{Din and reader are invited to Casino in Canto Bight, but reader is slipped something and truths come to light}
Stow Away ♦ On-Going ♦ Fluff/Smut/Angst
{Jomira sneaks aboard the Razor Crest and finds herself in a situation she never imagined}
— Chapter 1: Stow Away —
— Chapter 2: The First Night —
— Chapter 3: Hiding in Plain Sight —
— Chapter 4: The Bounty —
— Chapter 5: Guilty Conscience —
— Chapter 6: Collision —
— Chapter 7: Sleep Talking —
— Chapter 8: Trust —
— Chapter 9: Blue Flame —
— Chapter 10: The Return —
— Chapter 11: Finally Free —
— Chapter 12: Festival of Lights —
— Chapter 13: Villas of Theed —
— On-going —
The Bad Batch - Clone Force 99
Love Languages ♥️ Head Canon ♥️ Fluff
{Each batcher's love language, includes Omega and Crosshair.}
The Bad Batch - Crosshair
Forgiveness💧Request 💧 Angst
{Crosshair wakes up, distraught and in a cell on Tantiss. An unexpected ally helps him work through his emotions}
Questions & Answers ♥️ One Shot ♥️ Fluff/Angst
{You've met many clones, working as a medic on Kamino. But you've been harboring feelings for one clone in particular, but you never imagined he would return your feelings.}
Breathless ♥️ One Shot ♥️ Fluff/Angst
{After a treacherous mission you resolve to finally confess your feelings to Crosshair, only to find that he had a similar notion.}
The Bad Batch – Hunter
Vulnerable ♥️ Request ♥️ Fluff/Angst
{After being on the run from the Empire for so long now, the concept of relaxation is foreign to you. When you and the Batch reach Pabu, the excess of adrenaline in your body becomes a problem.}
Trapped 💧 Request 💧Fluff/Angst
{A mission goes horribly wrong, trapping you in a tunnel and forcing Hunter to leave you behind.}
The Bad Batch – Tech
Jealousy ♥️ One Shot ♥️ Fluff/Angst
{Recent events between Phee and Tech leave you feeling... Well, to put it bluntly leave you feeling jealous}
The Bad Batch – Wrecker
Touches ♥️ Request ♥️ Fluff
{After an encounter with Wrecker at the bath house in upper Pabu, you're realizing that the feelings you have for him may not be purely platonic, and he feels it too.}
Clone Wars
Late Nights at 79s ♦ Series ♦ Smut
{You are a new Jedi Knight living in the heart of Coruscant and discovering the joys of the night life and the pleasures of the men who work so closely with the Jedi.}
— Chapter 1: Taboo — Echo x Reader
— Chapter 2: The Edge — Fives x Reader
— Chapter 3: Tattoos — Fives x Reader (fluff)
— Chapter 4: A Late Night — Jesse/Kix/Echo/Fives x Reader (yes all of them)
— Stranger Things —
Eddie Munson
What's the Password ♦ One Shot ♦ Fluff
{reader surprises their boyfriend, Eddie, with a pillow fort}
Robin realizes her true emotions when it comes to a goofball cyborg.
Rated: Mature - 2.5k - Nico Robin x Franky
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Tags:
One Piece, Wano, Frobin, Nico Robin x Franky, Alternate Universe, AU, Fluff, Falling In Love, Secret Relationship, Mutual Pining, Eventual Smut, Implied Relationships, Jealousy, Jealous!Roronoa Zoro, Jealous!Franky, Unrequited Love, Misunderstandings, Inner Dialogue, Funny, Trauma, One Piece Universe, Nico Robin Needs a Hug, UsoNa, Usopp x Nami
After a struggle that seemed as if it would last a lifetime, the battle for Wano was won… Luffy and his crew, along with the samurai alliance, prevailed in their fight against Kaido and Orochi's army. With Wano free, Momonosuke rose to power and restored the Kozuki clan's honor, along with his country's hopes and dreams. Tonight, it seemed like the festivities would continue until everyone had their fill, free to do as they pleased.
What had been planned as a single-day fire festival soon expanded into a multi-day celebration, a joyous commemoration of Wano’s liberation from the tyrannical grip of suffering. The people of the island rejoiced in the streets, their laughter echoing through the air, lanterns glowing against the night sky like stars brought down to earth. The scent of grilled food, sweet sake, and burning incense permeated the air as Momonosuke, alongside the Straw Hat crew and his retainers, indulged in the freedom they had fought so hard to secure. It was a festival for the ages, meant to honor the fallen and the living, where the “heroes” of Wano could join in once their battered bodies allowed them to.
But while the island celebrated, reveling in their newfound freedom, there was one person who couldn’t quite join in, one whose chest still clenched tightly with lingering pain, her mind weighed down by memories that had not yet loosened their grip. Nico Robin had done her best to maintain her composure throughout the day, smiling when needed, offering polite conversations when approached. Yet, beneath the surface, the emotions she had bottled up were threatening to overflow.
As the merriment reached an all time high in the main dining area, Robin felt herself growing more and more detached from the festive atmosphere around her. The lively chatter and the constant movement became too much. Her mind was a whirlwind of thoughts, each one more oppressive than the last, and her chest tightened with an invisible weight she could no longer ignore.
She needed to get away.
In a moment of quiet resolve, she slipped from her seat, unnoticed by the others who were too engrossed in the party to see her go. Robin moved gracefully through the main dining hall area, her expression calm despite the inner turmoil she was trying so desperately to conceal. The clinking of cups, the hearty laughter, and the occasional bursts of music became distant as she retreated further and further from the crowd. The vibrant glow of lanterns faded as she made her way through the dim corridors of the hall, seeking refuge in the quieter corners of the building.
Finally, she found a small room tucked away from the celebrations. The door creaked softly as she pushed it open, stepping into the cool, shadowed space. It was dimly lit by a single paper lantern, its soft glow casting flickering shadows across the room’s sparse furnishings: a low table, a few cushions, and a screen door that led out to a quiet garden. The room had an air of serenity about it, a peaceful solitude that sharply contrasted the lively atmosphere just outside. But for Robin, it was a haven, a place where she could finally breathe.
She closed the door behind her, the muffled sounds of the festival in the distance. The silence of the room wrapped around her like a comforting blanket, but it also brought with it the thoughts she had been trying to escape. Her heart, which had been pounding all day with the weight of unprocessed fear and grief, now thudded heavily in her chest.
Robin moved slowly toward the center of the room, her knees feeling weak as she knelt on the floor. She placed a hand over her chest, as if trying to physically calm the storm of emotions swirling inside her. The flickering lantern light reflected in her dark eyes as she stared at the floor, her thoughts once again drifting to Kaido’s burning castle, the suffocating heat of the flames, and the chilling moment when CP-0 had appeared from the smoke.
She was defenseless after her battle with Black Maria, her stamina drained to the very edge. And then they had come for her, the agents, faceless and merciless, determined to capture her. It had all happened so fast, her limbs heavy with exhaustion, her mind screaming at her to run, to fight, but her body had been paralyzed by fatigue. She would have been taken, dragged away into the clutches of the World Government, had it not been for Brook. He had protected her, his calm presence a lifeline amidst the chaos, guiding her to safety even as the castle crumbled around them.
But even now, safe from danger, the old wounds resurfaced. The terror of being hunted, the memories of CP-9, the despair she had felt during the Water 7/ Enies Lobby incident, and the haunting fear of losing everything and everyone all over again. Those scars were fresh, bleeding beneath the surface of her calm exterior. Her body trembled slightly as she knelt there, the room’s quiet stillness contrasting the storm brewing inside her.
Her breath came in shallow, uneven gasps, and she wrapped her arms tightly around herself, as if she could hold herself together through sheer willpower. She bent forward, her forehead nearly touching the floor as her sobs, so carefully suppressed, finally broke free. Her mind was a blur of memories, each one sharper than the last: her mother’s final words, Saul’s laughter before he was silenced forever, the cold, hollow feeling of losing everything.
But then, through the darkness of her thoughts, a voice echoed in her mind. A voice she had not expected to hear at such a moment.
"No matter how dangerous you may be, just being alive, being who you are, is never wrong!"
She clung to those words like a lifeline.
Franky's voice suddenly cutting through the haze of her distress. It was strange—his voice wasn’t actually in the room with her, yet it had settled at the very center of her thoughts, clear and reassuring.
Franky…
The mere thought of him brought a wave of warmth that dulled the sharp edges of her panic. Slowly, her mind shifted away from the pain and toward him. His vibrant blue hair—so unique, so utterly Franky—flashed in her memory, and she found herself smiling, despite everything. Then came the image of his physique, a striking mix of power and sleek engineering, and with it, the bold, larger-than-life personality that made him stand out in a world full of extraordinary people.
As she thought about him, the tightness in her chest began to ease. Her heart, which had been racing with anxiety moments ago, now pounded with something else entirely: excitement. It amazed her how just thinking about him could chase away the shadows, and could lift the crushing weight off her chest. Franky had always been different, a person who managed to make her feel grounded, even amidst the chaos.
While the entire crew had fought to save her, there was something about Franky that had carved out a special place in her heart. She remembered how he’d put himself on the line for her, taking bullets without a second thought, shielding her with his body as though it was the most natural thing in the world. His concern for her had been so genuine, so selfless, and though they hadn’t known each other long, she felt a connection to him that went deeper than she could explain. There was also his morality that stood out to her, back in Dressrosa he swore to fight alongside the Tontattas in their revolution against the Donquixote family no matter what.
From that moment on, Franky stood out in ways she hadn’t fully acknowledged until now. She recalled the first time they brought him aboard the crew. She’d strong-armed him—literally—when the opportunity arose, grabbing him by the balls to force him to join. At the time, she hadn’t known why she felt so compelled to keep him close, but now it seemed obvious. Something inside her had known even then that she didn’t want him far from her.
As these thoughts caressed her, Robin could almost feel his presence beside her. She replayed the way his eyes had met hers in the past, the steady reassurance in his gaze before he snapped into his larger-than-life self. Her heart fluttered again, and she realized her hands were trembling slightly. What was this feeling? She couldn’t quite place it, but whatever it was, she didn’t want it to end.
Franky was rough around the edges, yes, but there was a warmth beneath the bravado that Robin had always sensed. His laughter was full-bodied, like he put his entire soul into it. He had a passion for everything he did, a reckless joy for life that she found intoxicating. Deep down, she had always cared for him, though she had never allowed herself to explore those feelings beyond the bounds of friendship. He was her crewmate, her friend. And yet, the way she felt about him was beginning to feel like so much more.
But that terrified her.
Robin had lost too much already: her mother, Saul, the island of Ohara. The fear of attachment had kept her guarded, she was a one point distant even from her crewmates. She had worn an air of aloofness, presenting herself as the mysterious scholar, the composed archaeologist. Inside however, she was anything but. The thought of getting too close to someone, of letting herself care—it filled her with a crippling anxiety. What if she lost him? What if Franky became another person she loved only to see ripped away?
She had told herself for so long that it was better to keep her distance, to protect her heart from that kind of pain. But here she was, sitting in the dimly lit room, feeling her heart race not from fear, but from the rush of emotions she could no longer deny. She trusted her crewmates with all her being, every single one of them, she had for a while now, and just as she went running to help Sanji in need, she was going to have to do the same for herself: and trust in her feelings.
Robin slowly sat up, her body no longer hunched over in despair. She adjusted her position, crossing her legs and resting her hands in her lap. Her breathing was still a little shaky, her heart still thudding heavily in her chest, but it was no longer the suffocating panic from before. Her spirit felt lighter than air now as she finally let go of the small portion of fear she had been holding on to.
Franky… What is it about you that makes me feel so strange?
Robin's thoughts swirled, trying to pin down exactly what it was about him that stirred this unfamiliar sensation inside her. Was it the way he carried himself, so confident? Or was it his genius, his knack for innovating everything around him? Or maybe it was that strange, boyish sense of wonder he seemed to carry, mixed with his occasional bursts of immaturity. She chuckled softly, her lips curling into a smirk as she fondly recalled the ridiculous moment when Franky had flown away using nothing but farts powered by cola. He could be so absurd—and yet, somehow, that only made him more endearing.
Memories began to flood her mind all at once, the small moments they had shared over time. The meals together, the way he’d playfully carry her like a queen without a second thought, the countless times he had shielded her from danger, guiding her to safety. A wave of warmth spread through her, washing away the last remnants of her earlier panic. In this quiet moment, she realized something that made her chest flutter—she wanted more. She wanted to be held by him again, to share more meals, more laughter, to be adored by him the way he always seemed to adore her.
"WOAH! Now who is that gorgeous lady!" His booming voice echoed in her head, filling her with a burst of joy. He had always seen her as beautiful, always accepted her for who she was. It wasn’t just the admiration in his words but the genuine warmth behind them. Franky wasn’t someone who said things lightly. When he called her beautiful, he meant it with his whole heart. And now, in this moment of clarity, Robin allowed herself to give in, to let her thoughts run wild with the possibilities.
For so long, she had carried the weight of her past, of loss and heartache. But now, as she let her mind linger on Franky, the pain of those old memories began to fade, replaced by a gentle, glowing hope.
She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, savoring the cool air as it filled her lungs. As she let it out, a sense of release washed over her. The tension she had been holding on to for so long finally began to melt away. And in that quiet moment, she came face-to-face with a truth she had been denying for far too long.
“I love him.”
The realization struck her like a tidal wave, overwhelming at first. She sat there for a moment, stunned, as the weight of it settled in. But as the words sank deeper, a smile crept across her face: wide, bright, and uncontainable. She tried to cover her mouth with her hand, but her joy bubbled up inside her, spilling out in soft giggles that soon grew louder.
"I... I’m in love with Franky," she whispered, her voice tinged with disbelief.
The sheer abruptness of the realization left her speechless for a moment. Her usually fair complexion flushed with a deep rose tint, spreading quickly across her cheeks. She had never, in her wildest dreams, imagined falling in love. Love wasn’t something she had ever thought possible for her—not with her history, not with the walls she had built around herself. It had always felt like something distant, something meant for other people. But now, the undeniable truth of her feelings was staring her in the face, impossible to ignore.
Can we truly be together? she wondered, the question lingering in her mind like a half-formed dream. Could someone like her, with so much darkness in her past, really be with someone as bright and open as Franky?
Slowly, Robin rose from the cold floor, her movements deliberate and measured. The room around her felt smaller now, as if the space itself was shrinking beneath the weight of her new realization. She couldn’t stay hidden away any longer, not with this truth hanging in the air.
With a newfound resolve, she stepped toward the door, her heart pounding in her chest. The next move was hers to make. If she was going to let Franky into her life, into her heart, she needed to know more, needed to see how he felt, if there was a real future for them.
Robin stepped out of the secluded room, leaving behind the shadows of her past. She would find him, talk to him, because if anyone could help her navigate this new, strange feeling, it was the man with the bright blue hair and the even brighter heart.
Notes:
Thank you for reading chapter 1!! I plan for this fic to be a good length, I’m refining chapter 2, so it will be up soon!
Rated: Teen - 4.1k - Rena Natsukawa x Original Character
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Tags: Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable, Rena Natsukawa x Original Character, Rena Natsukawa x OC, Rena x OC, Fuyuki Minami, Natsukawa Rena, Shiki Tsubasa, Original Character, Rena Natsukawa, Minami Fuyuki, Tsubasa Shiki, Akino Sayuri, Manga & Anime, Alternate Universe, College/University AU, Fluff, Friendship, College, Romance, Eventual Romance, Slow Romance, Enemies to Lovers, Fate, Drama, Light Angst, Tokyo, I didn't sleep to write this, Gossip, Love Confessions, Confessions, Crushes, Dating, Falling In Love, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Kendo, Plot, Slice of Life, Canon Spoilers, Tension, Family Drama, Plot Twists, Idiots in Love, post-epilogue
Finals came and went in a whirlwind, leaving Rena feeling triumphant, as if she had just slain a beast. Each test that had once stood in her way, now lay defeated. She had slayed them all: every problem, every essay, and every equation, claiming what felt like an inevitable victory over Akimitsu. In the week that followed, she allowed herself a rare indulgence: a well-earned break. With the semester officially behind her, Rena found herself in a state of restless anticipation, eagerly awaiting the moment when Akimitsu would reveal his scores. She had been chasing this moment for so long, desperate to see all her efforts pay off..
