[selencgraphy]

𝐒𝐄𝐋𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐏𝐇𝐘'𝐒 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓 ⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚

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last updated: 08/05/2025

– 𝐒𝐔𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐀𝐋

ONE SHOTS:

You Can't Handle the Truth - dean winchester x f!reader

– 𝐓𝐎𝐏 𝐆𝐔𝐍 𝐌𝐀𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐂𝐊

SERIES:

Please Don't Leave Me Hanging (Completed)

ONE SHOTS:

Can I Call You Tonight?

Fangs

Safety Net

HOT TO GO!

I Love You, I'm Sorry (NEW)

BLURBS:

tyler owens backstory but make it jake seresin

– 𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐕𝐄𝐋

SERIES:

About You (Ongoing)

Retribution (Ongoing)

ONE SHOTS:

Brothers, Bound in Red

i won't have to miss you

Mischievous Adventure

Weekend of Chaos

Welcome Home

I Got You

Lavender Haze

Blueberry Waffles

And If I Ever Get Too Far (I Remember Where I Left My Heart)

– 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐔𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐒:

ONE SHOTS:

Midnight by the Fire

– 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐆𝐑𝐈𝐒𝐇𝐀𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐄:

ONE SHOTS:

Late Nights

– 𝐌𝐈𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐋𝐋𝐀𝐍𝐄𝐎𝐔𝐒

RPF

Getting with the Program (Sebastian Stan)

So American (Callum Turner)

LOVE LANGUAGES || nonverbal ways of saying "i love you"

holding and squeezing their hands - jake seresin

sending them photo updates of what you’re doing - peter parker

remembering a trivial fact about them - logan howlett

buying something that reminds you of them - bradley bradshaw

open arms, ready for a hug - russell shaw

getting them out of an uncomfortable situation - beau arlen

[aquaticmercy]

Maybe This Time

Summary : John Walker trying to manage his anger issues accidentally turns into a second chance at love.

Pairing : New Avengers! John Walker x reader (she/her)

Warnings/tags : Tower-ish fic? FLUFF!!! divorce, co-parenting, you are John's crisis de-escalation trainer, workplace romance, Olivia has a new boyfriend, you are mentioned to have a sister and a niece, shooter mention, dental anxiety, food. (Let me know if I miss anything!) 

Word Count : 17.3k

Requested by : Anons! This is a combination these requests: X X

Notes : First time writing a full fic just for John! I swear I intended it to be 5k words but I am incapable of restraint when it comes to writing, apparently. Enjoy!

John didn’t want Olivia back.

He didn’t sit outside her place mourning the life they had lost. He didn’t picture himself walking back through the front door, walking back into her life like no time had passed, picking up where they had left off. There was nowhere to pick up from. There was no bookmark wedged between the pages of their nonexistent marriage, waiting for them to find it again.

There were too many dead versions of them scattered between the two teenagers they used to be and the two adults they had become. The high school sweethearts to military couple pipeline was simple enough. What came after, though? The serum and whatever he was now? No, they simply were two different people. They simply grew apart. 

John had made peace with the fact that they were over. The problem was that Olivia had started dating again first. Which meant she was winning the divorce.

Which was insane.

He knew it was insane. He knew divorce wasn’t a sport. He knew healing didn’t come with a scoreboard, and there was no prize for being the first person to look normal again. But this was John Walker we’re talking about, and Olivia moving on like a functional adult meant that she was beating him at life. And John was nothing if not competitive. As far as he was concerned, Olivia had points on the board and he didn’t.

John had government-monitored rage incidents and a search history full of “how to not hate your ex-wife’s boyfriend.”

Every other weekend, John would pull up to pick up his son, prepared to be mature, steady, and reasonable. A father, a grown man, a person who had done therapy-adjacent breathing exercises with Bob and therefore considered himself emotionally evolved.

Then the front door would open, and Olivia’s new boyfriend would be there.

The guy wasn’t even easy to hate.  If he had been smug, John could have worked with that. If he had been condescending, or handsy, or one of those guys who tried too hard to prove he was comfortable around another man’s kid, John could have filed him away as an asshole and let the anger fester without feeling guilty. 

The boyfriend’s name was Nathan, and Nathan wore clean sneakers and quarter-zips and had the calm face of aman who had never once been dragged into an international incident. He had neat hair, good posture, and a normal job. John didn’t know what the job was, because asking would imply interest, and John refused to be interested in Nathan on principle.

Nathan opened the door with his son’s bag on his shoulder, “Hey, John,” like they were neighbors.

Nathan remembered the stuffed dinosaur. Nathan knew the diaper bag needed the blue cup, not the yellow one, because the yellow one leaked if it tipped sideways. Nathan crouched to zip up tiny sneakers with patient hands while Olivia gathered a jacket from the hallway closet. So every time Nathan handed over the bag, John felt the score shift. Bing bing bing! 2-0!

Olivia: one emotionally stable boyfriend who knew the snack schedule.

John: one tactical vest in the trunk.

Nathan smiled at him one Saturday morning with a mug in his hand in John’s old kitchen.

He had signed the papers. He knew the house was Olivia’s now in every way that mattered. But his body hadn't received the update. Some stupid, territorial part of him still recognized the front hall and the little hook where his keys used to go. And then there was Nathan standing barefoot on the tile with coffee like he had spawned there naturally.

“Morning,” Nathan said. “Good to see you, man.”

John almost laughed. “Yeah,” he said instead. “You too.”

It came out flat enough that Olivia looked at him tilting her head.

His son squealed from the living room, and John stepped around Nathan to get him.

The kid launched himself at John’s legs with complete, reckless trust, and for half a second the whole world rearranged itself around the feeling of small hands gripping his jeans, his son shouting, “Daddy!” like John had never been anything other than wanted.

He bent down and picked him up.

There. That helped. That always helped.

For three seconds, the scoreboard didn’t exist. Then Nathan came out with the diaper bag.

“Packed extra wipes,” Nathan said. “He had a thing with the applesauce earlier.”

When John took the bag, his hand closed around the strap too tightly. “Great,” he said.

Nathan smiled politely. If he had been insincere in any capacity, John couldn’t spot it. “No problem.”

John wanted to bite through concrete. He hated that Nathan had packed the wipes. He hated that Nathan had been there for the applesauce thing. He hated that he knew there had been an applesauce thing at all. He hated that Nathan’s mug said something stupidly wholesome on it, probably from a farmer’s market. He hated that nobody was doing anything wrong.

Still, he knew Olivia was allowed to date. Nathan was allowed to be nice. Their son was allowed to be comfortable in the house he lived in, and in fact, John was relieved that he was. But that must mean John was allowed to feel complicated about it, too, right?

He was not, however, allowed to turn the whole thing into a personal war.

When he buckled his son into the car seat and glanced back toward the porch, Olivia and Nathan were standing side by side in the doorway. Olivia lifted a hand in goodbye, and Nathan did too.

John lifted his hand back because he wasn’t a monster. Then he got into the driver’s seat, closed the door, and sat there for one second too long with both hands on the wheel.

Winning. She’s winning!!! The thought flashed hot and stupid behind his eyes.

His son babbled a Bluey song in the back seat.

John looked at him in the rearview mirror and forced his grip to loosen. “Yeah, buddy,” he said, calming down almost immediately. “We’re going.”

He drove away like a normal person.

He made it three blocks before he muttered, “Goddamn Nathan,” under his breath like it was a curse.

His son repeated, “I call him Nay-fin because he has pet fish!”

John winced. “Don’t do that.”

“Nay-fin!”

“Buddy, please.”

“Nay-fin, Nay-fin, Nay-fin.”

By the time John pulled into traffic, he was considering whether crashing the car very gently into their mailbox when he came back counted as a setback.

—

There had been incidents, but not capital-I Incidents.  John would have made that distinction very clear if anyone had been brave enough to stand in front of him and call them that. 

They were simply… small things. Stupid things. Yes, he might’ve put a dent in the elevator panel because the doors stalled. Yes, he might’ve cracked a mug in the kitchen because Ava had asked him if he was “coping”. Yes, he might’ve punched a training dummy hard enough to take out half a weapons rack, which, in his defense, was what training dummies were technically for. 

If anyone saw them as individual, isolated incidents, none of it would be considered catastrophic. Nothing made the news, no one got hurt, no country issued a statement. No blurry civilian footage hit the internet with his name trending in all caps. But together, apparently, it made his teammates raise an eyebrow.

Bob noticed first, which made it worse. Bob didn’t make accusations or corner John and tell him to get his shit together. He just stood in the training room after the dummy incident, staring at the wreckage with those worried eyes like the dummy had a soul. Later, he told Yelena that he thought John was “having a hard time.” Yelena told Mel because of course she did. Mel told Valentina because she was contractually obligated to, and Valentina, naturally, couldn’t have cared less. John breaking things barely registered as a crisis to her. It was just another line item in the budget, somewhere below ammunition, blackmail, and whatever Alexei kept charging to the company card under “team morale.” Then Bucky overheard. 

So Bucky Barnes, of all people, ended up standing in front of him with his arms crossed and that irritatingly calm look on his face, like he had become the emotional adult in the room through some administrative error. Bucky, who had once looked like therapy was a foreign intelligence operation. Bucky, who had trauma spanning two centuries and nine decades. Bucky, who now apparently had the nerve to look John in the eye and say, “You need help.”

John laughed because the only other option was putting his head through drywall. “You’re lecturing me about anger?” he asked, because there were very few moments in his life where the universe felt this committed to humiliation.

Bucky’s jaw ticked, but he didn’t take the bait. “Yeah,” he said. “I am.”

“That’s rich.”

“Maybe,” Bucky said. “Doesn’t make it any less true.”

Bucky didn’t sound smug or superior. He sounded like someone who had already crawled through the same swamp and hated recognizing the mud on someone else’s boots. John hated being read like that. He hated that Bucky could stand there, calmer than him, more put together than him. His life had to be spectacularly fucked if the Winter Soldier was now the emotionally stable one.

“I’m fine,” John said.

“You punched an elevator,” Bucky replied.

“It got stuck.”

“For eighteen seconds.”

“It was still stuck.”

Bucky blinked at him in a way that made John want to throw something just to justify the conversation. “You hear yourself, right?”

Unfortunately, John did. He could hear exactly how insane he sounded. He could hear the pattern Bob had noticed. He could feel the way everyone had started looking at him, measuring the distance between him and the nearest breakable object in the room. It made his skin crawl.

Bucky sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Look, I don’t care if you’re pissed. Be pissed. But we can’t have another international incident involving you.” Bucky stepped closer, voice dropping, and John hated how serious he looked. “So you’re off missions unless you do a couple of crisis de-escalation training sessions.”

There it was, the leash. It didn’t belong to Val this time, who made him go on various suicidal black ops mission. It wasn't even the military’s. It was his own teammate’s.

“You can’t do that,” John said.

“I can.”

“Since when?”

“Since the team agreed.”

The team, huh? Is that what this has come to?

John’s nostrils flared. For one stupid second, he wanted to swing at him. Not really, and not all the way. It was just an old reflex, the urge to make the nearest solid thing pay for how cornered he felt.

Bucky saw it. “Don’t.”

John hated him for that, too. He hated everyone because they were right. John had been angry for weeks, if not months. He had been angry before, but this wasn't battlefield angry. Not useful angry. Not the kind of anger that pointed toward an objective and burned through it. 

This was different. This was ugly, sour, domestic anger. Divorce anger. Nathan-knows-where-the-extra-wipes-are anger. It had nowhere honorable to go, so it kept finding walls.

“Who am I seeing?” John bit out.

“Someone I worked with during recovery,” Bucky said. 

John scoffed. “Great. So you’re outsourcing me to your therapist?”

“She’s not a therapist,” Bucky shook his head, “she does oversight, that’s all.”

“Your anger babysitter, then.”

Bucky looked exhausted. “You’re really making my point for me.”

John stared at him. Bucky stared back. Neither of them moved, and then John snatched the file out of his hand because apparently that was what his life had become. Mandatory rage oversight, arranged by Bucky Barnes, because even a former Russian asset had managed to become more emotionally regulated than him. Fantastic. Wonderful. Humbling in a way that made him want to chew glass.

“Fine,” John said.

Bucky’s eyes narrowed. “Fine?”

“I’ll go to the stupid sessions.”

John looked down at the file. Your name was printed neatly across the top, along with your credentials. He hated the font. He hated the folder. He hated the idea of sitting in a room while some calm, professional woman asked him where he felt his anger in his body. He felt it in his fist, obviously.   He tucked the file under his arm and turned to leave.

Behind him, Bucky said, “For what it’s worth, she helped.”

John swallowed. That was it: proof standing right behind him that a man could crawl out of worse things and still become steady enough to lecture somebody else.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “Well. Good for you.”

Then he walked away, already certain you were going to be the worst person he had ever met.

—

Two days later, John attended his first mandatory rage counselling session in an empty conference room on the thirty-second floor of the tower.

He had spent the entire morning in a foul mood about it. He had woken up angry, showered angry, gotten dressed angry, drank coffee angry, and glared at the file Bucky had given him angry.

The conference room was empty when he got there, because of course he was early. Not because he cared. Not because he was nervous. John didn’t get nervous about talking to some government-approved feelings babysitter in a glass-walled room with a bad view and a table long enough to host a hostage negotiation.

He was early because being late would have given Bucky something to say.That was all.

He stood near the window with his arms crossed, watching the city move beneath him like he had somewhere better to be. Which he did. Literally anywhere. A mission, a sparring mat, a shooting range, his truck. Nathan’s front porch, even. Jesus, that was how bad this was. He would rather stand in Olivia’s doorway and watch her boyfriend hand him the diaper bag than sit in a room and answer questions about his anger.

The door opened behind him.

John did not turn right away. It was petty, but he had already committed to being difficult, and there was no reason to abandon the theme this early.

“John Walker?” Your voice was not what he expected.

It was steady, but not cold. Professional, but warm. He turned, already prepared to be unimpressed, already prepared to hate the woman who thought she was brave because she could sit across from an angry man and ask him to breathe.

Then he saw you. And his first thought was: She’s cute.

John actually felt his brain snag on it.

You stood in the doorway with a bag on one shoulder and a folder tucked under your arm, dressed like someone who did home visits all the time. In this case, Tower visits. You looked composed without looking stiff, kind without looking naive.

John blinked. Then, he forced himself to snap out of it.

No. Fuck no.

That meant nothing.

He was just touch-starved, that was all. Recently divorced and hadn’t gone on a date in a while. A pretty woman walked into a room and his brain did the humiliating male thing it had been biologically programmed to do. That didn’t mean anything, right? That wasn’t a crush. That wasn’t even a thought worth dignifying.

He was just being a guy. A tired, divorced guy with bad impulse control and a mandated appointment.

You gave him a small smile, “Thanks for meeting me here.”

John looked around the empty conference room. “Didn’t really have a choice.”

“No,” you said, setting your bag down near one of the chairs. “You didn’t.”

Huh. He had expected you to soften the blow, to say something like, I know this isn’t ideal, or I understand this must be frustrating, or some other fluffed little statement designed to make the whole thing feel less like punishment.

John narrowed his eyes slightly. “That’s it?”

You glanced up from your folder. “Were you expecting me to pretend this was voluntary?”

“No.”

“Good. Then we’re already starting from a place of honesty.”

He hated that he almost smiled.

You pulled out a chair, but you didn’t sit at the head of the table. You sat along the side instead, leaving the chair across from you open. Not a power move, as John had learned to read. For a second, John had to remind himself that you had no reason to take an interrogation setup. John stayed standing.

“I understand Mr. Barnes spoke with you,” you said.

John scoffed. “That what we’re calling it?”

“What would you call it?”

“A threat.”

“Was it?”

“Yes.”

“Was it effective?”

John stared at you. You looked back, patient but not passive, pen resting lightly between your fingers.

He hated that question, but the answer was yes. Bucky threatening to bench him had been effective. Bucky telling him he was becoming a liability had worked because John could argue with feelings all day, but he couldn’t argue with being taken out of the field.

He pulled out the chair and sat down. “I’m here,” he said. “That’s what matters, right?”

“It’s a start.”

He leaned back, folding his arms. “And what, you’re gonna fix me?”

You didn’t flinch. You didn’t look wounded or challenged or impressed.

You just looked at him for a second, thoughtful in a way that made him feel more seen than he wanted to be, and said, “No.”

John blinked.

You opened your folder. “I’m going to help make sure you stop throwing government property through walls.”

For one full second, John could not decide whether to be offended or laugh. Offended won, but only barely. “It was one wall.”

You looked down at the page. “According to the report, it was two walls, one elevator panel, one training dummy, a mug, three chairs, and a decorative glass installation.”

“The glass was ugly.”

“I’ll add that to the mitigating factors.”

He did smile then, and you saw it. Even more unfortunately, you were kind enough not to look victorious about it.

Instead, you made a small note. “I want to be clear about something before we start.”

John’s shoulders tensed. “Here we go.”

“This isn’t therapy,” you said. “If you want a shrink, get a shrink. I have a recommendation list the size of a novella, but I am not that.”

His eyes narrowed. “I know.”

“Good. Then you understand I’m not here to hold your hand through a breakthrough.”

John stared at you.

You continued, voice even. “I’m not here to humiliate you. I’m not here to decide if you’re a good man or a bad man. I’m not here because the director of the CIA cares about your emotional well-being.”

John let out a humorless breath. “At least you know that.”

“Oh, I know that very well.” You clicked your pen once. “I work risk management and crisis de-escalation. I used to work in personal coaching, but now I work for corporate. I am not new to enhanced individuals. I’ve worked with soldiers, fighters, mercenaries, people who can turn a bad mood into a property damage claim. My job is to make sure you don’t cause another PR incident.”

“So I’m a liability.”

“You’re behaving like one.” you said. “Unlike therapy, I’m allowed to be harsh. I’m allowed to be direct. I’m allowed to be mean if mean keeps you from putting your fist through another wall. Got it?”

John leaned back, arms crossed. He still looked pissed off, obviously. That seemed to be his default setting. But now he looked interested too, against his will.

“So what?” he said. “You train me like a dog?”

You looked him dead in the eye. “If that worked, Mr. Walker, Mr. Barnes would've brought treats.”

For one second, he only stared. Then he laughed. You made a note.

His eyes dropped to your pen. “What are you writing?”

“That you’re trainable.”

—

By the second meeting, John had convinced himself the first one had been a fluke.

It was a weird day. He was in a bad mood and drank too much coffee. Of course John had noticed you were pretty. Anyone with a heartbeat and a preference for women would have noticed. That wasn’t a character flaw, nor was it a problem. That was certainly not the beginning of a little crush on the woman assigned to make sure he stopped damaging government property like an overgrown toddler with security clearance.

Except then you walked into the conference room again, two days later, with your bag on your shoulder and your folder under your arm, and John’s first thought was, oh, good.

Not, oh, fuckin’ great, therapy. Not, look, the feelings police have arrived.

You smiled at him. “You’re early again.”

John looked down at his watch like this was news to him. “Traffic was light.”

“You live in the building.”

“Elevators were fast.”

“You took the stairs,” you said, “I ran into Mr. Reynolds in the lobby. He mentions something about you always taking the stairs after the… elevator incident.”

His eyes ticked a bit.

You sat down across from him like you hadn’t just dragged him by the collar into the truth with one hand. “So. We can start with why you feel the need to lie about it. Panels in this building cost taxpayer money, and frankly, John, you are not interesting enough to justify a renovation budget.”

John leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed. “Are you always this charming?”

“Not always,” you said. “Sometimes I’m much worse, but I try to save that for people with better excuses.”

He hated that you were funny. He hated that your voice stayed even when he pushed. You let his attitude lay itself on a silver platter, looked at it, and then kept going like it was mildly inconvenient rather than intimidating.

John hated that you were basically a leash on him. He hated the way you could walk into a room, say his name once, and suddenly everyone expected him to behave like a domesticated pet with paperwork. He hated that you were basically a corporate muzzle with a company badge. Most of all, he hated that it worked. He hated that you were good at crisis de-escalation, that when you told him to sit down, he sat.

That session was worse than the first because he talked more. Not willingly or gracefully. John didn’t spill his guts; he leaked under pressure and acted indifferent when anyone noticed the puddle. But you were good. 

You didn’t say, “Tell me about your feelings” like a shrink would. You asked practical things. What happened before the elevator stalled? What did he think before making the decision to do it?

He told you the elevator made a noise. He told you the noise reminded him of a transport door jamming during a mission that went badly.

You nodded.

John hadn’t realised until now, just how much that helped.

By the end of the session, he had only snapped at you twice, which apparently counted as improvement.

“That was progress,” you said, clicking your pen closed.

John scoffed. “Barely.”

He stood too quickly, because staying seated under your steady almost-smile felt too intimate. He picked up his jacket, glanced at you, then glanced away.

“Same time next week?” you asked.

“Yeah,” he said, and then, because his mouth had apparently decided to ruin his life, he added, “Works for me.”

Works for me. Like he was looking forward to it. Like this was a coffee date. Like he was not going to spend the next ten minutes in his room mentally punching himself in the face.

That night, he dreamed about you.

The first dream was almost merciful because it was vague. Your voice, mostly. The conference room, dimmer than it should have been, the blinds drawn over the glass walls. Dream-you said his name in his ears, and it sounded sensual.

John woke up annoyed at himself. 

Fine. Whatever. People had weird dreams. That meant nothing.

Then it happened again. And again.

By the fourth dream, his subconscious had apparently lost all interest in being PG-13.

In the dream, you were still in the conference room, but you weren’t sitting across from him anymore. You were on the edge of the table, folder abandoned somewhere behind you, your knees bracketing his hips as he stood between them. His hands were on your thighs, warm through the fabric of your skirt, and he knew even then that he should not be touching you. He knew there were rules.

But dream-you did not care.Dream-you looked at him with your head tilted, eyes steady in that same infuriating way you looked at him in real life, except there was nothing professional in it now.

“You’re very good at pretending you don’t want me,” dream-you said.

John’s hand tightened on your thigh.“I’m not pretending,” he lied.

Dream-you smiled, and hooked one finger beneath the collar of his shirt and pulled him in like he weighed nothing at all.

The kiss was filthy. It was hungry and open-mouthed, your fingers in his hair, his body crowding yours back over the table until the folder slid off the edge and papers scattered across the floor. He could feel your legs tighten around him. He could feel your breath break against his mouth when he dragged one hand under your shirt and you said his name like you were giving in.

John woke up hard, furious, and staring at the ceiling like God owed him an explanation.

“Nope,” he muttered to the dark.

Fuck!  

He spent the morning in the gym punishing a punching bag for crimes it did not commit, then took a cold shower and told himself, very firmly, that this was normal. He had been through a lot. You were pretty, direct, and unfortunately the person his idiot brain would latch onto after being emotionally starved for a year.

That didn’t mean anything.

It especially didn’t mean anything when he got dressed for the next session and changed shirts twice.

The fifth meeting was where you noticed.

Not the dreams, obviously. Christ. He would have walked into the Hudson before admitting those. But you noticed something.

“You seem tired,” you said.

John’s hand tightened around his coffee cup. “I’m fine.”

“You have shadows under your eyes.”

“I have a face.”

You paused, then you smiled down at your notes, and it was so small he almost missed it.

“Okay,” you said. “You have a face. Gotta do better than that if you want to be on the full mission roster again, John. I might have to tell Barnes you should work strictly recon only.”

He hated you.

Liar, liar, liar.

Still, he was starting to like the rhythm of the session. You didn’t chase him when he dodged, but you also didn’t let him disappear completely. You remembered details from the last session without having to flip at your notes. You asked about his son without making it feel like a test. You said Olivia’s name carefully, like you understood there was history there but didn’t assume the whole story.

You asked about Nathan once, asking how much of a liability he made him.  John groaned so hard you actually laughed.

“I’m sorry,” you said, still smiling. “I shouldn’t laugh.”

“No, go ahead. My pain is hilarious.”

“It is a little pathetic that you hate him mostly because he packs a good diaper bag.”

“I don’t hate him.”

You looked at him and lifted an eyebrow.

John sighed. “Fine. I hate him a little.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s there.”

You didn’t write that down right away. You let it sit.

See, you never rushed to dissect the truth. You didn’t pounce like you had caught him revealing evidence. You just let the truth breathe for a second. Then you said, “Because he’s where you used to be?”

John stared at the window. His reflection looked back at him, eyebrows furrowed, shoulders too tight. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Maybe.”

It was the first time he had admitted it without turning it into a joke.

You didn’t say that was progress immediately, which was good, because he might have thrown himself through the window. Instead, you said, “That makes sense.”

John looked at you. His muscles loosened so suddenly it almost pissed him off. That was all he wanted, apparently. Not permission. Just someone saying the feeling itself was not insane.

Then, after the talking part of the session, came the training part of it. That’s the whole point of these meetings, right?

You weren’t gentle with him. You didn't treat his temper like a tragic creature that needed to be understood by candlelight. You treated it like a workplace hazard. Like bad wiring. Like a loaded weapon left too close to civilians.

“Again,” you said, tapping your pen against your clipboard. “You’re in a hallway. Civilian contractor panics. He raises his voice and gets too close. You do what?”

“Tell him to back the hell up.”

You sighed. “Try again.”

He looked at the ceiling like he was praying for patience, which was funny because you had been fairly sure God had blocked his number.

“I create distance,” John said tightly. “I keep my hands visible and lower my voice.”

“Beautiful,” you look pleased. “Look at that. A whole adult sentence.”

“Do you have to say it like that?”

“Yes,” you said, sipping your cold brew. “It’s how I stay awake.”

You circled him once, unimpressed, watching the set of his shoulders, the way his hands curled when he got annoyed, the way he always shifted his weight forward like every conversation was one rude comment away from becoming a contact sport. “There,” you said.

“What?”

“That.” You pointed your pen at his right hand. “You made a fist.”

“I didn’t.”

“Don’t lie to me when I’m literally looking at the problem. That’s embarrassing for both of us.”

John looked down. His hand was, in fact, half-curled. He didn’t even realise. He flexed his fingers open, irritated.

“That,” you said, “is the part we fix. Not your childhood. Not your marriage. Not whatever patriotic hellscape lives in your frontal lobe. That. The two seconds between insult and impact. That is my jurisdiction.”

You stepped closer, lowering your voice just enough. “When someone escalates, you do not match them, do you understand? You don’t get to make it a dominance contest because your ego gets lonely. You create space, you name the behavior, and you give one clear instruction.”

He looked unconvinced.

You sighed. “For example: ‘Step back. Lower your voice. We can talk when you’re calm.’ See? Simple.”

“I know how to talk to people.”

“You know how to issue commands,” you corrected. “That’s not the same thing. Golden retrievers know how to bark. We don’t make them hostage negotiators.”

His mouth twitched up into a smile before he could stop it.

You caught it instantly. “Oh, good,” you said. “There’s a sense of humor under all that rage.”

“Are we done?”

“No.”

You made him run the scenario again. And again. And again.

You played the panicked contractor. Then an angry civilian. Then a reporter shoving a phone in his face. Then a teammate ignoring his order. Every time he got too mad, you stopped him. Every time his posture turned threatening, you pointed it out. Every time his voice dropped into that dangerous register, you made him start over.

“Less divorced drill sergeant.”

He tried again. 

“Better. Still terrifying, but now in a way HR can plausibly defend.”

John looked like he wanted to throw your clipboard through a wall. But he didn’t.

By the end of the session, he had forgotten to be hostile for nearly ten whole minutes.

