teens with superpowers.
Mitsuki nods her head towards the door and chuckles. “They can’t wait to see you,” The commotion outside stops all at once, like someone hit pause. Then—
“Did you hear that?!”
“Kaminari, shut up—”
“Wait, wait— I think she’s awake—”
“Katsuki’s gonna kill us if we go in—”
“Oh my god. Just. Check!”
Kirishima’s voice breaks through the chaos; firm, gentle, leader-of-the-chaos-crew mode “Guys. Calm down. We’ll knock first.”
There’s a beat of silence and then three different knuckles rap on the door at the exact same time. Your chest shakes with a tiny, pained laugh that’s followed by a thunderous cough. The whispering begins again immediately.
“Bro— I said one person should knock!”
“That wasn’t me!”
“You literally have the loudest knuckles, Sero!”
“How do you even know that—”
Someone sighs. Hard. You recognise the sound as Izuku, doing that tight little anxious inhale before he tries to be responsible.
“Should I… um… should I ask Recovery Girl if we’re allowed—?”
“No, if Kacchan shows up and we’re gone, he’ll blast us into space—”
“Oh he’s definitely gonna show up—”
You try shifting, just enough to look toward the door. A small movement, but enough to tug at something deep in your gut. You wince, which apparently sends the hallway into frenzy.
And before they manage to organize themselves, one brave soul reaches for the door handle.
Mina’s whisper—undoubtedly its hers—cuts through the noise “Okay, on three—”
You have exactly one second to process that, and tighten your hold around Mitsuki’s hand as hard as you can, before a hand curls around the knob and another, much sharper voice snaps from down the hall.
“Touch that door and I swear to god you’re dead.”
Every single voice outside vanishes. You don’t even need to see him to know who said it. Katsuki.
Last time you laid eyes on him he was in a puddle of his own blood, chest torn, right arm destroyed. The thought alone is making your jaw tremble.
Your stomach flips; your eyes do that stupid thing where they well up so much that they sting and your heart kicks into a frantic rhythm, strong enough that the monitor beside you responds with a panicked series of beeps.
For a fragment, you come to believe this is a dream. An afterlife experience. Some sick and twisted purgatory. Some strange, cruel limbo replaying the moments before everything went black.
Mitsuki reacts before you do. She leans in, her free hand hovering near your shoulder as if she can physically hold you together while the monitor continues its frantic beeping. “Easy,” she murmurs, voice low. “Breathe, sweetheart. You’re fine.”
Her thumb presses gently into the back of your hand, grounding you.
The footsteps outside slow, the scrape of rubber soles against the linoleum deliberate now, controlled in that way Katsuki walks when he’s trying to stop himself from running. There’s a muffled scuffle—someone tripping over someone else during their attempt to scramble out of his path.
The doorknob turns. Not violently, but slowly. Carefully. Like he’s afraid the world behind it might shatter if he enters too fast.
The door opens halfway, and Katsuki steps inside.
He’s out of breath, but it's the kind where he’s trying very hard not to show. His hair, shorter than you remember, is a mess from whatever fight he had with the wind on the way here. His uniform shirt is wrinkled, sleeves pushed up his forearms in uneven rolls, and his tie is gone entirely.
But none of that is what gets you. It’s the way he stops actually. Abruptly.
And not because Mitsuki is in his way or because your friends are whisper-squabbling just outside the door. He stops because he sees you.
Awake.
His eyes widen first, a stunned flicker of disbelief that washes over his face before he can hide it. Then everything in him seems to go slack for a moment — shoulders dropping, jaw unclenching, the tension dissolving so suddenly it looks like his legs might give out.
“No fucking way,” he breathes, so quietly it barely reaches the room. His gaze flits across your face, ignoring his mother’s plea for decent language.
Whatever strength he had walked in with drains from his posture all at once. His breath catches on a sound too close to a sob, and he stumbles two steps forward before genuinely stopping himself, like he’s afraid he might do the wrong thing and make you hurt again.
The monitor chooses that exact moment to spike again, a sharp, accusing beep-beep-beep echoing through the walls.
Katsuki flinches, just barely. His eyes flash to the machine, then to your hand clutching Mitsuki’s, then back up to you. Something like guilt — real, aching guilt — tightens his expression. His head jerks toward yours and in the same instant he looks completely gutted—like the beeping is some damning confirmation that you’re in pain because of him, that all those months of him replaying the footage of you almost getting torn apart in half, ignoring every warning from people who told him not to, all led to this moment right here: you trembling, terrified, trying to hold yourself together.
He tries to say your name, but it dissolves into a choked gasp. Tears are already spilling, hot and unguarded, not even wiped away. Katsuki Bakugo—who never cries—can’t stop crying.
Instinct drags you forward. You try to sit up, to reach for him, anything to close the distance, but the muscles in your abdomen seize. A bolt of pain rips through you so sharply your vision whites out, and you collapse back into the bed with a strangled breath.
“Stay still!” Mitsuki catches your shoulder before you can tear something, her voice shaking now too. “Sweetheart, you can’t move—”
Your hand slips from hers anyway, desperate to get to him.