During those carefree post-finals days, Rena often took walks through her neighborhood, occasionally with Umi and Hikari at her side. Unlike before, they went relatively unnoticed during their outings, a stark contrast to the unwanted attention that had once been a constant nuisance. However, Rena had begun to notice a peculiarity. Whenever she arrived at a place, any men who appeared to be university students mysteriously vanished. For someone of her petite stature, who didn’t exactly exude an intimidating presence, this sudden avoidance was strange.
One afternoon, curiosity got the better of her, and she turned to Umi with a puzzled expression. "Hey, have you noticed how guys just seem to… vanish whenever we show up?"
Umi raised an eyebrow, clearly not having given it much thought. “Huh. Now that you mention it, yeah, that is weird. I hadn’t really paid attention until you pointed it out.” She shared Rena's confusion, glancing around as if trying to catch one of these disappearing men in the act.
“Bizarre, right?” Rena mused, shaking her head with a soft laugh. "Not that I’m complaining. It’s actually kind of nice not to be harassed every other time we’re out."
They both laughed, but Rena couldn’t shake the peculiarity of it all. Ever since that incident when she was rescued, when those miscreants had assaulted her, and someone had stepped in to help, things had been different. Odd, yet refreshingly different. She could go anywhere now without constantly being on edge, without glancing over her shoulder.
On one particularly bright and sunny afternoon, Hikari was busy with drama club, leaving Rena and Umi free to wander the bustling streets of the shopping district. Their walk led them to a cozy little bookstore tucked away in a side alley, one of Umi’s favorite hidden gems. Umi, an avid reader with a love for historical and romantic novels, had brought Rena here before, but today she was especially animated. As they browsed through the shelves, Rena couldn’t help but notice Umi’s eyes light up when she spotted a series she adored.
“Oh my gosh, you have to read this!” Umi exclaimed, clutching a book to her chest as if it were a precious treasure. The excitement in her voice was contagious.
Rena raised an eyebrow, intrigued by Umi’s enthusiasm. “What’s it about?”
“It’s about these two lovers from different social classes who meet in secret, despite the risks. It’s so tragic but so beautiful!” Umi’s eyes sparkled with excitement as she spoke, clearly lost in the story already.
Rena chuckled, watching this new side of her friend with amusement. “Wow, I didn’t know you were such a romantic,” a playful grin spread across her face.
Umi blushed, laughing a little at her own giddiness. “Well, I guess I can be,” she admitted, glancing down at the book with a shy smile. “But Hikari isn’t really into the lovey-dovey stuff, you know? She’s more into the… uh, steamy, adult themes.” Umi squirmed as she confessed this, clearly embarrassed.
Rena couldn’t help but laugh at the contrast. “Really? Hikari’s into that?”
Umi nodded, still a little red. “Yeah, but it’s fine. I mean, it’s not really my thing, but I’m glad she doesn’t judge me for being, you know… more of a hopeless romantic.”
Rena gave her a playful nudge. “Hey, no judgment here. Besides, someone’s gotta balance out all the steam with some pure, heartwarming love stories.”
Umi was relieved, laughing off her earlier embarrassment.. "Thanks, Rena. I’ll leave the steamy stuff to Hikari, and I’ll stick to my tragic romances."
They both laughed, Umi grabbed a couple of books and they found a table to sit and read the back cover teasers.
Umi leaned in just a touch closer to Rena examining her, her eyes gleamed with mischief. “So,” she began, voice dripping with curiosity, “what’s your take on romantic novels, hmm?” Her question seemed innocent enough, but the undertone gave ulterior motives. Umi wasn’t just idly wondering about Rena’s reading habits—she was fishing, trying to unearth something deeper, a suspicion that had been brewing in her mind for a while now.
Much like Akino and Minami before her, Umi had started to notice little signs, small shifts in Rena's demeanor whenever Akimitsu's name came up. It wasn’t anything over the top though, just small instances noticed in their time in class. Rena, after all, was nothing if not composed, but there was definitely something there; A flicker in her eyes, a hesitation in her speech. Umi, ever the detective, was determined to get to the bottom of it.
Rena played it cool, though the question had caught her off guard. She tapped her fingers lightly on the table, a thoughtful look crossing her face as she considered her response. Umi, however, was having none of her aloofness. She raised an eyebrow and went to work. “Oh, don’t think too hard about it, Rena. Just tell me, do you swoon over all those grand romantic gestures, or are you more of a realist?”
Rena narrowed her eyes playfully. “And what exactly are you insinuating, Umi?”
“Oh, nothing,” Umi said feigning innocence with a shrug.. “Just that… maybe, just maybe, someone we know has a secret soft spot for a certain someone. You know, someone tall, rugged, and easy on the eyes?”
Rena felt the heat rise to her cheeks before she could stop it, and Umi, ever observant, did not miss the faint blush.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rena shot back, trying to maintain her usual calm. But her attempt to deflect only made Umi more convinced she was on the right track.
“Sure,” Umi teased, an expression of complete amusement sprawled on her face. “But you know, they say that romantic novels tend to reveal more about what we want in real life than we think. Just a thought.”
Rena tried to hold her composure, but Umi’s probing had clearly struck a nerve. “Romantic novels, huh?” she echoed, leaning back slightly as she pretended to mull over the question further. But in reality, her mind stalled at her questions. Why was Umi digging around this subject? This wasn’t just about books anymore, and Rena could feel the unspoken topic hanging in the air between them.
Of course, Umi wasn’t going to let her off easy. She had a glint in her eye, she was onto something and wasn’t about to let it go. “Come on, Rena,” Umi pressed, “Are you telling me you’ve never been swept off your feet by some grand romantic gesture in one of those novels? Or at least imagined what it’d be like?”
Rena scoffed, her fingers now drumming a steady rhythm on the table as if that might distract her from the creeping chills she could feel rising up her neck. “Swooning over some fictional prince charming isn’t exactly my style,” she replied, trying to sound dismissive.
Umi wasn’t buying it. “Really? Not even once? I mean, what about someone who’s not fictional? Someone… real?”
Rena rolled her eyes, but she could feel Umi’s gaze on her, sharp and unrelenting. It was obvious now that Umi wasn’t just talking about some random love story, she was digging for something far more specific.
“I think you’re reading too much into this,” Rena said with a sigh, but her voice didn’t carry the conviction she had hoped for. There was a slight waver, and Umi’s smile only grew wider.
“Am I, though?” Umi tilted her head, her voice turning sing-song. “Because, you know… you’ve been acting a little funny lately. Especially when a certain someone’s name comes up.”
Rena stiffened, and Umi pounced. “Akimitsu,” she said, dropping the name with a dramatic flourish. “You can’t tell me you haven’t noticed how often his name gets brought up in conversation these days. And how you always get just a little, what’s the word, flustered?”
Rena felt her heart skip a beat, but she refused to let it show. “Umi!” she scoffed in an attempt to play it cool but failing miserably. “That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?”
But Umi wasn’t backing down. “I don’t know… is it?” she teased. “I mean, come on, Rena. You’ve been locked in these ‘fights’ with him forever, right? And now that finals are over, you’re just sitting here, waiting for him to reveal his scores like it’s some kind of life-or-death showdown. Don’t tell me there isn’t more to it than just who scored higher on the math test. You've been at each other's throats all semester.”
Rena’s fingers paused mid-drum as Umi’s words sank in. It was true, she had been obsessing over Akimitsu’s scores more than usual. But wasn’t that just part of the deal? Part of the competition she thrived on? She tried to convince herself that’s all it was, but Umi’s knowing smirk was making it harder to believe.
“His deal is a big part of it,” Rena said after a moment, her voice carefully measured. “I’ve been dying to find out why he only goes by his first name all semester. Of course, I want to know how he did even though I hate him”
Umi let out a dramatic sigh, leaning back in her chair. “Yeah, yeah, The Deal. But you know what they say, right?”
Rena blinked. “What?”
“There’s a fine line between hate and… something else.” Umi gave her a pointed look, one that said she wasn’t fooled by Rena’s cool exterior.
Rena crossed her arms, leaning back herself as if mimicking Umi’s posture might give her some control over the conversation. “I think you’re confusing this with something it’s not,” she replied, but the defensiveness in her tone was impossible to miss.
“Or maybe you’re not ready to admit that there’s more going on here. It’s fine, you know? You wouldn’t be the first person in history to develop feelings for the person they’ve been beefing with,” Umi added.
Rena opened her mouth to protest, but no words came out. She wasn’t sure why Umi’s words had gotten under her skin the way they had. It wasn’t like she hadn’t thought about Akimitsu before, he was boorish, carefree, and unmannered. All things she despised. Feelings of romance toward him? That was a complete stretch. Wasn’t it?
“I don’t have feelings for Akimitsu,” she bluntly stated, the words feeling strange on her tongue.
“Of course you don’t,” Umi replied smoothly, but the sarcasm cut through Rena’s statement. She leaned forward, her tone playful but pointed. “I’m just saying, if you did, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.”
Rena narrowed her eyes. “I don’t.”
“Uh-huh.” Umi stood up, her smile still firmly in place as she stretched and grabbed her bag. “Well, when you finally figure out what’s going on in that overachieving brain of yours, let me know. I’ll be waiting.”
Rena watched her go and purchase the books, her mind spinning in the wake of the conversation. She didn’t have feelings for Akimitsu… did she? It was just a competition for the sake of information. Just fighting and irritation. That’s all it had ever been. But as she sat there, her fingers tapping absentmindedly on the table once more, she couldn’t help but wonder if Umi had a point.
With a frustrated sigh, Rena grabbed her things, bought a book that caught her attention, and headed out of the bookstore. Umi’s words had disturbed a side of her that lay dormant inside.
Days later, Rena found herself lounging on her sofa, trying to lose herself in the historical novel she had picked up during her last outing with Umi. The summer heat was at its peak, but her thoughts were elsewhere, constantly drifting to Akimitsu. His scores still hadn’t come in, and the waiting was gnawing at her. She had done everything she could to distract herself from the anticipation, but it lingered like a shadow in the back of her mind. She needed to know that she had succeeded. To her, victory over him was inevitable, a confirmation of her hard work. Damn it Umi… She thought to herself as she was reminded of her friend's analysis from the other day. But speak of the devil and she shall appear:
The universe had heard her inner thoughts, her phone buzzed on the armrest beside her. It was a message from Umi:
Meet Hikari and I at the diner in half an hour. I have something for you. It’s from him.
Rena’s heart leapt into her throat the second she read the message. This was it—the moment. The triumph she had been waiting for. She shot up from the couch, her heart pounding. Her hands were trembling as she hurried to change into something more suitable, opting for a nicer top, fitted shorts, and her white sneakers. She hesitated for a moment before grabbing her fan, the one she never left home without these days. It was her comfort, her shield, the thing that always steadied her when the world felt too chaotic.
Once she was ready, she set off for the diner, the tension and excitement building with every step. She couldn’t wait to finally claim her victory over Akimitsu, to throw his smugness back in his face after enduring his ridiculous attitude for the latter half the semester. As she walked, her fingers subconsciously tightened around the fan, clutching it close to her chest.
When she arrived at the diner, she spotted Umi and Hikari sitting at their usual booth, the same spot they always gathered for late-night talks and spontaneous get-togethers. Rena crept up behind them, sliding into the booth without a sound, grinning mischievously as she caught them both by surprise.
Hikari jumped, nearly spilling her drink. “Jeez, Rena! Could you not be a ninja for once? Say something next time!”
Umi burst out laughing, wiping a tear from her eye as she tried to catch her breath. “I swear, Rena, you’re way too good at sneaking up on people! Poor Hikari didn’t stand a chance.”
Rena grinned, pleased with herself as they exchanged greetings, but she quickly cut to the chase. “Alright, enough messing around. Where is it?”
“I’m happy to see you too Rena,” Umi joked, “I'm kidding, I know exactly how much you've been wanting this. Luckily I saw him out in the wild and badgered him for it.”
Umi’s playful expression softened, and she reached into her bag, pulling out an unopened envelope. She slid it across the table towards her, a glimmer of curiosity in eyes. On the front, it read:
To Natsukawa
Rena’s fingers shook slightly as she tore open the envelope, and inside were two sheets of paper. The first was a letter labeled ‘READ THIS FIRST’, while the second, folded beneath it, could only be his results. Her instincts screamed at her to skip the letter and dive straight into the numbers, to see the proof of her victory, but something about the letter demanded her attention. Why would he write a personal note? What is he playing at? Her curiosity won out, and she unfolded the letter, eyes darting over the words.
To Natsukawa,
I do hope there aren’t any hard feelings. I know how much you wanted to win this little competition of ours. I respect your dedication, and I’m sure you gave it your best. As promised, my results are enclosed. But, as you’ll soon see, there was only ever one outcome.
This semester has been… entertaining, to say the least. Watching you get agitated at my presence was amusing. You tried so hard not to show it, but I could tell. You snuck more than a few glances my way during class—don’t think I didn’t notice.
Unfortunately, this is goodbye. At least for a while. I won’t be around to enjoy your attempts at scolding me or that adorable blush that matches your pink hair.
Until fate allows us to meet again,
-Akimitsu S.
Rena's heart hammered in her chest. The arrogance in his words was maddening, but that wasn’t what froze her in place. It was the way he’d written his name at the end…that final hint... Akimitsu S. The letter had given her something she hadn’t expected, a small clue about his family name. She was a step closer to figuring out who he really was.
But her mind barely had time to process it before she remembered—the results. She quickly unfolded the second page, her eyes scanning the numbers, and then… her breath hitched.
She had lost.
The numbers didn’t lie. Akimitsu had beaten her by a narrow margin, just enough to rob her of the victory she had been so certain of. She sat there, staring at the page, her heart sinking. The smugness in his letter made sense now—he had known. Of course, he had known all along that he had won. And now, he was rubbing it in her face, his final words taunting her: until fate allows us to meet again.
For a moment, Rena couldn’t speak. The shock of her defeat was too fresh, too sharp. She had worked tirelessly, pushing herself past her limits all semester. How did this happen?
Umi and Hikari exchanged concerned glances, noticing the change in Rena’s expression. Umi leaned forward, waving her hand in front of Rena’s face. “Rena? You okay? What does it say?”
Rena blinked, still numb from the shock. She swallowed, forcing her voice to work. “I… lost.”
The silence that followed was palpable. Both Umi and Hikari stared at her, disbelief flickering in their eyes. Hikari was the first to speak, her voice soft but incredulous. “You lost? To Akimitsu?”
Rena nodded, barely able to process it herself. “By a tiny margin… but yeah. He won.”
Umi leaned back in her seat, folding her arms with a sigh. “Well, damn. I thought for sure you had this one.”
Rena sat in stunned silence for a moment, she switched back to the letter and kept on rereading his final words. The way he signed it—Akimitsu S.—was maddeningly vague. His family name was within her grasp, but that single letter wasn’t enough. Not for her. She had to know more, to uncover the full truth behind this elusive, frustrating guy who had gotten under her skin.
“S? Just S? What kind of ridiculous hint is that?” she muttered, her fingers tightening around the letter.
Hikari, always quick to jump to conclusions, scoffed. “Honestly, are we even sure he didn’t cheat? I mean, it’s Akimitsu! He seems like the type who would do anything to win.”
That accusation made Rena’s blood boil. She snapped her gaze to Hikari, eyes flashing. “Cheat? No way. Akimitsu may be obnoxious, but he wouldn’t cheat. He’d want to win fair and square, just so he could rub it in my face.”
Hikari raised her hands defensively. “Okay, okay, just saying! You don’t have to get all fiery about it, jeez.. Anyway, whatever, don't worry about it, what are you going to do now? You’re obviously not going to drop it.”
She was right on the money, Rena gritted her teeth. She couldn’t just accept this loss, not without at least finding out who he really was. She stood up abruptly, startling both Umi and Hikari. “I need to find him.”