—

Unfortunately, everyone else noticed him being weird about these sessions before he did.

It happened after the eleventh meeting.

He had put on some fancy cologne. Maybe he had sprayed once more than usual. Maybe twice. Maybe he had stood in front of the mirror afterward, frowned, and changed his shirt because the first one looked too tactical and the second one looked like he was trying too hard, which meant he had landed on the third shirt, which looked like he was trying exactly the right amount.

Whatever.It wasn’t a thing.

He walked into the common area afterward feeling, unfortunately, good. The session had gone well. You had smiled at him twice, called him out on his bullshit once, and told him he handled a frustrating call from Olivia better than he would have a month ago. He had pretended that meant nothing when it meant everything. 

He was still thinking about it when Yelena looked up from the couch and sniffed the air.

John stopped walking. Ava, sitting beside her with a bowl of cereal, paused mid-bite.

Yelena sniffed again. “Oh,” she said. “Interesting.”

John’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

Ava looked him up and down. “That’s a lot of… smell.”

“It’s cologne,” John said flatly. “I wear cologne.”

Yelena leaned back against the couch, pleased. “People wear cologne. You are marinating in it.”

Ava looked him over, not unkindly. “The training went well?”

John pointed at her. “Don’t.”

Yelena’s grin sharpened. “Oh, it went very well.”

“I’m leaving.”

“You wore the good shirt,” Ava pointed out.

“Oh!” Yelena made a delighted little sound. “He knows it is the good shirt.”

John felt heat crawl up his neck. “I don't know what the hell you guys are talking about.”

“You have many shirts,” Yelena said. “Most of them say divorced military action figure. This one says”—she waved a hand vaguely—“please think I am emotionally available.”

Ava snorted into her cereal, which by the way, she was eating at four in the afternoon.

John stared at them both, wishing briefly and sincerely for a mission, an explosion, a portal to hell, anything. “I don’t have to stand here and take this.”

John left before he could prove exactly why Bucky had sent him to counseling. But he did not slam the door.

—

John had a dentist appointment that day, and he only found out his regular dentist was on leave while he was already in the chair.

Great.

He already hated the dentist on a good day, but most people did, though. Nobody liked being tilted back beneath a blinding light while someone told them to relax with cold metal in their mouth. Nobody enjoyed lying flat and useless with their mouths forced open, unable to swallow properly, unable to answer questions, unable to do anything except stare at the ceiling tiles while the scrape of instruments were shoved in there. It was an inherently vulnerable place to be.

The angle of the chair was bad enough. The bib against his chest, the plastic suction tube pulling at the corner of his mouth, the hygienist’s polite voice telling him to open wider, the scrape-scrape-scrape of metal against enamel was worse.

He had one hand curled around the armrest and kept telling himself he was being ridiculous.People did this every day. Accountants did this. Schoolteachers did this. 

John was already in a bad mood when the hygienist leaned back, pulled off her gloves, and said, “Dr. Hayes will be in to do the final check.”

John went still. Hayes?

It was a common last name. That was what he told himself first. It could be anyone. New York was full of Hayeses. Thousands of them. Maybe millions.

Then the door opened.

The dentist stepped in wearing scrubs, gloves, a mask, and magnifying loupes pushed up over his forehead. For one glorious, stupid second, John didn’t recognize him. The mask hid enough. The entire situation was absurd enough that his brain tried to protect him by refusing to connect the dots.

Then the dentist looked at the chart and said, “Hey, John.”

John’s soul left his body.

Nathan.

Nathan Hayes, D.D.S., apparently.

John knew he should’ve listened to what he did for work.

Of course Nathan was a dentist. Of course Olivia’s boyfriend had a respectable job where he helped people and owned tiny mirrors and probably lectured about gum health with sincerity. Of course John had somehow ended up flat on his back, jaw aching, beneath the one man in the city he least wanted to see, while said man held a small, gleaming instrument between gloved fingers. There were levels of hell, apparently. This was a new one.

Nathan’s eyes crinkled above the mask in what John assumed was a smile. A normal smile. A professional smile.

“Dr. Miller’s on leave this week,” Nathan said. “I know this is a little weird. I can keep it quick.”

A little weird. Ha!

John stared up at him, pinned by the chair, pinned by the light, pinned by his own body’s immediate reaction to being trapped.

The overhead lamp hummed. The air smelled like mint paste, latex, antiseptic, and the sterile bite of metal, though it just smelled like a fresh magazine of bullets. The tray sat beside Nathan’s elbow, lined with instruments John’s brain catalogued before he could stop it: Probe. Mirror. Scaler. Suction tube. Polisher. Little hooked things. Silver points. Thin handles. Glass jar on the counter. Cabinet door half-open. Exit to the left. Nathan on the right.

John’s fingers tightened around the chair until the vinyl creaked.

He wanted to break something, but he didn’t, not even in a million years, want to accidentally hurt Nathan.

He didn’t want to hurt anyone. He just wanted out. Out of the chair, out of the room, out of his own head, out of being compared and found lacking by a scoreboard nobody else knew existed.

Nathan just adjusted the light and asked, “You okay?”

John felt the breath catch in his chest. “Fine.” It came out too flat.

Nathan paused, just barely. The hygienist glanced between them. He didn’t push, though. He nodded, lowered the loupes over his eyes, and said, “All right. Open for me.”

John almost laughed because there was no way this was his life.

No way Nathan’s gloved hand was braced near John’s chin, steady and gentle, while John’s whole body buzzed with the urge to move, to sit up, to take control of the room by force simply because lying still felt unbearable.

Still, opened his mouth.

The first touch of the dental mirror against his teeth made his spine twitch.

Nathan told the hygienist something about the back molars. He heard the scrape of the instrument traveled through his jaw in a way that felt too invasive and too loud. John stared at the ceiling and tried to breathe through his nose, but even that felt wrong, like he was barely holding the lid down on a volcano.

Then, Nathan’s phone rang. 

He said something about being done anyway, and told the hygienist to take over as he went outside to take the emergency call.

Then he heard Olivia outside the room.

He caught it by accident. The door wasn’t shut all the way, dammit. It’s not like he was actively trying to eavesdrop.

“Hey, Liv. Everything okay?”

Nathan’s voice was quieter now, but John could still hear it, because the serum made sure there was no privacy from the things that would ruin him.

“Yeah. No, I can help. Give me twenty minutes. Is he still fussy?”

John’s vision narrowed around the ceiling light. His son.

Olivia had called Nathan because she needed help with his son, and Nathan had answered like that was normal. Like he was allowed to be the easy call. Like John was not sitting there twenty feet away with mint on his tongue and a paper bib on his chest.

The hygienist said something about rinsing. John did it automatically.

He wanted to break something. A tray. A light. The plastic cup. His own knuckles if that was what it took to keep the feeling from becoming bigger than the room.

Then your voice came back to him. You weren't there, but he remembered your advice: Name the feeling before it names you.

John squeezed his eyes shut for half a second.

Fear. Loss. Control. No. Lack of it.

That’s it. He felt out of control. His normal dentist already made him feel out of control, and Nathan holding metal near his mouth while Olivia trusted him with John’s son made him feel like control was a house fire and he was standing there with a cup of water.

His hands shook once against the chair.

He breathed in. Four counts. Held. Out for six.

He had mocked the breathing exercises when you taught them to him. He had called them tactical breathing with better marketing. You had looked at him and said, “Mock it while you do it correctly, then. You think you’re helping the team with that mouth?” He had almost smiled. He had done it badly on purpose. You had noticed. 

Now he did it the way you had taught him. Again. Again.

By the time Nathan came back in, John hadn't broken anything.

By the time Nathan finished the appointment, John hadn’t said anything cruel.

By the time he got to his car, John could finally breathe normally again

He sat behind the wheel with both hands gripping it, staring through the windshield at nothing. His mouth tasted like fluoride. His teeth ached. His heartbeat was still too fast. He hadn’t shoved the tray over. He hadn’t crushed the armrest. He had recognized that he was standing on the edge and backed away from it.

So why did he feel like he was breaking apart?

—

He did not remember deciding to drive to your place.

Your address was in the file, because you, for some reason, hosted emergency sessions for selected individuals. Because you were a professional and John had no business using that information because he felt like he was coming apart.

But the thought of going back to the tower made his skin crawl, and you were the only person he could think of.

When he reached your building, there were two cop cars outside.

John stopped on the sidewalk, every nerve going cold.

Then the door opened, and two uniformed officers came out, speaking quietly into radios. Behind them, you stood in the entryway with one hand on the doorframe, your hair a little loose, your shoulders set. You looked… tired.

You looked up and saw him. “John?”

It was not your session voice. It was just your voice, surprised and worried all the same.

His throat tightened so suddenly he almost looked away. “I need to talk about something,” he said.

Your eyes moved over his face, quick and careful. He watched you read him the way you always did. “John, this isn’t—”

“I know,” he said quickly. “I know I shouldn’t be here. I know it’s not appropriate. I just—” His voice cracked, and he hated that it did. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

And because you were kind, you sighed and stepped aside. “Come in.”

The second your apartment door shut behind him, the effort of holding himself together finally gave in. He did not explode. Instead, he just stood there in your entryway, too broad for the narrow space, breathing too hard through his nose, eyes burning.

You turned toward him.

He reached for you before he could stop himself.

It was not a romantic gesture, at least not yet. Not like this. But it was too desperate to be anything casual. His arms came around you, and for one terrible second he held on like you were the only real thing left in the world.

You went still.

He felt the professional calculation, the boundary, the line drawn and redrawn in the beat between one breath and the next. Then your hand settled between his shoulder blades.

You hugged him back just enough to keep him from falling apart.

He closed his eyes. His face turned slightly toward your shoulder, not buried, but close enough that some aching part of him wanted to stay there. He wanted to press closer. He wanted to let the day end inside the mercy of your hand on his back.

He pulled away first because he had to. Because if he didn’t, he might forget himself.

Your eyes searched his face. “Sit down,” you said gently.

He did.

You brought him water.

He sat on your couch like a man trying not to collapse through it, staring at the glass in his hands while you took the chair across from him. 

“What happened?” you asked.

He laughed once. “My dentist was out on leave.”

You blinked.

He rubbed a hand over his mouth, then dropped it. “Nathan was covering.”

Your face changed. “The Nathan?”

“Yeah,” John said. “The Nathan.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” He let out a breath that almost shook. “Oh.”

Then it came out of him in pieces: The chair. The light. The tools. The fact that everyone felt a little powerless at the dentist, but for him it had been worse, because he could hear too much and see too much courtesy of the serum and his body kept cataloguing exits and weapons like everything was a threat courtesy of the military training. He talked about Nathan holding tools in his mouth. Olivia’s voice outside. Nathan saying he could help with John’s son.

He stopped there.

For a second, all he could do was stare at the water glass.

“I wanted to break something,” he said, voice low. “There were so many things in that room. And I knew where all of them were, and I hated that I knew. I hated that my head went there.”

You were very still.

“But I didn't want to accidentally hurt him,” John said, and that broke slightly on the way out. “I didn’t. I don’t. He’s not doing anything wrong. He’s good to Olivia. He’s good with my son. He’s just—” He swallowed hard. “He’s there. And I hate him for being there, and then I hate myself because he’s just being a good boyfriend and a good dentist and I’m sitting there thinking about breaking the tray.”

He dragged a hand over his face. “I felt like I was losing control.”

You didn’t rush him. You didn't jump in to make him feel better. You didn't perform comfort.

Then you said, “But you didn’t.”

John shook his head. “It felt like I did.”

“John.”

He looked at you.

Your voice was gentler now, but no less firm. “You were in a setting that already makes people feel vulnerable. You had someone in your personal space holding metal instruments, and then the person holding those instruments was someone tied directly to a major emotional trigger. You recognized that. You recognized that you didn’t want to hurt him, or yourself. You used the breathing exercises. You left without escalating the situation.”

He looked down.

“You came here,” you added, trying to hide the painfully obvious amusement and failed. You chuckled a little, “And we do need to talk about that boundary. But the dentist’s office was not a setback.”

He stared at you.

“It wasn’t even an incident,” you said, almost proud. “Because you handled it.”

Oh. Right. This was the point.

Still, tears came before he could stop them. Not many, but a few hot and furious tears that blurred his vision before he wiped them away with the heel of his hand. “Fuck,” he muttered.

You tilted your head and gave him a box of tissues, and that somehow made him want to cry harder.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For crying?”

“For showing up here.”

“I’m glad you looked for someone,” you said, a faint smile along your lips, and it was the most beautiful thing John had ever seen.

John looked at you. Someone, you had said, someone?

That was a polite way of saying it. It was professional, safe enough to sit between you without making him admit what was probably painfully obvious on his face.

That someone had been you.

He could’ve driven around the city until the anger burned through the soles of his shoes. He could’ve wandered Manhattan like a lost man, fighting the urge to snap a street sign in half or put his fist through the nearest lamp post. But he had not done that. He had come to you.

You.

And there was a hint of something in your face when you said it that he couldn’t quite read. Professional concern, sure. But beneath it, he could’ve sworn he caught something warmer. Something that had no place in reports or progress notes or mandated training in empty conference rooms.

Fondness, maybe. Affection?

No.

No, he couldn’t do that to himself. He couldn’t convince himself of that. That was just heartbreak in a bottle, because there’s no way you feel the same about him, right?

Right?

—

After a while, when his breathing stopped sounding like it was trying to crawl out of his chest, John started noticing your apartment.

He didn’t even mean to. He just needed somewhere to put his eyes that weren't you.

The place was warmer than he expected. You didn’t seem like the sort of person who arranged throw pillows for emotional fulfillment, but there was a lived-in clutter that was almost charming. Books were stacked near the couch, a mug was abandoned by the sink. A cardigan was draped over the back of a chair, one sleeve turned inside out. Shoes had been kicked off by the door like you’d come home in a hurry and forgotten.

It was endearing, how human it all made you.

Of course you were human. You had a kettle. You had overdue-looking mail on the counter. You had a slightly crooked lamp and a blanket folded badly over one end of the couch. You probably had preferences about laundry detergent and favorite takeout and stupid little routines you did when no one was looking.

Then he saw the photos on the wall.

Sam Wilson, smiling beside you with VA badges around both your necks. You with Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers, caught mid-laugh. You with Natasha Romanoff in a theme park somewhere. And beside them a photo of you standing next to the late King T’Challa of Wakanda, doing a peace sign together.

Huh. 

Apparently every person designed to make John feel like an underqualified replacement came with a personal connection to the old guard.

“You know them too?” he asked.

You followed his eyes and nodded. You looked almost embarrassed for a second. You, who had no problem calling him a patriotic parking violation to his face, suddenly shy because he had noticed your wall of impressive friends.

“Oh,” you said. “Yeah.”

He turned back to you, eyebrows raised. “You said that like it’s normal.”

That you knew two of the other Captain Americas, and yet you didn’t tell me. 

For once, he wasn’t really angry about it. For lack of a better word, he felt blank. Like great, nothing I ever do will impress her. 

You looked down at the mug between your palms, thumb brushing the handle in a small, unconscious circle. 

“I used to work for Homeland as a hostage negotiator,” you said, as if it was nothing. “Then I worked with Sam at the VA for a while. Y’know, reintegration and risk assessment.” You glanced toward the photo of Sam again. “Sam was better with people than I was.”

Yeah, tell me about it, John wanted to say, but kept his big mouth shut for once and listened.

“He still is,” you said. “He could sit down beside someone and make them feel like they had room to breathe. I was more…”

“Mean?” John offered.

You looked at him with half a scowl. “Practical,” you corrected. “After that, he asked if I could consult with Steve and Nat on a few things.”

You shrugged, like any of that was casual. 

His eyes flicked back to the photo of Bucky and Steve. “So that’s how this became your… niche?”

You huffed a small laugh. “Enhanced individuals with authority issues? Yeah, it pays very well.”

“Oh,” John said. It was a stupid answer, but the only one he had.

You looked down again, and he could have sworn you were hiding the beginning of a smile, and not even a professional one. Not the weaponized one you used when you were about to call him a liability in three syllables or less. This one was private. As if you were amused by him and trying to be decent about it.

He looked toward the door, partly because he needed to put his eyes somewhere else, and partly because the police cars outside had finally pushed their way back into his mind. The flashing lights had been turning the street blue and red for long enough that he had almost forgotten to ask the obvious question. “What were the cops about anyway?”

You sighed and looked down. You were anxious, and that set off the slightest alarm in his head. “You’ll probably see it on the news.”

John straightened. “What happened?”

You were quiet for half a second too long. Then you said, “I was on the subway earlier.”

John waited.

“There was a shooter in my train car,” you said. “I had to talk him down.”

Shit.

For a second, John couldn’t speak. His mind gave him the picture before he could stop it: Crowded bodies pressed too close together, nowhere to go, doors shut, the violent metallic shriek of the tracks. He saw a gun in someone’s hand pointed to you, standing there with nothing but your voice and the infuriating calm you used on guys like him when they were too angry to know they were scared.

Anger rose in him so fast it scared him. Not at you, but at the world. At the train. At the man with the gun. At the fact that you had been there, trapped underground, while he had been sitting in a car losing his mind over a dentist appointment like an idiot. At the fact that someone he…

Someone whose apartment he had come to, had been in danger.  You had been in danger, and he hadn’t known. He hadn’t been there. He hadn’t been able to do a single thing with the useless, violent instinct that roared awake inside him now.

His eyes moved over you before he could stop himself: Your face, arms, torso. He was searching for blood. Bruises. A limp. Anything that signalled that you were anything but okay. “Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, John.” His name sounded different when you said it like that. You weren’t irritated. You were trying to reassure him. 

It made the anger worse for a second because he had nowhere to put it. He couldn’t hit the past. Couldn’t storm onto a train that had already stopped. Couldn’t grab time by the throat and drag it backward until he was there between you and the danger.

He could only sit on your couch with his hands curled uselessly around his knees. And he could tell you knew what was happening, too. But you weren’t in a great state of mind right now, so maybe you couldn’t waste your energy to tell him to come down.

So he did a new-ish coping mechanism. He cracked a joke. “Kids these days, huh?”

He hated that that was what he said. He hated it even more when shook your head.

“No,” you said quietly. “He was a vet. Vietnam, I think.”

John’s attempt at humor died immediately. “Oh,” he said.

For a while, the room was silent.

The anger didn’t  leave him. It lost the directionless edge and became… more familiar. 

He looked at you again, at the fatigue under your eyes, the tension still sitting in your shoulders. He wondered how long you had been holding yourself still while he ranted about his stupid Nathan. 

You had let him into your apartment while your own hands were still shaking.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

You gave a small laugh, but it didn’t quite reach your eyes. “You’re not my shrink, John.”

“You’re not mine either,” he said. “And yet.”

That got him half a smile.

You leaned back slightly in your chair, studying him with that careful, cutting attention he had learned to dread. “Why do you wanna know?”

John swallowed.

Because you were in a train with a gunman. Because I care. Because the thought of you being scared makes me want to tear the world apart, and that is exactly the kind of thing you keep trying to train out of me.

He said none of that. He wasn’t brave enough. Not yet. “I’m asking as a friend,” he said instead.

Friend. The word felt small the second it left his mouth. But it was the only one he was allowed to use. Even that felt like reaching across a line.

You looked at him. Then your eyes dropped briefly to his hands. When you looked back up, your eyes had changed a little. 

“Yeah,” you said finally. “Yeah, I am.”

John nodded once. He didn’t believe you completely. You seemed to know that, because your mouth curved faintly.

“Mostly.”

It was not what John wanted.

He wanted to do something. To fix something. To stand in front of something. To put his body between you and every terrible thing that had already happened, which was useless and stupid and exactly the kind of impulse you would probably write down in your notes with a little disappointed frown. So he just sat there, close enough to notice the tremor had started to fade from your hands. 

And because you also used humor as a distraction, you gave him a sad smile. “The gunman has nothing on me, John,” you said, “I’m actually good at my job.”

John chuckled.

That, you were. 

—

The next meeting was supposed to be easy. You had prepared a mandatory mission readiness evaluation for John. It would maybe take forty-five minutes, and be made up of observation notes, updated risk profile, and recommendation to Barnes by end of day. You had printed the forms. You had set up the conference room. You had brought three different colored pens because, apparently, somewhere between Homeland, the VA, and corporate risk management, color-coding had become very important.

Then your sister called. Which was how you ended up standing in the middle of a government training room with a clipboard in one hand, a half-eaten protein bar in your mouth, and your four-year-old niece sitting cross-legged on the floor beneath the evaluation table, coloring a dinosaur pink.

Her parents were both paramedics. This meant their lives existed in a state of organized chaos: Shifts changed and childcare fell through, so you had babysat her before. Sometimes, someone got stuck transporting a patient across town. Someone else got called in because two ambulances were down and the city, apparently, was held together by caffeine, duct tape, and exhausted women with emergency medical certifications.

Your niece’s name was Mina. She was four and a half and you loved with all of your heart. 

You really did, but not in the way people were when they wanted credit for liking children. You didn’t coo or perform sweetness. You didn’t become a different person around Mina.

You were still you, efficient and as practical as a legal memo. But your hand automatically moved the juice box farther from the forms before Mina could knock it over. You noticed when she chewed on the end of the crayon and swapped it out without hesitation. You opened her apple slices one-handed. You brushed purple crayon dust off her cheek with your thumb, and Mina leaned into it without even looking up, like that touch was ordinary. 

“Yes, I can take her for an hour,” you had said to your sister on the phone. “No, I cannot take her for six. I have work. Actual work with unstable adults.”

Your sister had said something frantic.

“Fine,” You had sighed. “And no, that was not a dig at your child. Mina is emotionally more regulated than half my roster.”

And now here you were. Mina was under the table, humming to herself as she gave a stegosaurus what appeared to be purple lipstick. Her plushie sat beside your shoe, slumped with the weary dignity of a stuffed rabbit who had survived a lot of childcare emergencies.

“You can use blue,” Mina said, holding a crayon up toward you without looking away from her dinosaur.

“I’m working.”

“You can work in blue.”

“I can’t evaluate a federal asset in crayon.”

Mina looked up at you, deeply unimpressed. “Why not?”

Hm. That was a good question.

“Because,” you said finally, “corporate is joyless.”

Mina nodded like this made perfect sense (it didn’t) and went back to coloring.

That was when John appeared in the doorway. He stopped dead when you looked up.

He looked at you. Then at Mina. Then at the juice box on the table. Then at the open packet of baby wipes beside your neatly stacked mission readiness assessment forms.

For several seconds, nobody said anything.

Mina looked him up and down with the suspicion of a tiny secret agent. John looked like he had walked into the wrong room. 

You took the protein bar out of your mouth and said, “Before you speak, choose your words with the same caution you should be bringing to crisis de-escalation.”

His eyes came back to yours. “She yours?”

“Do I look like I have time to produce children?”

His mouth twitched.

You pointed your pen at him. “No.”

Mina crawled out from under the table just enough to examine him properly. She had your sister’s eyes, which meant she could look judgmental without trying. It was honestly impressive and slightly unsettling. 

John noticed her staring and immediately adjusted. He shifted his weight back and lowered himself just a little, enough to seem less like an unwelcome wall.

“Hey, buddy,” he said. His voice was gentler than you expected.

Mina narrowed her eyes. “Who are you?”

“John.”

She looked at you. “Is he in trouble?”

John’s eyebrows rose.

You took a slow sip of coffee. “Constantly.”

Mina nodded with grave understanding, like she too had dealt with federal compliance issues. Then she held up her stuffed rabbit. “Auntie works with people in trouble.”

John’s gaze flicked up to yours. “I’m not in trouble,” John told Mina.

Mina considered this, then looked at you for confirmation. You tilted your hand. “He’s in evaluation.”

“What’s eval-vul-wation?”

“It means we check whether someone can behave in public.”

Mina looked back at John. John looked at you like he was trying very hard not to smile.

Mina held up her stuffed rabbit. “This is Mr. Bun. He has anxiety.”

John’s attention shifted immediately to the rabbit, not fake attention and patronizing adult attention. He gave her real attention, serious enough that Mina seemed to approve of it.

“Mr. Bun,” he said solemnly. “Good name.”

“He gets scared when people yell.”

John’s eyes flickered to you, and you just smiled brightly. “Don’t look at me. I didn’t train the rabbit.”

He didn’t quite laugh, but some of the tension left his mouth. His shoulders settled by a fraction. He looked down at Mina’s coloring page and, without thinking about it too much, picked up a green crayon she had abandoned near his boot.

“What’s the dinosaur’s name?” he asked.

Mina looked pleased, because this was apparently the correct question. “Princess Stomp.”

“Strong name.”

“She bites bad guys.”

“Useful skill.”

“John,” you said.

He looked up, innocent in a way that did not suit him at all.  You went back to your clipboard immediately.

“Mission readiness evaluation,” you said. “Slightly modified.”

“Modified how?”

“My niece is present, so we will do our written evaluation first and the practical one next week. It means no shouting, no tactical demonstrations involving doors, no threats, no furniture damage, and no saying anything that will get repeated to my sister in law while she’s holding trauma shears.”

John looked at Mina, and she smiled back at him with a colourful crayon mark smeared on her cheek.

John looked back at you. “Trauma shears?”

“Both my sister and her wife are paramedics,” you said. “Which means Mina can identify a tourniquet, tell you why you don’t move someone with a suspected spinal injury, and constantly asks grown adults why they look tired.”

Mina, without looking up, confirmed, “He does look tired.”

John stared at her.

You pressed your lips together to hold back a smile. “See?” you said. “Gifted.”

John cleared his throat. “I’m fine.”

Mina looked at you. “He’s lying.”

You sighed. “We’re working on that, honey.”

John gave you a look. You gave it right back.

This should have been irritating. One more stupid thing shoved into an already overpacked day. Instead, John stood there with his hands loose at his sides, and Mina pushed a spare coloring page toward him like she had decided he was permitted to exist.

“You can color if your work is boring,” she told him.

John looked at the coloring page. Then at you. He picked up the green crayon.

Oh?

“You do realize,” you said, “If you draw during a mission readiness evaluation, I will include it in the report.”

John looked down at the paper. “What if it’s good?”

“That’d be more concerning.”

Mina leaned over to inspect his work after approximately fifteen seconds of scribbling. “That’s not a dinosaur.”

“It’s a tank.”

You looked up from your clipboard. “John.”

“What?”  he asked defensively. “It’s not armed.”

“It has a turret.”

“It’s decorative.”

Mina frowned. “Make it a turtle.”

John paused. Then, in grave resignation, he drew legs and a head on the tank. Mina nodded approvingly. “Better.”

You stared at him. John did not look at you, but the tips of his ears had gone slightly pink.

You wrote something down.

John tried to look annoyed, but he was terrible at it with a child in the room. 

He was not awkward with Mina. He was good with her. He listened when she spoke, even when she was explaining that Mr. Bun couldn’t sit near the door because he hates doors. He didn't laugh at her or rush her. When she dropped a crayon, he bent and picked it up without comment, placing it back beside her little hand like it mattered.

John Walker, who could turn a hallway into a warzone, somehow knew not to make a four-year-old feel small.

You hated that your heart noticed before your brain could tell it to stop.

John seemed to notice things you did for her, too: The apple slices you had cut into careful half-moons because Mina liked them that way. The way you reached down without looking when she leaned against your calf, your hand landing briefly on the top of her head before returning to your clipboard. The way you were brisk with her but never careless. Practical, but never cold.