“Hey—” His voice cuts off, a sob and cracks, embarrassing him. He swallows hard, trying again. “Hey. Take it easy, you dummy.”
He says it softly. Too softly for it to be an insult.
Katsuki kneels swiftly beside the bed, and his scarred hand hovers over yours.
When he finally touches your hand, it’s feather-light, trembling with the same fear and relief burning in his eyes. He doesn’t grip, doesn’t hold too tight, doesn’t let go either. He rests his palm over yours, as if he’s anchoring himself to you while afraid that even the slightest pressure might hurt you.
You notice he’s holding a flower inside his other hand. Your eyes widen at the sight and he looks down at his hand too, muttering “It’s for you. A ‘get well soon’”
“Katsu–tsuk–ki” you breathe out, shakingly.
Your fingers twitch, wanting to wrap around his hand, to pull him closer, to fix the broken edges of him the way he’s holding onto you. You try to shift, to ease closer, but your abdomen flares with pain and you freeze, groaning softly.
He freezes too, instantly still, and looks at you with wide, frantic eyes. “Hey… hey, hey, I—I’m sorry,” he whispers, voice cracking, almost pleading.
Then, slowly, he adjusts himself so he can lean against you without putting weight on your ribs. His hand over yours flexes, releases, flexes again, as if he can’t decide whether to grip or just stay connected to you.
His tears fall freely now, soaking your fingers, and the sound of him crying forces tears to come out of your eyes too.
All you can do is squeeze his hand back, as much as your pain will allow, and whisper his name again.
He takes it, eve though his own hand aches like it’s being pierced, because the touch is not just an ember that you’re alive. It’s the undeniable fact that you’re awake.
And Katsuki is just so, so happy that this one good thing happens to him, he doesn’t even mind that the rest of the class storms inside minutes later and everyone sees him crying.
Katsuki Bakugo Masterlist
~All rights reserved: @/strawberry-nugget, 2025. Please do not copy, over write or steal my work //
Likes and reblogs are so appreciated but if you you liked this you can let me know in the comments <3
my husband suddenly became love"sick"?! ft. phainon
basically regressor au bc he lowkey fumbled in the past lifetime (and you died) so he pulled the uno reverse card and highkey turned back the time (pt3)
a continuation to part 1 (hc) of yan demon which can be found here: part 1
yandere demon! who easily finds you again today, hiding in your favourite church in the mortal realm. "Miss me?”
yandere demon! who grins at how you flinch in surprise at the sound of his voice, how your wings instinctively curl around your body a little more as if protecting yourself from him. As if that would be enough.
"Did you really think hiding in this pathetic little church would keep me away from you?" He laughs as he slowly stepped closer to you. "You're just adorable!" One step. "So naive." Another step. A gloved hand reaches towards you slowly. Instinctively, you squeeze your eyes shut. You feel his finger poke your cheek.
"Scared, angel?"
yandere demon! who barely stiffles his laughter as you flush in embarrassment and avoid his gaze. Satisfied with your reaction, he retracts his hand and moves to lean against the altar.
"What have you been up to all day? Other than play hide and seek with me of course.” He takes in the surroundings, before his gaze lands back to you. “Anyone bothering you recently?" He asks routinely, making sure no one, neither angel or devil, was getting too close to you. Bothering you. Making you waste your precious time on them instead of spending it with him.
"No, I— wait, play?" Your voice raises an octave higher as you poorly conceal your shock. "You think this is a game?"
"Isn't it? Aren't you, what do they call it?…Playing hard to get?"
yandere demon! who simply can't understand the anger and annoyance that flashes through your eyes. Not that it bothers him, seeing how adorable and sexy you look when you're all worked up like this. As you sputter and fumble to find the right words to express yourself, he watches you with amusement, cocking his head to the side with a smirk.
yandere demon! who listens to your whole rant about how "none of this was ever a game" and there was "never any playing hard to get". Not that he buys that flimsy explanation, of course. To him, you're not avoiding because you hate him or find him annoying— you're just shy and more traditional with the whole "I'm an angel and you're a demon and we shouldn't be near each other" thing.
"If you're not playing hard to get, then we should just get together already. Cut to the chase, and all." He makes a kissy face, which only enrages you more.
yandere demon! who gives you an exaggerated look of hurt as you swat his hand away.
"I'm going back to Heaven! You'll never be able to reach me there." You declare, turning around to leave.
yandere demon! who subconsciously causes the surrounding temperature to drop upon hearing your hasty decision. You stop in your tracks, not daring to turn your head to look. A chill runs down your spine as you wrap your arms and wings tighter around yourself. You can see your own hurried breaths leave your lips. His footsteps echo through the empty church hall as he slowly stalks towards you.
yandere demon! who bends down and leans in, his lips brushing the shell of your ear. "My cute little angel," he drawls in a low whisper, dragging out the words as if savouring it on his tongue.