Umi frowned, a flicker of concern in her eyes. “Really? Right now? Sit down and I'll order you a milkshake or boba.”
“No,” Rena responded. “I’m not thirsty… I’m so lost right now, I’ve never felt this way before. I want to find him and I don’t know where to start.”
Umi examined her with the utmost concern and took Rena’s hand in her own.
Hikari bit her lip as if deep in thought before her face lit up with sudden realization. “Actually… wait a minute. I think I have a lead.”
Rena faced her, her heart skipping. “What lead?”
“Well, I know someone who dated him back in high school,” Hikari responded calmly. “My friend Mai’s older sister went out with Akimitsu for a little while. You know I always thought he was a jerk, but maybe she knows something useful.”
Rena’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”
Hikari nodded, already pulling out her phone. “I’ll text Mai and ask.”
The minutes dragged by slowly. Rena’s pulse thrummed with nervous energy as she waited. It wasn’t long before Hikari’s phone buzzed, and she glanced down at the screen, eyes widening.
“She says she knows where he goes often, a rec center nearby. He goes there for some kind of regular event.”
“Event?” Rena asked, leaning in, eager for details.
“Yeah. Mai says it’s something extra. Hold on, let me get more info.” Hikari typed furiously, and after another tense few seconds, she raised her head with a smirk. “It’s a kendo tournament. Apparently, Akimitsu is really into it. She even sent me a link to the event’s website.” Hikari scanned the website thoroughly, “Hey, there’s a tournament coming up soon, and you can buy tickets. And there’s a catch: formal traditional attire is required for spectators.”
“Kendo?” Rena blinked, the pieces of Akimitsu’s hidden life clicking into place. Kendo? Of all things, she hadn’t expected that. He didn’t strike her as the traditional, martial arts type. “There's so much I don't know about him,” she murmured, both surprised and intrigued. This was a side of him she hadn’t anticipated before, one that added more layers to his mysterious persona. And formal attire? That detail had stirred her personal interest. She had always loved traditional dress, the grace and poise it required. Now, she had even more reason to go.
Without missing a beat, Rena pulled out her phone and quickly looked up the event. The tournament was happening in just a few days. She scanned the page, taking in the details. This was her best shot at finding him, at getting some real answers.
She let out a determined huff and couldn’t risk waiting any longer. This was the perfect opportunity to confront Akimitsu, to finally get the truth about his family name and maybe, just maybe, to understand why he had been so enigmatic and difficult all semester.
Rena clenched her fists, her stubbornness and determination swelling within her. “I’m going,” she declared, the fire in her eyes burning brighter. “I have to go to this event. It’s the only way.”
Umi leaned forward, mingling with curiosity and concern. “Are you sure about this, Rena? What if he’s not even there?”
“He’ll be there,” Rena said firmly, her gaze locked on the website. “He wouldn’t miss this. I just know it.”
Hikari grinned, clearly enjoying Rena’s fiery determination. “Wow Rena, you have it bad. In that case, you’d better go all out then. You’ll need to get your hands on some formal attire. You can’t show up to a kendo tournament looking casual.”
Rena didn't pay any mind to her comment, her actions were beyond rationality. She was already mentally planning her outfit. “Don’t worry, I know exactly what I’m going to wear.”
Knowing her next step, Rena was finally able to relax and socialize with her friends in a normal fashion. Umi and Hikari offered their support and teased Rena about her newfound determination to track Akimitsu down.
Umi couldn’t help but give Rena an encouraging pat on the shoulder. “You’ve got this. Just… don’t kill him when you find him, alright?”
Rena laughed, the fire in her eyes had not dimmed. “No promises.”
With a final round of thanks to both of her friends, Rena stood up, determination radiating off her. She knew what she had to do next—prepare for the tournament, plan her outfit, and, most importantly, confront Akimitsu. She couldn’t let this opportunity slip away.
As she left the diner, her mind buzzed with plans. The clock was ticking, and the tournament was fast approaching. She only had a short time to prepare, but that only made her more determined.
This wasn’t over… not until she had her answers.
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Rated: Teen - 5.4k - Rena Natsukawa x Original Character
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Tags: Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable, Rena Natsukawa x Original Character, Rena Natsukawa x OC, Rena x OC, Fuyuki Minami, Natsukawa Rena, Shiki Tsubasa, Original Character, Rena Natsukawa, Minami Fuyuki, Tsubasa Shiki, Akino Sayuri, Manga & Anime, Alternate Universe, College/University AU, Fluff, Friendship, College, Romance, Eventual Romance, Slow Romance, Enemies to Lovers, Fate, Drama, Light Angst, Tokyo, I didn't sleep to write this, Gossip, Love Confessions, Confessions, Crushes, Dating, Falling In Love, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Kendo, Plot, Slice of Life, Canon Spoilers, Tension, Family Drama, Plot Twists, Idiots in Love, post-epilogue
The next morning, Rena woke up with a slight headache, her mind clouded and disoriented. It took her a few moments to piece together the fragments of the previous night, and then, all at once, it rushed back to her— the confrontation with those men, their jeering voices cutting through the night, and the mysterious figure who had come to her rescue. His soft, calm voice echoed in her memory, soothing but distant. She groaned as she pushed herself up, her muscles aching from the struggle. Though she hadn’t been seriously hurt, the tension of the encounter clung to her body.
As she replayed the events, her thoughts kept circling back to him— her rescuer. He had appeared out of nowhere, a fleeting presence in the chaos, and then disappeared just as quickly. Why had he helped her? Who was he? The questions gnawed at her as the remnants of fear lingered in the pit of her stomach.
Over the next few days, time seemed to slip by in a blur, yet Rena couldn’t shake the unease. Her steps were quicker now, and she made sure to be home before nightfall, the memory of the attack haunting her with every step. It wasn’t just fear anymore; a new wariness had settled into her, a heightened awareness of her surroundings that she hadn’t needed before.
Though the street had become a source of anxiety, the image of her rescuer stayed with her, like a strange light amidst the darkness. She caught herself thinking about him constantly— his silhouette, his voice— almost as if she were looking for him in every passing figure. But these thoughts were complicated. They brought a sense of security, yet they also highlighted her vulnerability, reminding her of how quickly things could spiral out of control. Whether she was walking to class or sitting in lectures, Rena's mind drifted, caught between the lingering trauma and the bizarre comfort she associated with the stranger who had saved her.
The trauma grew more pronounced as days went by. She started missing class, which for Rena, was unheard of. Nights were the worst; sleep didn't come easily. She found herself waking up from vague, disjointed dreams where she was running, always running, and those men were right behind her. Whenever her mind drifted back to the moment of her rescue, it stirred a mix of emotions. There was relief, even a strange sense of warmth, but it clashed with an unsettling reminder of her vulnerability. Thinking of him brought a confusing comfort— something good in the midst of fear— yet it also made her question why she couldn’t let go of the memory, as if clinging to him was both soothing and troubling at once.
More time passed and Rena began to feel like herself again, though it was a slow and uneven process. The nightmares became less frequent, and she no longer felt the constant weight of fear pressing down on her chest. With each passing day, she regained some of her old confidence, convincing herself that the incident was behind her. She started going out with Umi and Hikari again, though she still kept an eye on her surroundings, and her steps were always a little quicker when she was alone. The sense of unease still lingered, but it had dulled, like a distant echo rather than a sharp, immediate fear.
When she finally decided to go back to class regularly, Rena felt ready, as if she had turned a corner. Walking into the familiar space brought a sense of normalcy, and she found herself looking forward to catching up with Umi and her other classmates. That feeling came to an abrupt halt the moment she entered the classroom.
As she stepped inside, she noticed that everyone seemed unusually quiet, their attention focused on someone sitting towards the back of the room. Murmurs filled the air as her classmates exchanged glances, their eyes darting to the same spot. Umi hurried over to Rena, tugging her sleeve gently.
"Hey, did you see him?" Umi whispered, nodding towards the back.
Rena followed her gaze, and in an instant, her stomach dropped. Her eyes landed on him— an invader. He sat there, relaxed, as if he belonged, while everyone around him gossiped in hushed voices. Rena's breath caught in her throat. She recognized him immediately, Akimitsu, noticing his smug presence. But instead of feeling glad that she had finally encountered him after weeks, a wave of frustration surged through her.
Her thoughts raced: Why was he here? Did he know she was in this class? Her mind buzzed with unanswered questions, and a knot of anger tightened in her chest.
Rena groaned, muttering under her breath, "You’ve got to be kidding me."
Umi tugged at Rena’s arm, quietly pleading with her to let it go, but Rena was already on the move. Completely ignoring her friend's warnings, she made a beeline for him. Her irritation bubbled up with every step, the unresolved emotions from the diner now mixing with this unexpected and unwelcome surprise. Her eyes narrowed as she approached him. She crossed her arms over her chest as she stopped in front of his desk, her presence demanding his attention.
He was sitting there casually, leaning back in his chair as if the whole world revolved around him, completely unbothered by the curious glances and whispered chatter from the others in the room. His long legs were stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles, and his posture was one of effortless ease. When he finally glanced up, their eyes met, and for a split second, she caught something unexpected— a faint redness and intrigued look on his face, just barely visible beneath his composed exterior. But, just as quickly, his expression shifted, that familiar, insufferable smirk taking over, like he hadn’t just been caught off guard.
Rena narrowed her eyes, stepping closer, her fan resting securely in her hand, a physical reminder of her own resolve. She wasn’t about to let him off easily.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice edged with irritation, cutting through the quiet air between them.
A lazy eyebrow quirked up as he met her gaze head-on, unflinching. For a brief moment, he seemed to consider her question, his lips curling into that trademark smug grin.
"What, no 'hello'?" he teased, his voice smooth and infuriatingly calm. "You know, you could at least pretend to be happy to see me."
Rena's jaw tightened, her patience wearing thin, but before she could fire back a retort, he continued, that smirk of his growing more pronounced.
"Hey Pinky," he muttered, his tone casually teasing her, he found the whole situation amusing. "Believe it or not, I’m part of this class now."
Her teeth ground together at the nickname, but before she could speak, he shot her a look that was all too knowing. It was as if he was daring her to rise to the bait, to challenge him.
"Pinky? Really?" she shot back, her arms tightening in frustration. "That’s what you’re going with again?"
"What? It suits you," he smirked.
She rolled her eyes, trying to rein in her rising temper, "That’s not the point. Why are you here? You don’t just show up in a class out of nowhere."
"Relax." —he leaned back in his chair with a shrug— "Transfer. Simple as that. Guess that makes us classmates now."
Rena’s frustration spiked. Of all the places…
"Right," she scoffed, her voice dripping with sarcasm, "And I’m supposed to believe that it’s just a coincidence?"
"Think whatever you want, Pinky. But I’m not here for you," he met her gaze with a challenge in his eyes.
Rena huffed, the tension between them so thick it was almost suffocating. Why did he always have this effect on her? Her pulse quickened, not from fear or even rage, but from the way he looked at her, so smug, so certain of himself. She hated that he could rile her up so effortlessly, like flicking a switch.
Umi, ever the voice of reason, slipped in behind her and gave her a gentle nudge, her presence grounding Rena for just a moment.
“Rena, maybe this isn’t the time,” Umi whispered, her voice low and cautious, sensing the impending clash. There was a nervous edge to her tone, as if she knew exactly where this was headed and hoped to stop it before it spiraled.
Rena took a breath, her lips parting as if to respond, but her eyes stayed locked on Akimitsu’s, the challenge in them unmistakable. She knew Umi was right, but there was something about this moment that made her reluctant to back down, especially with the smirk still plastered across his face.
"This isn't over" Rena muttered, her eyes not leaving his. She turned sharply and walked away, her heart racing.
"Well, I have to pass this class too," he remarked in a testy manner "So no, I won’t be leaving anytime soon. This history class is one of the most important ones for my degree. But apparently, they’re not letting me take it outside anymore like I was."
Rena spun back toward him, her eyes narrowing into a fierce glare. She could practically feel the heat rising to her cheeks as Akimitsu’s smug expression dug under her skin like a thorn. Every inch of him radiated arrogance, from the slight tilt of his head to the lazy way he leaned back, like he had already won some unspoken game between them. She hated that he could affect her like this, that with just one look, he could ignite a fire she had trouble controlling. The air around them felt charged, like a storm on the verge of breaking.
Akimitsu leaned forward slightly, his grin widening as if he could sense her rising frustration.
“I had no idea you’d be here. It was definitely a surprise,” he smirked with self-satisfaction. His eyes gleamed with a teasing light, one that Rena couldn’t ignore even if she tried. “What? Do you think I’m following you or something?” The way he played it so cool only made her temper flare hotter, her hands balling into fists at her sides.
Her patience was reaching its breaking point.
"Of course, of course. A total coincidence, huh?" She retorted as if insinuating that he was a creep and a stalker.
Akimitsu's eyes flashed with annoyance, his usual composure cracking for a moment. He straightened up, his jaw tightening as he glared at Rena.
“Watch yourself!” he snapped, his voice sharp. “This has nothing to do with you. I’m only here because they forced me into this class for the rest of the semester.” The smug amusement in his voice was gone, replaced by a raw edge that surprised Rena.
For a split second, Rena considered backing off, sensing that something deeper lay beneath his sharp words. But her own irritation flared just as quickly, and she wasn’t about to let him off so easily.
"Well, aren’t you just a pleasant one," she shot back, her sarcasm stinging. "I feel so bad for the professor, having to deal with you for the rest of the semester. Must be exhausting keeping up that attitude all the time."
"You’ll eat those words, Pinky," he muttered begrudgingly. The nickname was still as bothersome as ever but she noticed the slight shift in his tone.
Rena’s eyes gleamed with a new sense of satisfaction, her smirk widening as she tilted her head slightly, watching Akimitsu's reaction. His usual cocky demeanor, which once grated on her nerves, was now becoming more entertaining than annoying. It was like a game to her now, watching him struggle to maintain his cool while she chipped away at his facade.
“So, what’s the matter? Not as sharp when someone gives it back to you?” she teased, her voice light but laced with a challenge. “You always seemed to enjoy pushing my buttons, but now that I’m pushing back, you’re the one getting all riled up?”
She could see the faintest twitch in his jaw, a clear sign that her words were hitting their mark. For the first time, Rena found herself enjoying the banter more than she expected, the irritation that usually accompanied his presence fading into something closer to amusement. Is this what Minami meant by getting back at him? If so, she reveled in it and continued her assault against him.
"Oh, I’m so scared of you," she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "Your words are just so intimidating. How will I ever survive the rest of the semester with ‘scary you’ sitting back there?"
He clenched his jaw, glaring at her with clear frustration. "Just you watch... PINKY!"
“Would you stop calling me that, you child!” Rena was feeling drained of the same old thing. “It’s starting to lose its effect”
His head flung back and he stared at the ceiling for a moment before thinking of a comeback. It did not take him long to turn the tables on her once more.
"And what would you have me call you, huh?” He started. “You keep butting into my business without even introducing yourself. Talk about rude!"
Her retort was on the tip of her tongue, but his words stopped her cold. He was... right. She hadn’t introduced herself. But she didn’t want to be on friendlier terms with him— he didn’t deserve that right now. Still, the fact that he had a point irked her to no end.
With a reluctant sigh, she lowered her arms and stared directly into his eyes. "Fine. I’m Rena Natsukawa. And I’m not rude. You just don’t deserve the pleasantries."
He raised an eyebrow at her, his expression unreadable for a moment. Then, with deliberate emphasis, he replied, "Who are you to determine what I deserve, Rena?"
Hearing him say her first name like that, without the usual teasing or hostility, took her breath away for a split second. Her eyes widened, and to her dismay, she felt a flutter in her chest. The unexpected shift in tone threw her off balance, and though she tried to hold onto her annoyed demeanor, her cheeks betrayed her, heating up slightly.
She quickly tried to recover, but the shift in the air between them left her feeling uncertain. In an attempt to regain her control, she shot back, "Don’t think using my first name changes anything. You're still a pain."
He knew she had lost her grip in the situation. "Whatever you say, Rena."