You told Mina not to wipe her hands on your trousers, then handed her a napkin before she had to ask. You fixed the little cardigan slipping off her shoulder with one hand while reading John’s file with the other. You were not nurturing in an obvious way. You were efficient love. Competent love.

The kind that remembered snack preferences, packed extra socks, and still said, “No, you cannot lick the marker, even if it smells like grapes, because capitalism is trying to kill you.”

John watched you do it and felt his brain go very still.

Oh shit. 

His crush had been manageable when it was only about you being hot. It was easier when he only thought of sinful things when he looked at your mouth. But this was worse.

This was you with a child leaning against your leg. You with crayons and classified paperwork sharing a table. You telling Mina no with the same clean confidence you used to tell John to unclench his fists.

John’s mind, apparently determined to ruin his life, supplied an image of you in a kitchen, feet kicking over the edge of a counter as he cooked dinner. 

Oh, no, he thought. No, no, no.

No, because now he was thinking about coming home to you, and not even in the fun, stupid, crush way. Not in the she’s pretty when she’s mean to me way. Worse. So much worse.

Desire was simple. Embarrassing and inconvenient, sure. But it was simple. This was not simple.

Now he was thinking about the sound of your keys in a lock. About your shoes kicked off by the door. About you by a dining table, practical and beautiful, telling him not to hover while you cut apple slices into moon shapes because a child liked them better that way.

Now he was thinking about your coffee going cold because you got distracted helping a child zip up her cardigan. About your hand landing automatically on a child’s head when she leaned into your leg. 

And then his mind went somewhere sweeter. His son.

Oh, God.

John imagined bringing him around you. He imagines the way you would speak to him like he was a person, not a prop in John’s life, not a fragile little extension of his failures. You would be direct with him, gentle in that dry, practical way that made care feel less like pity and more like a crutch. 

You would remember what he liked. You wouldn’t let John dote, like he always did . You would probably look at him over his son's head after you woke up in his bed and say, “Stop making that face, John. He’s eating cereal, not defusing a bomb.”

Oh, no. Because that was it, wasn’t it?

He didn't just want to sleep with you. He wanted to build a life with you.

He wanted mornings, errands, and arguments about nothing. He wanted your jacket over the back of a chair. He wanted a second chance at something he hadn’t even let himself admit he still wanted.

Family. Not the perfect kind. A patched-togethed, difficult one. 

And that was when John realized, with a stomach-dropping horror, that this was not a crush.

It had probably stopped being one weeks ago. Maybe it stopped being one the second you let him sit on your couch after the subway and asked for nothing from him but the truth.

He wanted to be with you.

“John?”

He blinked hard.

You were watching him, clipboard lowered, a bit concerned because he usually didn’t space out this long. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he said too quickly. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

You clearly didn’t believe him. Before you could say anything else, though, Mina tilted her head, looked from him to you, and said, “I think he likes you.”

John forgot how to breathe.

Mina hugged Mr. Bun to her chest. “Like likes you.”

John cleared his throat, desperate for a way out. “I don’t think she’s qualified to make that assessment.”

But you weren’t laughing. You just looked down at your clipboard, and there was… a flush on your cheeks. 

For the first time since he had known you, you looked shy.

John’s heart did a stupid little flip. 

Mina leaned against the table, peeking over it, pleased with herself.

You lifted the clipboard like it could still save you. “Back to the evaluation.”

John nodded once, and neither of you looked at each other for the next several seconds.

Mina sighed as if she was the only adult in the room.

—

By the time the written evaluation was done, the room had settled into a strange middle ground, where your printed leg forms sat beside Mina’s half-finished coloring page, and John sat still, trying not to look too pleased while you reviewed his final notes.

You read in silence for a moment, pen tucked between your fingers, your mouth composed in that way he had learned meant you were thinking rather than judging. Mina was near your chair, humming softly to herself while trying to fit Mr. Bun into your tote bag. She was failing, but Mina wasn’t one to give in easily. 

John kept his eyes on the floor for as long as he could. It lasted maybe three seconds before he looked at you again.

You had that slight crease between your brows. The one that appeared when you were concentrating. Your jacket sleeve had ridden up your wrist, and there was a faint crayon mark on the side of your hand where Mina must have gotten you earlier. You hadn’t noticed. Or maybe you had and decided it wasn’t worth the battle.

Finally, you lowered the page.

Mina seemed to notice as she appeared beside your knee and leaned her whole weight into your leg. “Is John done?”

You set your pen down and rested a hand lightly on top of her head without looking. “He is.”

“Did he do good?”

John raised his eyebrows.

You looked at him for half a second, then down at Mina. “He did,” you said.

Oh. 

Good. John let out a deep breath he didn’t even realise he was holding.

Mina nodded, satisfied, then looked up at him with a thumbs up. “Good job.”

He swallowed a smile. “Thanks, Mina.”

You seemed to notice his voice changed for her. It made you pause for just a breath while packing your clipboard into your bag.

John wanted to offer something. Anything. He wanted to stay in the orbit of this little half-chaotic scene for a few seconds longer, which was insane because he had spent most of the session being dismantled by a woman with a toddler snack container in her bag. “I can walk you to the elevator.”

You paused again, just enough for him to wonder if he had overstepped. You shifted your bag higher on your shoulder. “Sure.”

His heart made a hopeful jump.

Mina immediately lifted both arms toward him. “Uppies.”

John froze.

You looked down at her. “Mina.”

“My legs are tired.”

“You have been sitting on the floor for an hour.”

“They got tired from coloring.”

“That’s not how legs work.”

Mina only held her arms higher.

John’s gaze flicked to you, careful now. He was asking without asking.

Your eyes softened, assessing, like you were checking a bridge before letting a loved one cross it. Then you nodded. “My sister said any Avenger I trust is allowed to give Mina uppies.”

Any Avenger I trust.

You said it lightly, like it was just logistical. Like it didn't matter. 

How well had he done on that assessment?

Because you’re not just tolerating him. You’re not just professionally managing him. You trusted him.

He must have looked as pathetic as he felt, because your smile softened by half an inch before you covered it with impatience.

“Well?” you said. “She’s not going to levitate.”

John crouched in front of Mina. “You sure?”

Mina nodded fiercely. “Uppies.”

So he picked her up carefully. Mina settled against him immediately, one arm looping around his neck, Mr. Bun squished between them. John adjusted his hold with the caution of a man  who knew kids were not fragile exactly, but precious. 

Your eyes glittered before you could stop it.

John saw it. He looked down at Mina quickly, like that might save him.

Mina rested her cheek against his shoulder and pointed toward the door. “Elevator.”

You cleared your throat and reached for your bag. “Bossy,” you murmured.

John looked at you over her head, a helpless sigh at his mouth. “She learns from her aunt.”

You shook your head and started walking out of the conference room. 

And John followed you out with Mina in his arms, feeling trusted and doomed in equal measure.

—

That night, John Walker paced into the common room like a race car doing 200 laps in the Indy 500.

He wasn’t even sure when he had started. One minute he had been standing in his room, staring at his own reflection in the dark TV screen with his arms crossed, and the next he was out here, walking the same ugly little path around kitchen island like a man trying to wear a trench into corporate flooring.

Do not ask out your crisis de-escalation trainer. He turned at the window and came back. Do not ask out your team-mandated crisis de-escalation trainer.

He stopped, dragged both hands over his face, and made a noise between a groan and the beginning of a breakdown.

Because, sure. Fine. He could admit it now, in the privacy of his own head, where nobody could testify against him later.

He liked you.

No, actually, that was stupid. That was insulting. He didn’t just like you. Liking you would’ve been manageable. Liking you would’ve been noticing your mouth when you smiled, or standing a little straighter when you said his name, or feeling vaguely pathetic because you wrote a note down and he wanted it to be good.

This was worse. This was full-body, humiliating, high-school-level idiocy with the added horror of being a grown man with a divorce, a child, a government file, and a history of public property damage.

He liked you so much it made him feel unstable. He liked you so much that your approval pulled a physical reaction out of him. It got under his ribs. It made him want to show up on time and do the exercises properly. It made him want to be better in a way that had nothing to do with mission clearance and everything to do with the way you looked at him when he managed not to be the worst version of himself.

John resumed pacing.

And then there was the other problem. The worse problem. The problem so embarrassing he almost said it out loud just to hear how pathetic it sounded.

He hadn’t asked a woman out since high school.

High school.

He had no idea how to do this now. What did people even say?

Hey, I know you were assigned to me because I’m a liability, but have you considered dinner?

No.

What if he was bad at it? What if he came on too strong? What if he didn’t come on strong enough? What if you gave him that calm face and told him this was inappropriate in the same voice you used when he had to restart a de-escalation scenario?

John stopped again and stared at the ceiling.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.

“Jesus is not here.”

John turned.

Alexei stood in the doorway wearing a robe and sweatpants. He had a bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other, like he had wandered in for a snack and discovered live entertainment.

John stared at him. “What are you doing?”

“Eating cereal.”

“At 9PM?”

Alexei looked down at the bowl as if this explained itself. “Yes.”

John exhaled through his nose and turned away. “Forget it.”

“No, no.” Alexei stepped farther into the room, eyes narrowing. “You are pacing.”

“I’m not doing this.”

“You are thinking about woman.”

John’s shoulders went rigid. How the fuck did he know?

Alexei gasped, delighted. “Ah! It is woman.”

“No.”

“It is the trainer woman.”

John closed his eyes. Great. So everyone knew before he did.

Alexei pointed his spoon at him. “Crisis lady.”

“Don’t call her that.”

“Oh-ho.” Alexei’s grin widened. “You defend title. Very serious.”

John turned back. “I said forget it.”

But Alexei had already moved to the kitchen island, and John was suddenly reminded that Alexei had never once taken a hint as anything but a challenge. “So ask her out.”

John stared at him like he had suggested setting himself on fire for morale. “I can’t just ask her out.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s my crisis de-escalation trainer.”

Alexei shrugged. “So be very calm when you ask.”

John blinked at Alexei, who looked pleased with himself.

“That’s not—” John stopped, dragged a hand over his mouth, and tried again. “There are rules.”

“Always there are rules.” Alexei waved his spoon. “Rules for missions. Rules for weapons. Rules for not microwaving fish in common kitchen. Rules can be respected. This does not mean you die alone.”

John hated that there was a point somewhere in there. Sure, you were his trainer, but you weren’t his counselor. You weren’t his therapist, or his doctor, or some sacred keeper of his deepest psychological wounds You were corporate. A well-paid professional brought in to stop enhanced idiots from turning emotional dysregulation into infrastructure damage. And honestly? People dated at work all the time, didn’t they? Accountants dated other accountants. Lawyers dated other lawyers. Half of corporate America was probably one badly timed office romance away from an HR seminar. So, yes, there were rules. But this wasn’t impossible. It wasn’t simple, but it wasn’t forbidden by the laws of God and man either.

“She’s assigned to me,” he said anyway. “It’s not like I can just show up and say—” He cut himself off.

Alexei leaned in. “Say what?”

“Nothing.”

“Say it.”

“No.”

“You want practice?”

“I will walk into traffic before I say it to you.”

Alexei nodded sagely. “Bad opening line.”

John glared.

Alexei ignored him and set his bowl on the counter. “You go to her. You say, ‘Hello. I like you. I understand this is problem. Can this be problem later, when you are not making me less angry?’”

John stared at him for a long second. “That is the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

Alexei shrugged, just a little. “You are allowed to want things, Walker.”

John’s throat tightened. For a second, the common room felt too quiet. The city glowed cold beyond the windows. John stood in the middle of the room, feeling too big for his own life and too old to be this scared of a woman saying no.

Alexei picked up his spoon again. “Worst case, she says no.”

John looked at him.

“If you do nothing,” Alexei said, pointing at the floor, “you keep moping. Then we all suffer. I am already suffering.”

John looked toward the hallway.

He thought of you in the conference room. He thought of Mina announcing his feelings to both of you like she had been appointed by the God of crayons. He thought of the flush on your cheeks. 

Maybe he was being stupid. Maybe this was a terrible idea.

Maybe he was about to ruin the one thing in his life that had started making him feel like he could actually become something other than angry.

But then again, maybe he wasn’t.

John grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair.

Alexei’s eyebrows shot up. “You are going now?”

“Yes,” John was already heading for the door. “Before I change my mind.”

—

By the time John reached your building, the bravery had started to wear off. That was inconvenient, considering he had already parked.

He sat in his car with both hands on the wheel, staring through the windshield at your apartment building like it was an enemy compound.

He wasn’t going to lie, he considered leaving. 

He should’ve gone home. He should’ve sent an email, which was what normal people with impulse control probably did when they developed feelings for the person assigned to help them stop behaving like an angry forklift with a gun license.

John let his head fall back against the seat and shut his eyes.

“Okay,” he muttered to himself. “You can still not do this.”

Then he pictured Alexei’s disappointed face if he came back.

Nope. Not coming back to that.

John got out of the car.

The air was cold enough to bite through his jacket, which helped a little. It gave him something else to focus on besides the fact that he was walking toward your front door. He had faced down armed men with steadier hands than this.

By the time he reached your door, he had rehearsed and discarded six different openings.

Hi.

Too casual.

Can we talk?

Too ominous.

I know this is inappropriate.

Great start, Walker. Lead with the lawsuit.

I have feelings for you.

Jesus Christ, no. Absolutely not. Was he twelve? Was he about to hand you a folded note in the homeroom?

He stood outside your door for three seconds too long, staring at the chilled paint on the frame. Then he raised his hand and rang the doorbell before he could lose his nerve.

The apartment stayed quiet.

For one second, relief flooded him. You weren’t home. Great. Perfect. Act of God. He could leave and pretend he had made an attempt. 

Then the lock clicked.

John’s spine straightened.

The door opened just enough for you to look out, and he immediately forgot every reasonable thought he had ever had.

You were in home clothes. You were wearing a loose sweater, your hair gathered messily away from your face, one sleeve slipping down your wrist. 

Your eyes widened slightly when you saw him. “John?”

“Can I ask you something?” he said abruptly

Your brow furrowed, and you glanced behind you into the apartment before looking back at him. The hallway light caught the side of your face, and John thought it was the most angelic sight he had ever seen. “Why are you here?”

John opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

Amazing. Wonderful. He had made it all the way across the city and failed at the first hurdle.

Your eyes moved over his face, reading him. He watched concern take over. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said quickly. “I’m not- uh— this isn’t a crisis.”

You sighed, relieved. “Okay.”

“It’s not that kind of thing.”

“John.”

He swallowed. You were already drawing the line. He could see it happening. The professional part of you stepping forward because that was the safe thing, the right thing, and he knew it. He respected it.

He hated it.

“I know,” he said. “I know this is probably crossing every line.”

Your face went still.

Behind you, he could see the dim gold light of a lamp. There was a small pair of tiny shoes near the wall outside your unit, Mina’s, probably, because her parents were still clocking in a late shift. 

“Mina’s asleep,” you said quietly. “So if this is going to be loud—”

“No,” John said, too quickly again. He lowered his voice at once, almost wincing. “No. I’m not here to be loud.”

Your eyes flicked back to him, and your pupils in them softened. “This,” you said, still quiet. “Is usually not the beginning of a calm conversation.”

“I know.” He looked down. “I know. I’m sorry.”

And he meant it.

John took one step back, creating more space between you before you had to ask him to.  

He couldn’t make this worse by standing too close to you in a hallway like a man who didn’t understand how doors and boundaries worked. “I can leave,” he said. “I should probably leave.”

You didn’t say yes, though. In fact, you looked like you wanted him here.

Huh.

You didn’t step back and close the door. You didn’t give him the clean professional dismissal he had probably deserved. “What do you need to ask me?” you asked.

John let out a short breath.

This was it, then. The line was right there. He could still back away from it. He could make something up. He could say this was about his next session, or his evaluation, or some bullshit about the remaining paperwork. He could spare both of you.

Instead, he looked at you and found he was tired of being brave in every direction except the one that mattered.

“Okay,” he said, more to himself than to you.

Your mouth twitched into a small smile. “That’s not a question.”

There was that dry little edge he was so fond of. Fuck, he was done for.

“No,” he said. “It’s me trying not to make an idiot of myself.”

“Is it working?”

“Not even a little.”

You chuckled, looking over your shoulder again, listening for Mina. Your unit remained quiet. When you looked back, your voice dropped even lower. “John, whatever this is, you need to say it carefully.”

Did… did you know? 

“I know.” John gulped.

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

“No, I don’t think you do.” Your fingers tightened around the doorframe. “I am still assigned to you.”

He nodded once. “I know.”

Your eyes searched his face.

That was another thing you had taught him, even if you had never meant to. How not to crowd. How not to fill the room just because he was nervous. How not to make the size of his feelings everyone else’s emergency. So he stood there, hands visible, shoulders tense but back, voice low.

“I’m not asking to come in,” he said. “I’m not asking you to make this easier for me. I’m not asking you to pretend this is normal.”

You tilted your head in curiosity, and he took another breath.

“I just need to say it.  And then you can tell me to shut up, and I will.”

For a second, you said nothing.

The silence was deafening. He could hear someone’s television through a wall somewhere down the hall. A car moved along the street outside. 

John immediately lowered his voice even more.

“I like you,” he said finally.

The words came out rough.

“I like you,” he repeated, because apparently he needed to make sure he had really done it. “And I know this is inconvenient.”

You didn’t smile, but he could tell you felt something.

It was not nothing.

It was so clearly not nothing that John felt his chest loosen, just a fraction.

“I don’t like you because you’re nice or some shit,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “You’re actually pretty mean to me.”

You looked down, cheeks burning with a smile you couldn’t help anymore. He almost smiled back, but he was too terrified to let himself have that much.

“And not because you’re helping me,” he added. “Not only that. I mean, yeah, maybe that’s part of it. You got stuck with me at a bad time and somehow made me feel less like a walking lawsuit, so I’m sure there’s some stupidpsychology in there.”

Your eyes narrowed faintly. “That was self-aware.”

“Don’t start.”

“Sorry,” you whispered, not sounding sorry at all. “Continue.”

Fuck, you were awful. He still adored you, though.

John looked away for half a second, then back at you. “You don’t let me get away with anything,” he said. “And I know I need that. I know that’s the whole point of why Barnes brought you in. But it’s not just that. You don’t look at me like I’m already a lost cause.”

Your face grew very still again.

This time, he knew it was because he had gotten too close to something real.

“You see me,” he said, and the words were quieter than he meant them to be.

Your breath caught on something that almost became a laugh.

He looked at you then. Your hand was still on the door. Your thumb moved once against the painted wood, a nervous motion. Your hair had slipped loose near your temple. You looked like you were trying to keep every feeling behind your teeth, and for the first time since he had known you, it didn’t quite work.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” you said.

“I know.”

“You really shouldn’t have.”

“I know.”

“You’re making this difficult for me.”

His heart flipped. “Am I?” he asked, before he could stop himself.

The hallway seemed to shrink around the two of you. 

Your voice, when you spoke again, was very quiet. “Yes.”

Oh.

John forgot how to breathe for half a second.

“You need to understand,” you said, “that me saying that doesn’t change the rules.”

“I know.”

“I can’t encourage this.”

“Of course.”

“I can’t say anything that blurs the line.”

“You’re not.”

You looked back at him then, and the look on your face nearly ruined him. 

You were being so careful.

You were so obviously trying to do the right thing, but the right thing looked like it hurt a little.

“And I can’t invite you in,” you said.

He nodded. “I’m not asking.”

“But I also…” You stopped. You closed your eyes for one brief second, like you were annoyed with yourself. When you opened them again, your voice had become a teeny bit more professional. “I also don’t want you to think I’m… dismissing what you’re saying.”

John swallowed.

Again, not nothing.

“Okay,” he said, because his vocabulary had apparently been reduced to one-word responses.

Your mouth softened. “Okay?”

“Yeah.” He nodded once, then again. “I know there are rules. I’m not asking you to break them. I’m not asking you to do anything you don’t want. But if there’s a way to transfer me to somebody else, or close this out, or whatever has to happen so this isn’t…” He grimaced, searching for the least terrible phrasing. “A whole ethical disaster.”

Your lips pressed together. He could tell you were fighting a laugh. 

“A whole ethical disaster,” you repeated quietly.

“Is that not the technical term?”

“No,” you said. “But it’s vivid.”

“I’m trying to respect the seriousness of the situation.”

“You drove here at night to confess feelings to the woman.”

That time, you did laugh. Then your eyes widened slightly, and you glanced back into the apartment unit.

Both of you froze.

From somewhere inside came the faintest sleepy rustle, then silence again.

You turned back to him, relieved.

It was stupid, how much that he wanted you, even when you were just standing there in the doorway, trying not to smile because Mina was asleep, because rules existed, because the world was inconvenient.

John said the next part before could stop himself. “I’d like to take you out.”

This time, there was no joke to hide behind this time. No self-deprecation. 

Your eyes changed again, and he saw the answer before you said anything.

And then your gaze dropped, just for a second, like you needed somewhere safer to look. When you looked back up, you had pulled yourself together.Mostly.

“John,” you said softly. “You can’t ask me out while I’m training you.”

“How many remaining?” He asked.

“Four.”

John stared at you. “Four,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

He looked briefly toward the ceiling like patience might be stored there. He thought the next session was the last, but apparently three more had been added for whatever fucking reason. He assumed Barnes had something to do with it (he was right).

You folded your arms loosely, still half-hidden behind the door, and there was something almost teasing in your eyes now. The kind that kept both of you on the correct side of the line while acknowledging that, unfortunately, the line was very much there and both of you could see it.

“You survived worse,” you said.

“People keep saying that to me.”

“Maybe you should start believing them.”

“I’d rather complain.”

“Ha.”

He looked at you again.

Your emotions were unguarded second, and he could see the things you weren’t saying. It wasn’t permission. It wasn’t a promise. It wasn’t you reaching across the line.

But it was interest.

John lowered his voice. “What happens after?”

You went quiet.

Inside, Mina slept on, blissfully unaware that the adults were being stupid in the hallway. Thank god.

You looked at him for a long second, and he watched the argument happen behind your eyes. He watched you measure ethics against honesty, professionalism against whatever had just happened between you. He watched you decide exactly how much you could give him without breaking the rules you clearly cared about.

Then, finally, you said, “After four sessions, you can ask again.”

John nodded like you had just handed him coordinates for rescue. “Yeah.” He breathed out. “I can do four sessions.”

Your smile broke through.

Suddenly, he felt the bright, aching, want-to-be-good-for-you feeling climbing up under his ribs and made a home in his heart. The same feeling that made four sessions feel less like a punishment and more like a mission he intended to pass with honors.

He stepped back, giving you the space again.

“I should go,” he said.

“You should.”

Neither of you moved.

Your fingers were still curled around the edge of the door. His hands were loose at his sides. The hallway light hummed above you. Somewhere inside your apartment, Mina made one tiny sleepy sound and then went quiet again.

You lowered your voice even more. “And John?”

“Yeah?”

“Call me first next time, like a normal person.”

“I can do that.”

You lifted an eyebrow.

“I can learn to do that,” he corrected.

You smiled again and he felt hopeful. “Goodnight, John.”

He swallowed. “Goodnight.”

Then, before either of you could make it worse, you stepped back and closed the door gently, careful not to wake Mina.

John stood in the hallway for one second after the lock clicked.

He didn’t move.

For once, it was not because he was frozen or furious or trying to wrestle his way out of his own head. He just stood there, staring at your closed door while his heart skipped several beats, in a good way. 

He could do four sessions. He could wait. He could earn it.

He could do it right.

For you, he wanted to do it right.

John turned toward the stairs with the stupidest smile of his adult life pulling at his mouth.

And for the first time in a long time, John wanted to be patient.

He didn’t throw anything through a wall that week, or any of the weeks after. 

He did, however, spend the next day thinking about you the entire drive to pick up his son. 

And when Nathan helped carry the diaper bag out to the car, John managed to take it and say, “Thanks, man,” without sounding like he was chewing glass.

Olivia noticed.

She gave him a small, knowing look while he buckled his son into the car seat. “You seem better.”

John tightened the strap, smoothed a hand over his son’s little jacket, and tried not to smile too much.

“Yeah,” he said. “I am.”

—

Eight months later… 

John was standing in your kitchen wearing an apron Mina had picked for him.

It had tiny unicorns on it.

He had argued, briefly, that he was a tough superhero and he didn’t need to wear the unicorn apron. Mina had stared daggers at him, held it out, and said, “Chefs wear aprons.”

So now John was wearing the Unicorn apron.

And for the last six months, that was your life.

He had held up his end of the bargain: he asked you out after the sessions were complete, kissed you on the first date, and never looked back. 

You stood beside him in your apartment now, trying not to laugh while he stirred soup on the stove. His son and Mina were in the living room, sitting cross-legged on the rug, making Mr. Bun and a toy dinosaur get married under a blanket fort. Mina had been another last-minute addition, because your sister and her wife had a last-minute shift. John had only looked at you and said, “Good. More taste-testers.”

You kissed him then and there.

Olivia and Nathan came over, too.

That should have been strange. Maybe it still was, in tiny little ways. But it was also sweet. Nathan brought dessert. Olivia brought wine. 

Somehow, against all sense and probability, you and Olivia had become friends. And not even polite co-parenting-adjacent friends. Not awkward, mature, “we are all adults here” friends.

Actual friends.

It made no sense. You two were polar opposites.

Olivia was soft-spoken where you were snarky. Olivia asked gentle questions; you asked questions like you were trying to locate immediate weakness. And yet there you both were, basically best friends. 

Olivia had started texting you pictures of terrible PTA emails. You had started sending her voice notes about work drama with all names redacted for legal reasons. The two of you had brunch without John once, which had made him pace the kitchen for twenty minutes until you came home and told him, very sweetly, that you weren’t going to break up with him because his ex-wife aired all his dirty laundry. Because “remember, there was nothing Olivia could say that wasn’t already in your file, honey.”

John made up for it by teaming up with your sister to make fun of your cute little snores. But anyway. 

It was strange, but it had become one of the best things in his life, because his son had more people loving him in one room than John had ever known how to ask for. 

“I can’t believe you finally learned how to make vegetables taste good,” Olivia said, poking at her plate.

John pointed his fork at her. “Don’t sound shocked.”

You leaned toward Olivia and said, “He needs praise or he gets difficult.”

Olivia nodded solemnly. “I remember.”

John looked between you both. “I hate this alliance.”

“No,” Nathan chuckled. “I don’t think you do.”

He was right. He loved it.

He loved watching you and Olivia lean over the table together, laughing quietly while Mina and his son bartered potato cuts like tiny criminals. He loved that Nathan could ask him about his dental health without making it a big emotional event. 

And when John mentioned wanting to join a veterans support group, it felt… easy. 

“After listening to your subway thing,” he said, glancing at you. “And everything else. I think it might help.”

Your hand found his under the table first.

Olivia smiled at him sincerely. “I think you’d be good there, John. And I think it’d be good for you.”

Nathan nodded. “Sometimes it helps to be around people who understand without needing the whole story.”

You just kissed him on the cheek. “M’ proud of you, sweetheart.”

John looked down, thumb brushing over your knuckles, clearly trying not to get emotional about everything. 

Then his son looked up from his peas, very serious. “Do you get snacks at support group?”

John blinked. “Probably.”

His son nodded, satisfied. “Then you should go.”

Everyone laughed.