"Do you really think…" His hands trail up your arm, up your shoulders and across your collarbone, before resting around your neck, eliciting a small gasp from you. The heat from his palm radiates through his glove. You're certain he can feel how your pulse quickens. His hand merely rests there— a warning. A reminder. "… hiding in Heaven would stop me from catching you?"
yandere demon! who's stronger than he lets on. More powerful than what he lets you believe. Breaking through the Heavenly gates…You don't want to find out if he actually means what he says.
a/n: yan demon was one of the first few characters i wrote about when i started writing so hope i did him justice in this short scene. i have a rough idea of what to write for the backstory of how they first met so i’ll get started on that soon! stay tuned and thanks for reading!! (also this is my first time linking a post in a post so if it doesn’t work pls lmk and i’ll fix it)
Imagine having a big fat crush on a person but learning that the exact same person has an obsession with you.
He's my man
And I love him like nobody else can
He's my man
He's gone quite mad
Yandere HSR mean x reader ( Phainon, Jingyuan, Sunday ) different AU
PHAINON
Phainon was the dream son in law for every family, he is very popular and known by everyone–you bet that there's one person among your circle that knows phainon. You have been having a crush on him, but it was something small–it's not something big plus you move on by then plus he has a girlfriend.
One day out of the blue, you receive a message or a friend request from phainon Instagram. Your best friend's boyfriend, outed your previous crush on him during a hangout and now he's messaging you. He is checking in on you as well as wondering whether or not you still like him, you thought that he was asking for reassurance because he already has a girlfriend and he doesn't want to make it awkward between you and her.
You reassure him that you no longer have any feelings for him thinking it was the end of it–he took a long time to respond to your messages and he responded with an okay and then went offline. For one week, you've been hearing gossip of phainon and his girlfriend getting into arguments because he has a gallery of photos of a girl–thats what cyrene and castorice has been telling you.
The next day, your best friends break the news that phainon and his girlfriend officially ended their relationship. Honestly, you feel sad because his girlfriend is genuinely a nice presence but you guess people fall out of love–thats what you thought on what happened towards phainon and his girlfriend.
What you don't know is that phainon for the longest time has fallen in love with you, he's aware of the crush you had on him–in fact he enjoys the chase from you, from the gaze that you think he wasn't paying attention it simply fuels the flames in his heart. He and his girlfriend were nothing but a stunt to make you more jealous, and the relationship was fake for him. It immediately becomes a big problem when you said that you don't like him anymore, he instantly panicked. By now, he's now focused on rekindling the old spark–since you are too shy to make the first move he would.
JINGYUAN
You have admired the head chairman for a long time and from a distance, it's already known that the chairman is often too busy for a relationship–which is such a shame due to his good looks that would not be passed down, that's what the elders in your family say–after when you tell them about your small crush on your boss.
You were an assistant towards him and would manage his schedules so that he would not be overwhelmed and be burned out by the constant work he already has to do, he already has enough up his plate and he doesn't need more. There was so much for a person to handle, and he already suffered enough.
Jingyuan would often find your presence comforting and grounding, that's what he often says about you–referring to you as his sanctuary. Quite nice to be dotted on at first, but now it becomes uncomfortable for you–back then when you first work for him, he's always distant and closed off even dismissing you.
During a company party, you accidentally got too drunk and confessed your crush towards jingyuan in front of him and coworkers. It was a disaster night for you and the worst day of the year, you were ashamed of showing your face again but the paycheck was too big so you kept a low profile to avoid any attention.
Recently you've been trying to do a transfer but when you send your papers it's always denied, it's very frustrating because all you wanted to do is just to leave and start a new but unfortunately the chairman has this idea of wanting to "embarrass" you by keeping you there as a reminder of your previous embarrassment. When you finally, confronted him–he already expected it. You asked if this was an attempt to embarrass you and humiliated your confession, all he said was "when did I ever reject you" now you are all his now.
SUNDAY
You were a childhood for Sunday and robin, both coming from a royal family. Despite being from a lower status–your family and king gopher have a close relationship, that's probably the reason why you are able to meet Sunday and robin not to mention growing up together. You used to have a crush on the prince, but that dream was always a fantasy because it's expected for him to marry a high Noble.
Unfortunately a revolution has emerged and separated you from them for a long time, both Sunday and robin went missing when people flood the castle to execute the royal family with their relationship with the order which is seen as blasphemy against the Harmony that your nation serves.
During the years without them, you manage to grow in status by becoming the current king advisor. You never really expected that Sunday would return back, to take back his throne. It was a cold war and penancony was then split up again, another side wishes the return towards the oak prince while the other wishes to maintain the watchmen's wishes.
By the end Sunday manage to reclaim his throne again, you originally thought he might hate you but he seems neutral with you. Holding no grudge with you, in fact express happiness towards finally meeting you. He tells you his stories about travelling the world and his path of atonement as well as self reflection.
When you offer him a list of future spouses he seems to have taken it back, he always thought that you would be the one to be by his side–that caught you by surprises and move back, as you take a few steps back–sunday stand up from his chair and approach pinning you up against the wall. He is quite sad how lowly you viewed yourself, when you explain that you are not trained as a spouse–he told you that he doesn't mind at all because the title of spouse or advisor doesn't matter all that matters is you by his side.
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pixelskylines
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