Her lips tightened, she had nothing more to say, she marched back to her seat, Umi leading the way. But even as she walked away, his voice lingered in her mind, the way he said her name echoing longer than she'd like to admit.
Rena had resigned herself to the fact that every Monday and Wednesday, she would have to deal with Akimitsu. It had become an inevitable part of her routine, and every single time, without fail, they ended up at each other’s throats. It wasn’t like her at all—normally, Rena was calm, composed, the perfect girl with perfect grades. But something about Tokyo, and Akimitsu in particular, had a way of pushing all the wrong buttons, turning her into a woman who was constantly on edge, simmering just beneath the surface.
It didn’t help that, despite how much he infuriated her, her heart insisted on betraying her every time she was near him. Her chest fluttered whenever he spoke, and she hated the effect he seemed to have on her. It made things worse because Minami’s plan— an attempt to mess with him and throw him off— had completely backfired. Instead of getting under his skin, he was getting under hers. And though she refused to admit it, the confusion of it all left her flustered.
But one day, after enduring his endless teasing for what felt like forever, Rena decided she’d had enough. She wasn’t going to let him keep calling her by her first name without giving her something in return. She mustered up the courage to confront him, determined to force him to introduce himself properly. It felt ridiculous that they’d been sparring like this for weeks without so much as a formal introduction.
"W-well," she started, her voice faltering just slightly, betraying her nerves. "Aren't you gonna say your name? All you do is call me by my first name, but you never introduced yourself." Her tone was laced with frustration—she’d taken enough of his attitude without even knowing what to call him.
Akimitsu, of course, leaned back in his chair with that insufferable smirk of his. "I have a feeling you already know mine," he said with a lazy drawl, as if the whole thing was some kind of joke.
Rena groaned, shaking her head and rolling her eyes in exasperation. "Of course I know it. Everyone knows who you are. You're trouble," she shot back, her voice rising with each word. "But why should I be the only one introducing myself? You’re the one using my first name all the time. You should return the favor."
For a second, it seemed like he might actually take her seriously. But then, with a dramatic sigh, he shrugged. "Fine. My name’s Akimitsu. A pleasure," he said, voice dripping with sarcasm. "But you only get my first name. No family name. Not that you didn’t already know that."
Rena’s eyes flicked toward the ceiling as she rolled them yet again, her patience already worn thin. His tone, the way he always managed to undercut every serious moment with that sarcastic edge, made her want to scream. She let out a long sigh, trying to rein in her frustration.
"Of course," she muttered, her tone now resigned as she glanced back at him. "How could I forget? Mister Mysterious, too cool for a last name."
He chuckled, clearly enjoying the way he was getting under her skin. "You get it, Pinky," he said with a wink, knowing full well the nickname still irked her.
She shot him a glare, but it lacked the intensity she’d intended. Somehow, the more she sparred with him, the harder it became to keep her annoyance genuine. There was something about the banter that, despite everything, felt… almost fun. But she wasn’t about to admit that out loud.
"Whatever," she said with a dismissive wave, though the small smile threatening to break through her frustration gave her away. "Just don’t get too comfortable with my name. You’re still a pain."
"And yet, you still can’t seem to stay away," he teased, leaning forward with that trademark smile.
Rena felt her cheeks warm slightly as her heart gave another unwelcome quiver. She hated that he wasn’t entirely wrong. She hated even more that some small part of her was starting to enjoy these exchanges. "Shush you," she shot back, quickly turning her attention to her notes as if the conversation hadn’t gotten to her at all.
But deep down, she knew better. Akimitsu had wormed his way into her thoughts, and despite everything, she couldn’t shake him—no matter how much she wanted to.
Akimitsu was always the first to duck out when class ended. The moment the professor dismissed them, he was already halfway out the door, disappearing before anyone could blink. He never said a word to anyone, not even Rena. By the time she realized he was gone, his seat was empty. At first, it didn’t bother her much— he was always a bit aloof, after all— but as time went on, she couldn’t help but wonder: Why does he leave so fast? The thought nagged at her. Did he not want to be around her any longer than he had to?
The ideas swirling in her head made her uneasy. It wasn’t like Akimitsu was one to care what others thought, but the idea that he might actually be avoiding her left a bitter taste in her mouth. The more she mulled over it, the less she liked where her thoughts led. Was it her? Was he just trying to escape from her, specifically?
The next day, she sat through the entire lecture, only half paying attention. Her gaze kept drifting toward him, her thoughts miles away from whatever the professor was saying. There was something that came back to mind that had been bothering her since she met him at the diner: he doesn't have a family name. It was odd and no matter how hard she tried to focus on the class, that detail kept floating to the surface of her mind. It just didn’t make sense still.
Despite her best efforts to focus on her upcoming finals, Rena found her thoughts straying to Akimitsu more often than she’d like to admit. She helped Umi and Hikari study whenever she could, hoping that tutoring them would serve as a distraction for her own restless mind. She was confident about the material, but her curiosity about Akimitsu had only grown. She found herself stealing glances at him more frequently, unable to stop the questions bubbling up inside her. It was driving her mad.
One day, after yet another unproductive study session in class, Rena let out a frustrated grunt and ran her hand through her hair, brushing a few stray strands out of her face. She had to stop this. If she didn’t ask him directly, her mind would keep spinning in circles, and she couldn’t afford to be distracted like this. Against her better judgment, she made up her mind.
Just ask him. What’s the worst that could happen? she thought, though her pulse quickened at the idea. She stood up, glancing over at Akimitsu, who was, as usual, minding his own business. Her palms were clammy, and her heart raced, but the need to satisfy her curiosity was stronger than her nerves. She walked toward him, closing the distance with each determined step.
When she stopped a few feet from his desk, he didn’t even bother looking up at first. “I’m starting to think you like me, Rena,” he said, his tone dripping with dry amusement. “I can’t think of any other reason you keep coming up to me.”
She scoffed, rolling her eyes at his smugness. Typical Akimitsu. Of course, he would say something like that. Still, she wasn’t about to let him get under her skin. With an exaggerated sigh, she composed herself, her voice coming out cool and indifferent despite the wild beating of her heart.
“In your dreams,” she shot back, folding her arms. “I just... have a question. It’s been bothering me for a while now, and I want an answer.”
She glanced away for a moment, taking a deep breath before finally meeting his eyes again. Her expression was firm, a mix of stubbornness and determination.
“Why do you always leave so fast after class? No parting remark, no last-minute insult? Do I really bother you that much?”
"Don’t you worry your pretty little pink head, I’m not avoiding you," Akimitsu said, leaning back in his chair and finally meeting her eyes. "I enjoy our little spats. It gives me something to look forward to. But I’ve got other priorities, things to take care of." He chuckled softly, his eyes gleaming with amusement. "Now it really sounds like you like me."
That signature smug smile of his crept across his face, the one that always made her want to either punch him or… well, something else. "I have a feeling this isn’t the only thing you want to ask me, though."
He wasn’t wrong, but how he knew this was a mystery, it was as if he could read her like a book. She’d been dying to know his full name—the one topic that had eluded her for so long. It was strange, like some kind of puzzle she couldn’t solve, and now that she was standing right in front of him, curiosity took hold of her even more. She hardened herself, summoning her courage.
"My question is about your name. Your full name. I want to know..." Her voice was firm, her determination clear as she locked eyes with him. She expected another smirk, a sarcastic retort, something to brush her off. But for a split second, she saw him falter, his expression slipping. He looked surprised—caught off guard by her seriousness.
Without realizing it, Rena had taken a step closer into his comfort zone. Her usual composed demeanor cut through his playful nonchalance, leaving him momentarily flustered. He quickly tried to recover, straightening up and forcing his smug grin back into place, but she had already seen the shift.
"You really do want to know, huh?" he said, his voice betraying a hint of nervousness as his heart raced. But he wouldn’t give in that easily. No, he’d make her work for it. "Alright then, how about this? I’ll cut you a deal."
Rena raised an eyebrow, sensing some sort of trick coming. Sure enough, his facial expression turned playful, and he looked at her like she was the most amusing thing he’d ever seen.
"If you can top me in the final exams, I’ll tell you my full name. That’s my deal."
Her eyes widened in surprise. Was this… a challenge? And if so, was he actually serious? The guy who barely took notes, who spent most of the class with his head down, napping, was challenging her in academics? There was no way he was serious. It had to be some kind of joke. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion, a frown forming on her lips as she tried to make sense of it.
"Why do you always have to be so difficult? Can’t you just answer the damn question already?" she snapped, her frustration bubbling to the surface.
Akimitsu leaned back again, lacing his fingers behind his head as he shrugged casually. "I truly hope you do your best in the finals, Rena Natsukawa. Good luck." His voice was dripping with amusement, and without another word, he closed his eyes, clearly signaling that the conversation was over—at least in his mind.
Rena stood there, speechless, her jaw clenched in frustration. He had completely ignored her question, again. She gritted her teeth, glaring down at him. How could one person be so infuriating?
"You’re unbelievable, you know that?" she huffed, her voice sharp with irritation. "I’m trying to get a straight answer from you, and all you do is dodge the question like it’s some kind of game to you!"
Akimitsu didn’t even flinch. He didn’t have to try; just by existing, he had a way of ruffling her feathers. It was maddening. He was the one person who could rile her up without even lifting a finger, and it drove her absolutely crazy.
Rena didn’t approve of Akimitsu’s challenge—of course he had to make it difficult—but if this was the only way to get him to answer her, then fine. She’d do it. She’d give it her absolute best. The thought of him outperforming her was laughable. Ridiculous, even. She had always been top of the class, and there was no way she was going to let some lazy, smug little shit beat her.
With just a week left before finals, Rena found herself more determined than ever. This wasn’t just about maintaining her rank anymore—it was personal. She threw herself into studying with a renewed intensity, even tutoring Umi and Hikari until they were nearly on par with her. By the time finals rolled around, the three of them had practically become study machines.
The night before the exam, they had decided to blow off some steam and headed to a karaoke bar. It turned out to be the perfect antidote to their week of cramming. After days of relentless studying, this was their well-deserved night filled with singing, laughter, and absolutely no talk of exams.
They took turns belting out their favorite songs, the tension from the past few days slowly melted away. Rena, Umi, and Hikari were in high spirits, their laughter ringing through the air as they playfully teased one another about who could hit the highest notes. At one point, they even video chatted with Minami and Akino, who joined the fun from a distance. Rena had been raving about them for ages, so it felt great for her friends to finally "meet" her other friends— even if it was through a screen. Akino’s light teasing and Minami’s infectious laughter only added to the joy of the night.
For the first time in days, Rena felt completely at ease. No worries lingered in her mind, not even the nagging thoughts of Akimitsu’s challenge—just pure, unadulterated fun. She desperately needed this moment: a perfect night with her friends where nothing else mattered.
“Hey, Rena!” Hikari called out, nudging her as she struggled with a high note. “If you keep this up, you might just summon a dog from the next block!”
“Please, Hikari, I’m clearly hitting all the right notes,” Rena shot back, feigning offense. “Or at least more than you are!”
“Yeah, well, I’m not the one who’s been bragging about how I’m going to crush Akimitsu,” Umi chimed in with a playful roll of her eyes. “You might want to save some of that confidence for the exam.”
Rena laughed, feeling the warmth of friendship envelop her like a cozy blanket. Little did she know, however, that this light-hearted banter would be the calm before the storm.
As the night continued, the karaoke bar buzzed with energy. Rena, fueled by her friends' playful jabs, decided to pick a particularly challenging song, one she had always dreamed of belting out perfectly. “Alright, everyone, watch and learn!” she declared, winking at her friends as she scrolled through the song list.
“Oh, this should be good,” Hikari said, leaning back in her chair. “I hope you brought your A-game!”
With the mic in hand, Rena launched into a spirited rendition, her voice rising and falling with dramatic flair. The others joined in, adding harmonies and making exaggerated faces as they cheered her on. Laughter bubbled around them, and for that moment, it felt as if nothing else existed outside the colorful lights and booming music.
Midway through the song, Rena paused for dramatic effect. “And this is what winning sounds like, Akimitsu!” she teased, winking at the camera where Minami and Akino were still connected. She sat back down and grabbed the phone to hear them better.
“Is that your strategy? Distracting him with your karaoke skills?” Umi shot back, laughter in her voice.
“It might be the only way to give him a fighting chance,” Rena retorted, reveling in the back-and-forth.
It was Hikari’s turn to start another song, but Umi glanced at her phone and frowned. “Hey, guys, we need to keep an eye on the time. We can’t be up all night singing. We have an exam tomorrow!”
“Oh, come on! We still have plenty of time!” Hikari protested, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “One more song won’t hurt!”
Rena waved one hand dismissively, her phone in the other. “It’s fine! We’ll sleep after the exam, right?” she quipped, earning another round of laughter.
“Yeah, right. Just don’t sleep during or you'll lose for sure!” Minami chimed in from the screen.
“Okay, okay, let’s do one more,” Umi relented, feeling the momentum of the night pull her in. “But then it’s time to go home and rest!” She scanned the list again, her eyes lighting up. “How about a duet, Hikari?”
“Absolutely! Let’s give them a show!” Hikari grinned, and they hopped up to the stage together, ready to steal the spotlight.
As they sang, Rena felt a spark of hope and joy, a feeling she hadn’t let herself indulge in during the grueling week of studying.When the song ended, they jumped up in excitement, the duo breathless and exhilarated.
“I can’t believe how good you two sounded!” Rena exclaimed!
“Best stress relief ever,” Umi agreed, giving Rena a playful nudge when returning to sit next to Rena. “Just don’t forget: tomorrow, we’ll need to channel all this energy into our finals”
“Don’t worry! I’ve got it all figured out,” Rena insisted, radiating confidence.
As the evening came to an end, Rena couldn’t shake the determination building inside her. There’s no way I’m losing this bet, she thought, a strong expression plastered on her face. She was feeling borderline cocky about it. After all, she had been studying tirelessly while, from what she had observed, Akimitsu hadn’t even bothered to take notes. The very idea of him beating her was simply absurd.
Yet, unbeknownst to Rena, she was blissfully unaware of how complicated her challenge with Akimitsu would turn out to be. Something was brewing beneath the surface, something she had completely overlooked in her perfectly laid plans. And when it finally emerged, it would catch her utterly off guard.
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how I sleep at night knowing my daughter is in a prison of my own design because I turned her into a murderer, my son is abandoned on a notorious garbage realm, and my other son is having an identity crisis because they are from a race I taught them from a young age to hate:
The Stars are Cheering for You ♥️ On-Going ♥️ Fluff
{Rena has finally left her hometown of Kitami for University in Tokyo. Will her life in a new place be as she planned? Or will a certain mystery guy turn her world upside down?}
Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable just ended, and I'm crying! Great job to Kai Ikada for such a wonderful series. I joined the fandom late, but I still got to wait for the final chapter that dropped today.
I found myself wanting more from other characters in the series, so I decided to try my hand at fan fic writing, im so nervous because it's my first fic ever. In this instance, I'm expanding Rena's character and her experiences at college after Chapter 115.
Here's a snippet of Chap 1 of
The Stars are Cheering for You
By me! Fudgesuperior!
The night before she left for university Rena ran into Tsubasa’s grandfather, Gin. He was a man who inspired and encouraged her to do what she loved. She accredited him for her love of traditional Japanese history and culture. They had not seen each other since she was a child, encountering him so near her departure felt as if it were fate. Shiki bestowed upon her his personal hand fan as a token, a reminder to look up at the sky so that the stars might cheer her up when she was sad. This was the final push she needed to confront her future and begin her new journey.
Rena Natsukawa left Hokkaido with a mix of emotions, feeling bittersweet as she said goodbye to her friends, family, and hometown. Though leaving was hard, she was excited to pursue her career in her chosen field at her top pick university in Tokyo. As she packed for the move, her thoughts were filled with reflections on the friends she’d made, her cherished home, and Tsubasa…
Her arrival in Tokyo couldn’t have gone smoother. Rena’s living arrangements had all been settled and it was only a matter of finding the address and unpacking. Tokyo was far busier than Kitami, but she had grown accustomed to the city’s hustle and bustle after traveling here several times in the past. Still, there was something different this time— a sense of finality, of stepping into a new chapter of her life. The towering skyscrapers, the sea of people rushing past— all of it felt both exhilarating and overwhelming. She took a deep breath, trying to steady herself as she navigated through the unfamiliar streets.