Later, in the kitchen, while the kids were distracted and Olivia was explaining something to Nathan, John caught you by the waist and pulled you gently toward him.

“Hi,” he murmured.

You smiled. “Hi.”

Then he kissed you.

It was supposed to be quick— it was most definitely not. Your hand curled into the front of his shirt, and John smiled against your mouth like he still couldn’t quite believe he got to have this. You, in his arms. Dinner in the next room. His son laughing. Olivia and Nathan not annoying him. Mina yelling something about Mr. Bun requiring surgery.

“John,” you whispered, laughing against his mouth. “Children.”

“They’re busy.”

You rolled your eyes, but kissed him once more before slipping out of his hands.

Near the end of the night, his son got sleepy and serious, leaning against John’s side while Mina sat on the floor beside him with Mr. Bun in her lap.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah, buddy?”

He pointed between himself and Mina. “Are me and Mina cousins now?”

Oh. 

John looked at you. You looked back, before glancing at Olivia. Olivia looked like she was trying not to cry, which immediately made Nathan look concerned, because Nathan was Nathan.

You smiled first, a wordless permission without making it a whole thing.

So John shrugged, easy as anything, and kissed the top of his son’s head. “Sure,” he said. “Think of it that way, kid.”

His son beamed.

Mina nodded once, very pleased. “Can I be the in-charge cousin?”

“No,” you and John said at the same time.

Olivia laughed. Nathan smiled. The kids immediately began negotiating cousin rules on the carpet.

For once, nothing in his life felt like a scoreboard. It didn’t even feel like a competition.

It just felt like family.

—end. 

[hudconvent]

the hottest thing a guy can be is a slut. and the second hottest thing a guy can be is self aware of how hot they are. and i have really really bad news about hudson williams.

[regainingparadise]

When #myshane retires, he doesn’t go into coaching or podcasting or whatever.

He becomes a consultant who shitty teams trying to not suck, good teams who want to last further into the playoffs, great teams who want to finally win the cup, call to Fix Them.

He is paid absolutely bonkers amounts of money to watch a team play for five minutes and immediately diagnose what’s wrong with them. He is always right.

Ok 5 minutes is probably an exaggeration. The coaches send him a bunch of tape to review in advance. They probably focus on their best players or the ones they think need the most improvement, but half the time Shane requests more, focusing on players they hadn’t paid much attention to before. Then one day at practice, the players look up into the stands and are filled with awe, terror, and wonder, because Shane Hollander is sitting there staring directly at them with a scarily thoughtful look on his face.

He meets with the coaches and gm and reports his conclusions. Who to trade and for who , how to get better results from certain players, how to run power plays and penalty kills, changes in line makeups.

Some lucky players get to meet with him. He takes about five minutes to list off or demonstrate everything they need to do to stop sucking. He has no time for chit chat or hero worship. Focus, listen, learn, and do exactly what he says and you will be good. Fail to do what he says and you will shame your entire bloodline.

I think that, if he’s not the one actually playing, this would be a dream job. It involves Knowing Things About Hockey, Judging Shitty Hockey Players, Getting Recognized As The Best at Hockey, Being Correct, and Making Hockey Better. He should get to do all these things

[themoonandmyman]

baby Ilya’s tiny angry Russian ranting when Irina won’t let him stay on the ice and his cheeks are all bright pink and his little nose is wet and he’s plopping down onto the ice and crossing his arms and yelling NYET NYET NYET.

Across the ocean at the exact same time, the exact same thing is happening to a very exhausted Yuna Hollander.

[littleewhitelotus]

i just HAD to draw this

[argillaforma]

ilya looking at himself shirtless in the mirror: am i getting too hairy, do you think i should shave some of my body hair?

shane trying to explode ilya with his mind: sure, if you hate me

[mutinsfromthemoon]

a lot of the centaurs learning that shane fucking hollander hockey robot is a YAPER. some of them are walking towards the locker room and as they get closer they start hearing very animated voices talking loudly and they recognizes ilya and shane’s voices and shane is explaining something to ilya and ilya is laughing hard at that and they’re just going back and forth about this topic and having fun with it and then the teammates finally round the corner and walk in and see ilya sitting on the bench half dressed fishing to putting his hockey gear and shane standing up gesturing with his hand talking very animated and still in his compression clothes and then it hit them that they genuinely didn’t know nothing about shane outside his PR image and they learn that not only shane talk loudly and a lot but shane and ilya are genuinely best friends on top of being married. and of course ilya wouldn’t be wiling to marry someone that doesn’t make him laugh or understand his type of humor. the chemistry of hockey husbands are in and out of the rink. that’s soulmates shit fr

[deansonlyangel]

ꨄ︎ happy birthday / dean winchester

⋰˚☆ dean x reader | fluff | 3.6k ⋰˚☆ where you’d never been big on birthday celebrations, and hadn’t once mentioned what date yours was, but dean always knew, and this year… he wanted to make sure you felt celebrated. ⋰˚☆ content: fem!reader, a little bit of angst, established relationship

a/n: happy birthday to meeeee!!!! well… sort of late birthday as i had no service to be able to post! but i decided i wanted to write myself a little birthday fic as it was in fact my birthday yesterday :3 of course it had to be a dean fic involving pie. i really liked writing this :)

It was your birthday.

Not that anyone knew. Because… why would they?

You’d gone most of your life without bothering with birthday celebrations, cake or parties. So why would you start now?

The last birthday you celebrated was when you turned 5. That was before your whole life changed. When you lost your parents.

As a few people you knew, you grew up with a family of hunters. Mainly your father. He would be gone for days, if not weeks at a time, tracking down whatever monster he’d found to trap it, kill it, salt and burn it.

Your mother kept you safe for the most part, even though she was just as involved. Sometimes she’d go with your dad, help him hunt, leave you with other friends or family to take care of you.

So much, to the point that your milestones, your birthdays, got forgotten about.

You’d get no gifts, no one telling you happy birthday. At one point, you were sure your own parents had even forgotten the date you were born.

That’s what made you give up on your birthday, on any celebrations. What was the point if nobody wanted to bother remembering.

A few years down the line, things did change. You got the news that things had gone sideways on one of your parents hunts, and that they wouldn’t be coming home.

Sure, you were upset. But what life had they given you? They’d forced you into this terrifying life, they didn’t show much care since you were a young child. You should’ve been more heartbroken, but the relationship you once had with your parents was long gone.

Instead, you’d found others. You had friends. Perhaps not normal friends. But other hunters.

Sam and Dean Winchester.

One that you were more close to than the other.

From the moment you met Dean, you were pulled in straight away. His style, how easily he flirted, that smooth voice always brining you back to him. You had no chance at a friendship.

Maybe you didn’t officially jump into a relationship right away, a little messing around here and there, flirty kisses at other times. In all honesty, it took you both a while to decide you were ready for a real relationship.

His brother, Sam, of course voiced his worries. But overall, he wanted Dean to be happy, and he didn’t mind becoming closer friends with you in the process. So that’s all there was to it.

By this point, you’d been dating Dean for a little over a year. And god, had it been an incredible but crazy time.

Dean was everything you’d ever hoped for. He cared about you more than anyone ever had, in a sense he was giving you the love that you never had from your parents. Sometimes shocking you with the things he’d do for you.

You’d always do things for him too. Since joining the brothers in their hunting, you did more of the research, less of the actual hunting. And you took it upon yourself to let them get the most rest on the days off.

You’d make sure you were up first, in the kitchen, cooking a nice breakfast for both of them. You loved it, loved feeling useful, loved how they enjoyed your food and were always grateful for it.

Although today was your birthday, it was just another normal day for you. No case, no research to do, no hunt to prepare for. Which meant, you were up, cooking breakfast.

Just as you were almost finished cooking, you heard quiet footsteps enter the room… and then come to a halt.

“Morning?” Sam had confusion in his voice.

You turned briefly, smiling at him, nodding towards the table where he usually sat to eat.

“Food’s almost ready,” you grabbed out three plates and a few sets of utensils. “Did you notice if Dean was up? Don’t want his food to get cold.”

He hesitated, soemthing else clearly on his mind, “uh, yea, yea he was right behind—“

“Cooking today?” Dean’s voice echoed around the kitchen.

He glared at Sam, but all he could do is raise his hands. He wasn’t up in time to stop you. You had no idea what was with all of the questioning.

“Yea?” You answered, starting to dish out the eggs, bacon, sausage and hash browns onto the plates. “Same as always, no case means I cook you breakfast.”

“Today’s different though.”

You glanced back at Dean, “how so?”

He just shook his head, moving to sit down opposite Sam at the table. A few minutes later, you brought two plates full of food to the table, walking back to the counter to get your own. And finally, you were sat down next to Dean.

Before you could even pick up your fork, Dean was pulling you against his side, leaning down to press a kiss— or three— to your cheek, making you look at him.

“Hi,” you smile.

“Any idea what you wanna do today?” He asked.

“Um,” you didn’t know why he was asking. “I don’t know, maybe go sit in the library for a while, there’s a book I never got time to finish.”

Dean looked away from you, “the library,” he paused. “Right.”

He let go of you, moving to start eating his breakfast, as you did too. Sam glanced to Dean, giving him a look as if saying dont be too hard on her. You still had no idea why they were acting like that.

After you’d all finished, Sam insisted on doing the dishes to let you and Dean get on with the day, spend some time together.

Dean went to the bedroom, letting you know he had something to take care of. You made your way to the library, finding the space Dean had specifically made for your love of books. You sat down, finally having a break from the scary world you live in.

You hadn’t realised how long you’d been in there until you heard someone clear their throat in front of you.

Dean was sat there, eyebrows slightly raised, “you always look so…” he leaned forwards on his elbows. “Engaged, in those books.”

“Engaged?”

“I’ve been sitting here for 20 minutes.”

“Oh,” you close your book, reaching over to take his hands in yours. “Did you need me for something?”

That’s when Dean smirked, “always need you, sweet girl.”

You shook your head, “don’t do that,” you stand up, walking a few steps to place your book back on the shelf.

Once you were back over with Dean, you stood behind his chair, leaning to wrap your arms around his shoulders, pressing a soft kiss to his cheek.

He placed his hands over your arms softly, “sure there’s nothing you wanna do today, baby?” He felt you shake your head. “No? Nothing at all? Don’t wanna take a drive, don’t wanna go for a stroll, I know you love that.”

“Just wanna stay here, take it easy today,” you stood again, leaning against the table. “Do you wanna do something? Is that why you’re asking?”

Dean shook his head, going quiet again. Peace surrounding the library as you enjoyed these small moments away from the craziness of your lives.

After the library, you had some time to yourself again, rearranging a few things on your half of the bedroom that you share with Dean. Reorganising your clothes in the closet. The usual things you did on your days off.

That’s when Dean appeared again, this time, he took your clothes straight out of your hands, practically shoving them back into your overflowing closet, moving to push you backwards to sit on the bed.

“Can I help you?” You laugh.

“You’re doing chores,” Dean’s hands rested on your shoulders. “You should be relaxing.”

You furrowed your brow, “when else can I organise everything?”

“Well… not today, that’s for sure.”

“Dean, it’s a normal day,” you folded your arms.

He chuckled, “is it though?” He stepped back, leaning against the wall.

“Last time I checked it was just a regular Sunday.”

It was hard for him. Keeping his chill. He so badly wanted to ask why you didn’t want to do anything, why you didn’t want to tell him or Sam about your birthday. Why you’re acting like today isn’t special at all.

But he’s learned from the past. Learned that you’re stubborn like him. So he didn’t push it, didn’t make you tell him anything you didn’t want to.

It was your choice after all.

Once he realised you really weren’t going to say anything about your birthday, he decided he’d had enough. You were his girlfriend, the person he loved the most, and he wanted you to feel that, especially today.

By the evening, Dean found you talking to Sam in his bedroom, and he gave a knowing look to Sam, causing him to stop talking. You turned to Dean with a smile.

“Kinda hungry, you wanna grab food?” He asked, pretending to aim the question at both of you.

“Sure, I could eat,” you smiled at Dean, turning your attention to Sam after.

He hesitated, eventually understanding Dean’s raised eyebrows after a few seconds, “you know, I think i’ll just stay here,” Sam decided. Not that he had a choice. “There’s some— uh… lore, I should catch up on.”

Sam got up, leaving the room in the direction of the library. You chuckled, walking over to Dean to start heading towards the exit of the bunker.

“That was totally weird, right?” You referred to Sam. “He normally comes out to eat on our days off.”

Dean shrugged, “guess he just wasn’t feeling it.”

On the way out, you followed Dean closely. It was hard to not notice the way he was fiddling with something in the pocket of his jacket, but you wouldn’t question it.

He took you to baby, opened the door for you and closed it after. You buckled your belt while he got into the drivers side, starting up the car immediately.

He wouldn’t say it out loud, obviously, but he was really excited to be doing this.

Taking his girl out for a birthday meal without you even knowing what’s happening. You still had no idea that he knew it was your birthday, and he was pretty good at hiding it.

Once arriving at the diner, he rushed out of his car to open the door for you before you got a chance to. As soon as you got out, he was closing the door, taking your hand in his to walk you to the entrance.

He lead you inside, picking a booth by the window to sit at. A view to the street just a short ways away, which he knew you always liked to look out at.

After 5 minutes, you’d already ordered drinks and food… now it was just the two of you, in this diner, sitting opposite each other while Dean tried to figure out how to do this subtly enough.

He reached over slowly, taking both of your hands in his. You turned to him, smiling as he squeezed softly, something you always loved.

“This is nice, you know?” He smiled softly. “Getting out, no hunting, just the two of us.”

You nodded, “wish it could be like this more often,” you sigh. “That we could be a normal couple.”

“I know, sweetheart,” he took a breath, knowing already that that’s why it took you so long to agree to dating. “At least we have these times though, even if they are rare.”

“Can we—“ you stopped talking as your food got brought over, Dean started eating his fries right away, but he was paying attention to you. “Can we try to schedule this into the hunting?”

He furrowed his brow, “what d’ya mean?”

“Like— after hunts, say if it’s a Friday, we go to the nearest food place, just me and you, spend some time together.”

Now you started eating your food, Dean taking his turn to talk about what you’d just suggested.

“We can work that out,” he agreed. “Not just eating out on special occasions— or uh, our days off.”

You were happy that he wanted to do that. However, you were becoming a little suspicious at his mention of special occasions. He only just caught himself with what he was saying.

In little time, you both finished your meals, Dean already preparing for his little surprise that he needed to try and pull off.

Your server came back over, asking if either of you wanted any dessert. Dean always wanted pie, ordering the cherry pie. He was very happy when you decided you wanted the same as him.

After what felt like only seconds, Dean was moving to stand up, gaining a confused look from you.

“I might change my mind on that pie,” he explained, trying to lie to you even though you could usually tell when he was.

He walked up to the counter gaining the attention of your same server. She walked over, already noticing the two candles mostly hidden in his palm.

“Birthday?” She asked.

Dean nodded, “tryna surprise her,” he glanced back at you.

The server nodded, taking the candles from him. He smiled happily to himself, taking a seat opposite you in the booth again.

To you, this was just a normal day off, getting a meal, relaxing, spending time with Dean. Nothing could be more perfect. There’s no other place you’d rather be right now.

You and Dean loved each other. Sure, neither of you actually said those three words very often, but you always showed it. Whether it was on a hunt, Dean protecting you, you watching his back, or if it’s on your days off, spending time together, Dean sitting with you while you catch up on reading or to watch a movie.

Your relationship was perfect.

And you were still sure neither of the brothers knew when your birthday was. Which is why you stopped blinking when your server began approaching with your two plates of pie.

Only, one piece of pie had two pink and yellow candles sitting on the top. The glowing flame moving in the motions of her steps.

She smiled at you as she put the pie in front of you, placing Dean’s down after. And then she let you two have your time to celebrate over some good cherry pie.

Dean looked at you, trying to hide the smile on his face, but you didn’t smile, you hadn’t even blink yet. You were staring at the two candles casting an orange glow towards you. It’s as if you didn’t know what to do, what to say, or even what to feel.

What were you feeling?

A lot of emotions all at once. This was the first time you’d had candles to celebrate your birthday since you were a young child. The first time that someone had actually put in an effort to do this for you. That’s when you felt tears welling up in your eyes.

Dean’s smile dropped, “hey, hey, what’s going on? I didn’t want you to cry, baby.”

You shook your head, holding back a sob, “no, it’s not— I just—“ you took a shaky breath.

You looked at Dean finally, chuckling with an upset sound to your voice. You reached for one of his hands, linking your fingers together.

“Um, no one’s ever done this for me before,” you wiped away a tear that managed to fall. “I haven’t done anything for my birthday since I was a kid.”

Now he was really listening. He had no idea. Dean knew you must’ve had some sort of issues surrounding your birthday since you’d never told him in the time you knew him for, but he never knew it was like this.

“I never talked about my birthday because my parents never used to care,” you explain. “They left for hunts and basically forgot about me because I wasn’t as important.”

You pause, looking down at the pie again, “I hated my birthday for such a long time, all it brought me was pain,” you sniffle. “I got over it. Decided to not think about it myself.”

Dean squeezed your hand, getting you to look at him again, “this is why you always deflect when the topic of your parents gets brought up, isn’t it?”

You nodded, sighing for what felt like the millionth time. Dean let go of your hand, moving to get up and sit right next to you in this booth. One arm going around your waist to pull you closer, the other tucking your hair behind your ear.

“How did you know it was my birthday?” You asked, not looking away now he was so close. “I made sure never to tell anyone, or give away any hints that it was coming up.”

“You think I wouldn’t know when my girls birthday is?” He thought that was obvious. “We do research for a living, sweetheart, you really thought I wouldn’t find out?”

You took a breath, Dean leaning towards you to press a soft kiss to your forehead. You leaned your head against his shoulder after, keeping one of his hands firmly in yours.

“I never thought I’d get close to celebrating my birthday again,” you mumbled. “Especially since I lost my family so young.”

Dean gently brushed your hair back with his fingers, “you’ve got a new family to celebrate it with now,” you leaned up to look at him after he said that. “Me and Sam, we’re your family, you got that?”

You hesitate, but slowly nod. They did feel like family, especially after how Dean had been treating you since you’d started dating.

A second later, Dean was pulling your slice of pie closer to the edge of the table, glancing to you slowly.

“You gotta blow out your candles,” he urged, hand squeezing your hip encouragingly. “Make a wish, pretty girl.”

Your cheeks didn’t take long to heat up at him calling you that, but you did think of a wish in your head. Perhaps to keep having days like this, for all of you to be safe, wanting Dean to be by your side like this always. You’d never tell him what you wished for though.

You blew out the candles quickly, a smile growing on Dean’s face after. Instead of reaching to now eat your pie, you wrapped your arms around Dean’s torso first, leaning your head against his chest.

It took him by surprise, wrapping his arms around your shoulders. He’d never mind just holding you like this for a while, no matter the reason.

“Happy birthday, sweetheart,” he whispered into your hair, placing a kiss there softly.

You finally leaned back, “I love you,” you said quietly, pecking his lips.

“I love you too, my girl.”

Then the pie was to be eaten. The cherry pie a perfect choice for this rare occasion. You were happy to be celebrating your birthday like this, with the person you loved most. Dean was just happy to see you smiling, see you didn’t mind that he wanted to do this for you.

Once you’d finished, Dean paid for the food and drinks, lead you out of the diner and straight back to the impala.

Before you could get inside, he grabbed you by the waist, spinning you around to him with that signature smirk on his face.

“Did you have a nice time?” He asked, he always asked.

You nodded, “I did,” you ran your hands through his hair. “Thank you for everything, for wanting to celebrate this, for not getting mad that I didn’t—“

“Why would I be mad?” He stopped you. “Baby I’d never be mad. I get it, you know? The hunting life isn’t easy, I don’t blame you for not wanting to tell us.”

You tried to smile, taking a breath as you looked down. Dean caught that immediately, placing his index finger under your chin to keep you looking at him.

“I’m not mad,” he said firmly. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

Dean leaned down, kissing you slowly, pouring his love into it as much as he could while standing outside by his car. He wanted tonight to end on a good note, and maybe he had another idea to make that happen.

He pulled back, seeing the way you were looking at him. The same way you always look at him. Like he’s everything and more.

“How about we go back to the bunker,” he speaks quietly, close to you. “And I’ll show you just how not mad I am, yea?”

You couldn’t help the red tint that coloured your cheeks, cupping his face in your hands as you leaned forwards for one last kiss.

“Whatever you want,” you agreed.

He laughed, “whatever I want?” He shook his head. “You’re the birthday girl, so you’re gonna tell me exactly what we’re gonna be doing before we get back.”

You listened, and easily agreed. Taking one step back before Dean stopped you again, he kissed you one last time, this time giving a genuine, loving smile.

“You’re everything to me, you know that?” He caressed his thumb across your cheek.

“and you’re everthing to me, Dean,” you kissed his cheek, finally going to get into the car.

You sat down, buckling your belt, Dean doing the same before starting to drive you back to the bunker.

The day was perfect, your birthday was perfect. And finally, after such a long time, maybe you’d realise your birthday doesn’t have to be a bad memory anymore, but something good, with your new family that was here to stay.

taglist: @sturnspup @icpsammy @milkyhrtss | if you would like to join my dean winchester taglist, please comment here or see this post

[satellite-evans]

the cure

Pairing: David!Clark Kent x reader

Summary: It doesn't matter how Clark's love feels, it won't fix you.

Word count: 8k+

Warnings: angst, insecurities, based on the Olivia Rodrigo song

A/N:

hey guys!! don’t worry, part 2 of hula hoop is still coming <3 but I really wanted to post this fic because I genuinely think it was illegal for olivia rodrigo to release the cure??? The song is devastatingly beautiful. The second I heard it, i knew I wanted to write a fic about it.

This fic is really special to me and definitely one of the more emotional things i’ve written, so I really hope you guys enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it :( xxx

English is not my first language, so I apologize if I made any (grammar) mistakes. Feedback, requests, talks, vents, recommendations or just simple questions are always welcome.

Happy reading xxx

I do NOT give permission for my work to be translated or reposted on here or any other site.

The first time Clark kissed you, you cried afterward.

Not because it was bad. God, it was the opposite.

It happened in the kitchen of your apartment at two in the morning while rain hammered against the fire escape outside your window hard enough to rattle the metal. Your apartment smelled faintly like rain-damp laundry, and the tea Clark had insisted on making, even though both mugs now sat forgotten on the counter, steam long gone cold.

You wore one of his sweaters over sleep shorts, the sleeves hanging past your hands because Clark liked tugging them over your fingers absentmindedly when he talked to you. His glasses sat crooked beside the sink where he'd abandoned them while drying dishes, and without them he looked softer somehow. Less like the sharp-featured reporter from the Daily Planet and more like the man underneath all of it.

There had been music playing quietly from your phone somewhere in the living room, something low and old crackling through bad speakers. Clark had been talking about work, about Perry assigning him some impossible article, but you hadn't really been listening anymore because he kept looking at your mouth between sentences like he was trying not to.

That nervousness in him undid you.

Clark Kent, who could stop planes from falling out of the sky, looked terrified of kissing you wrong.

You leaned against the counter while he stood too close in your tiny kitchen, broad shoulders nearly blocking out the overhead light. He smelled like clean laundry and rainwater and something warm you could never fully name. Home, maybe. Safety. Whatever it was, it made your chest ache.

“You're staring,” you murmured.

A flush crept slowly up his throat, visible even in the dim light. “Sorry.”

“You don't sound sorry.”

His mouth twitched slightly. “Guess I'm not.”

You should have looked away then. You knew you should have. Moments like this always became dangerous eventually. Intimacy always carried the possibility of disappointment behind it, and disappointment had teeth.

But Clark looked at you like you were something worth being careful with.

That was your first mistake.

His hand lifted slowly, hesitant enough to give you time to move if you wanted to. When his fingers finally touched your jaw, warmth spread through you so quickly it almost frightened you. He held your face like he thought too much pressure might crack you apart, which was ironic considering he could probably shatter concrete without trying.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked softly.

Not cocky. Not assuming.

You nodded before he even finished speaking, and Clark kissed you like he was trying to convince you of something.

Not with urgency. Not greedily. There was no performance in it, none of the practiced confidence you'd grown used to from other men. He kissed you with unbearable sincerity, like he was offering you every gentle thing inside himself all at once.

The hand on your jaw trembled slightly.

That nearly destroyed you.

Because nobody that powerful should have been nervous around you.

You kissed him back harder than you meant to, almost desperately. Your fingers tangled in the front of his shirt as if your body already knew something your mind hadn't caught up to yet. Clark made this small sound against your mouth, startled and soft, and then his other hand slid carefully to your waist.

For one suspended, impossible second, your brain went quiet.

No comparisons. No inventory list of everything you wished you could carve away from yourself. No remembering every prettier woman you'd passed on the street that day or imagining all the girls Clark could have wanted instead.

Just him. Just the warmth of his mouth against yours and the slow drag of his thumb against your waist through the sweater, just relief so overwhelming it felt almost holy.

It hit you all at once then, sudden and devastating.

Oh.

This was what people meant, this unbearable quiet.

You felt it so strongly your eyes burned instantly.

Clark kissed you deeper, slow and careful, and your chest ached with terrible, desperate hope. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the thing you'd been waiting for your entire life. Maybe love really could reach into all the ruined places inside a person and pull them whole again.

You had spent years believing that.

And the second he pulled away, your chest cracked open with grief so sudden it embarrassed you.

The silence inside your head vanished all at once, replaced by something sharp behind your eyes.

Clark noticed immediately, of course he did.

“Hey,” he said softly.

You turned your face quickly before the tears could fully spill over, wiping beneath your eye with the sleeve of his sweater. “Sorry.”

Your laugh came out weak and embarrassed.

Clark's expression shifted instantly, concern softening every feature. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” you answered too fast.

“Was it too much?”

The nervousness in his voice made guilt twist painfully in your chest. He looked genuinely worried he'd crossed a line somehow, his hand slipping from your waist slowly like he wasn't sure if he should still be touching you.

“No, Clark.” You shook your head quickly. “God, no.”

“Then why are you crying?”

You swallowed hard.

Because how were you supposed to explain that the kiss had felt too good somehow? That your emotions suddenly sat too close to the surface to hold back properly?

So instead, you lied.

“I think I'm just overwhelmed,” you said quietly, staring down at your hands. “I've been waiting for this for a long time.”

Clark's entire face softened at that.

Relief flickered visibly across his expression.

“Oh.”

You nodded quickly, forcing out another shaky laugh. “It's stupid.”

“It isn't stupid.”

His voice dropped softer then, warmer somehow, and before you could say anything else Clark stepped closer again carefully, like he was still trying to make sure this was okay.

“You scared me for a second,” he admitted.

The confession was so earnest it made your chest ache.

“Sorry,” you whispered again.

Clark frowned immediately. “Stop apologizing.”

Then he smiled a little, nervous and sweet in that way only he could manage, and brushed his thumb lightly beneath your eye where your tears had escaped.

“You know,” he murmured, “for the record, I've been waiting for this too.”

And somehow that made your throat tighten even more.

When you were younger, love looked medicinal.

Not literally, of course. Nobody ever sat you down and said one day another person will save you from yourself. It was quieter than that. Hidden inside every movie you watched late at night and every song you replayed until the lyrics hollowed something out inside you.

Love was always presented as transformation. The lonely girl became radiant. The insecure girl became chosen. The moment somebody looked at her with enough devotion, all the sharp little insecurities evaporated like they had never existed at all.

Every story seemed to promise the same thing in different packaging: you will be wanted, and then you will finally become whole.

You absorbed that message young enough for it to root deep.

You remember being fourteen and standing sideways in front of your bathroom mirror, sucking in your stomach until your ribs hurt because girls in magazines looked effortless, and you already understood somehow that effortlessness was the closest thing women were allowed to perfection. You remember tilting your chin different ways, pulling at your clothes, analyzing every inch of yourself with the detached cruelty of someone grading an exam.

Too soft here. Too awkward there. Not pretty in the right way.

You spent years believing there was a correct version of femininity everyone else had received instructions for except you.

At school, pretty girls moved through the world differently. People softened around them automatically. Conversations bent toward them like gravity. They laughed without covering their mouths afterward, existed without apologizing first, and you wanted that ease so badly it made your chest ache.

Instead, you became observant. Funny. Self aware in the exhausting way insecure people often are.

You learned how to laugh before anyone else could laugh first. Learned how to make yourself agreeable and easy to keep around. You became skilled at reading rooms within seconds of entering them, instinctively figuring out who needed you quieter, prettier, smarter, less emotional.

Smaller.

And underneath all of it lived jealousy so intense it frightened you sometimes. Not loud jealousy, but silent jealousy. The kind that sat in your stomach like swallowed poison while you smiled through it politely.

You would see a beautiful girl beside someone you liked and immediately begin dissecting yourself against her without even meaning to.

Her skin is clearer. Her waist is smaller. She doesn't look nervous all the time.

You could ruin entire days that way.

Then dating started, and everything got worse.

Because suddenly there were histories attached to people. Other girls who existed before you. You approached relationships like someone preparing for inevitable disappointment, every question feeling like gathering evidence before a trial.

How many exes have you had?

Have you ever been in love before?

How many girls have you slept with?

You always forced yourself to sound relaxed asking it, like the answers wouldn't matter. Then afterward you'd lie awake replaying every detail they gave you voluntarily and inventing dozens more they didn't.

Sometimes you'd stalk social media until three in the morning searching for faces you could attach to names. Then you'd compare yourself against carefully curated photos until your stomach hurt.

It became ritualistic in a horrible way. You'd spiral. You'd cry. You'd hate yourself for caring so much.

Then you'd do it again anyway.

The worst part wasn't even the jealousy. It was how humiliating love made you feel afterward. The neediness. The panic. The unbearable desire to be chosen permanently in a world where nothing actually stayed permanent.

You hated how quickly affection turned into fear inside your chest. Hated that one delayed text could unravel your entire evening. You wanted love desperately, but you resented what wanting it turned you into.

Then Clark arrived and complicated everything.

Not because he was Superman, though discovering the quiet reporter you'd started falling for could hear heartbeats from buildings away certainly rearranged your understanding of reality for a while.

No, Clark terrified you because of how gently he loved.

There was nothing calculated about him. No games. No strategic withholding. Clark cared openly, almost recklessly, like affection was the easiest thing in the world for him to give.

Most men you'd dated made you feel auditioned, even the good ones. There was always some underlying sense that attraction was conditional, that you were being evaluated against every other woman in the room.

But Clark looked at you with this steady certainty that made your chest tight. Like he wasn't searching for flaws. Like he had simply seen you and decided that was enough.

You didn't know what to do with that kind of acceptance.

The first few months of knowing him, you kept waiting for the illusion to crack. Waiting for him to notice something disappointing about you and pull away slightly afterward. You expected affection to fluctuate because every other version of love you'd encountered had.

But Clark remained painfully consistent.

He remembered things you mentioned once in passing. He brought you coffee exactly the way you liked it after memorizing your order accidentally. He texted you when he got home safe without being asked. When you spoke, he listened with his full attention instead of scanning the room over your shoulder for someone more interesting.

And maybe none of those things sound extraordinary.

But to someone who had spent years feeling fundamentally replaceable, they were.

Clark made you feel seen in a way that bordered on unbearable.

Because part of you still believed love had to be earned constantly through beauty, usefulness, perfection, or whatever version of yourself seemed easiest for other people to keep.

And Clark loved you before you had proven any of those things.

That should have healed something.

Instead, it exposed every wound more clearly.

Because if someone like Clark could love you this sincerely and you still hated yourself afterward, then maybe the problem had never been a lack of love at all.

You met him at the Daily Planet on a Thursday afternoon that already felt cursed.

The air conditioning on your floor had broken sometime before noon, leaving the newsroom sticky with late summer heat and irritation. Phones rang endlessly from every direction. Someone in politics was arguing loud enough to be heard across the bullpen. Perry had shouted your name three separate times in the span of an hour, and by three o'clock you were surviving entirely on bad coffee and spite.

You were halfway through rewriting a headline when Lois appeared beside your desk like a hurricane in heels.

“You look terrible,” she informed you casually.

You didn't glance up from your computer. “And you look intrusive.”

“Good. Keep that energy.” She dropped a folder onto your keyboard before you could stop her. “I brought you something.”

“Unless it's a winning lottery ticket or hard liquor, I don't want it.”

Lois grinned, sharp and dangerous in the way only Lois Lane could manage. “Perfect. You two already sound married.”

You frowned and finally looked up.

That was when you saw him standing awkwardly a few feet behind her.

Tall. Broad shouldered. Wearing a button down rolled messily at the sleeves like he'd tried to look professional halfway and given up afterward. His tie sat slightly crooked beneath the collar, glasses slipping down his nose just enough to make him push them back up every few seconds.

Clark looked painfully out of place against the chaos of the newsroom. Like someone had taken a small town librarian and accidentally dropped him into the middle of Metropolis.

“This,” Lois announced with immense satisfaction, “is Clark Kent. Small town farm boy. Be nice to him.”

Clark immediately looked embarrassed. “Lois.”

“What?” she said innocently. “It's accurate.”

You expected him to laugh it off smoothly.

Most men did.

Instead, Clark glanced at you with visible nervousness, like he genuinely cared whether or not you liked him already.

“Hi,” he said, offering a hand. “Clark Kent.”

His voice surprised you. Warm. Deep. Softer than someone his size should've sounded.

You shook his hand automatically and immediately noticed how careful he was. Most people shook hands absentmindedly. Clark held yours like he was worried about gripping too hard, despite the fact that you were not made of glass.

“Nice to meet you,” you said.

Clark smiled then.

And God.

He was beautiful. Not movie star beautiful, not the polished kind of attractive that made heads turn instantly when someone entered a room. Clark's beauty unfolded slower than that. It crept up on you quietly until suddenly you realized you'd been staring at him for too long.

He looked warm. Open. Like sunlight through curtains early in the morning.

There was something deeply unguarded about him that threw you off balance immediately. Most people in Metropolis wore layers. Professionalism. Charm. Calculation. Everyone at the Planet sharpened themselves into something harder just to survive the pace of the city.

Clark still looked soft around the edges.

Sincere in a way that almost seemed outdated.

You remember thinking, very suddenly and very clearly, 'This man is going to ruin my life.'

Not because he was intimidating, because he wasn't.

That was the problem.

Men like Clark always ruined you the worst. The gentle ones. The ones who listened too carefully and smiled too softly and made you feel safe enough to lower your guard before they left carrying pieces of you with them.

It was never the cruel men who did the most damage. Cruelty at least prepared you for impact. But kind men convinced you to trust them first.

Then they became irreplaceable.

Clark settled into your life slowly after that.

At first he was just another reporter weaving through the chaos of the newsroom, apologizing too much when he bumped into desks and always looking faintly overwhelmed by Lois' existence. You'd catch glimpses of him throughout the day — bent over notes, arguing quietly with Perry, carrying six coffees because apparently he knew everyone's orders within a week.

And he looked at people when they spoke.

Really looked at them.

Most conversations in the newsroom happened while typing emails or scanning headlines or mentally preparing responses before the other person finished talking. Everyone was moving too fast to fully pay attention.

Clark paid attention completely.

The first real conversation you had with him happened after midnight during a stormy deadline shift. Half the office had gone home already, leaving the bullpen dim and exhausted. You were rubbing at your eyes trying to finish edits before Perry lost his mind when Clark appeared beside your desk holding two vending machine coffees.

“I think this legally qualifies as motor oil,” he said, setting one beside you. “But it's warm.”

You laughed despite yourself.

“That's the nicest thing anyone's done for me all week.”

His smile appeared slow and shy, like he wasn't used to making people laugh on purpose.

“You've been here since six this morning,” he said. “Figured you could use it.”

The comment startled you.

Not because it was invasive, because he'd noticed.

“You keeping tabs on me, Kent?”

A faint flush climbed his cheeks instantly. “No. I just... notice things.”

And there it was again.

That sincerity.

After that, Clark became impossible to keep at a distance.

He remembered things casually, effortlessly, in ways that made your chest ache without permission. If you mentioned liking a certain pastry once, he'd bring it the next week because he “happened to pass the bakery.” If you complained about insomnia, he'd text you ridiculous articles about sleep habits at two in the morning because apparently he was awake too.

You started expecting him without meaning to. Expecting the warmth of his voice drifting over your cubicle walls. Expecting him beside your desk asking if you'd eaten lunch yet because somehow he'd noticed you skipped it again.

One afternoon you muttered absentmindedly that your favorite pen had run out of ink.

The next morning there was an identical pack sitting on your desk.

No note. Just Clark shrugging awkwardly when you confronted him about it.

“You sounded upset,” he said simply.

The terrifying part wasn't grand gestures.

It was the consistency.

Clark cared in steady, unremarkable ways that slowly became devastating.

Even after you started dating, even after discovering he was Superman and spending several weeks mentally unraveling over that information specifically, he remained impossibly attentive.

He texted you after interviews. After late shifts. After nights out with friends.

Made it home safe?

That was it sometimes.

Four words.

But nobody had ever checked for you so consistently before.

There were nights he'd disappear suddenly in the middle of dinner because somewhere across the city a building was collapsing or someone screamed for help loud enough for only him to hear. Then hours later you'd receive a text at three in the morning.

Sorry. You asleep?

Did you remember to eat?

It made no sense. This man could be stopping disasters halfway across the planet and still remembered tiny details about you.

Sometimes you'd catch him looking at you when he thought you weren't paying attention. Not staring. Something quieter than that. Like there was an ache inside him he didn't know what to do with.

You'd be talking about something completely meaningless — office gossip, bad takeout, a movie you hated — and Clark would watch you with this soft, almost wounded affection that made your chest feel too small for your ribs.

Like he couldn't believe you were real.

And slowly, horribly, you began to hope.

Not all at once. Hope arrived carefully, in pieces. In the way your body relaxed around him without permission. In the way silence stopped feeling dangerous when you were together. In the way you started believing him every time he called you beautiful, even if only for a few seconds before doubt returned.

You hated that hope most of all.

Because hope meant vulnerability. Hope meant believing this time might be different.

And deep down, beneath all the fear and jealousy and poison you'd carried for years, a small desperate part of you started whispering something terrifying every time Clark touched you gently enough to make your throat ache:

Maybe this was it.

Maybe this was finally the antidote.

One night, months into the relationship, you sat cross legged on Clark's couch while he cooked dinner behind you.

It was late autumn by then. Cold enough outside that the windows fogged faintly around the edges, the city glowing soft and blurred beyond the glass. Clark had left one of his sweaters draped over your shoulders the second you walked through the door because apparently your hands were “always freezing,” and now the sleeves swallowed your fingers while you scrolled absentmindedly through your phone.

His apartment smelled like garlic and tomato sauce simmering on the stove. Warm and comforting, the kind of smell people associated with home.

The television murmured quietly in the background, some black and white movie Clark loved because his parents used to watch it when he was little. You weren't paying attention to the plot, only the rhythm of it. The low static hum of old film. The occasional burst of orchestral music. Clark humming softly under his breath while he stirred the sauce.

It was domestic and safe, the kind of moment people wrote vows about.

That thought hit you strangely hard.

Because this was the sort of life you'd imagined wanting when you were younger. Not glamorous. Not dramatic. Just this. Someone moving comfortably around a kitchen while you existed together in easy silence.

Clark looked over his shoulder toward you then, wooden spoon still in hand.

“You hungry?”

“Starving.”

“You said that twenty minutes ago.”

“Because I was starving twenty minutes ago too.”

A smile tugged at his mouth.

God, even that smile hurt now.

Not in a bad way. In the way beautiful things sometimes did when you loved them too much.

You watched him move around the kitchen for a moment longer. The sleeves of his gray henley pushed to his elbows. His glasses slipping down his nose while he cooked. The quiet ease in his posture now that he was home with you instead of carrying the weight of the world somewhere on his back.

Clark in private still stunned you sometimes.

Superman belonged to everyone; Clark Kent belonged only to you.

Then Clark's phone buzzed on the coffee table.

You glanced down automatically, thinking it was a text message, and felt your stomach drop almost instantly.

A girl from Clark's college years had followed him on Instagram.

You knew that because her profile included the university initials, and because her picture was beautiful enough to make something sour twist beneath your ribs before you even clicked it.

You should've ignored it.

Instead your thumb moved anyway.

The first photo loaded, and she was pretty.

Of course.

Not intimidatingly glamorous. Worse than that. Effortlessly pretty. The kind of beauty that looked untouched and easy. Soft brown eyes. Tiny waist. Bright smile that didn't seem practiced at all.

You clicked the next photo.

Then another.

And another.

A sickness bloomed slowly beneath your skin because now your brain had something to work with.

A real face. A real woman who had existed in Clark's life before you.

You imagined them younger. Meeting in college hallways. Sitting too close together at parties. Her laughing at something he said while touching his arm casually like beautiful girls always seemed to do without fear.

Had he loved her?

Had he looked at her the way he looked at you now?

Had she ever stood in this kitchen?

You hated how quickly your thoughts spiraled.

Nothing had even happened. A follow request, that was all.

But your body reacted like betrayal had already entered the room.

Your chest tightened painfully. Heat crawled up your throat. You kept scrolling even while nausea spread hot beneath your ribs because some ugly part of you needed to know exactly what kind of woman Clark had once wanted.

Every photo became evidence against yourself.

Her legs are thinner than yours.

She looks easy to love.

She probably doesn't overthink every little thing.

Clark noticed the shift immediately.

Of course he did.

“You okay?”

His voice came from behind you, gentle and immediate.

You locked your phone too quickly. “Fine.”

The answer came automatic, almost too fast.

You heard the stove click off behind you almost instantly.

Silence settled over the apartment except for the television murmuring softly in the background.

“Hey.”

You looked up to find him watching you carefully from the kitchen doorway. Concern already written across his face. He wiped his hands absentmindedly on a dish towel before crossing toward the couch.

“Talk to me.”

The kindness in his voice nearly undid you on the spot.

You hated that sometimes. Hated how quickly tenderness made tears burn behind your eyes these days. It felt embarrassing, how fragile you became whenever he handled you gently.

“I just...” You laughed shakily. “God, this is stupid.”

Clark's brow furrowed immediately.

“It isn't stupid if it's hurting you.”

There it was again. That awful, beautiful softness. Like your pain mattered to him even when it made no logical sense.

Clark crouched in front of the couch slowly, close enough for your knees to brush his chest. His expression stayed open and patient, waiting instead of pushing.

You stared down at your locked phone in your lap.

Then whispered, “Do you ever compare me to other girls? I don't know, like girls you know, girls you dated before me, girls you see walking on the street. Do you?”

The question sat between you for a second too long.

Clark's face softened immediately, something sad flickering across his expression. Not annoyance. Not frustration. Just the quiet hurt of hearing someone he loved talk about themselves that way.

“No,” he said softly.

You looked away first.

“But you've loved people before.”

“I cared about people before,” he corrected gently.

The distinction should've comforted you. Instead it made your throat tighter.

“Sometimes I think about everyone you've ever been with before me and I feel physically sick.”

Clark went very still.

The television laughed faintly in the background at some joke neither of you heard.

Silence stretched between you then, but not the dangerous kind. Not irritated silence. Sad silence. The kind that came from watching someone you loved hurt themselves in real time and not knowing how to stop it.

Clark reached for your hands carefully enough to give you time to pull away if you wanted.

You didn't.

His palms were warm around yours, steady.

“Listen to me,” he said quietly. “I don't want anyone else.”

“But that's not the point.” Your voice cracked unexpectedly on the last word.

Because suddenly this wasn't really about the girl on Instagram anymore.

It was about the ugly thing underneath all of it. The constant, gnawing belief that eventually everyone would realize you were harder to love than they first thought.

That one day Clark would wake up and see you clearly. Really clearly. All the insecurity and jealousy and fear curled underneath your skin. All the exhausting ways you constantly needed reassurance while simultaneously distrusting it.

And once he saw it fully, he'd leave too.

Maybe not cruelly.

Maybe sadly.

But he'd leave.

Because people always did eventually.

Clark searched your face carefully like he was trying to read thoughts you couldn't say aloud.

“What is the point? Please tell me.”

And there it was.

The impossible question.

You stared at him, devastated suddenly by how badly you wanted him to answer it for you.

Fix me.

Please.

Tell me why I feel this way all the time.

Tell me how to stop measuring myself against every woman who walks into a room.

Tell me how to believe you when you say you love me.

Tell me why being loved still feels terrifying instead of safe.

Clark waited patiently while tears gathered in your eyes again.

“I thought...” Your voice trembled badly. “I thought being loved would make me feel different.”

The words landed heavily between you.

Clark looked heartbroken.

Not defensive. Not frustrated. Just devastated in this quiet, aching way, like he'd finally realized how much grief you'd been carrying silently the entire time he'd known you.

“Baby,” he said softly, “you think I don't see how hard you are on yourself?”

That did it.

You started crying fully then.

Because the worst part was that he did see it. Every flinch in front of mirrors. Every shift in your mood after seeing prettier women nearby. Every self deprecating joke disguised as humor.

He saw every ugly little fracture inside you and loved you anyway.

That should have healed something. Instead, it made the grief sharper.

Because now there was proof. Proof that even being loved completely and wholeheartedly still didn't silence the ache inside you.

And that realization terrified you more than loneliness ever had.

Clark moved immediately, sitting beside you on the couch and pulling you into him before you could apologize for crying.

You folded against his chest instinctively.

His arms wrapped around you carefully, one hand moving slowly up and down your spine while the other cradled the back of your head against his shoulder. You could hear his heartbeat beneath your ear, steady and warm and painfully human despite everything extraordinary about him.

“I've got you,” he murmured softly.

The words nearly broke you apart.

Because he meant them, completely.

“You don't have to earn love,” he whispered into your hair after a long silence.

Your eyes squeezed shut.

Because logically, rationally, you knew he was right. You knew people weren't meant to perform perfect versions of themselves just to deserve softness from others. Clark had spent months trying to show you that through every small, steady act of care he gave so naturally.

But somewhere deep inside you, underneath all the warmth of his body against yours and the comfort of being held, another voice still lingered quietly.

Small.

Persistent.

Cruel.

Then why doesn't it feel like enough?

Loving Clark felt like standing in sunlight with frostbite.

Warmth reached you, it did. That was what made it so confusing sometimes. Because Clark loved you beautifully. Consistently. There was never any shortage of tenderness between you, never any question about whether or not he cared.

And yet some parts of you stayed numb anyway.

Some wounds remained untouched by all that warmth no matter how desperately you wanted them healed.

Clark tried so hard.

Sometimes you thought loving you must feel like trying to hold water in his hands. Every time he soothed one hurt, another crack opened somewhere else. Another insecurity. Another spiral. Another night where your own mind turned against you so viciously it left you exhausted.

And Clark met every single one of those moments with gentleness.

That was the unbearable part.

He never mocked your fear or rolled his eyes at the things that sent you spiraling. Even when he clearly didn't fully understand why your mind turned ordinary things into catastrophes, he still handled your feelings carefully, like they deserved compassion instead of ridicule.

Like you deserved compassion instead of ridicule.

There were nights he'd find you sitting on the bathroom floor after staring too long at yourself in the mirror, knees pulled to your chest while shame crawled hot beneath your skin for reasons you couldn't even fully articulate. Clark would crouch in front of you immediately, concern softening his face before you'd spoken a single word.

“Hey,” he'd say quietly. “Talk to me.”

And sometimes you couldn't.

Sometimes there wasn't language for the heaviness sitting inside your ribs. How do you explain to someone that your reflection feels wrong in ways too abstract to name? How do you explain the exhaustion of constantly fighting your own brain just to exist comfortably inside yourself?

Clark never pushed when you couldn't answer. He would just sit beside you on the cold tile floor, broad shoulders pressed against yours, waiting silently until your breathing slowed again.

Once, after a panic attack left you shaking so badly you could barely unclench your hands, Clark sat cross legged on the edge of your bed and held your face between both palms with such impossible care it made fresh tears spill from your eyes.

The room was dark except for the small lamp glowing beside the bed. Your breathing still hurt from crying too hard, too long. Clark had arrived halfway through it, still wearing his glasses and rumpled work clothes, concern written all over his face the second he saw you curled against the headboard struggling to breathe properly.

He hadn't panicked, hadn't overwhelmed you with questions.

He just climbed onto the bed carefully and stayed close until the worst of it passed.

“Look at me,” he whispered gently once your breathing started slowing.

You tried. God, you tried.

But your vision blurred too badly with tears, and shame crawled hot beneath your skin at the thought of him seeing you like this again. Broken open. Unsteady. Too much.

“I can't,” you admitted weakly.

Clark's expression softened immediately. His thumb brushed beneath your eye, wiping away tears with a tenderness that almost hurt to endure.

“Yes, you can,” he murmured. “There you are.”

The words lodged somewhere painful inside your chest.

Not 'calm down.'

Not 'get it together.'

Not 'what's wrong with you?'

There you are.

Like he'd been searching for you beneath all the panic and noise. Like he still believed there was a version of you worth finding underneath all the unraveling.

And maybe that was the cruelest part of loving Clark Kent sometimes, the way he looked at you during your worst moments like you were still someone gentle and precious underneath all the damage.

Clark kissed every scar like reverence.

Not literally at first. It was quieter than that.

The scar near your knee from childhood. The stretch marks you once apologized for instinctively before he frowned and asked why you were apologizing at all. The parts of yourself you tried to hide automatically because past experiences had taught you softness was conditional.

Clark handled all of it carefully.

The first time he traced his fingers over the faint scars on your thigh without hesitation, your throat tightened so suddenly you had to look away.

It happened late at night while the two of you lay tangled together beneath his sheets, rain tapping softly against the windows while Clark talked about something you weren't really listening to anymore. Your attention had caught entirely on the gentle drag of his fingertips across skin you'd spent years trying not to think about too hard.

Then his thumb brushed over the scars.

He didn't freeze or pretend not to notice them. He simply touched them with the same tenderness he touched every other part of you.

Your chest tightened instantly.

Because he wasn't recoiling. Wasn't silently evaluating your body piece by piece beneath his hands.

Clark looked at your body like it was simply yours. Human and real and deserving of affection exactly as it was.

And still, somehow, you couldn't fully absorb it.

That disconnect tortured you quietly.

Because you knew how lucky you were. You knew people spent entire lifetimes searching for love this gentle, the kind that remained patient even when confronted with the ugliest parts of someone.

Clark loved you in a way that should have felt healing.

Instead, it often felt heartbreaking.

Not because he failed you. Because every time he held you through another spiral and the spiral still returned eventually, grief settled heavier inside your chest.

You started realizing love and healing were not the same thing.

That realization gutted you.

Sometimes Clark would wake in the middle of the night and find you staring at the ceiling beside him while thoughts churned endlessly inside your head.

“You're thinking too loud again,” he'd mumble sleepily, voice rough with exhaustion.

You'd laugh weakly. “Sorry.”

Clark always hated when you apologized for hurting.

Even half asleep, you could feel him frown.

“C'mere.”

Then he'd pull you against him immediately, large arms wrapping around your body until your back pressed firmly to his chest. Sometimes his hand would settle over your sternum like he was trying to steady the frantic rhythm underneath.

And slowly, eventually, your heartbeat would begin matching his.

Steady.

Clark held you like proximity itself could protect you from your own mind.

And maybe sometimes it helped.

There were moments where the noise inside your head softened enough for relief to slip through. Moments where Clark kissing your temple absentmindedly while half asleep made you feel briefly anchored to something solid.

But eventually the pain always returned.

You would wake the next morning and still feel fragile in your own skin. Still compare yourself against strangers without meaning to. Still flinch at compliments some days because part of you remained convinced love could disappear without warning.

And every time that happened, guilt followed immediately after.

Because Clark was trying so hard.

You'd catch him watching you carefully after another spiral with this quiet devastation in his eyes, like he hated that he couldn't save you from something invisible. Superman could stop earthquakes. Could hold collapsing buildings above his head.

But he couldn't pull the self hatred out of your bloodstream.

And the cruelest part was that some broken, childish part of you still wanted him to.

You kept waiting for the moment his love would finally outweigh your fear. For the day you'd look in the mirror and hear his voice louder than your own cruelty.

But healing didn't work like that.

Love didn't either.

That realization came slowly and painfully. It lived in the quiet moments after comfort faded. In the mornings where Clark kissed your forehead before work and you still spent twenty minutes criticizing yourself in the bathroom mirror afterward.

Clark's affection was real. Powerful, even.

There were parts of you that survived entirely because he'd loved them gently instead of harshly. Loving Clark changed you in undeniable ways. It made the world feel safer. Made tenderness feel possible again.

But it was not a cure.

His love could hold you while you unraveled, but it could not stop the unraveling itself.

And maybe that was the hardest truth of all.

Not that Clark failed to save you.

But that he was never supposed to.

The fight happened in winter.

It wasn't explosive or cruel, which somehow made it worse.

There was no screaming. No slammed doors. No sharp words designed to wound on purpose. If anything, the entire thing unfolded too softly, like watching something precious crack in slow motion while neither of you knew how to stop it.

The work gala had been sitting on your calendar for weeks. Some charity event hosted high above the city in a building full of people who looked expensive even standing still. Lois had been excited for it. You had been dreading it quietly since the invitation arrived.

By the time the night finally came, your anxiety already sat heavy beneath your ribs before you'd even started getting ready.

The apartment bathroom glowed warm with yellow light while snow drifted past the windows outside. Makeup products cluttered the counter beside half empty glasses of water and abandoned earrings you'd decided you hated the second you put them on. Three dresses lay discarded across the bedroom behind you like evidence from some humiliating crime scene.

Nothing fit right.

Or maybe it fit fine and your brain simply refused to let you see it correctly anymore.

The black dress pinched too tightly around your waist.

The blue one made your shoulders look broad.

The silk one clung wrong at the stomach.

Every angle in the mirror felt unbearable.

You stood there twisting sideways beneath the bathroom light, arms wrapped around yourself while shame crawled hot and vicious through your chest. The longer you stared, the less recognizable your reflection became. Every insecurity sharpened under scrutiny until it felt impossible to imagine leaving the apartment at all.

Outside the bathroom door, Clark moved quietly through the bedroom gathering his wallet and watch, the soft sounds of hangers shifting and drawers opening carrying faintly through the apartment.

“We're gonna be late,” he called gently.

Not irritated. Never irritated. Even now, with the evening slipping away while you stood frozen in front of the mirror fighting yourself, his voice stayed patient and warm.

You squeezed your eyes shut briefly. “I know.”

There was a small pause before he spoke again, softer this time, closer to the door like he'd started making his way toward you.