She was lost in thought as she made her way outside of the airport, her eyes taking in the cityscape that stretched before her. The towering buildings, bright signs, and crowded streets were a stark contrast to the quieter life she had known in Kitami. The voices of conversation and the distant sound of traffic filled the air, blending with the aroma of street food that wafted from nearby vendors.
The buildings and stores started to blur together as she continued to walk, heavily contemplating what her new life would be like. Would she meet new people here? Was there a possibility for her to make more impactful friendships like she had back home?
Uneasiness began to creep into Rena's mind because of all the unknown factors. With her perception of the outside world diminishing, she found herself stumbling directly into a stranger. She had been so lost in her thoughts that she hadn't noticed the young man approaching from the opposite direction— neither of them paying attention, both engrossed in their respective worlds.
“HEY, WATCH IT!” the young delinquent yelled, his voice sharp and filled with irritation. Rena blinked, momentarily stunned that someone would shout at her over such a minor incident. As she collected herself, she couldn’t help but feel a strange sense of familiarity as she looked up at him. Tall, broad shoulders, and that messy brown hair… something about him struck a chord within her. The recognition was unsettling.
i need to correct this: wow classic doesn’t have any npcs that can only talk to one player at a time. these lines actually formed for a quest npc that players had to kill to complete the objective. knowing that i think this image is even funnier.
He takes the helmet off. A grin spreads across Din’s face, sickened and bloody, as he rips limb from limb.
At the end, there’s just silence. He stands, covered in crimson and guts, with the blade of the Darksaber flickering in the same pulse as his heartbeat. It is monstrous and wonderful and he feels nothing but adrenaline, coursing through his veins. The helmet hisses back into place like a rattlesnake striking its prey.
Din turns around, wipes the blood marring his visor, and runs back to Nova.
He sheathes the Darksaber. He tries to sink back into his skin, to put the monster back into its cage.
It goes, angrily, snarling, all the way back to her.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: HAPPY SOMETHING HOLY SATURDAY!!! i had such a wicked and exciting time writing this one ;) ENJOY! leave me a comment at the end if you did <3
If you're new here, Something More & Something Deeper are the first installments in this series, available on here & ao3!
Everything is hollowed. Fucked out. The rest of the world filters away, vanishing.
Nova drops to her knees, then crashes against the ground. Din’s not quick enough. Maker, it’s like he’s been trapped in amber. He’s fast, but he’s not fast enough. He cries out, the sound high and panicked through the modulator. Din sounds wounded, but he’s not the one that’s been stabbed. Nova’s white-faced, all the color leached out. She is held together with whispers and prayers, with nothing but him.
She keeps fucking bleeding. His hands are doing nothing to staunch it all, leaving out of her like an oil spill. Something terrible is flashing in the back of his mind. Something that feels an awful lot like deja vu.
This is how it must have felt, he realizes, horrified, frozen, when he got knifed with Sparmau’s poison dagger, and Nova had to keep him alive and pilot the shattered Mand’alor vessel away from enemy territory. The weight of the world, she holds it up. It slams into him like a Star Destroyer.
Din feels—bowled over. Scraped raw.
“Novalise,” he hisses. Her eyes flutter, rolling back in her skull. “Nova. Wake up.” It’s senseless. She is out entirely, on a different plane of existence, on a different reality. She’s so cold. Her blood pools around his gloved hands. She got hit deep. Somewhere critical. Fear leapfrogs up his throat. It tastes like bile.
This is a fucking disaster. They should have never come here—to Corellia. To the Unknown Regions at all. Everything that’s happened since that damn distress call.They should have stayed in the stars, out there in the darkness, before any of this was real. If he could go back—he would pin her down back on Mandalore, before Nova decided to do this, to run headfirst into a rescue mission where she is within the line of fire.
But that’s not who she is, his Nova. She cannot be caged. So he will be a monster for her. But this time… this time, he wasn’t fast enough.
Din swallows, tries again. “Can you hear me?”
It’s senseless. It doesn’t work. She’s passed out, which is likely a terrible sign, Din’s only passed out—clean, full out—a few times, and each instance, it was when he almost died. He keeps reliving Novalise falling to her knees, on repeat. He shakes his head, trying to clear it, trying to dislodge the memory. He hooks his fingers under the rim of his helmet, exposing his face. He doesn’t care who’s watching. He’s going to burn this entire planet to the ground. “Nova,” he whispers again.
A miracle happens. Her eyes open. Blearily, pained, but they’re open.
There’s something in his eyes. Din wipes the back of his bloodied glove across his face, realizing what it is when it comes back wet and clear. Tears. “Hey. Can you hear me?”
“Ouch,” she whispers, voice croaking. Din almost laughs—laughs—in sheer relief.
“Hold on for me,” he whispers, compounding the wound with his gloves. Maker, they’re dirty. Filthy. But he can’t worry about infection. Not now. Keeping Nova alive is mission number one. Hera will have bacta, needles, compounds—all of it, back on the ship. He’s seen her use up her dwindling supply on Nova already. He just needs to get her okay enough to get her back to the Ghost, then he can go save Bo-Katan and Wedge. He can do that. He can carry that weight. He won’t collapse. “Stay awake, baby.”
Her eyebrows furrow. Nova coughs up blood spatter. Her pink lips are a ghastly shade of white, stained on the insides. “‘M trying,” she slurs. “What—what happened?”
“That lowlife hunter,” Din snarls. His voice is a blade. He increases the pressure of his hands against her wound, and Nova whimpers. He has to steel himself, gritting his teeth down to refuse to rip his hands away. “Stabbed you. Deep. I’m gonna kill him.”
“No,” Nova manages. Her hair is haloed out around her on the ground. Din bites down on his lower lip, fetid wind blowing over the both of them. It’s cold. Corellia’s temperate until it isn’t, but right now, it’s freezing. They’re not far from the makeshift battlefield—they’ve run a couple of klicks into the center of Coronet City, but the remaining forces of their enemy could very easily be on their six. “No need. Already did.”
Love floods him. Din bites out a quick laugh. “Of course.” He shudders in a shaky breath. “Course you did, sweet girl.”
Nova blinks up at him. “It hurts,” she manages, and her voice cracks down the middle. She’s putting on a brave face, his Novalise, but she’s in bad shape. “How much blood have I lost?”
Din leans down, presses a quick kiss to her clammy forehead. He’s deflecting, and he knows it’s apparent. He knows that Nova could see it written across his untrained face, but it doesn’t matter. Not more than evacuating her, now. He’s not answering that question. “I’m getting you out of here,” he promises, putting his helmet back on. “We’re jetting back to the ship. Gonna compress your wound, okay—”
“No.” It cuts clean through. The airlocks hiss as he snaps his helmet back into place. Din stops, blinking at her through the visor. It’s been running her metrics in the absence of when it was last on his head. She’s lost so much blood. That fact keeps cycling through, entirely unhelpful, bringing him back to reality. This is—unfair. Royally so. She was saving him, chasing him, fighting his battles for him. Anger is aerating through his bloodstream, and Din swallows a growl in the back of his throat. Losing it won’t help anything. Won’t keep Nova safe from slaughter.
Maker, he really, really wishes it would. He wants to feel blood pouring out on his own hands. He wants to unleash vengeance. He wants to call revenge by name.
“Nova. I need to bring you back to the ship.”
“Not happening.” Her eyes flutter again, pupils unfocused. “‘M coming with you.”
Din stares. “You can’t—”
“They’re coming.”
It’s so quiet. He doesn’t realize what she’s said at first—and then he hears it. The sound of footsteps. They’re not concealed. Not under the helmet. He could hear the bloodstream of a rodent with the combination of the Mandalorian mask and his fine-tuned senses. And that’s exactly what’s coming towards them right now—fucking vermin. He stands. A blade. His body becomes a blade.
“Here.” Nova’s hand clenches at her side. “Take this—”
“I am not,” Din enunciates, cold and flat through the modulator, “leaving you.”
Nova holds his concealed eyes, just for a second, before she shutters hers in pain. “Take it, Din.” Her hand wraps around the shaft of it, and then she’s unclipping the Darksaber from her belt.
He stares. “It’s not mine anymore—”
“Not the time,” Nova manages, breath uneven, “for saber-wielding semantics.” She wheezes, spitting out more blood, and Din’s panic flares again, a heat-spike, red-hot. “Do it.”
He blinks at her. “I can’t.”
“You can. Cut them down,” Nova whispers. Then she shoves at him—with so much more strength than he would have been able to muster—and it propels him to his feet. “No mercy.” She cracks a wan, exhausted smile. It curves up, half-scarlet, and fuck if it isn’t the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. “Then you come back to me.”
Din Djarin disappears. The Mandalorian takes over. It whistles through his bloodstream, the strength of it. He is a weapon, a blade, the thing that lives in the darkness. He hasn’t been this—the beskar bullet, the metallic monstrosity—for years long past. Before Nova. He can still don the mask and pretend, but this is different. Troopers and hunters alike surge around the corner, and he flexes, breathes, unloads.
No living thing stands a chance.
*
Pain.
That’s the only word that registers, the only feeling Nova knows. It comes on like a lava surge, white-hot and deafening. She looks down, blurry-eyed, at the gash in her stomach, a knife wedged tight into the muscle of her pre-existing scar. It’s almost laughable, the irony of it all.
“Okay,” she whispers. The world shifts around the edges, elastic. The knife squelches in her abdomen, and Nova winces. “You,” she chastises herself, “can do the hard thing.”
She can. Novalise is very good at doing the hard thing. The problem is—she knows the blade is plunged into something bad. Her liver, maybe. Her spleen. In a divine comedy, this knife sliced through her sinew in the same place Sparmau’s poison dagger did to Din, back on Hinari, back what feels like a lifetime ago and is only a handful of months. Nova felt stronger then, but in all reality, she’s stronger now.
It’s facing death for what seems like the umpteenth time, stuck with a relentless blade. She’s here again. She’s always here, it seems.
Novalise has seen so much hurt. This same scar has been carved into her skin like an awful melody, muscle memory. She’s suddenly transported—back to when she was still a teenager, back when she ran right into the hornet’s nest, a viper’s den, danger that didn’t give way to goodness. She’s nineteen and haunted again, chained down in iron to a ship that was a sucking pit of despair, with a man whose kisses were venom and whose hands were made of terror.
She is not there. She is not Andromeda. Not anymore.
And the last time Novalise got stabbed in the stomach, she pulled light from the sky itself. She doesn’t need to do that this time, but she will.
Because she can.
Distantly, very distantly, Nova can hear Din cutting through the rat’s nest of troopers and hunters. Flaying them alive. She knows he will be a pit of a man for her, an interlude of darkness and terror, and he will come back on his knees. He will pray for forgiveness.
He doesn’t need to, though. He’s already gotten hers.
She’s the holy thing granting it.
“You,” Nova levels with herself, “can do this.” There’s no room left but to face it. Nova has spent enough time anthropomorphizing the past, pulling it in layers over her skin. There is nothing another timeline can do for her now. There is nothing that can save her back in her memory.
Nova has spent months fighting against her intuition to do things alone. But this time, she isn’t running away. She’s ripping the blade out of her skin, and she is facing the light, and she is going to save her friends—her family. No more running. Just fighting back.
She does the hard thing. She pulls the dagger out, inch by sickening inch.
Biting into the heel of her hand to staunch the screaming, Nova props herself half-up against the wall. She utters a string of curse words under her breath—ones in Basic, Mando’a , Huttese, and a few more that she picked up along the way. She’s the daughter of a collector of linguistics, and Nova knows how to cuss her way through at least twenty languages. “Okay,” she says, wiping the sheen of sweat from her face, “okay.” She utters the word over and over again, until she’s convinced herself that she is.
The Darksaber is being wielded by her Mandalorian, so Nova unclips her own lightsaber from her belt. It’s covered in crusted blood, the silver handle tinged crimson. She bites down on her swollen lip as she ignites it, feeling power spark to life in her exhausted bloodstream. The blade flickers and trips, but it doesn’t falter. Nova stares into the golden abyss. Her lightsaber gazes back.
“You can do this,” she whispers, calling on the strength of all her past and future selves. They flick through her shuttered eyes like a hologram, like fortification. She sees her parents’ faces. That’s likely not a good sign—stars, she’s really bleeding—but Nova takes that as a good omen. That’s what she does. Takes a black hole and pulls a supernova out of it. She is her own exploding star.
She cauterizes this wound with her lightsaber. Maybe it’s a metaphor for something, but Nova can’t think of anything else but stardust right now. She is not forged by the darkness. It cannot call her by name.
Only Nova can do that.
It’s not the first time Novalise has forged her own scar into her skin, but this one is different. The last time, she was on the brink of death out in the crush of space. This time, she’s planted on the ground. There’s still something cosmic in that, though. Something holy.
Novalise is the only star on Corellia. She detracts her lightsaber’s blade, and the world still glows yellow.
*
Din Djarin isn’t here. He is hiding, far underneath the mask that he wears and the Creed that he once swore by. He is not bleeding crimson rivers, but if he did, there would be no wound that could cut him down. At this moment, he has ceased to be a man. He is all Mandalorian—all fighter. No, that’s not correct. Even soldier is too small of a word. The definition is closer to warrior, but even that is far below what he is.
He is an oil spill, vantablack in movement, silver in makeup. He is tungsten and steel, a weapon forged from beskar. The Darksaber—decidedly not his—flickers in his hand, pulsing the people he cuts down into grayscale. It’s heavy. So heavy. It is the weapon of something stronger than he is, but that something is laying on the ground behind him. And Din wants them all to pay for it.
He does not know the Empire. Not intimately like the people that surround them. Not personally like Novalise. He does not care. It doesn’t matter who they are. If the troopers are being called upon by the mysterious First Order. If the bounty hunters are reporting to a shadowy figure. Those are not questions he is equipped to know the answers to. The truth is that it doesn’t matter. None of it matters except wielding the weapon in his hands.
No mercy. That’s what Novalise said back there, blood staining his gloves scarlet, pooling over her perfect mouth. She gave him permission. No mercy.
Din Djarin is not answering to his name. He is not taking prisoners. He does not care about life. Every single person in front of him is responsible for the attack on Novalise, crumpled and bloody on the ground. He will stomp the light out of their eyes. He will massacre the evil from the ground around them.
He cuts through the army surrounding him like paper. Not humans. Not anything, not anymore. Nova would mourn their half-lives—because she is good, because she has not become a sucking wound, even in the face of so much horror.
But Novalise is not the Djarin in front of this swarm of evil. They have Din to answer to. And he’s not listening.
He does not stop. He is relentless. He is a warrior, a weapon, the darkest version of himself, and for the first time in years, Din can switch his humanity off. He doesn’t care. He cannot care. Every single one of these people—stormtroopers and bounty hunters alike—were responsible for his heart laying half-dead in the back of a filthy alleyway, stuck with a knife so big it could have cleaved her in half.
No mercy, Nova had said.
He takes the helmet off. A grin spreads across Din’s face, sickened and bloody, as he rips limb from limb.
At the end, there’s just silence. He stands, covered in crimson and guts, with the blade of the Darksaber flickering in the same pulse as his heartbeat. It is monstrous and wonderful and he feels nothing but adrenaline, coursing through his veins. The helmet hisses back into place like a rattlesnake striking its prey. Din turns around, wipes the blood marring his visor, and runs back to Nova.
He sheathes the Darksaber. He tries to sink back into his skin, to put the monster back into its cage.
It goes, angrily, snarling, all the way back to her.
*
When Din returns, Nova isn’t where he left her. She did that on purpose. She’s propped against the steel of the building behind her, but she’s standing. Her top hangs in shreds around her midriff. She spits a mouthful of blood onto the filthy ground, disappearing into the dust. Her hands are braced on either side of the wall, slung low like an assassin, face grimed with sweat and blood alike.
“What the hell,” Din asks, low and angry, “did you do?”