“You look beautiful.”

The compliment hit something raw inside your chest.

Your laugh came out brittle before you could stop it. “You don't have to say that.”

Silence answered immediately.

Heavy silence.

The kind that made your stomach sink because you knew, instantly, you'd hurt him.

Clark stepped inside the bathroom carefully, like approaching a wounded animal that might bolt if startled too quickly. He'd already changed into his suit, dark tie loosened slightly at the collar while snowlight filtered pale through the bedroom windows behind him.

God.

Even then, part of you noticed how beautiful he was.

Not intimidatingly beautiful, just unfairly kind looking.

Clark took in the scene immediately. The dresses scattered across the room. Your mascara beginning to smudge beneath your eyes. The way your arms folded tightly around your middle like you were trying to physically hold yourself together.

Concern softened his face instantly.

“You've been in here almost an hour,” he said quietly.

You looked away from the mirror first. “I can't find anything that looks right.”

Clark frowned slightly, confused in that earnest way he always became when confronted with pain he couldn't logic through.

“You've changed three times,” he said gently. “You looked beautiful in every dress.”

Your throat tightened immediately.

Because he meant it.

That was the problem.

Clark wasn't saying it automatically or carelessly. He wasn't throwing compliments at you just to end the conversation faster. He genuinely looked confused standing there in the bathroom doorway, like he couldn't understand why you were seeing something so completely different in the mirror than what he saw standing in front of you.

“I don't understand why you can't just believe me.”

The words were quiet. Careful. Not accusatory in the slightest, but they still split something open inside your chest.

Because there was hurt in them too.

Not anger.

Just the soft, exhausted sadness of someone trying desperately to hand you love in a language you still didn't know how to accept.

You stared at your reflection in the mirror, at the tears gathering humiliatingly fast in your eyes, and suddenly anger flared sharp beneath all the shame.

Not at him.

Never at him.

At yourself. At the exhaustion of carrying this feeling everywhere you went. At how impossible it seemed to escape your own mind no matter how deeply Clark loved you, no matter how gently he held you, no matter how many times he looked at you like you were something worth cherishing.

Something inside you snapped.

“Because you love me.”

The words came out harsher than you intended, echoing off the bathroom tiles in the silence between you.

Clark blinked, visibly thrown by the sudden sharpness in your voice. “Yeah,” he said slowly.

You laughed once under your breath, bitter and shaky all at once. “So of course you don't see me clearly.”

The second the sentence left your mouth, regret crashed into you.

You watched the pain cross his face in real time.

Not offense. Not anger.

Pain.

Real, quiet pain that softened his expression instantly, like you'd reached into his chest and pressed against something bruised there. Clark stared at you for a long second without speaking, and somehow that hurt worse than if he'd snapped back. He looked at you like you'd just reduced his love to something naive. Like you'd taken something honest and beautiful he'd been trying to offer you and called it blindness instead. Like you'd struck something tender directly with your bare hands.

“Is that what you think love is?” he asked softly. “Blindness?”

You opened your mouth, and closed it again.

Because maybe it was.

Maybe some part of you truly believed love required delusion to survive. Maybe you thought people only stayed because affection distorted reality enough to make flaws tolerable.

Otherwise, why would anyone stay at all?

The silence stretched painfully between you.

Clark stepped closer slowly.

Snow drifted quietly outside the windows behind him while the radiator hissed softly in the apartment, filling the room with warmth that somehow never reached your skin.

“I know what you look like,” he said carefully.

You shook your head immediately. “Clark...”

“No.” His voice stayed gentle, but steadier now. “Listen to me.”

He moved closer until he stood directly behind you in the mirror.

Not trapping.

Just there.

Grounding.

“I know every version of you,” he continued quietly. “I know when you're insecure before you even say anything. I know when you're pretending you're okay because your left eye starts twitching when you're anxious.” A sad smile flickered briefly across his face. “I know you leave cabinet doors open. I know you steal my shirts even though you claim you don't. I know you cry when dogs get hurt in movies and pretend it's allergies afterward.”

Your chest hurt.

Clark's voice softened further.

“I know you.”

The words landed heavily.

Completely.

“And I still love you.”

His voice wavered slightly on the last part.

That nearly destroyed you.

Because there it was again. The unbearable truth of him. Clark wasn't loving some idealized fantasy version of you. He saw the mess. The insecurity. The spiraling thoughts and sharp edges and ugly fears.

And he loved you anyway.

Tears blurred your vision instantly.

“But why doesn't that fix me?” you whispered.

The question slipped out before you could stop it.

Raw.

Ugly.

Honest in a way that made your stomach twist afterward.

Why wasn't his love enough?

Why did you still stand in mirrors feeling fundamentally wrong even after being loved this deeply? Why did panic still crawl through your bloodstream at parties full of prettier women? Why did reassurance dissolve so quickly inside you no matter how sincerely he offered it?

Why could Superman hold collapsing buildings together with his bare hands but not the inside of your chest?

Clark looked devastated.

Not because you'd insulted him, and not because he was angry. It was worse than that. You watched understanding settle over his face slowly, painfully, like he was finally seeing the full shape of something that had been hurting right in front of him this entire time.

The problem had never been that he wasn't loving you enough.

The problem was that somewhere along the way, you'd started expecting love itself to save you. To reach into years of fear and insecurity and self hatred and somehow cut them out cleanly. Like being loved deeply enough would finally silence every ugly thing you believed about yourself.

And Clark, for all his strength, could not survive carrying that responsibility forever.

He reached toward you slowly then, hands careful and uncertain in a way that made your chest ache. Like your heart had become something fragile in his hands, something he was terrified of hurting further.

“This isn't something I can save you from.”

The words shattered something inside you.

Not because they were cruel.

Because they were true.

You felt the truth of them immediately, sinking heavy into your ribs with devastating clarity. Clark could hold you through every panic attack. Could kiss every scar on your body gently enough to make you cry. Could love you with terrifying sincerity for the rest of your life.

But he could not heal wounds he didn't create.

Your knees gave out before you fully realized you were crying.

You slid down against the bathroom wall hard enough for the tile to sting through the thin fabric of your dress, sobs tearing out of your chest so violently it hurt to breathe. Everything inside you felt split open. Years of impossible hope collapsing all at once under the weight of reality.

Clark followed you down immediately.

Suit forgotten. Gala forgotten. Everything forgotten except you.

He knelt in front of you on the cold bathroom floor, both hands reaching for your face while tears blurred your vision so badly you could barely see him.

“Hey,” he whispered urgently. “Hey, look at me.”

You couldn't.

Everything hurt too badly.

“You're your own hero in this story, baby,” he murmured shakily, pressing his forehead against yours. “But I don't want to lose you to this.”

The words cracked something open inside you all over again.

Because Clark sounded scared.

Not exhausted. Not resentful.

Scared.

Like he was watching someone he loved drown right in front of him while knowing he couldn't jump into the water and breathe for them.

“You won't,” you whispered automatically.

But even to your own ears, the words sounded uncertain.

Because for the first time, truly, you were beginning to understand how exhausting it must be to love someone who kept asking for proof love could resurrect them.

Clark closed his eyes briefly, his breath uneven against your skin before he spoke again.

“I'll stay,” he said quietly. “But you have to stop asking me to heal something I didn't break.”

That one hurt the most.

Not because it was harsh.

Because he was right.

Love would hold you. Comfort you. Change you in small, tender ways over time. But it would never become the cure you spent your whole life searching for, and somewhere beneath all the grief pouring out of you on that bathroom floor, you finally understood that.

Love won't fix you.

taglist : @sunlightkent @mollymal @clarkswhore-jpeg @kristne13 @slytherinscreamqueen

[lizleeillustration]

As a Canadian it’s illegal for me not to make Hollanov fanart. Ilya and his kissy face slay me.

(Don’t repost please ;) reblog are fine)

[sheheatedonmyrivalry]

There is a kid out there who did every single one of his school essays and projects and short stories and friendly introductions at the beginning of the year about Shane Hollander. He did his book reports on the books Shane recommended in interviews. He saved his money to buy that stupid cologne Shane advertised. He got a puck from Shane once at warm ups and he slept with it in his bed for three weeks. He writes his moms name on his stick tape because Shane did it first. He watches the Olympics in awe. He gets into fights with kids at school about whose a better hockey player and its Shane all the way, no matter what the other kids told him or what their moms and dads said. Shane is the best.

And this kid did not have a lot of friends. His teachers thought he wasn't very smart because he made everything about hockey. And they dismissed him when he struggled with math and reading. "if you could just put some of your hockey energy into school, then maybe you would get better." His classmates laughed at the hockey themed valentines day cards him and his mom had to hand make because nowhere was selling hockey themed valentines day cards. And they laugh at him when he repeats the same thing over and over about "getting pucks deep, pucks deep, pucks deep." When he would play all by himself on the yard pretending he was skating, picking up any big stick he could find on the ground, they'd push him around. "Can we play? We'll be defenders" and ram him and take his stick. And he'd just go through all the penalties they would have just gotten over and over again until he can calm down. He celebrated every birthday at the ice rink in his full hockey gear even though he didn't really have classmates showing up. Not for lack of invite.

And his parents try to steer him away from it. They try and watch new sports, they try and get him to watch kids shows, get into things kids his age like, but all he wants to do is watch reruns of the metros cup wins. Wants to wear his hat backwards with his black shirt because that's how Shane looks in the interviews. Memorizes the answers he gives in french even though this kid never learned french in school. And its useless. This kid is hooked and they just kinda have to ride this wave.

So when the announcement comes for the Game Changers camp, these parents do absolutely everything to get him there. They don't care what it takes, this is like a light for all of them really in the midst of all the bullying at school and the meltdowns at home and the obsessive routines that fall apart if even one thing is out of place.

And they explain to the camp that their boy might have a hard time. Might need some time to adjust. That he struggles with math, and reading, and can get caught up in all the rules sometimes. Preemptively trying to say "he's not a bad kid. he's trying his best."

So at the end of the first day, his parents are prepared for a meltdown. Its new, its a lot of kids, the rink can get loud and cold, and he doesn't always do well with transitioning out of hockey. He's hard to pull off the ice at home.

And they can see some upset under the surface when they arrive. He clearly doesn't want to go home. Thats no surprise.

What is a surprise is the way Shane gets down on one knee next to where the boy is sitting upset on the ground. He doesn't move to touch him. He just gets down and the two of them softly have a chat. The boy is tugging on his hair and nodding at what Shane says. And eventually he stands and the parents walk over to them.

"You must be the parents. Its good to meet you," Shane says softly. "I was just going over some things about tomorrow. So that way he would know the schedule."

And they can see their son isn't quite happy, still clearly exhausted. He'll nap in the car and be grumpy at dinner. But he is much more regulated than they expected him to be.

"And, I was telling him about my schedule when I go home. About getting some quite time, making sure I can decompress. I think that's what all good hockey players need, right buddy?"

"Right buddy," he repeats.

And for all the understanding that seems to be there, his parents are just grateful that of all the things their kid could have a special interest in, its Shane Hollander.

[all-my-love-for-harry]

Home For The Holidays

pairing; jake seresin x fem!reader

summary; Jake finds out you have nowhere to go for the holidays and becomes quietly, stubbornly determined to take you home with him.

word count; 11.7k

warnings; a little bit of a slowburn, frenemies to lovers, mentions of parents passing away

a/n; the holidays aren't over for me so here's a christmas fic for y'all, feliz día de reyes!! :) i thought about this right on the 24th so it took me a bit to write down haha, let me know what you think! happy reading <3

masterlist

The Hard Deck smelled like salt and citrus cleaner and something fried that had soaked into the wood years ago. Late afternoon light poured in through the open doors, slanting low and warm, catching on dust motes and the rims of half-empty glasses. It wasn’t loud yet — not the night crowd — just busy enough to feel alive.

You stood behind the bar, sleeves rolled up, methodically wiping down the counter while Penny flipped through the schedule beside you. Outside, waves rolled in steady and patient, their sound threading through the room like a quiet heartbeat.

“I’m still figuring out Christmas week,” Penny said, casual, but her eyes flicked to you with intention. “You sure you don’t mind picking up the shift?”

You didn’t stop what you were doing. Didn’t look up. Just shrugged, like it was nothing.

“I don’t have any plans anyway,” you said lightly. “Might as well stay busy.”

The words were easy. Practiced. You’d said them before.

Penny’s pen hovered above the paper for a fraction of a second too long. She knew the difference between fine and fine. But she also knew when not to press. She nodded once, a quiet agreement, and wrote your name in.

“Alright,” she said gently. “I appreciate it.” You smiled, bright and polite, and reached for another glass.

Behind you, the door creaked open.

Jake hadn’t meant to stop walking.

He’d come in laughing, jacket half off his shoulders, the day’s ease still clinging to him. The Hard Deck was familiar territory — noise, beer, you behind the bar rolling your eyes at him. Comfort in routine.

But your voice cut through it all.

I don’t have any plans anyway.

He slowed, boots scraping softly against the floor, his grin faltering before he could catch it. He stayed near the entrance, just long enough to hear Penny confirm the shift. Just long enough for the meaning to settle heavy in his chest.

Christmas. No plans. Alone.

Jake exhaled through his nose and forced himself to keep moving. Took a seat farther back instead of his usual place at the bar, fingers drumming absently against the tabletop. He told himself it wasn’t his business. That he didn’t care.

That was a lie.

Phoenix slid into the chair across from him, the legs scraping loudly against the floor. She set her beer down and studied him with narrowed eyes, already suspicious.

“You look like you just lost a dogfight,” she said.

He scoffed, gaze still fixed on the bar. “Hardly.”

“Mhm.”

Silence stretched, filled with the clink of glass and low conversation. Then, like he was testing the ground beneath his feet, Jake spoke again.

“She got family around here?”

Phoenix didn’t answer right away. She leaned back instead, arms crossing, watching him like a scientist observing a long-predicted reaction. A slow smile tugged at her mouth.

“Oh,” she said. “So that’s where we are now.”

Jake grimaced. “Don’t.”

“I knew it,” she continued, clearly enjoying herself. “Months of denial, and all it takes is one holiday schedule.”

He finally looked at her, jaw tight. “Nat.”

That got her attention.

Phoenix followed his gaze to where you moved behind the bar, laughter soft and unguarded as you handed someone a drink. When she spoke again, her tone was quieter.

“She doesn’t really have anyone,” she said carefully. “No family close. That’s all you get.”

Something shifted in him — a dull ache blooming beneath his ribs.

Jake nodded once, stiff. He didn’t ask follow-up questions. Didn’t need to. The picture was already forming in his mind, uninvited and vivid.

His mom’s house in Texas, too warm and too loud. The smell of cinnamon and roasting meat. His dad’s voice carrying from the living room, his sisters already complaining about the playlist, his nieces running around. Familiar chaos. Annoying. Comforting.

Unavoidable.

He couldn’t imagine Christmas without it, couldn’t imagine choosing not to have somewhere to be.

Phoenix watched the realization settle into his expression. “You gonna do something about it,” she asked, “or just sit there brooding like a sad country song?”

A faint smile tugged at his lips — gone as quickly as it came. “She’s not gonna be alone.”

Phoenix arched an eyebrow. “That wasn’t the question.”

He stood, decision already made. “It’s the answer.”

Later, when the crowd thinned and the sun dipped lower, Jake approached the bar — not you, but Penny.

She looked up the moment she saw him, recognition flickering across her face. Penny noticed things. Always had.

“She won’t be working Christmas,” Jake said quietly.

Penny studied him for a long moment, then glanced toward you — laughing, unaware, completely unprepared for the way your world was about to shift.

“I wondered when you’d say something,” Penny replied softly. “Alright. I’ll cover it.”

Relief loosened something in his shoulders.

“She deserves better than another shift,” Penny added. “I’m glad someone agrees.”

Jake watched you for a beat longer than necessary.

You didn’t know it yet.

But you weren’t spending Christmas alone.

Not this year.

—

The bar was caught in that quiet in-between hour, when the sunlight poured in low and honeyed through the open doors and the ocean breeze slipped lazily across the floor. The bar smelled faintly of citrus cleaner and salt, the wood warm beneath your palms as you stepped behind it, already reaching for the schedule board without really thinking about it.

Routine was comfort. Knowing where you were supposed to be, when, had a way of grounding you.

Your eyes skimmed the list once, then again, slower this time. Monday. Tuesday. Christmas Eve. The space where your name should have been on Christmas Day stared back at you, blank and wrong, and a small frown tugged at your mouth as you leaned closer, as if proximity alone might make it reappear. You traced the line with your finger, checked above it, below it, then stepped back, confusion settling in your chest.

“That’s… odd,” you muttered.

You were just about to turn and call for Penny, already forming a casual explanation in your head — something light, something easy, like it didn’t matter — when the familiar weight of someone else’s presence registered behind you.

“Studying the wall now?” Jake’s voice drawled, warm with amusement. “Careful, it might flirt back.”

You closed your eyes briefly before turning, already bracing yourself. He stood a few feet away, leaning against the bar like he owned the place, confidence worn as effortlessly as his dog tags. The sight of him sparked the usual mix of annoyance and reluctant fondness, the kind you’d never admit out loud.

“Don’t you have literally anyone else to bother?” you asked, gesturing vaguely around the bar. “I’m busy.”

He tilted his head, eyes flicking from your face back to the schedule, then back again. “Looks like you’re not, actually. What’s got you so worked up?”

You sighed and pointed at the board, irritation slipping into your voice despite yourself. “I was supposed to work Christmas. Guess Penny forgot to write me in.”

Jake followed your finger, his expression unreadable for a moment as he took it in. Then his mouth curved into something like satisfaction. “That’s a win,” he said easily.

“Not really,” you shot back. “I had a plan. Now I don’t.”

“Well,” he said, pushing off the bar and closing the distance by a step, hands sliding into his pockets like he was trying very hard to look casual, “since you’re free, what are you doing instead?”

You shrugged, feeling strangely defensive all of a sudden. “Nothing. That was the point.”

Something flickered behind his eyes, but he smoothed it over quickly. “Perfect,” he said, far too confidently. “You’re coming to Texas with me.”

You stared at him, disbelief blooming into a short, incredulous laugh. “You cannot be serious.”

He smiled, broad and unapologetic. “Dead serious.”

“No,” you said immediately. “Absolutely not. I am not crashing your family’s Christmas like some stray you picked up at a bar.”

He waved the comment away like it was nothing. “You wouldn’t be crashing anything.”

“Hangman.”

“You’d be invited.”

“You didn’t even ask me,” you pointed out, crossing your arms. “You just decided.”

“Yeah,” he said lightly. “I do that sometimes.”

You shook your head, already backing away. “Plane tickets alone would be insane this close to Christmas. I’m not letting you spend that kind of money on me.”

“I already checked,” he replied, far too quickly. “I’ve got miles.”

You blinked. “You what?”

He shrugged. “Occupational hazard.”

You pressed on, stubbornness flaring. “I have responsibilities.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Such as?”

“I—” You hesitated, then said, “I have to feed my cat.”

His grin turned knowing. “You don’t have a cat.”

You narrowed your eyes. “How do you know that?”

“Because you’ve never talked about a cat,” he said, voice softer now, less teasing. “And because I pay attention.”

That gave you pause, something warm and uncomfortable settling beneath your ribs, but you pushed past it. “Even if I didn’t, it’s still a terrible idea.”

Jake’s smile faded just enough to matter. He straightened, hands dropping from his pockets, presence suddenly heavier, more grounded. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, steadier.

“I’m not letting you spend Christmas alone.”

The words hit harder than you expected, your breath catching before you could stop it. You stared at him, caught off guard by the sincerity in his eyes, by the absence of his usual bravado. This wasn’t flirting. This wasn’t teasing.

“You don’t get to decide that,” you said quietly.

“No,” he agreed. “But I get to offer you somewhere to be.”

Silence stretched between you, filled only by the soft clink of glasses and the distant rush of the ocean. You searched his face for the joke, the punchline, and found none.

“I don’t want you alone,” he said again, gentler this time. “Not when you don’t have to be.”

Your defenses wavered, the weight of the season pressing in all at once — the empty apartment, the quiet nights, the way you’d already resigned yourself to pretending it didn’t hurt.

You exhaled slowly. “You’re impossible.”

His mouth curved into a small, victorious smile. “I’ve been told.”

“…Fine,” you said after a moment, voice softening despite yourself. “But if your family hates me, this is on you.”

His grin returned, bright and genuine. “They won’t.”

You weren’t sure you believed him.

But as he stepped back, satisfaction radiating from him, one thing was suddenly, undeniably clear.

You weren’t going to be alone this Christmas.

—

Jake showed up on the twenty-third like the decision had been settled for weeks, not days. You spotted his car from your apartment window first, parked crookedly at the curb like it didn’t quite fit the narrow street, and the sight alone made your stomach flutter with nerves you hadn’t fully acknowledged yet.

By the time you made it downstairs with your bag slung over your shoulder, he was already out of the vehicle, sunglasses on despite the overcast sky, posture relaxed in that infuriatingly confident way of his.

“You know,” you said as you locked your door behind you, “I told you I could meet you at the airport.”

Jake didn’t even pretend to consider it. He reached for your bag without asking, fingers closing around the strap before you could protest, and lifted it easily. “Yeah,” he replied, already walking toward the car. “But then I wouldn’t know you actually showed up.”

You huffed, trailing after him. “I said I was going.”

“Mmm,” he murmured, popping the trunk. “You also said this was a terrible idea about fifteen times.”

He slid your bag in beside his — like it belonged there, like it had always been part of the plan — and shut the trunk with a decisive thud before opening the passenger door for you. The gesture caught you off guard enough that you paused, then climbed in without comment. He grinned like he knew he’d won a small victory and went around to the driver’s side, starting the engine and pulling away from the curb with easy confidence.

The drive to the airport passed in a strange, suspended quiet. Jake filled the space with low music and occasional commentary about traffic or the weather, and you answered when necessary, but your thoughts were already miles ahead. Four hours in the air. Four hours trapped with your own nerves. Flying had never been something you enjoyed — too much time to think, too little control — and you hadn’t done it often enough to pretend otherwise.

You kept that part to yourself.

The last thing you needed was Jake Seresin clocking your anxiety and turning it into ammunition.

By the time you reached the airport, the tightness in your chest had settled into something familiar, a low hum of anticipation and unease. Jake grabbed both bags this time, slinging his over one shoulder and tugging yours along beside him as if this, too, was just how things were done. You followed him through the automatic doors, the air inside cooler and smelling faintly of coffee and disinfectant, voices echoing overhead in a constant stream of arrivals and departures.

You lingered near the gate once you’d checked in, fingers twisting together as you stared out at the planes taxiing along the runway. The reality of it all — Texas, his family, the holidays — pressed in on you again, and you turned toward him with a sigh.

“This is still a bad idea,” you said quietly. “We can turn around. It’s not too late.”

Jake glanced up from his phone, unimpressed. “You’ve already said that.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I,” he replied, slipping his phone back into his pocket. “You’ll survive.”

You frowned. “Have you even told your family?”

That earned you a shrug, casual and infuriating. “I always bring friends home.”

“Friends,” you repeated, incredulous. “Jake, we barely tolerate each other.”

“That’s your version,” he said lightly. “Mine’s different.”

You opened your mouth to argue — to point out that this wasn’t normal, that families asked questions, that holidays came with expectations — but the overhead announcement cut you off, boarding call echoing through the gate. Jake stood immediately, grabbing both carry-ons without hesitation, then paused when he noticed you still rooted in place.

He turned back to you, a slow, knowing smile spreading across his face, eyes warm and steady in a way that made your pulse skip.

“Well,” he said, holding out a hand, “ready for a Texan Christmas, darling?”

You stared at him for a beat longer than necessary, nerves and doubt and something dangerously close to excitement tangling together in your chest.

Then you sighed and took his hand.

“God help me,” you muttered.

His grin widened as he led you toward the gate.

The plane smelled faintly of recycled air and coffee as you stepped into the narrow aisle, Jake moving ahead of you with easy confidence. He glanced down at the boarding passes in his hand, then lifted his chin toward the row on the right.

“Here we are,” he said, already reaching up to shove his bag into the overhead bin. “Looks like we lucked out.”

You followed his gaze to the seats and felt your stomach dip when you realized what he meant. The window seat waited at the far end, the curved wall of the plane already pressing in on the space like a quiet warning. Jake motioned toward it without thinking, stepping aside to let you pass.

You shook your head immediately. “Nope. You take it.”

He paused, frowning slightly. “Why?”

“Because I said so.”

Suspicion flickered across his face, but he didn’t push it — not yet. He slid into the window seat, long legs stretching out as he settled in, and you took the middle seat beside him, already focused on grounding yourself. The familiar click of the seatbelt felt louder than it should have as you fastened it tight, pulling the strap snug across your lap like it might anchor you.

You inhaled slowly through your nose, then exhaled, intertwining your fingers together in your lap to keep them from fidgeting. The cabin filled around you with quiet movement — bags shifting, seats creaking, voices murmuring — and you fixed your eyes straight ahead, determined not to let the nerves show.

You became aware of his stare before you saw it.

Jake wasn’t subtle when he was curious. His attention had weight to it, and you felt it settle on you like a spotlight. You turned your head, meeting his gaze.

“Can I help you?” you asked dryly.

He blinked, like he’d been caught mid-thought, then a slow grin spread across his face. “You’re afraid of flying.”

You scoffed. “Absolutely not.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I fly all the time.”

He tilted his head, eyes flicking briefly to your still-clasped hands, the tight line of your shoulders. “Sure you do.”

You opened your mouth to argue, but it was already too late. Recognition softened his expression in a way that caught you off guard, the teasing dialed down just a notch.

“Hey,” he said quietly, leaning back in his seat. “Planes are basically just buses with wings. Statistically safer than driving.”

“That’s not helping,” you muttered.

He smiled anyway. “I could explain how lift works, if you want.”

You rolled your eyes. “Please don’t.”

“Suit yourself,” he said lightly. “I could always take you flying sometime. Show you how it’s done.”

You shot him a look. “There is no universe where I get into a tiny plane with you in charge.”

He laughed at that, real and unguarded, shaking his head. “Your loss.”

The cabin lights dimmed slightly as the doors closed, and the shift in atmosphere sent another wave of unease through you. As the plane began to taxi, your leg started bouncing on its own, nerves leaking out in restless energy. You rubbed your palms against your thighs, trying to will yourself into calm.

Jake noticed immediately.

Without a word, he reached over and took your hand in his, fingers warm and steady as they curled around yours. The gesture was so unexpected it stole your breath, and before you could react, he squeezed twice — firm, reassuring — then kept his hand there like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Tell me something,” he said softly, like this was just another distraction. “What’s the worst drink you’ve ever served at the Hard Deck?”

Despite yourself, a laugh slipped out. “You, ordering anything with umbrellas.”

“Ouch,” he said, mock-offended. “That hurts.”

The engines roared louder, vibration humming through the cabin as the plane picked up speed. When it finally lifted off the ground, your fingers tightened reflexively around his hand, eyes squeezing shut as your stomach lurched.

“It’s okay,” he murmured, leaning closer, his voice low and sure. “You’re safe. I’ve got you.”

The words anchored you more than you wanted to admit.

When the ascent leveled out and the seatbelt sign blinked off, you slowly opened your eyes. Jake loosened his grip and let go, the contact ending as gently as it began. When you looked at him again, the softness was already fading, replaced by that familiar glint of mischief that lived permanently in his eyes.