Nova musters a smile, wincing as another round of pain rips through her. “You were busy.”
There’s silence. Then a low, quiet hiss as he removes the helmet. Her heart catches in her throat when she realizes that Din ran off into battle with it removed, at least partially. That signifies no survivors. He is bloody, crimson splashed across his beautiful, tortured face. Heat runs through her, even amidst all that pain, and Nova inhales, staggering, staring into the silhouette of the man she loves. He is not the darkness he just swallowed and spat back out. He is in front of her in armor, but the face her Mandalorian is wearing is not the Mandalorian’s at all.
“Nova—” His voice is low, flagellating. Another thrill runs through her. “You—”
“Had a problem,” she says, gesturing at her now-exposed midriff, the curve of her belly sucked in and carved with a new scar. “And I fixed it.”
He steps forward. Those footsteps could shake the ground beneath them. They have. They will again. Nova sighs as he catches her swaying, exhausted body and pins it between him and the wall. Safety. She hums, endorphins overriding all the hurt still coursing through her bloodstream. “Fuck,” Din says. No—he snarls it, right into her open mouth, and Nova maps his brown, deep eyes on her own. “You—cauterized your o-own wound?”
Nova offers him a grin, cocking her head to the side, curls blowing in the acrid wind. His hand curls up around her cheek. She knows it comes off bloody. “Not the first time I’ve had to,” she whispers, and then the reality of the situation sets in. She swallows, blinking back sudden, desperate tears. “I’m fine,” she says, damage control. Maker, Din’s eyes are almost black. “I’m okay, Din. I promise. I—well, I’m holding it together.” Then, the real version of the truth: “I’m safe.” She looks up at him. “Now.”
He’s staring into her soul. It feels like a heart attack. Nova’s stuttered breath catches in her throat. “I am doing a very dangerous thing,” he grits out, “letting you stay out here. Do you understand me?” His hand grips her chin, lifting it to meet his. He’s only inches away, and Nova’s newly cauterized stomach flips over—in hunger. Want. Need.
“Yes,” she breathes.
“Should’ve you slung over my shoulder.” He’s muttering. Nova leans closer. “Should take you b-back to the ship. Shouldn’t let you stay out here.” This rambling, forged together of half-sentences and clipped words, sounds like the Din she knew before she knew he was Din at all—when he was just the Mandalorian and she was barely Novalise yet.
“I slaughtered them,” Din whispers into the hollow of her open mouth. “I slaughtered them.” It sounds like a vow. No—a prayer.
“It’s okay,” Nova manages. “You were—”
“Protecting you,” Din growls. “No—avenging you. You said no mercy.”
Nova doesn’t break eye contact, doesn’t look away. “And I meant it.”
His head is slung so, so low. His forehead—rife with gore—is pressed up against hers. “I killed them all, cyar’ika.”
Past-Nova would have been heavy with grief—thankful, but uncomfortable. Not now. She is not a murderer, but there are some forces in this galaxy that cannot be saved. That need to be cut down, cut away from the festering, invading wound of unfixable evil. She saw it back with the cloning tanks. She saw it in Sparmau’s teeth. She saw it in Gideon’s stare. She felt it in the blue, even face of Thrawn. Even just in nightmares, she’s known the evil coming out of them—leaching, bleeding, like an oil spill. She doesn’t need to be her own avenging angel.
She has her Mandalorian for that.
“They would have killed me,” she whispers. “They tried to. They would have gotten to Bo and Wedge, too.” Nova swallows. Two words—what a weight they hold: “I’m glad.”
His mouth slots against hers—timid at first, then coaxing, then a fucking wildfire. He kisses like he’s starving, like he’s been whetting himself on danger and adrenaline while her lips were away from hers. Nova sighs as Din holds her face flush against hers, tongue licking into her mouth like a viper. She wants to get drunk on his particular brand of venom. She needs him inside her like a demon. She wants to be possessed by Din Djarin. Getting fucked isn’t enough.
A moan unfurls from behind her teeth, spilling over into his, and Din freezes. With the strength of something holy, he wrenches himself free. “I am doing a very dangerous thing,” he murmurs again, “letting you stay out here. With me. Rather than bringing you back to safety.”
“Din,” Nova whispers, and a small whimper leaves his lips at the sound of his name, “if you tried to put me back on the Ghost, now, when we still have our friends to save, I would fight you.”
A wicked smile curls across his mouth. “You would, hm?”
She nods, looking up into his eyes like a siren. She reaches forward, for his belt, and his knees sag when she finds it—and then Nova yanks the Darksaber off of it, igniting the slick, spitting blade. Both of them shutter into black and white, and Nova sees Din’s pupils flare so large his whole iris is almost black. “This,” she breathes, “belongs to me.”
He groans. “That’s not the only thing that does,” he murmurs, and then, with a Herculean effort, he pulls away. Nova sheathes the blade, flaring back to the blue-grey dampness of Corellia’s atmosphere. “You tell me,” he warns, “if you feel worse, if you feel anything—”
“I will.”
Holding her gaze for what feels like an eternity, Din nods. When he turns to put the helmet back on, Nova winces, falters, then forces her way through. She is fortified by her Mandalorian and from her own light. Both forged by stardust.
They soldier on.
*
“Anything?”
Bo-Katan throws Wedge a glare over her shoulder. “If I had the signal back by now,” she says, sourly, “I would have told you.”
Wedge sighs, dragging a hand over his face. His stubble is longer than she’s ever seen it. Wedge’s age doesn’t often show—the four of them are scattered across their late forties and early thirties, now—but it does now. “Okay.”
Bo-Katan softens. A little. “I’m working on it,” she whispers, a shade lighter than the voice she usually uses. “They must have crossed over into the inner rung of the city by now, though.”
Wedge’s eyes are fixed on a hollow point behind her. They’re in what looks like an old shipping container. Bo-Katan didn’t happen to look before she threw both of their bodies inside and locked the door. The troopers were close—too close. Internally, she muses over this as she fiddles with their damaged radio, held together with little more than hope. These troopers—they were far from incompetent, slung onto the field with blunt force and a desire to shoot blaster rounds. They seemed…organized. With older armor. Of the Empire, not of its scattered remains. She swallows, flipping from station to station, trying to root out the static.
“This is bad,” Wedge admits, his head hung heavy. And then, quieter, “I’m scared.”
Bo-Katan catches his eye. He looks exhausted. Neither of them have slept much over the last few days, especially since the cheap, thieving Mon Cala they hitched a ride with sold them out to the troopers. “I know.” She doesn’t try to push the feeling away.
Hell, she’s scared too. Thrawn, back in this galaxy. Thrawn, in his massive Star Destroyer, heading towards Hoth. Bo-Katan hates Hoth. Thinks an ice planet is a waste of space. But she knows how much it means to Wedge. And Nova. They’ve both been displaced out of a home—since the Alliance moved to Hoth, it’s the home Wedge has lived in when not out in the stars. And Nova… it’s one of the last untouched places where her parents once lived.
“How bad?” Wedge’s voice snaps her back to the present. Bo-Katan fiddles with the radio again for something to do with her hands. If she doesn’t, they’ll be curled into fists.
“How bad, what?” She’s deflecting.
“Thrawn.”
Bo-Katan sighs, pinching the bridge of her swollen nose. One of the troopers broke it with the butt of his blaster. Consequently, she ripped off his chestplate and fired the remaining rounds straight into his heart. “Bad.”
Wedge swallows. “I was afraid,” he muses, crossing his arms over his chest, “of that.”
Bo-Katan inhales, exhales. “Wedge,” she manages, “...I’m sorry.”
He holds her eyes, a small smile captured on his lips. He knows what she means—sorry for being this way, sorry for getting him in this situation, sorry that they’re stuck together again, sorry that she wasn’t strong enough to get them out of this mess, sorry that Din and Nova are rushing here and putting their lives on the line for the two of them again, sorry that his home is about to be pulverized. She’s sorry for it all. Even the stuff she doesn’t have control over.
“I know.” A beat. “I’m sorry, too.”
The radio flares to life. “Bo-Katan?”
It’s a female voice. Not Nova’s, though. Bo-Katan blinks, sitting up a little straighter. “Hera?”
“I told Din and Nova to be back here with you both an hour ago,” she says, voice staccato from the static. “I’m assuming something has gone horribly wrong, right?”
Bo-Katan exhales through her sore nostrils, wincing. “It’s likely.”
Hera’s quiet. “Should I wait?”
Her eyes flick to Wedge. He nods. Imperceptibly, but Bo-Katan can read his expressions by now. “Yes.”
“We’re running—”
“Out of time,” Wedge cuts in, moving closer to the radio. “But—”
Hera’s voice comes through again. “I’ll wait.”
Bo-Katan smiles up at the rusty ceiling of the shipping container. Something nasty is dripping off in the corner, and the smell in here is rank, musty, but she can see a tiny glimpse of the night sky, and there’s a star. Bo-Katan Kryze doesn’t usually do signs, but she does do stars.
“What are the odds,” Hera continues, “that the four of you will end up back on the Ghost alive?”
At this, Bo-Katan cracks a wide, true smile. Nova would be thrilled. “General Syndulla,” she says, proudly, “I sure as hell wouldn’t bet against us.”
Hera sighs. “I have their location,” she says. “Maybe, if they couldn’t get to you—”
“We’ll get to them,” Wedge says firmly.
“We don’t have time,” Hera reminds them. Bo-Katan can sense the fear in her voice. It’s the same fear she’s kept close to her own chest. “Be safe. But—”
“We’ll be quick,” Bo-Katan promises. She looks over at Wedge, mustering up all the energy she can. “Ready?”
He gets to his feet—gingerly, carefully, but when he stands all the way up, he’s locked in. Hardcore. All Rebel. “As I’ll ever be.”
Bo-Katan musters up one more true smile. One for her friend Wedge. After all they’ve been through, he deserves it. “Run.”
And they unleash hell on the center of Coronet City.
*
Nova winces. She recovers, quick enough to hope against hope that Din didn’t catch it—but he is nothing if not observant, especially in that helmet, and he whips around. “Stop.”
She fixes him with a sour look. “I,” Nova proclaims, “am fine.”
Din sighs. “You were stabbed and cauterized your own wound, Novalise,” he says, “you are certainly not fine.”
She exhales and then relents, sagging back against the wall. They’re in another alleyway, now, and this one is considerably cleaner than the last. Less bloody. She hisses out a breath between her clenched teeth, dragging the shredded remains of her tank top up over her bellybutton. She can hear Din’s breath through the helmet, and it fogs her clarity.
“Let me see.”
She does.
They’ve been here before. They’ve been here before multiple times. Blood dripping, the other person silencing it, stifling it. Din rips one glove off with the other—his hands, topographic and so much softer than anything else on his body—are unbloodied. The only thing on his entire suit of armor that isn’t dripping scarlet. That makes love flare up in her chest, suddenly, completely. Nova watches him, carefully, lovingly, as he lifts her shirt higher, breath catching somewhere between his throat and the modulator. “Looks okay.”
Nova looks at him through half-lidded eyes. “Only okay?”
He tilts his head to the side, affixing her with a tired look. She can tell, even through the visor. It’s the only part of his helmet that isn’t sticky, gored with dead stormtroopers. The blood, for once, does not bother her. Want sings low in her injured stomach, and Nova bites down on her bottom lip.
“Novalise.”
“What?”
He sighs again, and then Din bends lower, sinking down on his haunches until he’s level with her on the ground. Nova grabs onto his clean, ungloved hand, needing to feel his warmth. It coils around her with comfort, and she relaxes. Just a little. “You,” he says, irritably, “are distracting me.”
She laughs—the sound is melodic as bells in such a hellish atmosphere. Din’s bare hand finds her cheek, stroking over her cheekbone, her bottom lip. They both melt, a little, into each other. Entwining like roots of the same gnarled tree. Nova feels uncalled tears stinging at the bridge of her nose, flooding in at the corners of her eyes. The air is heavy, thick. Tensioned. She’s suspended here by her Mandalorian. “What?”
“C’mere.”
Nova feels air leave her lungs, air she didn’t have the capacity to give. “I’m here,” she whispers, the sound barely a sound at all.
“This is going to hurt,” Din says gruffly, and fear drops in Nova’s chest like an anvil.
“Nope.”
“Novalise—”
“No needles.”
He looks at her head-on. In the low light of the quickening dark around them, Nova can almost see the outline of his eyes. Maybe she’s just memorized them—the depth of them, where they sit on his face. “You pulled a blade out of the muscle of your stomach,” Din says, shortly, “and the cauterized it.”
“Yes.”
“But a bacta needle is where you draw the line?”
Nova hisses in a breath between her teeth. She can see her reflection in the silver of his helmet. “Yes,” she repeats.
Din sighs. This time, it is wearily. “It’ll be a pinch.”
“I don’t want it—”
“You take everything else, my good girl,” he murmurs, “why not this?”
Nova points a finger in his face, stabbing the nail against the visor. “Hey. You’re not playing fair—”
“Novalise,” he interrupts, holding her cheek in one gloved hand, “just—do this for me, okay?”
She swallows. Relents. Din lifts her chin with one hand and sinks the needle into the lip of her exposed belly with the other. She yelps, a little one, and then the antibiotic seeps in, and Nova relaxes. The needle hurts—but the rush of the medicine helps soothe the sting. And Din’s touch—well, that soothes it, too. She wipes a single pearl of blood away from where the point went in. Din brushes one gloved finger over it, feather-light, and it disappears into the leather.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Din murmurs, “was it, cyar’ika?”
“You distracted me,” she says, haughtily, expecting Din to laugh again. But his grip tightens, his knees sag, and both of them sink back against the wall. Nova blinks up again, grimey forehead almost pressed flush against his metal one. “Din—?”
“You scared me,” Din says quietly. “Terrified me. If I had gotten back there and you were—” he chokes, and the tears spill to the forefront of her eyes. “Fuck, Novalise. I don’t—I don’t know what I would have done.”
She swallows. She wants to touch his face, to ground him against her. To push the fear away. “I’m alive,” Nova breathes. “I’m here.”
Something changes in his body language, although she can’t quite put a finger on what. Tightens. Shifts. Like silver mercury, becoming rigid. “What if—”
“No what ifs,” Nova says, much more decisive than she feels. “I am right here.” And it’s true, she realizes. For the first time since they left Mandalore on this gods-damned failed mission, she feels like herself. Whatever was inhabiting her—the darkness—has quieted. Put on mute. Not gone. She can feel it, still. But for right now—now, the fight has flooded back into her veins—she is starlight, golden, herself. Nova tightens her grip on Din’s hand, still silhouetting her face. “You pulled me back,” she whispers. “Every time, you pull me back.”
It conjures a memory. Not one that’s passed—one that’s waiting for her. Nova feels herself stutter over timelines, lost between what’s happened and what’s to come, and then it’s all drowned out as her husband moves closer. Din’s helmet rests against her forehead, anchoring her in place. Nova can feel the steel of the wall through the protective curtain of her hair—and it isn’t even half as strong as the man on his knees in front of her. She breathes, the cloud of air fogging up the bloodied visor, and then Din’s hand is leaving her, and Nova makes a disappointed noise, low in her throat like an animal.
He chuckles. His laugh could launch a thousand birds out of the sky. “Need to give you something.”
Nova rears back. “Nope.”
Din laughs again. Her heart clenches against the sweet, sweet sound. “It’s not another bacta shot.”
Nova’s eyes narrow. “Don’t know if I believe you,” she says.
Din sighs. Din’s always sighing. But this time, it’s not out of exasperation. “Will you just—”
“No needles,” Nova says. She’s trying to sound brave. She really is. But bravery left with the golden light of her lightsaber, and she has to really muster up the conviction. “Mean it.”
“Novalise.”
“Mm.” It’s noncommittal, that noise, her hands held up, braced against his pauldrons. “If you’re lying to me—”
“Relax,” Din hisses, and for some reason, some untold signal in his voice, she does.
His hand isn’t in the pocket on his belt that was hiding the bacta. No, he’s reaching into a hidden one, tucked in the inner workings of his beskar, and the protest dies in her throat. Nova’s breath evaporates into the air around them. In his one, ungloved hand, Din is holding a ring. It’s silver, but lighter than the beskar he shines in, lighter than the beskar of his ring she’s worn proudly on her left hand since he first dropped to his knees in Nevarro. But in the middle, mercurial, shifting, is a marbled, swirling grey stone. It looks—alive. Almost like the Kyber that ignites her lightsaber, but not really. Almost like her mother’s pearls that hung around her neck, but not quite. It’s unlike anything Nova has ever seen before, and yet, it calls to her. It sings. Like calls to like.
“Found this,” Din says gruffly, like he’s trying to keep emotion out of his voice, and Nova’s heart swells. “It’s for you.”
She shakes her head imperceptibly, blinking up at him. “Where?”
“I’ve almost lost you so many times.” It’s not an answer to her question. Nova doesn’t care. “I know we’ve been…” he swallows. “Fighting. Arguing. Like we haven’t… been on the same…wavelength.” It’s her word, coming out of Din’s mouth, and Nova’s never loved it more. “I’m sorry.” He clears his throat, and then, huskily: “I’m trying. I love you.”
“I love you,” she echoes, reaching out to touch him, to take the ring. Din moves, stacking it on top of her engagement ring, and it hisses into place. It swirls in front of her eyes, the metal cool to the touch, the stone a pool for her to fall into—swallowing. Consuming. It slots onto Nova’s finger like it was made for her. Like it’s been missing this whole time. It pulses. It glows. It’s obsidian and ivory. It’s silver and not. It is hers. It sings out to her. Nova responds.
“Do you like it?” Din cuts back in, slices through her reverie. His voice is so low, slung deep. Hungry.
Fuck, Nova’s hungry, too. “Yes.” So much weight is thrown behind that one word. She swallows. Need is coursing through her veins, holding her heart hostage. “Come here.”
“Nova—”
“I know, and I don’t care,” she breathes, grabbing the back of his neck, anchoring him lower, closer. “Kiss me.”
He is fighting an unspoken battle, her Mandalorian. Nova can hear his breath deepen, intensify, can feel the heat radiating off him like magma. “You—”
“Kiss me,” she breathes, emboldened, brazen. Desire slams into her, an entire ocean. “Please.” She’ll beg. She’s not above begging. But it doesn’t matter, because Din curls his fingers underneath the rim of his helmet, pulling it clean off, and he blinks at her, brown eyes almost black.
“Fuck it,” he snarls, and then his mouth, hot and wanting, is on hers.
This is selfish. His touch, molded against her skin—that’s selfish. Devouring hers in a dirty back alley, that’s selfish. Spending time, sweet precious time, with their bodies melded together like metal, when their friends are out there fighting—that’s selfish. Nova feels the darkness flood in, take over her body like a superbloom. She sighs out against the lock of Din’s mouth against her.
“Din,” she whispers.
He stiffens like it takes all of his control, all that silver now rigid and unyielding. “What?”
Nova looks up at him, wetting her lips with her tongue. He groans out, the sound choked in the low light of the alley, and want pulses again between her legs. Hungrily. Snarling. “Don’t take it easy on me.”
His eyes are so dark. Maker, she could drown in them. Nova shudders, wanting to, needing to. “That’s not how this works.” He swallows, the sound thick. “Especially now.”
She pushes at him, clawing her fingers into the untouched skin at the back of his neck. Din whimpers—full on, loudly—and a thrill runs through Nova’s entire body. Fire, sparked to life. “It is today.”
He looks at her. “Nova—”
“Fuck it away,” she breathes into the hollow of his open mouth. “Please. Please. You want me to beg? Fine, I’m begging. You want me on my knees? You’ll have to make me.” Din’s mouth falls open wider. Nova wants to shove her tongue into it, make his lips take away all of the pain. “Yeah, it hurts. It hurts.” And it does. But what’s a little charred flesh worth in battle against her Mandalorian? Nothing. “Make me ache. Fuck the pain away.”
Din grips the back of her head, a halo of hair in his ungloved, unbloodied hand. There’s a metaphor in it, in the way he’s clutching at her like his unbecoming. Nova sighs into the space between them—just armor and skin, nothing more.
“You don’t know what you’re asking.”
Nova does not flinch. “Yes. I do.”
She’s calling Din on his bluff. He’s holding himself back. Right now, it’s not Din she’s speaking to. She wants the monster underneath his skin, licking and pulsing like flames. It’s barely contained. It is snarling at her, screaming. He is a tar pit. He is blackened steel. He is all beskar, all blade. Nova knows what she’s asking.
She loves Din. But right now, she needs the Mandalorian.
When he breaks, when he crashes his mouth against hers, it’s not reassuring. It doesn’t taste like empathy, like sweetness. He’s not trying to take away the pain. Din’s doing exactly what she asked for. He’s going to fuck it all away.
Din’s tongue, leaden, is heavy inside Nova’s mouth. It pulses, rolling over her own, desperate. Cloying. Needy. He is all teeth and bone. He growls—really, truly growls—and it’s not a mockery. It’s not anything but desire, coiled so deep it needs to strike. Like a pit viper. Like a rattlesnake. Like venom and honey. She wants to drink it down.
“Novalise—”
“Tear me apart,” she enunciates, the words barely a whisper, already off on Corellia’s fetid wind. “I give you permission.” Then, louder, emboldened, for only him to hear: “No mercy.”
Din’s mouth returns and leaves like a furious tide, biting down on her lips, cascading down her neck, licking tides to her collarbone, over and over. He is rhythmic in his domination. Unyielding. This is not the man she married. This is the Mandalorian she loved first. He takes instruction well, the weapon of a man in front of her. And then he takes control.
Din’s hands—cloying, desperate—rip at the seam of her pants. It burns so bright, his fingers wrenching her clothes away. Nova’s eyes are blackening at the edges, sweet, sweet sensation. “Don’t rip them,” she mewls, and his hand stills. Shame and need war inside of her, and Nova reels back against the metal wall. Her knees—all that’s left standing, at this point, the rest of her body slumped against Din’s metal one—shake on the cold ground.
“So bold,” he croons, and the hair on the back of Nova’s neck stands straight up. His hands dip lower, lower than her belt, low enough to hook around the waistband of her panties, and flame licks at the very core of her. “You’re not in charge,” he whispers, and every word is electric, a live wire, a lightning bolt. Nova isn’t cold, but she shivers. “You gave that up, sweet girl. You don’t get to make demands. But fuck, you sounds so good when you try.”
“Still have—” she pants, “a mission to f-finish—”
“Then shut your pretty mouth,” Din snarls, “and let me finish you first.”
That does it. Nova hums out as he digs low. His fingers are filthy. Not with blood or grime—no, not from the men he felled back on the impromptu Corellian battlefield. No, he kept his gloves on for that. But with her—slick, wet, wanting. Nova’s eyes roll back in her head as Din sinks two fingers inside of her, to the hilt, and curls. He presses, and she feels it building, the crushing crescendo of an orgasm, already, yes, already—but then there’s an absence of where his fingers once were, and her eyes open fully, eyebrows furrowed in frustration—
He’s sinking the same two fingers into his mouth. The moan he emits could fell a nation. An army. Nova’s not sure. She would die on the battlefield if this were her enemy, silver-clad and dangerous. Electric. She blinks at him, eyes half-lidded. “Oh,” she says, distantly, distantly because there’s something buzzing in her ears. “Oh—”
“Taste so fucking good,” he grits out, and Nova shudders, going limp. And then his fingers are back inside of her. “Clench around me. Good girl.” He takes a fistful of her hair in the other bare hand and yanks back. Hard. Nova’s ears are still ringing. “Harder.” It’s rhapsodic, that voice. An echo chamber of filth shudders back at her.
“Tell me,” she whispers. To cum is the rest of that sentence, but stars above, Nova can’t finish it. She’s limp. Undone. And all he’s done is touch her—and then Din’s fingers, that ecstasy, is gone again. “Fuck—” she cries, frustrated, and Din chuckles. The sound is so bright, so perfect, that it dulls the ache of his absence. A little. And then it floods back in and Nova grabs at his wrist. But it doesn’t budge. It trails up from the sucking seam of her pussy, wet with her own slick.
“Stop leaving me,” she whines.
Din chuckles again. Lower this time. It feels like a vibration. Nova hums, and then he’s gripping her face. Hard. Her lips pucker out as he clenches down on her cheeks. It hurts, pain singing out in the best way. “Open.”
Nova tries to comply, she really does, but her mouth is being held captive by the massive plain of Din’s flexed fist. He shoves his fingers inside, wet and dripping. “This is how you taste,” he hisses, licking a line of it off the cleft of her split bottom lip. “Before you’ve even cum for me.” He clicks his tongue. Nova’s thighs clench together. It’s involuntary, truly. “Wanna taste how sweet you are when you have?”
She stutters out a breath, lips puckered in a perfect O, and the way Din grins at her is sinful. Criminal. Dark and lecherous, if it were any other mouth wearing that smile, but he looks at her like he worships her, even now, and Nova’s heart flips.
“Need you,” she manages, through the painful part of her mouth, “please—”
“Who am I to deny my sweet girl,” Din breathes, “when she begs for me?”
Nova can barely keep her eyes open. Din’s grip lessens, just a little. The other hand, previously anchoring her hip in place—which is likely going to be sporting purpled bruises tomorrow, but Nova doesn’t care—leaves the curve of her waist to shove something at her. It’s her shawl. Nova blinks at it. “What—?”
“Cover your stomach,” Din says, brushing the mess of ringlets out of her face. “Don’t get it dirty.”
“It’s—” Nova’s breath catches as he pushes her back against the wall, dragging her body up against the durasteel of the abandoned building they’re up against—fuck, she can’t think straight. “Not a wound anymore—”
“Don’t care,” Din grits out, shoving it against her skin. Nova feels the pain of the contact, just a little. Faintly. Maker. She’s losing it. “No cover, no cock.” Hearing him say it so crudely sparks something bright and devastating in the pit of her stomach. “Don’t argue with me. You won’t win.”
Nova nods. Din’s hand finds her chin again—still slick—and she sighs out into the air around them.
“I’m going to fuck you now,” he rasps out.
Nova looks down—he is still, so regrettably, clothed. She pouts. “Wanna see you.”
Din grins again. Devilish. Dark. Her stomach curls. That softness, there just a minute ago, is gone. He is a blade, the pit of a man called into battle. “Then look down,” he simpers, and then his hand slips down to her throat, pushing just hard enough to make her beloved stars explode.
Nova cries out into the open air, stifled by the warrior’s hand clenching around her airway. Just how she likes it. She tries to look down. To see his cock, thick and wanting, pierce her, cleave her in two. She wants to watch—really watch—to see how the Mandalorian moves inside of her—but Nova can’t. She’s trapped in the staccato rhythm of pleasure and pain, equally enticing.
“Look at me.”
Nova hears it, dully. She’s too far gone, already almost on the edge again. Din’s grunting, animalistic, and it’s the sweetest, sickest sound she’s ever heard. She is undone. This is sacrosanct. This is divine. She was standing on holy ground, and her Mandalorian is desecrating it.
“Novalise.” Her name cuts through, and Nova abandons sweet disconnect to look him in the eye. Din’s not here right now. He is the version of himself that kills, that slaughters. She wants him. She needs him. “Look at me.”
“Maker,” she manages, strangled, and Din hoists her higher against the wall to fuck into her harder, deeper, so much deeper, sheathing himself inside her like he would a blade into safety, except nothing about this feels safe. She’s craved danger before. But Nova has never craved danger more.
“No,” Din snarls. “No Maker is here right now. No, cyar’ika. You pray to me.”
Her orgasm rips through her—bluntly. Unyielding. Unfettered, like the pulse of her Mandalorian. He cries out, grunting, fingers curling in her hair.
“Who do you belong to?” Din asks, and the sound is ringing from somewhere far, far away. Nova is a universe of exploding stars. She is slick and sweaty, dangling from the wall like an animal while the man in front of her rips her to shreds in the sweetest, holiest way.
“Mmm,” Nova manages. She is gone. She is over in another galaxy, her body hanging limp in Din’s hands. “You.”
He fists a hand in her hair, dragging her gaze up to his. “I’m not finished with you yet.” And—fuck—he’s not. He snaps his hips into hers. An unending rhythm. Time stops. There is nothing here—nothing on this plane of existence. There’s Din, and there’s Nova, and there’s the want, the heavy thrum of sex, desire pumping amorphous, silty blood through their veins. This is a darkened star, this is the only thing in the world. The divine feeling of her Mandalorian, fucking with abandon, bisecting her. Din tips Nova over the edge, once, twice, three more times. She is a mewling, destroyed mess.
“Mine,” Din is whispering. Chanting. Then, in Mando’a: “ibac’ner.”
It’s a prayer. Or something close to it. Nova’s eyes open, watching her Mandalorian’s face as he comes undone.
“Yours,” she whispers, into the open hollow of his mouth, and then everything contracts. He slams into her, once, twice, three times—and then he’s undone, spurting into her, hot and wet and warm, and Nova feels something settle and crack inside of her all at once. She can hear his heartbeat. Through the armor. Through everything, They stay there, panting, foreheads locked together, and when Din pulls out of her, Nova mourns. He licks his lips as he tucks his cock back in his pants. He wipes the cum leaking out of her away with his bare hands. Nova watches, half-lidded, as he lifts his fingers to her mouth. Nova takes it like communion. She feels wrecked. A ship hurled against rock. Undone. And fortified. That sweet, sweet darkness licks at her edges.
“What do you taste?” His voice is low. Guttural. Whatever Din let out of its cage is not fully back in.
Nova hums, licking it off her lips. “You.”
He smiles, wicked and low, before pulling his helmet back over his head. “Not quite.” Then, modulated, voice duo-toned, flickering like the Darksaber, double-sided like the vessel of his armor and the stature of the man within it, with one finger hooked under her chin: “Us.”
Nova doesn’t have time to contemplate what that means. Two things happen.
One: She just feels the vantablack obsidian curling low in her stomach—seeping back in.
Let's admit it, the wait for the final season has been unbearably lonely - but it doesn't need to be!
Chaos Force 99 is a chaotic good server that has been around since the first season, with social members, good memes, and an even greater crew!
Our server has a range of channels, from the depths of Star Wars lore, to the general highs of day to day life.
Not to mention, we have channels for darker topics; feel free to openly rage in our many vent channels, or enjoy smut in our variety of NSFW channels (18+ only.)
At the end of the day, we're all here for the same thing - to cry over however The Bad Batch will end (?!!!??!)
We welcome all, no matter your age, gender, location, etc!
So I just had a very interesting conversation with my dad. He and I have always bonded over similar interests in media (ie movies, books, shows, music etc.) and we were discussing Harry Potter and what a 'What if...' series for that would look like.
Suddenly he drops on me that he always thought Hermione and Draco should have ended up together. In his head he always saw the treatment of Hermione as more of a schoolboy crush that turned to obsession. That Draco didn't know how to treat his feelings towards the pretty and smart muggle-born because he was always taught to be disgusted by them.
My father proceeded to articulate a beautiful verbal Dramione head canon with details and reasonings for a little under half an hour and that the end of his explanation... I told him about fanfiction and sent him a link to AO3. Something tells me he's going to benefit greatly from this, but I'm still wrapping my head around the fact that my dad is a Dramione Shipper
I've been seeing a lot of discourse (mostly on the clock app) about the casting for the show and I'll be completely honest, when I first saw the cast list I wasn't happy about it at the time myself. I have always hated studios that adapt and existing work and then change the ethnicity of a character to "be more diverse" when in reality they do nothing to diversify any other part of story just "here's a colored character." It's always felt like such an empty gesture to me and that is exactly what I thought Disney was doing with this series.
Now I have seen the first three episodes and I have got to say, it was not at all an empty gesture. The move to cast a wider net for the talent they have casted in this show was the best move they could have made. The actors are portraying their characters beautifully. The casting choices feel like the show runners really put personalities first and looks last. Percy is sassy, Annabeth is ballsy, Grover is giving neurotic camp counselor.