“Well,” he said, smirking, “for someone who’s definitely not afraid of flying…”

You groaned. “Don’t even, Seresin.”

He grinned wider, clearly pleased.

Once the initial tension of takeoff faded into the steady hum of cruising altitude, your body slowly followed suit. You kept your seatbelt fastened out of habit more than necessity, the strap a quiet reassurance across your lap, but the restless energy that had been buzzing under your skin finally eased. Your leg stilled, your hands resting calmly now instead of gripping at nothing, and the tight knot in your chest loosened just enough for you to breathe normally again.

Jake noticed, of course. He always did.

He leaned back in his seat, stretching slightly, a satisfied look crossing his face as he glanced sideways at you. “You want me to put on a movie for you?” he asked, tone deliberately teasing. “Something animated, maybe?”

You shot him a look. “I am not an iPad kid.”

He laughed, head tipping back against the seat, the sound easy and genuine. “Could’ve fooled me. You were gripping that armrest like it owed you money.”

“Very funny,” you muttered, though the edge was gone now, replaced by something lighter. Familiar. Comfortable in a way that surprised you.

The plane settled into its rhythm, the cabin lights dimmed slightly, and the world outside the window stretched into an endless canvas of clouds. For a while, you sat in companionable quiet, the kind that didn’t demand filling. Then, almost without thinking about it, you turned your head toward him.

“So,” you said softly, hesitant in a way you hadn’t been before. “What’s your family like?”

The effect was immediate.

Jake’s expression shifted, the perpetual smirk softening into something real as a genuine smile spread across his face. Not cocky, not practiced — just warm. He looked forward as he spoke, like he was picturing them as he went.

“My mom’s… a force,” he said fondly. “Loud, opinionated, will feed you until you physically can’t move. My dad’s quieter, but he’s the kind of guy who fixes everything with his hands. Always has some project going.”

You listened intently, surprised by how easily the words flowed from him now.

“I’ve got two sisters,” he continued. “Older. Both of them think it’s their life’s mission to keep me humble. Didn’t work.” He smirked briefly, then softened again. “And three nieces. They run the house now. I’m basically just their personal jungle gym when I visit.”

Despite yourself, a smile tugged at your lips, growing wider the more he talked. You could picture it so clearly — Jake in a loud kitchen, a child clinging to each arm, someone scolding him for tracking mud through the house. It felt… impossible. And yet, it fit in a way you hadn’t expected.

You’d always known him as infuriating, endlessly confident, ego first and feelings somewhere far behind. The man who flirted shamelessly, who never seemed to take anything seriously. You’d never once imagined him in a domestic setting, surrounded by family, soft around the edges.

Yet here he was, eyes warm as he talked about them, voice carrying an affection that felt deeply ingrained.

“They’re… everything,” he finished quietly. “Holidays especially.”

Your smile lingered, unguarded now, and you realized that there was so much more to Jake Seresin than the version he showed the world.

—

Two hours into the flight, the cabin had settled into a steady, subdued rhythm, the low hum of the engines blending with the occasional rustle of movement and muted voices. You pulled the book from your bag and opened it on your lap, fingers resting against the worn edges of the pages as you tried to focus on the words in front of you. The letters blurred together more often than they should have, your eyes skimming lines without absorbing their meaning.

Beside you, Jake had put on a movie — something loud and action-heavy, punctuated by explosions and dramatic music that filtered faintly through his headphones. You glanced at the screen briefly, a corner of your mouth lifting despite yourself.

Of course he’s into that.

You turned back to your book, but your thoughts refused to cooperate. They drifted, unmoored, pulled away from the page and toward everything waiting for you on the other side of the flight.

Your nerves had changed shape.

It wasn’t the plane anymore — the metal shell carrying you thousands of feet above the ground — that made your chest feel tight. It was Texas. Jake’s family. The weight of walking into something you hadn’t belonged to in a long time.

You hadn’t spent Christmas with other people since you were twenty.

After your parents passed, there hadn’t been anyone else to fill the space they left behind. No crowded living rooms or overlapping conversations, no shared meals or traditions carried forward. Holidays and birthdays had slowly become quieter things, marked by routine instead of celebration. You’d learned to make peace with it — or at least something close enough.

Most years, Christmas meant sitting alone in your apartment, the city outside your window moving on as usual. Sometimes you lit a candle, the soft flame flickering in the dim, and let yourself think about them for a while. About how it used to be. About how quickly it had all slipped away.

Family, to you, had become an abstract idea.

Something that existed in memories, and in movies you avoided because they hurt more than they healed. Scenes of people decorating trees together, of kitchens filled with warmth and noise, of gifts wrapped and unwrapped with laughter — all of it felt foreign, like a language you used to speak fluently but had forgotten over time.

You wondered what the next few days would look like. What Jake’s family would say when they met you, how they’d greet you, whether they’d ask questions you didn’t know how to answer. You wondered how they celebrated, what traditions they held onto, what expectations you might accidentally step into without realizing it.

You swallowed, eyes drifting from the book to the clouds passing slowly beyond the window.

More than anything, you hoped it would be kind. That it would be gentle. That it would feel less like an intrusion and more like… something you were allowed to be part of, even just for a little while.

Beside you, Jake shifted slightly in his seat, still absorbed in his movie, unaware of the quiet storm unfolding in your thoughts.

And for the first time since you’d agreed to come, you let yourself hope — cautiously, carefully — that this Christmas might be different.

Two more hours passed in a blur of cloud cover and steady descent, the captain’s voice crackling softly over the speakers as the plane began its approach. The shift in pressure made your ears pop, your stomach dipping slightly as the ground drew closer, and without thinking about it, you tensed again.

Jake noticed.

He didn’t say anything this time. He just reached over and took your hand in his, fingers closing around yours with the same quiet certainty as before, offering it without comment or expectation. You accepted it just as silently, squeezing his hand when the turbulence bumped the cabin, grounding yourself in the solid warmth of his grip.

The wheels touched down with a jolt, followed by the familiar rush of deceleration, and relief washed through you so quickly it left you lightheaded. You laughed softly under your breath as you finally unbuckled your seatbelt, tension draining from your shoulders in one long exhale.

Jake squeezed your hand once more before letting go. “Told you,” he said lightly.

You shot him a look. “Don’t.”

The cabin filled with movement as passengers stood and reached for their belongings. Jake grabbed both of your carry-ons without hesitation, slinging them easily over his shoulder, and waited for you to step into the aisle before falling into place beside you. He guided you down the narrow walkway and off the plane, one hand hovering at your back as if to steady you through the press of people.

The moment you stepped into the terminal, the air felt different — warmer, heavier, carrying a faint hum of familiarity you couldn’t quite place. You slowed your pace, eyes drifting around as you took it all in: the wider corridors, the drawl in overheard conversations, the subtle shift in atmosphere that made it unmistakably Texas.

Jake disappeared briefly to grab the rental car, leaving you to linger near the exit, your arms wrapped loosely around yourself as you watched families reunite and travelers hurry past. When he returned, keys in hand, he led you through the parking structure and to a car waiting beneath the harsh glow of fluorescent lights. He popped the trunk, stowed the bags in the back, then rounded the car and opened the passenger door for you.

You paused, hand resting on the doorframe. “You know,” you said carefully, “you can drop me off at a hotel. I’ll meet you at your parents’ later.”

He straightened slowly and looked at you like you’d just suggested something wildly unreasonable.

“A hotel?” he repeated.

“I don’t want to impose,” you said quickly. “And what if your parents get the wrong idea? What if they think we’re… a thing?”

Jake chuckled, shaking his head as he closed the door behind you once you finally sat. He leaned against the roof of the car, arms crossed, completely unbothered.

“I’ve told you,” he said easily. “I always bring friends home.”

“That doesn’t make this normal.”

“It makes it fine,” he replied, already moving around to the driver’s side. “Relax.”

You watched him settle behind the wheel, the confidence in his movements both comforting and unsettling. As the engine started and the car pulled out of the lot, you glanced out the window, the unfamiliar roads stretching ahead.

Whatever waited for you at the end of the drive, it was happening now.

And there was no turning back.

The road stretched on longer than you expected, the airport fading far behind as open land took over. The drive to his parents’ ranch was quiet in the best way — the kind of silence that didn’t ask anything of you. The radio played softly, a steady stream of Christmas music filling the car without demanding attention. Jake hummed along under his breath, fingers drumming against the steering wheel in time with the song, relaxed in a way you rarely got to see.

You pulled your phone out briefly, more out of habit than necessity. A single unread message from Phoenix waited on the screen.

Have fun with Hangman 😏 Try not to fall in love or whatever.

You scoffed quietly, rolling your eyes as you typed back something dismissive and vague before turning the screen dark again. You set the phone aside and looked out the window, watching the land open up around you. Wide fields, fences stretching into the distance, ranches spaced comfortably apart like they needed room to breathe. Your chest tightened slightly as you realized you were probably close now.

You inhaled deeply, then let it out slowly, willing your nerves to settle. You didn’t want to be awkward. You didn’t want to stand out for the wrong reasons. These people were opening their home to you for the weekend — for Christmas — and the thought carried a weight you weren’t sure how to hold anymore.

Jake turned off the main road, gravel crunching beneath the tires, and suddenly his family’s ranch came into view. The house sat wide and warm against the land, lights strung along the roofline and wrapped around the porch railings, glowing softly against the early evening sky. A few cars were parked out front, and people moved easily in and out of the house, laughter drifting faintly through the air.

Jake parked the car and glanced over at you, something gentle settling into his expression. “You’re gonna love them,” he said quietly.

You managed a small smile, your stomach fluttering as he stepped out of the car. He walked around to your side and opened the door for you, offering his hand as you climbed out. Before you could even fully straighten up, movement caught your eye.

A woman came hurrying across the yard toward you both, her pace quick and purposeful, arms already lifting. Jake barely had time to laugh before she reached him and wrapped him in a bone-crushing hug. It was almost comical — how small she was next to him — but Jake bent down instinctively, folding himself around her and returning the hug without hesitation.

When she finally let him go, she didn’t miss a beat.

Her attention snapped to you, and before you could brace yourself, she was pulling you into her arms too. “Oh, you must be,” she said your name warmly, squeezing you tight. “You’re even prettier in person. I’m so glad you’re here.”

The suddenness of it caught you completely off guard. You tensed for half a second, breath hitching in your chest — and then something in you gave way. You softened into the hug, resting your chin lightly against her shoulder and closing your eyes for just a moment longer than necessary.

“It’s so nice to meet you,” you said quietly. “Thank you for letting me crash your Christmas.”

Jake watched silently from beside you, noticing the way your shoulders had stiffened before relaxing, the way you seemed to melt into his mother’s embrace like it was something you hadn’t felt in a very long time.

She brushed your words off just as easily as Jake had earlier, pulling back only to keep her hands firmly on your arms. “Oh, honey, nonsense. You’re more than welcome here,” she said, smiling brightly. “I’m just glad Jake finally brought someone home.”

Jake huffed a laugh under his breath, but you barely noticed.

All you could feel was the warmth of the lights behind you, the steady presence beside you, and the unfamiliar — almost overwhelming — realization that for the first time in years, you weren’t arriving somewhere alone.

Jake’s mom barely gave you time to take another breath before ushering you inside, one hand warm and firm at your back. The house greeted you all at once — overlapping voices drifting from the living room, laughter echoing down the hallway, the hum of something baking in the kitchen. It felt lived in, full in a way that made your chest ache just a little.

You had just stepped fully into the entryway when the sound of small, hurried footsteps came thundering down the hall.

“Uncle Jake!”

Three little bodies barreled into him with zero hesitation, crashing into his legs and wrapping around his waist as if they’d been launched. They chanted his name between giggles and excited shrieks, climbing him like little monkeys determined to reach the top. Jake laughed, loud and unguarded, arms coming up automatically as he accepted his fate as a human jungle gym.

You didn’t realize you were staring until a voice behind you pulled you back.

“Alright, girls, give your uncle a break,” a woman laughed, amusement clear in her tone.

You turned to find Jake’s oldest sister watching the scene with a fond smile, clearly used to this chaos. She met your eyes and stepped forward, greeting you warmly, and you returned it — your smile softer, a little shier, but genuine.

Before you could say much more, another woman appeared at your side. Jake’s middle sister wasted no time before wrapping you in a hug, squeezing you like you were already part of the family. You laughed softly, returning it as best you could.

Once the girls were finally coaxed off Jake, they turned their attention to you instead. Three pairs of curious eyes studied you carefully, whispering among themselves before one of them asked, blunt and unapologetic, “Who are you?”

You crouched down slightly to meet them at eye level, introducing yourself with a small smile. Whatever answer you gave must’ve passed their internal test, because within seconds they decided they liked you — and promptly attempted to climb you next.

You laughed, surprised, hands hovering awkwardly as you tried to keep your balance. The tension crept back into your shoulders before Jake stepped in.

“Alright, alright,” he said gently, peeling one of them off with practiced ease. “Let her breathe, monsters.”

He guided you farther into the house, his hand resting briefly at your back as if grounding you. The walls were lined with framed photos — childhood snapshots of Jake and his sisters, crayon drawings proudly signed by the girls, old concert tickets preserved like treasures. It felt like a timeline of love, memories layered on top of each other.

The living room opened up around you, anchored by a tall Christmas tree glowing softly in the corner. Perfectly wrapped gifts sat beneath it, neat and patient, waiting their turn.

The back door opened then, letting in a rush of cooler air along with Jake’s dad, followed by two men you assumed were his brothers-in-law. Another round of greetings followed, easy and warm. Jake’s dad hugged you too — not as tightly as the Seresin women, but steady and sincere all the same.

Before you could get overwhelmed again, Jake’s mom swept you toward the kitchen, eager to show you what she’d been working on. Trays of cookies covered the counters — Christmas trees, gingerbread men, stars, every festive shape imaginable. The smell alone was enough to make your mouth water.

“Want to help decorate?” she asked.

You nodded without hesitation, and she guided you to one of the tall stools at the kitchen island, calling for Jake over her shoulder. When he appeared in the doorway, she immediately pointed upstairs.

“Sweetheart, take the bags out of the car and put them upstairs.”

You stood up instinctively. “I can help—”

She waved you off without even looking at you. “Sit.”

Jake smirked. “Yes, ma’am,” he said easily, sending you a quick wink before disappearing back outside.

You rolled your eyes, lips twitching despite yourself.

Soon his sisters joined you around the island, each grabbing a cookie and a handful of frosting. The conversation stayed light — where you were from, what you did, little things that felt safe. When one of them asked if you had a boyfriend, heat rushed to your cheeks and you shook your head.

“No,” you said softly.

You told them about your master’s program, about working as a bartender at a local Navy bar to support yourself — and how that was how you’d met Jake.

They exchanged knowing looks, smiling to themselves, while you focused very hard on piping frosting onto a cookie, hoping it would distract from the way your heart was suddenly beating just a little too fast.

One of his sisters looked at you thoughtfully as she smoothed frosting over the edge of her cookie, then smiled like she’d just connected a few dots.

“So,” she said lightly, “you must be a pretty special friend for Jake to bring you home for Christmas.”

You paused, piping bag hovering midair. Your brows knitted together as you tilted your head, genuinely confused. “What do you mean?” you asked. “Doesn’t he bring friends home all the time?”

The question hung there, soft but heavy. The sisters exchanged looks — subtle, quick, loaded with meaning — eyebrows lifting, smiles turning knowing in a way that made your stomach flip. One of them finally spoke, her tone gentle but certain.

“Actually,” she said, “you’re the first person. The first woman he’s ever brought home.”

Your mouth parted, words lining up that never quite made it out. The thought hit you all at once, disorienting and strange, and before you could ask anything — before you could even process it — footsteps sounded behind you.

Jake appeared in the kitchen doorway, tall and relaxed, leaning casually against the island as if he hadn’t just walked into the middle of something important. He reached for a cookie, fingers already stretching toward the tray.

“Don’t even think about it,” his mom said, slapping his hand away with practiced precision. “Those are for Santa.”

You laughed softly with the others, the moment dissolving into easy chatter as Jake joined in, stealing a cookie anyway the second his mother turned her back. The conversation shifted, flowing around you, and you nodded and smiled where appropriate, trying to stay present.

But the words lingered at the back of your mind.

The first woman.

Why would he tell you he brought friends home all the time if that wasn’t true? The thought felt strange, almost unsettling, and you didn’t know what to do with it yet. You pushed it aside, focusing instead on the warmth of the kitchen, the laughter, the way you didn’t feel quite so out of place anymore.

Once the last of the cookies were set aside to cool and the kitchen settled into a quieter rhythm, you wiped your hands on a towel and excused yourself, asking where the restroom was. Jake’s mom pointed you down the hall with a warm smile, and as soon as you disappeared around the corner, the atmosphere shifted.

His sisters wasted no time.

“Well,” one of them said, leaning back against the counter with her arms crossed, “she’s gorgeous.”

“And completely your type,” the other added, grinning. “Sweet, too. We like her.”

Jake scoffed, reaching for a glass of water like he hadn’t heard them. “You’re reading into it. We’re just friends.”

His sisters laughed in unison, clearly unconvinced. One of them nudged him with her elbow. “Then why have you been glued to her side all afternoon like a lost puppy? You usually disappear outside with Dad and the guys by now.”

He rolled his eyes, irritation creeping into his voice. “Oh my god, will you both fuck off.”

“Jacob Seresin,” his mother snapped immediately, shooting him a look that could stop him in his tracks. “Language.”

He raised his hands in surrender, muttering an apology under his breath while his sisters smirked, entirely pleased with themselves.

By the time you returned, the interrogation had dissolved into casual conversation again. You paused near Jake, suddenly aware of how tired you felt, the long day finally catching up to you.

“Hey,” you said quietly, tugging at the strap of your bag. “Can you show me where you put my things? I just want to change out of my airport clothes.”

Before he could answer, his mom clapped her hands together softly. “Of course. Take her upstairs, honey. Go freshen up.”

Jake nodded and motioned for you to follow him. The stairs creaked faintly underfoot as you climbed, the house growing quieter with every step. He led you down a short hallway and stopped at a door on the right, pushing it open to reveal a neatly made guest room, soft light filtering through the curtains.

“That one’s the bathroom,” he said, pointing across the hall. “Take your time.”

You thanked him, and he hesitated for half a second before closing the door gently behind him, leaving you alone in the quiet space. You stood there for a moment, listening to the muffled sounds of the house below, your heart still doing that strange, unfamiliar flutter.

Whatever this weekend was turning into, it already felt different.

You changed into something softer, slower, letting yourself linger as you folded your clothes with care and set them neatly over the back of a chair near the door. In the bathroom, you washed your face and lifted your eyes to the mirror, pausing when you noticed the expression looking back at you. You looked… calm. Peaceful in a way you hadn’t felt in a long time, the kind of quiet ease that usually only showed up in fleeting moments before disappearing again. You held that version of yourself for a second longer, then turned off the light and headed downstairs.

Laughter drifted up from the living room, light and bright. When you stepped into the space, you found Jake’s three nieces sprawled on the rug, dolls scattered around them in colorful disarray. Emma, the oldest, looked up first and immediately pointed at an empty spot on the floor beside her.

“Sit,” she said, not so much asking as deciding.

Lily and Nora echoed her demand, patting the carpet enthusiastically. You laughed and obliged, lowering yourself cross-legged onto the floor and picking up one of the dolls. You smoothed its hair between your fingers, easily slipping into their game as if you’d always belonged there.

Emma watched you carefully for a moment, a mischievous glint in her eyes. “Are you Uncle Jake’s girlfriend?” she asked, barely holding back a giggle.

You smiled softly and shook your head. “No,” you said. “We’re just friends.”

“Too bad,” Lily muttered, still focused on fixing her doll’s dress.

Nora nodded in agreement. “Yeah. Anyway,” she added casually, glancing up at you, “would you like to be?”

You laughed, startled and entirely unprepared for the interrogation. “You’re very direct,” you told them, earning a chorus of proud grins.

A moment later, a familiar voice sounded from behind you. “Well,” Jake said, stopping just inside the living room, “looks like you made some friends.”

You glanced up at him with a small spark of mischief in your smile. “I like them better than I like you.”

He pressed a hand to his chest in mock offense. “Wow. That hurts.”

Still smiling, he dropped onto the couch nearby, stretching his arms along the backrest as if settling in for the long haul. Not long after, the rest of his family filtered into the living room, conversation blooming easily around you. One of his sisters handed you a mug of hot chocolate piled high with marshmallows, and you thanked her before taking a careful sip, warmth spreading through you instantly.

The room filled with overlapping voices and laughter, the kind that felt lived-in and real. Jake leaned forward, lowering himself closer to your level on the floor.

“You doing okay?” he asked quietly.

You nodded, smiling up at him. “Yeah. I’m great,” you said, then gestured toward the dolls. “I’ve been promoted to Barbie hairstylist.”

He chuckled softly and leaned back into the couch, but neither his mom nor his sisters missed the way his gaze lingered on you, steady and unguarded, as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to look away.

Dinner passed in a blur of shared dishes and easy conversation, the kind that lingered long after plates were empty. You insisted on helping with the dishes despite being waved off more than once, rolling up your sleeves and working alongside his mom and sisters while laughter echoed through the kitchen. By the time everything was clean and put away, the girls were already rubbing their eyes, yawns slipping through their excitement.

Jake’s sisters gathered their things, promising they’d be back first thing in the morning. The girls hugged Jake tightly, then you, their arms warm and sticky-sweet from dessert, before they were ushered out the door amid soft goodbyes.

And just like that, the house grew quieter.

It was only you, Jake, and his parents now, the hum of the heater and the faint crackle of the fire filling the space between words. Jake glanced at you from across the living room.

“Movie?” he offered. “Or something?”

You shook your head, exhaustion finally settling into your bones. “I think I’m going to head to bed, if that’s okay.”

He nodded immediately, no teasing this time. You stood and said goodnight to his parents, thanking them again for welcoming you into their home. His mom squeezed your hands warmly, telling you how happy she was that you were there, while his dad smiled and wished you goodnight.

Jake led you upstairs, one step behind you, ignoring the pointed look his mom sent his way from the bottom of the stairs. When you reached the guest room door, you turned to face him.

“Hey,” you said softly, a small smile tugging at your lips. “You’re not as bad as I thought, Seresin.”

His face lit up instantly, pride and something softer flickering across his features. “I’ll take that as a win.”

“I’m glad you came with me,” he added after a beat.

You huffed quietly. “It’s not like you gave me much of a choice,” you teased. “You practically dragged me to Texas.”

Then, more sincerely, “But… I’m glad you did.”

The moment stretched, comfortable and charged all at once. You held each other’s gaze for a second longer than necessary before you finally looked away, reaching for the door handle.

“Goodnight, Jake.”

“Night,” he said, watching as you slipped into the room and closed the door gently behind you, leaving him standing in the quiet hallway, a small, satisfied smile lingering on his face.

—

You woke to the low murmur of voices and the steady rhythm of movement downstairs, the house already alive in a way you weren’t used to this early. For a moment, you stayed still beneath the covers, listening, letting the sound of it all settle around you. Then you sat up, changed out of your pajamas, and pulled on something soft and comfortable, still unsure what the unspoken rules were for Christmas Eve. You paused, wondering if today was meant for dressing up or if that waited until tomorrow, then brushed your teeth and splashed cool water on your face before heading down.

The smell of coffee and something warm filled the air as you reached the dining room. Everyone was already gathered around the table, plates half full, conversation flowing easily. You hovered in the doorway for a second before offering a quiet, slightly shy, “Good morning.”

Jake looked up immediately. “Hey,” he said, smiling as he slid a chair out beside him. “Sit.”

You did, settling into the seat next to him as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Breakfast passed slowly and comfortably, the kind where no one was in a rush to finish. You listened more than you spoke, absorbing the way his family talked over one another while planning the day ahead — grocery runs, food prep, wrapping the last of the presents, small traditions mentioned so casually you could tell they’d been part of this routine for years.

Jake leaned back in his chair at one point and glanced at you. “Tonight we’ll have a bonfire out back,” he said. “We do it every year.”

You nodded, picturing it already — firelight, bundled layers, voices carried into the cold night. It sounded simple and warm and impossibly far from the way you usually spent Christmas Eve.

The morning slipped easily into afternoon as you helped wrap gifts at the dining table, folding paper carefully and smoothing down edges with more focus than strictly necessary. When the last ribbon was tied, you offered to help in the kitchen, and without much discussion you were handed a peeler and a cutting board, stationed at the counter with a small mountain of vegetables in front of you.

You worked quietly at first, listening to the low hum of conversation around you, chiming in now and then when something caught your attention. It felt comfortable, natural, the kind of shared space where no one expected you to fill every silence. Jake drifted in and out of the kitchen throughout it all, grabbing water, leaning against the counter for a moment, then disappearing again — only to return minutes later.

One of his sisters noticed first.

“You know,” she said, glancing between the two of you, “this is the most time Jake’s ever spent in the kitchen during the holidays.”

The other laughed. “It’s like he can’t leave you alone.”

You shook your head, smiling as you kept working. “He’s just making sure I don’t burn the house down or slice my hand off,” you said lightly.

Right on cue, Jake walked in.

“Oh, no, that part’s actually accurate,” he said, grinning. “You should’ve seen her at the bar. Cut her finger on a lime and nearly passed out at the sight of blood.”

Heat rushed to your cheeks instantly. “Jake, shut up,” you groaned, mortified.

He only winked at you, entirely pleased with himself, as his sisters laughed and you tried very hard to focus on chopping vegetables instead of the way your heart had started racing for no good reason at all.

The rest of the afternoon drifted by in that unhurried way that only holidays seem capable of. As dusk settled in, the men took over the backyard, stacking logs and coaxing the fire to life while laughter and the scrape of boots against gravel filled the air. You claimed one of the chairs closest to the growing bonfire, watching the flames begin to dance as the sky darkened above you.

Jake appeared behind you without a word, draping a blanket over your shoulders before disappearing back into the house as quietly as he’d come. You pulled it closer around yourself, the simple gesture warming you more than the fire ever could.

Before long, Lily, Nora, and Emma joined you, armed with sticks and a determined seriousness about their marshmallow roasting. You helped them hold their sticks just right, laughing as one caught fire and another slid straight into the embers. Around you, stories flowed freely — tales from past Christmases, inside jokes, memories so well-worn they’d clearly been told a hundred times before.

Emma turned to you suddenly, eyes bright in the firelight. “What do you usually do for Christmas?”

You hesitated, the question landing heavier than you expected. There was no way you could tell her the truth — about the quiet, the half-decorated tree, the way the day usually passed in silence. So you smiled instead, offering something vague and gentle, steering the conversation toward something lighter, something easier.

She accepted it without question and went back to her marshmallow, satisfied.

Jake, however, didn’t miss it.

From where he stood across the fire, he watched the way your shoulders dropped, how your gaze lingered on the flames a beat too long. His expression shifted, the teasing ease falling away as he studied you with quiet attention, the firelight catching in his eyes as if he were committing the moment to memory.

You lingered outside long after the others had gone in, the cold night air slowly driving them back toward the warmth of the house. One by one, goodnights were said, promises made to be back early in the morning to open gifts. Eventually, it was just you and the dying fire, embers glowing softly as the flames settled into something quieter.