Another thing that I've loved about this new adaptation is you can feel Riordan's growth as a storyteller. The books he wrote were meant for 2005 middle-schoolers and his writing was mindful of that. Now he has seen how the world has grown and shifted and he obviously has recognized that there was
1) a lack of diversity in the original book series
2) a slight undertone of unaddressed misogyny
3) a general need for more awareness past percy's POV.
All of this to say, I'm so freaking happy with direction the show is moving. It's diverse without feeling token, it addresses the deeper issues without being in your face, and it focuses on Percy as the main character but with more of a third person limited omniscient POV rather than only being focused on Percy.
The others finally arrive to your apartment and you learn quickly that Fives isn't the only dominant one.
Explicit - 3.1k words - first person - female reader
Chapter 3 | Chapter 5 | Masterlist | AO3
Tags: Reader x Echo, Reader x Fives, Reader x Jesse, Reader x Kix, Reader x Rex, Jedi!Reader, Fem!Reader, AFAB!Reader, the 501st, Coruscant, 79s, poly?ish, kissing, no use of Y/N, no beta (WE DIE LIKE MEN), I tried my best to edit, THIS ONE IS PURE SMUT
WARNINGS and fic below the cut
NO YOUNGLINGS BEYOND THIS POINT
Warnings and Explicit tags: nudity, exhibtionhism, voyeurism, dominant/submissive, sub!reader, choking, uses of terms like (slut and whore), breast fondling, threesome, g@ngbang, vag!nal, an@l, oral m!receiveing, creamp!e, @nal creamp!e, throatp!e, facial, cum play, everyone gets involved, consent is key, aftercare is sexy
Please let me know if I missed anything
Echo stared at me in a way that sent shivers up and down my spine. Kix was smirking at the sight of me in the pale yellow silk robe. Jesse was the first one to speak.
“No need to be so formal, sweetheart,” he stated plainly as he approached me and put his hands on my hips. “We all know why we’re here.”
I inhaled sharply as his fingertips dug into my flesh. My gaze flicked from his eyes to his lips and back again. I didn’t understand why I was nervous. Possibly because there were four men standing in my home, all ready and willing to fuck me.
Hold on. Four?
I looked around with a look of confusion. Jesse laughed, grabbing my chin lightly and bringing my focus back to him.
“What? Is four not enough?” He smirked.
My eyes widened at his bluntness earning a chuckle from him in response.
“I’m just kidding. Rex wishes he could have been here, but he’s got an early start tomorrow.” Jesse leaned in close to my ear, “but he said that he’ll just have to make up for it some other time and to give you this.”
Jesse pulled me into a deep and passionate kiss. The kind of kiss that made me weak in the knees. He broke away with the biggest grin. I glanced around the room to see how the others reacted to that. Echo was standing just behind Jesse, Fives and Kix were right behind me. All the men were smirking with a fire in their eyes. The same fire sparked inside me and all my nerves burned away into excitement. I licked my lips and spun around in Jesse’s grip so I could face the two men behind me. My ass pressed against Jesse and I could feel him getting harder by the second. I leaned my head back against his chest and locked on to Kix. I gestured for him to come closer, beckoning him with the motion of a single finger. He did as I asked and I draped my arms over his shoulders, pulling him into me and effectively trapping myself between the two clones.
Kix's hands found my neck and trailed up into my hair. He laced his fingers into my crown and brushed his lips teasingly against mine. So light that I wasn't entirely sure he had touched them at all. I let out an involuntary whimper.
Jesse leaned down into my ear, while Kix continued to tease me with the possibility of kisses.
“What is it? Do you want him to kiss you? Want to feel his lips on yours with my cock pressed against your ass?” Jesse’s words made my mind go numb and the overpowering need crept back in. I nodded in agreement to his words.
Kix pulled at my hair lightly and spoke so close to my lips that he brushed them with every syllable, “Use your words.”
My eyes rolled back and I shut them as I moaned again from the tension on my scalp.
“Yes…” I moaned.
Jesse’s hand snaked up my body and to my throat, he grasped it with gentle pressure as he growled into my ear, “Yes…who?”
A chill ran through my body. I’m not sure when he did, but Fives had somehow told them. Regardless, I was glad he did.
“Yes, sir.”
Kix finally pressed his lips to mine. He was slow, deep, methodical. He worked me open, licking at my lips lightly, and without even realizing it I had given into him completely. Moaning into his mouth as he explored and tasted every bit of mine, our tongues dancing around each other. He lulled me into a trance, and I would have completely forgotten about the surrounding men.
I would have, if not for Jesse kissing my neck and grinding against my ass as he whispered, “That’s a good girl. Such a good little Jedi slut.”
My eyes flew open and my mouth froze. I locked eyes with Fives. He took a step forward, clearing his throat. “We hadn’t discussed talk like… that yet. She may not be into it,” he warned.
I appreciated Fives’ concern with my boundaries, but my reaction hadn't been from them being crossed. In fact it had been quite the opposite. Kix had pulled back from the kiss when I had frozen, and Jesse’s grip was loosening around my neck. I mentally cursed myself for what I was about to do, but in all honesty, I didn’t care anymore. I reached out with the force and wrapped Jesse’s hand back around my neck with even more pressure than before. I shot Fives a sultry look that said everything he needed to know as I bit my lower lip and moaned.
“Mmm… I think she likes it, don’t you Fives?” Jesse said with the same air of cockiness that Fives had.
“I want to hear her say it.” He commanded indirectly. The fact that they were talking about me and not to me should have pissed me off, but instead it was making me unbelievably wet.
“Well?” Kix probed. “Tell us what you want.”
My brain felt as if it had completely melted, but I managed to stutter out, “W–want to be your good little J–jedi slut, sir.”
I was too lost in my own arousal to notice the shift in the room. The men circled me like hungry wolves, their eyes alight with desire.
Jesse's voice hummed in my ear, "Look at them. Look how badly they want you. Feel how badly I want you." He finally released me and I stood at the center of the small circle.
I spun slowly, taking in the face of every clone I had invited in. A wave of confidence washed over me. These men were here for me, wanting me, craving me. I smirked at the thought.
I took the hands of Kix and Jesse, guiding them down the hallway towards my bedroom. Fives and Echo followed close behind. The door slid open to reveal my modest room, stark yet warm. I didn't have much in the way of decorations, but the massive bed and floor to ceiling windows made up for it.
I guided them over to the foot of my bed and that was the end of my control. Jesse slipped from my grasp and sat on the bed in front of me, his gaze a fire on my skin. Kix pulled me into another kiss while Fives and Echo positioned them at the head of the mattress, content to watch this unfold for now.
Kix broke the kiss off and spun me to face the bed, the three men watching me intently. I felt Kix hands reach for the loose bow on my robe and the fabric slid effortlessly off my body to pool at my feet. I was bare in front of these men, all of them in varying states of undress. Echo was no longer donning his armor plates and had ditched his shirt. Fives was still lounging in the towel he had wrapped around himself after the shower.
Then there was the man directly in front of me. Jesse had removed everything while Kix had been preoccupying me. His hard cock flexed as his hand reached for my waist. My heart hammered in my chest as I let him pull me in. I stood between his open legs as he nipped and sucked at my bare skin, working his way up to tender breasts.
His hand hooked the back of my knee as he sucked my nipple into his mouth, urging me to straddle his lap.
I followed his lead and settled down into his lap, the head of his cock pressing against my swollen clit in the process. I whimpered at the contact. Jesse’s attention shifted from one breast to the other and his hand drifted between our bodies. He rubbed his cock through my wetness and I gasped. Jesse released my nipple.
“So wet for us already and we’ve barely even touched her yet. She’s being such a good little slut, don't you agree?” His voice was rough and his words vibrated through my entire body. The two men behind him hummed in agreement but then a voice came from behind me.
“Hmm… such a good girl. How much do you think she can take?” Kix gently wrapped his hand around my neck, gently coaxing my head back so that we made eye contact. Jesse teased my entrance with his tip as he responded, “Not sure, guess we just have to find out.”
Jesse pressed me down onto his cock, filling me completely. A loud moan escaped my lips and my eyes fluttered shut.
Kix’s hand tightened around my throat, “Ah ah ah, eyes open and on me.” Still adjusting to the stretch of Jesse’s cock, I forced my eyes open. Kix looked different than he had before, he was composed and domineering with a look in his eyes hungrier than any of the others.
“Good little Jedi,” he said with a slight smirk. I was hypnotized, and then Jesse thrusted. My eyes wanted to shut, but I did as I was told and remained as I was for Kix. Jesse began to drive up into me, hitting the right spot with every stroke.
“Fuck, her pussy feels amazing. So warm and tight. You need to try her Kix.” Jesse sounded intoxicated as he continued to thrust into me, my moans nearly drowning out his voice.
Kix had my head in his hands, watching my face contort with pleasure, but my eyes never left his.
“You enjoy her for now, I want to watch her cum first.”
His blunt confession caused my pussy to flutter around Jesse, making him curse and thrust even deeper. I was a mess of moans and cursing now, and Kix was devouring every moment of it.
I felt Jesse lay back beneath me and his cock shifted to a different angle inside me. I wasn't going to last long in this position. His thrusts were slower and more deliberate now, but that's exactly what I needed.
“Gonna… fuck… ‘m gonna cum…” I managed.
“You cum when I tell you to,” commanded Kix. “Understood?”
My whole body was tense in anticipation of the release but I listened and nodded, “Yes…”
“Yes…?”
“Yes…Sir.”
“Good girl, just a little longer.”
Jesse had me right there, right on the edge. My whole body was shaking and I wanted so badly to give in, but something deep inside me craved to follow Kix’s orders. Jesse’s thrusts were perfect, every stroke was everything my body craved. I could hear Jesse beneath me, moaning and cursing as he sunk into me. I wanted to look. I wanted to see his pleasure, but again. Kix’s orders held me in place. Frozen and in a continuous state of near-release.
“Please… please sir… please I want to cum. I need to. I… can't hold-” I was cut off by my own moans. Kix's eyes flashed wickedly as he watched me unraveling beneath him. Without breaking eye contact, he finally commanded it.
“Cum.”
Just one word and my whole world melted. My orgasm ripped through my body, knocking the air out of my lungs. My eyes rolled back, breaking from his finally.
“Such a beautiful Jedi slut when you cum like that,” Kix praised as he released my neck.
I collapsed forward onto Jesse’s chest, my eyes closed and my body trembling from the aftershocks of my orgasm. Jesse had stopped pumping halfway through to give me a moment to breathe. Jesse's thick arms wrapped around me and held me tight against him. His cock still buried in me, no one moved.
A few still moments passed and Jesse whispered quietly in my ear, “Are you okay?”
I lifted my head from his chest, and finally looked into Jesse’s eyes. A look of relief painted his face when he saw mine.
My eyes were heavy and I felt like I was on the strongest spice in the galaxy but I was beaming at him. The biggest, dopiest grin.
“I've never been better.” I answered. A tension in the room I hadn't noticed before, released.
I felt Kix’s hand gently massage my back, “I knew she could handle it.”
Fives and Echo shot him a look that I couldn't see.
Jesse chuckled, “I know we can… be a little intense. We don't cut loose like this all the time though.”
I sat up and stared down at Jesse, “Maybe we should change that.”
My words were punctuated by a roll of my hips. I watched in satisfaction as Jesse’s eyes rolled back. I shifted again and a guttural groan erupted from deep within his chest, his jaw clenching as he attempted to keep his composure.
I looked to Fives and Echo as a grinded against Jesse a third time. They had long since abandoned any semblance of clothing and were now palming themselves slowly, taking in the show that was being put on at the foot of the bed. I was about to make a suggestion when my thought was interrupted by Kix’s gentle kisses along the back of my neck.
Jesse had reclaimed control and was guiding my hips on him. Kix kissed a trail along my neck to my ear and gently whispered as he gripped my hair in a fist.
“Give him a kiss and thank him for letting you cum on his cock.” Kix commanded as he bent me back over so that I was face to face with Jesse. As soon as our lips met, we melted together. Kissing Jesse was intoxicating to say the least, tasting of breath mints and whiskey. I had almost lost myself completely in the kiss, but I managed to break away to whimper against his lips.
“Th-thank you for letting me cum o-on your cock.”
And then I was lost in him again, the feeling of his mouth against mine and his cock inside me was overwhelming. I was pulled from my haze when I felt a second cock rub up against me from behind. It was Kix.
Jesse moved from my lips to my ear and asked in a low voice, “which hole?”
I whimpered my answer, my voice too weak for Kix to hear.
“Which one did our slut pick?” Kix asked in anticipation, rubbing the head from one entrance to the other.
“She chose ass,” responded Jesse.
Kix hummed excitedly as he pressed a thumb inside of the untouched hole. “Is that so?”
I moaned into the crook of Jesse’s neck as the new stimulation was added to my pleasure. Jesse slowed his thrusts, pacing with Kix. He was working me open carefully, delicately, so slowly I began to beg.
“Please… please I need you so bad. Fuck my ass Sir. Please please ple-” the last plea was interrupted by the head of his cock stretching me out. Jesse stilled his thrusts as Kix sank into my ass. I felt as if I couldn't breathe, the pleasure immeasurable. Never had I felt so full in my life. Kix bottomed out, his pelvis flush against my ass.
“We’ll start slow,” he assured me as he began to pull out for the first thrust. I winced and whimpered, adjusting to the feeling. Already missing the feeling of him inside. He thrusted, filling me once more. A guttural, primal moan escaped my lips.
“My turn,” proclaimed Jesse as he resumed his thrusts. The pair of them fucking into me caused my mind to go completely blank. I was a mess of moans and pleas. Jesse’s arms wrapped around my waist and Kix gripped my hips. Both progressively picked up pace, eventually matching up with their tempo and speed. There was nothing else. Just them and me. And then there was a third pair of hands.
My head was lifted by the gentle hand of the first man. The one I had started my night with. Echo.
“Open that pretty little mouth for me,” he ordered. I did exactly as he asked, nice and wide. He tapped his tip against my tongue and I sucked him in. Echo’s hand fisted my hair as he began to fuck my mouth. I did what I could, but being as cock-drunk as I was it wasn't much. Every hole was filled. Jesse in my pussy. Kix in my ass. Echo in my mouth.
My orgasms had blurred together at this point, my body was weak and trembling as these men pumped into me.
Jesse began to grunt and moan much louder than before beneath me, his thrusts getting needier and more erratic.
“Fuck… gonna cum… feels so good… ahh” Jesse released inside my pussy. He peppered my breasts with soft kisses as he softened. Echo pulled himself from my mouth and shifted so Jesse could climb out from underneath me.
Kix took this opportunity to pull me flush to his chest and thrust up into my ass with reckless abandon. The new angle caused a whole new wave of pleasure to crash over me. He held my throat with one hand and touched my cum soaked pussy with the other.
“Look at them. This is what you’ve done to us.” I opened my eyes to see Fives and Echo excitedly stroking themselves while Jesse was coming down from his release.
“Make them cum for you my good little whore.” Kix bent me back over and I took Echo back into my mouth. I worked him with my mouth till I felt him tense up and then I thrusted him deep down my throat, allowing all his cum run down into my stomach.
Echo fell back onto the bed and was replaced by Fives. He knelt in front of my face, moments from his release he merely commanded
“Stick out your tongue.”
My mouth and face were painted in his cum, hot and sticky. I took what made it into my mouth and swallowed, not breaking eye contact.
Finally it was Kix’s turn. He pressed my face down into the mattress creating an arch. He moaned and pounded into my ass, several long hard strokes and he was gone. He spilled inside me and pulled out, but instead of falling onto the bed beside me he stood behind me for a moment longer. Any cum that dripped out he pushed back in with his thumb.
“You keep that inside you, understood?”
All I could manage was a small nod.
“Good girl,” and with that he was beside me.
I was scooped into his arms and held against his bare chest. I could hardly open my eyes but I could feel everyone caring for me. Hands massaging my legs or caressing my hair. A warm wet towel cleaning my body. Kisses on my cheek and forehead.
I hadn't planned on it but I drifted off to sleep that way. Not a care in the world, and doted on by the men I had brought home with me.