You stared into it, lost somewhere between the present and memories you hadn’t meant to revisit. You didn’t hear the back door open, didn’t notice Jake until he took a seat beside you, close enough that his presence registered as warmth at your side. He didn’t speak. He didn’t rush you. He just stayed.

You weren’t sure what prompted it, but after a moment you broke the silence, your voice softer than you meant it to be.

“Your family is really nice,” you said softly. “It’s… been a long time since I’ve been around this many people during the holidays.”

Jake stayed quiet, afraid that if he interrupted, you might stop. He turned slightly toward you, listening.

You swallowed and glanced at the fire. “My mom used to do this,” you continued. “Roast marshmallows with me until my dad came outside and told us we were going to freeze.”

You let out a quiet, almost breathless laugh. “He was always the one who put the tree up too. Super particular about it. Colors had to be balanced, ornaments placed just right. None of us were allowed to touch it once he started.”

You shook your head gently. “But it didn’t matter. It always looked perfect.”

Jake’s chest tightened as he listened, the past tense impossible to miss. His voice was barely above a whisper when he spoke. “They sound like great people.”

You turned to him, a sad smile on your lips. “They were.”

He scooted closer, slow and careful, and reached for your hand, lacing his fingers through yours the same way he had on the plane. “I’m really sorry,” he said quietly.

You shook your head. “It was a long time ago,” you replied. “But… this time of year still hurts. It opens the wound.”

He nodded, squeezing your hand gently. “I understand. And I’m glad you’re here — even if it brings stuff up.”

You looked down at your joined hands. “I am too. If you hadn’t insisted, I’d be working my shift at the Hard Deck tonight. Then I’d just go home and be alone, lighting up the same candle and thinking of them.”

He hesitated for half a second before teasing crept back into his voice, softer than usual. “What? I thought you had a cat to feed?”

That did it. You laughed quietly, shaking your head. “You’re impossible, Seresin.”

The heaviness eased just a little. Jake didn’t let go of your hand, his gaze lingering on you as you turned back toward the fire, his feelings still sitting there between you — unspoken, waiting.

That night, Jake lay awake in his childhood bedroom, staring at the faint cracks in the ceiling he’d memorized years ago. The house was quiet now, the kind of quiet that settled deep into your bones. Somewhere down the hall, a door creaked softly as it shifted with the cold, and outside the wind moved through the trees like a hush.

His mind, however, was anything but quiet.

It kept circling back to you.

To the way you’d looked sitting by the fire, the glow catching in your eyes. To the way your voice had softened when you spoke about your parents, like the words themselves were fragile things you hadn’t meant to take out into the open. His chest ached at the thought of you spending so many years alone, of holidays reduced to survival instead of celebration. He’d always known you as strong — fierce, sharp-tongued, unafraid to call anyone out on their bullshit, especially him. Seeing the tenderness beneath that armor hadn’t made him think less of you. If anything, it made the feeling settle deeper.

He’d been drawn to you from the moment he first saw you behind the bar at the Hard Deck. You’d slid a beer across the counter without even looking at him while he leaned there, cocky grin in place, fully expecting you to melt like everyone else did. Instead, you’d rolled your eyes and muttered something about Penny warning you that pilots couldn’t keep it in their pants, then turned away to help the next customer.

He’d been hooked immediately.

At first it was a game — flirting, teasing, trying to get a reaction. But somewhere along the way, months in and completely against his will, it stopped being a joke. He stopped noticing other women at the bar. Stopped taking anyone home. The only person he ever tried to flirt with was you, and even then, it felt different. Less like a performance. More like hope.

You never gave him much back. A sarcastic smile here, an eye roll there. And still, he stayed.

Jake Seresin was a lot of things — arrogant, stubborn, infuriating — but he was also patient. And tonight, lying in the room where he’d grown up, listening to the quiet hum of a house full of people he loved, he made himself a quiet promise.

He would wait.

After tonight, after seeing you here, wrapped in his family’s warmth even while carrying so much of your own hurt, he knew one thing for certain: he’d make sure you were never alone again. No matter how long it took. No matter what it cost.

He turned onto his side, a small, determined smile pulling at his lips as sleep finally claimed him — your face the last thing on his mind.

—

The morning came sooner than you expected, sunlight spilling into the living room as Jake’s entire family gathered around the tree. Wrapping paper crinkled and ribbons flew as Emma, Nora, and Lily tore through the pile of gifts with unfiltered excitement, their laughter filling every corner of the house. Jake’s dad hovered nearby with a camera, capturing everything — the chaos, the smiles, the inevitable mess.

You sat beside Jake on the couch, knees almost touching, a fond smile tugging at your lips as you watched the girls. Every now and then, you felt his gaze on you, quick glances he thought you didn’t notice, his smile soft in a way you’d never seen before.

Nora reached for another present, this one smaller than the rest, wrapped neatly in navy blue paper with a little note taped to the top. She held it up proudly. “Uncle Jake,” she announced, “this one’s for you.”

Jake leaned forward and took the box from her hands, pausing the moment he saw the handwriting on the tag. His eyes flicked up to you instantly. You were already looking at him, your hand lifted to your mouth as you tried — and failed — to hide your smile.

“Sneaky,” he murmured, shaking his head as he started to unwrap it.

Inside the box was a polished brass aircraft compass, small enough to fit in his palm, the glass catching the morning light. The kind pilots used to keep close — a reminder of direction, of home. He turned it over slowly, clearly taking it in before lifting his gaze back to you.

“Thank you,” he said, voice sincere.

You shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. “I just found it online and thought it fit your… never-ending obsession with planes.”

The blush creeping into your cheeks didn’t go unnoticed, especially not by the Seresin women, who exchanged knowing looks from across the room. Jake smiled and shifted closer to you on the couch, his knee brushing yours as he kept the compass in his hand.

He stayed there until the last gift was opened and the excitement faded into contented exhaustion. Soon enough, his mom and sisters headed into the kitchen, leaving you and Jake behind to gather torn wrapping paper and empty boxes.

While you were distracted, Jake disappeared briefly and returned with a small, rectangular box of his own. He cleared his throat, suddenly nervous as he held it out to you.

“For you,” he said.

Your brows lifted in surprise as you took it from him, carefully opening it. Inside lay a delicate gold necklace, simple and elegant, catching the light in a way that made your breath hitch.

“Jake, this is too much,” you started, but he waved you off immediately.

“It’s nothing,” he insisted.

Before you could argue further, he took the necklace from the box and stepped closer, fastening it around your neck as you lifted your hair out of the way. His fingers brushed the back of your neck, sending a shiver down your spine. For a moment, neither of you spoke, the closeness heavy and unmistakable.

He said your name softly, eyes flicking between yours and your lips, leaning in just a little closer.

You opened your mouth to speak—

“Uncle Jake!”

Emma, Nora, and Lily burst into the room, calling out for him to come play. You both pulled back at once, the moment breaking as quickly as it had formed, leaving something warm and unresolved hanging in the air between you.

At some point in the afternoon, once the kitchen had been cleaned again and the house settled into a quieter rhythm, you slipped upstairs to shower and get ready for dinner. The door to your room closed softly behind you, and almost immediately, Jake found himself surrounded.

His mom and sisters wasted no time.

“That compass,” one of them said, crossing her arms. “Don’t pretend it didn’t mean something.”

“And the necklace,” another added, nodding toward the staircase. “You think we didn’t notice that?”

Jake groaned, dragging a hand down his face. “It’s Christmas. People exchange gifts.”

They laughed, entirely unconvinced.

“You two looked adorable on the couch,” his oldest sister said, smiling. “All cozy. Like you belonged there.”

His mom sighed dreamily. “Just imagine how cute your babies would be.”

“Mom,” Jake muttered, horrified. “Please stop.”

She only waved him off, unfazed. “I’m just saying.”

His oldest sister leaned closer. “It’s obvious, Jake. You’ve been glued to her side since you walked in the door. You’ve had heart eyes the entire time.”

He scoffed and rolled his eyes. “You’re all reading into it. She’s just a friend.”

His middle sister raised an eyebrow. “Sure she is.”

Then she grinned. “Honestly, what better time to confess undying love than Christmas? It’s practically a Hallmark movie.”

Jake groaned again, but his silence said more than his words ever could.

Later on, Jake stepped out of his childhood bedroom, fingers busy with the last button of his dress shirt, his attention fixed on getting it just right. At the same time, you opened the door to your room across the hall, towel-damp hair falling loose around your shoulders, dress soft and carefully chosen. You nearly collided with him.

“Oh—sorry,” you murmured instinctively, already stepping back.

When you looked up, he was staring.

Jake’s hands stilled at his chest. His breath caught so quietly you might’ve missed it if you hadn’t been so close. His gaze dragged over you, slow and reverent, taking in the dress, the way it hugged you, the faint glint of the necklace at your throat. Heat crept into your cheeks before you could stop it. He’d flirted with you a hundred times before—lazy smirks, teasing remarks—but this was different. There was nothing playful in his eyes now. Just softness. Fondness. Something that made your chest tighten.

“You look… beautiful,” he said, voice lower than usual.

You smiled, shy despite yourself. “You clean up okay too.”

That earned you a grin, smaller than his usual one but warmer. “Shall we?” he asked, offering his arm like it was the most natural thing in the world.

You slipped your hand around it, your fingers resting against his sleeve, and together you made your way down the stairs. The house was already full of voices and laughter. Jake pulled your chair out for you at the table, waited until you were settled before taking the seat beside you, close enough that your knees brushed.

Dinner passed easily—plates piled high, glasses refilled, stories traded back and forth. You laughed more than you expected to. Jake leaned in now and then, murmuring context when his sisters launched into stories from his childhood, his shoulder warm against yours. Every so often, you caught him looking at you, and when you did, he didn’t look away.

Somewhere between bites and laughter, something shifted. You realized you hadn’t rolled your eyes at him once. Instead, your pulse jumped every time he leaned closer, every time his knee nudged yours beneath the table, every time his voice dropped just for you.

After dinner, you wandered outside, ignoring the way the cold immediately sank into your skin. The air was sharp enough to sting, but you welcomed it. You leaned back against the wall, tilting your head up, letting your gaze drift across the sky. The stars looked impossibly bright out here, scattered like someone had been careless with glitter.

You heard the backdoor open behind you.

You didn’t need to turn around to know it was him.

Jake stepped outside and closed the door quietly, the sound soft and deliberate. You felt him stop beside you, his shoulder brushing yours as he leaned back against the wall the same way you were. When you finally looked over, you noticed the candle and lighter in his hands, the small glass catching what little light there was.

He didn’t say a word. He just flicked the lighter, shielding the flame with his hand until the wick caught. Then he turned and held the candle out to you.

Your breath hitched. Your chest tightened, eyes burning before you could stop it. You took the candle carefully, fingers trembling just a little.

“Thank you,” you whispered, your voice thick as you fought the tears.

Jake leaned closer, his voice low, meant only for you. “I don’t ever want you to forget them,” he said gently. “But I never want you to be alone again.”

You didn’t answer right away. Instead, you rested your head against his shoulder, your cheek warm against him as you stared at the small, steady flame in your hands. It danced softly, stubborn and bright.

After a moment, you breathed out a quiet, “I have a feeling you’ll have something to do with that.”

He smiled, the kind that you felt more than saw. “I’ve been trying, sweetheart,” he murmured. “You just make it very hard for me.”

Something shifted then. The air felt heavier, charged. You lifted your head, slowly, until you were only millimeters apart. His breath mingled with yours, warm against the cold night. You smiled, understanding blooming between you.

“Someone has to, Hangman,” you teased softly.

He chuckled under his breath and leaned closer, noses brushing. “Do you believe in Christmas miracles?”

“Depends what you’re wishing for,” you whispered back.

He bumped your nose gently, once, twice, like a secret. “Baby,” he said, voice barely there, “there’s only one thing I’ve been wishing for.”

“And what’s that?” you asked, eyes locked on his.

“For you to let me kiss you.”

Your lips curved into a small, knowing smile. His pupils were blown wide, the green in his eyes almost swallowed whole. He looked at you like you were everything — like you’d hung the moon and the stars and somehow convinced the universe to follow suit.

You didn’t overthink it. You closed the distance, pressing your lips to his in a soft, careful kiss that carried everything neither of you had said. He kissed you back like he’d been waiting for it, like it was something he’d imagined and never quite believed would happen. His body relaxed into yours, warm and sure.

You lifted a hand instinctively, then laughed softly as you remembered the candle still between you.

Pulling back just enough, you giggled. Jake laughed too, leaning in to blow the flame out gently before smiling down at you. “Don’t want you burning down the house,” he said lightly. “Or worse — my hair.”

You rolled your eyes, setting the candle aside before wrapping your arms around his neck. “Now that,” you said, tugging him down toward you, “would be a tragedy.”

You kissed him again, surer this time.

And somewhere deep in your chest, you realized something warm and steady had finally taken root— you’d never be alone for the holidays again.

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[marwrite]

figure it out

summary: clark shows his love for your friendship in many ways. fetching your lunch, carrying your things for you, always being there when you need him- but who could have imagined it would include kissing you on the lips? every casual peck makes your head spin, your heart stammer; until one night, one lingering kiss finally answers all your questions… and then some.

clark kent x best friend ! reader

themes: soo much fluff. clark is hopelessly devoted to you, but you have no idea. you're a cutie who loves fashion. he is adorable, friends to lovers, funny, domestic clark always! barely proofread, but enjoy xx

You’re running late. Again.

For the fourth time this week, and it’s only a Wednesday.

It’s not your fault. Really, it’s not- nothing was going right to begin with, and the outfit you’d initially planned on wearing ended up hanging off your body like loose rags. You had to change three separate times, and still, you aren’t too pleased with how you look today.

The day is miserable- all rain and clouds and grey skies.  There isn’t an ounce of sunshine to be seen, not even in you, because your typically upbeat personality has been taken and held hostage by the city around you.

“Perry’s gonna kill you.” Clark greets you, umbrella clutched in his free hand that he immediately holds over you as you join him. He slings your bag smoothly off your shoulder, hooking it over his own instead.

Together, you walk in unison; quick, and sharp, your shoulder bumping into his arm due to the height difference.

“Then we better hurry up, Kent.” you say back, earning a chuckle from him.

You walk through the rain, and you don’t notice the way he ducks his head outside of the umbrella completely. How you don’t veer off the jagged path ahead even though it usually pains you to walk in a straight line, because his hand is hovering on your lower back, careful, steady.

You don’t even question why, when you finally get through those double doors, Clark’s curls are almost soaked and you’re bone-dry.

The elevator ride to the top is comfortable, like it always is with Clark.

“How was your evening?”

“I ate ice cream for dinner,” you tell him absentmindedly, “And I rewatched The Devil Wears Prada.”

His eyebrow quirks up, “Must have missed my invite.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Were you not in a different city last night fighting an intergalactic threat?”

“How’d you know that?”

“I watch the news.”

Clark smirks slightly. Never arrogant or cocky, just knowing. “I still would have come.”

You don’t say anything, busy straightening your shirt and wrapping your coat even tighter around you. When the elevator finally reaches the top of the skyscraper, you’re the first to step out, Clark directly in tow.

Your heels clack against the linoleum floor with a precision that can only come from someone with something to prove; in this case, the fact that you’re late for a good (nobody has to know the truth) reason. Lois looks up for a split second, nodding at you in acknowledgement.

Beside her, Jimmy grins. “What time do you call this?” he jokes.

“Got held up,” Clark lies. You smile inwardly, knowing he was perfectly on time; it was you who couldn’t decide on what to wear this morning, on what rings to pair with what necklaces.

You’d told Clark to go on; I’ll be like, thirty more minutes. I’ll just see you there! You’d said, but of course he refused to listen.

Someone barks your surname. They also bark Clark’s. You don’t even have to turn around to know who it is.

“Sorry, Perry.” You and Clark say in unison, his cheeks flushed crimson, yours still cold from the wind. Thankfully, Perry White seems to be in a good mood today; he just shakes his head in exasperation, a small mutter akin to tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum leaving his lips as he places another cigarette between them and turns around.

Clark pulls your chair out for you, waiting for you to sit before he does the same.

“Close call.” he mumbles, and you stifle a laugh.

It’s a busy day; one that stretches for far too long. You type until your eyes blur and you drink coffee until you can’t even taste the bitter burn of it anymore, but you’re focused.

You’re a great journalist, and you’ve chalked that down to be the very reason why Perry gives you so much grace. Why being late is a bump in the road instead of a fireable offense like it is for most people.

It’s Clark you have to thank for that; being his best friend certainly has it’s perks. He knows better than anyone how to charm the Planet’s infamous grump. Over time, you’ve learnt how to mimic him; be bashful when confronted about tardiness, especially by someone like Perry White, and you’re good to go.

After a couple hours of head-down, zipped lipped quiet, he finally breaks the silence.

“How you holding up?” Clark asks you, head hidden behind his own screen. You can’t see him, but you can envision his lips parting as he speaks, eyes trained on whatever word document he currently has open.

“Surviving. You?” you mumble, fingers wrapped around a yellow highlighter that has yet to land on the page. He lets out a chuckle.

“Counting down the seconds until lunch.”

“Are we going out today?” you pop your head around your monitor then, and Clark doesn’t skip a beat before doing the same.

The sight of him- especially after a long 121 minutes without it- makes something flutter dangerously in your stomach. His curls are unruly, piercing blue eyes only the slightest bit red as he looks at you.

You blink the feeling away, willing it to disappear and not come back for at least a little while.

“You want to? Or I could just grab us those bagels you like from the place ‘round the corner?”

“I can come with you,” you offer, but Clark shakes his head, the corners of his mouth upturned.

“No need. I’ve got you.”

You nod, a thankful smile spreading across your lips as you turn back to your desk. Of course, Clark does the same, and under the table you feel the tip of his shoes nudging against your foot.

Your smile only widens, though you try to hide it with a purse of your lips and a clench in your jaw.

It’s not that you have a crush on your best friend- absolutely not. Crushes, you’ve always believed, are for high schoolers; teenagers in faux love who believe that big, ugly bouquets mean romance, and cheesy, outlandish prom-posals equate to a lifetime of happiness.

No, you’re a little more pessimistic than that. And you’re a lot deeper in than that, because unfortunately for you, Clark Kent continues to be a shining example of the world’s most perfect boyfriend.

Minus the kissing. And the holding hands. Also the freakier stuff like sharing a bed, and hugging each other regularly- who ever said being in love was rational?

He’s kind. He’s patient. He waits hours for you to get ready and doesn’t even scold you for wasting his time, just smiles and stares at you like you’ve already done him the biggest favour by simply existing.

He knows your coffee order off by heart, grabs you a couple of sugars every time even though it’s sweet enough- just in case, he always says. He knows you like your bagels from Leon’s on Tuesdays but every other day, it’s Liberty’s or nothing.

Clark remembers. He cares. So deeply.

He is also in love with someone else.

“Just waiting for her to realise, I guess.” he’d told you once, when you asked him why he hadn’t dated anyone since Lois- all while holding a box of Christmas baubles you were picking from.

And he'd told you that he didn't need to date, not unless it was the person he wanted to be with forever. Clark Kent didn't do casual. To him, time was precious, and he simply had no interest in 'playing the field'.

Though even you had to admit; no matter how big the field, it would be very difficult for anyone on Clark’s future roster to compete with the brilliant Lois Lane.

“What if she never does?” you asked, gesturing for him to pass you another bauble to add to the tree.

It was mid-November, and a random chill in the air had you fixated on getting your decorations up ASAP. Naturally, Clark agreed, even playing pack-mule with you in the store as you collected everything caked in artificial frost and tinsel- even a brand-new tree that he held tucked under one arm as you ran up and down the aisles.

Clark simply smiled, eyes holding a shine as he watched you examine a fragile looking ornament, fingers twirling it in the light.

“She'll figure it out. She always does,” he’d said confidently, “One day.”

“What if she takes forever?”

Clark remained unfazed, “Then I’ll wait.” you just raised an eyebrow, dropping the topic immediately and trying to forget how deliciously romantic he sounded right then and there.

That, was six months ago.

And Clark has yet to introduce you to this mystery girl, has yet to even give you her name; you don’t even know what she looks like.

You supposed it was for the best. For now, you were happy living in blissful ignorance. Just until you got over this silly little love-crush of yours. Or, until you pushed yourself to finally start dating again and could finally forget about this whole thing.

You continue typing, the words blurring together incoherently. By the time 12:30pm comes around, your stomach is grumbling and it’s only the noise of everyone packing up for lunch that breaks your concentration.

Clark is already standing up from his desk, stretching those muscles of his that never go stiff, yet he does it anyway because it’s what everyone else does.

You lock eyes with him as he makes his way around the edges of the table.

“The usual?” he asks. You nod with a grateful smile.

“Please. Take my card-“ you’re already fumbling for your wallet, but Clark shakes his head firmly.

“No need. I’ll be back in ten.” He tells you, and before either of you can register what happens next, he leans down. Smoothly.

And gives you a peck on the lips.

It’s quick. It’s over within a split second. But it still happens; and when Clark pulls back without so much of a stunned look or an apology on his face, you swear you can still feel the plush skin of his lips on yours.

“Text me if you think of anything else you want.” he says coolly, as if he didn’t just short-circuit your entire being.

And he’s gone.

Just like that; he turns on his heel, nods goodbye to a gobsmacked Jimmy Olsen, and heads for the elevator. Leaving you; stunned, shocked, baffled, detonating in your seat.

You don’t move. For a long while, Jimmy mimicks you, eyes wide as his gaze darts between the elevator where Clark was and your desk, where you currently still are. And probably will be for days to come.

Eventually, he wheels his seat over to you.

“What was-“

“I don’t know.”

“Why did he-“

“I don’t know,” you swallow, and with a disbelieving shake of your head, you turn back to your desk, palms flat out on the table as a way of anchoring yourself to it. For a long while, Jimmy doesn’t speak, silently begging you to.

But you can’t. You physically can’t. Because it may have been an accident- it’s not unusual for Clark to give you a kiss on the forehead, an occasional one on the cheek if he’s feeling extra gratuitous. But on the lips?

Maybe he missed. Maybe, you turned your head without even realising it- and maybe, right now, he’s on his way to Liberty’s trying to come up with ways to end your friendship because he definitely knows now, if he didn’t before.

He knows, and he’s disgusted, and you wouldn’t be surprised if he came back with your bagel in a bag and a stern talking to about how you shouldn’t move your head when people lean in for cheek-kisses.

You decide you will never eat another bagel ever again in your entire life. You will be bagel-less and Clark Kent-less and best friend-less for the rest of time and it’s all because you couldn’t control yourself.

But you know you’re being stupid, because Clark is many things. Superman being the most important one of them- he catches rolling pencils before they can fall to the floor, nudges you gently out of the way when rain falls off outer stall canopies so you won’t get wet. He has reflexes that the normal man doesn’t. If you were to turn your head, he’d know, and he’d stop.

So why didn’t he stop?

You’re still frozen by the time he gets back. He has your bagels in their usual printed takeaway bag and he’s flushed from the cold, tie slightly crooked, glasses foggy and slipping down his nose.

He forgets to steady them, the grin on his face pointed so directly towards you that it distracts him completely.

Your eyes widen, hand shooting up instinctively just as they’re on the cusp of clattering to the floor. You push them up for him, the tip of your middle finger barely brushing against the bridge of his nose.

He smiles, crooked. Out of the corner of your eye, you can see Jimmy’s jaw on the floor.

“Thanks,” Clark says softly, and because your heart is going a million miles per minute, you just nod a reply back.

He sets the bagels on your desk, pulls his chair around to sit next to you.

“So,” he starts, getting the food out like he always does. You, first; he unwraps your bagel, sets your sauces out, and drapes a tissue across your lap. “What ice cream did you have last night?”

You tell him, carefully at first, reluctantly, like it wasn’t just vanilla and caramel. But Clark doesn’t catch on.

He just nods, attentive as always. He laughs when you make a joke, tells you in a hushed tone about his new friend in Gotham, Bruce Wayne. He’s an alright guy, bit serious though. And he wipes the corner of your mouth when you get a bit of ketchup on it. But he doesn’t bring up the kiss.

So, neither do you.

Clark keeps kissing you.

And you, well- all you can do is keep pretending you’re not actively malfunctioning every single time it happens.

At first you assume it’s a one-off. A strange, meteorological anomaly- like those fish that sometimes fall from the sky. Weird, very rare, and inexplicable.

But then he does it again the next day.

It’s the same routine: lunch break, Clark grabbing the food, you offering to pay, him refusing like always. Except now there’s a new beat to the choreography; one that involves him leaning in, cupping the side of your elbow like you’re made of spun glass, and giving you a very deliberate, very real peck on the lips before leaving. It’s gotten deeper since the first, you realise.

And every single time, you just sit there like someone unplugged you from the wall.

Jimmy has stopped pretending he isn’t watching. He mostly just gasps now. Out loud. Very dramatically.

Thursday, Clark arrives with two macchiatos and a cinnamon walnut pastry you mentioned liking once. You’re about to thank him when he dips forward and presses- there it is again- a warm, soft peck to your lips.

“Be right back,” he murmurs, like that is the casual part of this exchange.

This time, your confusion is so loud it actually echoes. Beside you, Jimmy drops his pen, and it rolls for three desks.

By Friday, you try to mentally prepare. You puff your cheeks out, slap them lightly, tell yourself that if he does it again, you will absolutely ask him what on earth is going on.

But of course, you don’t. You don’t ask your best friend anything.

Because the second he leans down and those soft lips brush yours in that infuriatingly tender, maddeningly gentle Clark-Kent way, your brain promptly ejects itself out the window.

He walks off, humming, as you slowly rotate in your chair like a malfunctioning Roomba.

Your head is foggy, filled with so many unanswered questions that somehow, feel so far from being said out loud.

Nothing’s changed, oddly enough. Clark still walks you home. Still hovers over your desk, helping you with rewrites and amendments. He still brings you lunch and spends Wednesday evenings watching re-runs with you in your apartment.

He just… kisses you, now. Pecks you, more like, like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

And before you know it, days pass. Days turn into weeks, and naturally- predictably- it gets worse.

Or better. Or whatever this is.

Because now- now, Clark starts doing it not just before lunch. He no longer limits himself, and you still say nothing.

He kisses you goodbye when he heads home for the night.

Kisses you hello when you meet at the elevator in the morning.

He kisses you when he hands you a report you asked for.

And, he even kisses you when you complain about the printer.

Tiny, sweet, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pecks. Like he’s testing you. Like he’s waiting; for what, you don’t know, but what you do know is that you are very close to the brink of explosion.

By the time a whole month passes, your confusion has reached clinically concerning levels. Your Google search history is comical, an amalgamation of confusion and shock before you swiftly swapped to incognito;

do best friends kiss on lips??

signs of short term memory loss

am I hallucinating long-term?

long term hallucination symptoms

group long term hallucination

do kryptonian people greet each other with kiss

You search with a slight hunch, your entire body covering your phone screen in both fear and shame of someone seeing. You’re desperate; completely at your wits’ end, and Clark seems to be none the wiser.

But then, comes the moment everything changes.

It’s late. Everyone else has gone home, and the newsroom is buzzing only with low lights and the distant hum of the city outside.

It’s just you and Clark, finishing up an article he’s been helping you with.

You’re buried in revisions, your brains working in sync as you push through the exhaustion of the last few weeks. You and Clark had gotten better about leaving on time, but with deadlines closing in, staying late wasn’t really optional tonight.

You’re tired, very much so- to the point where pretending like you’re not bothered is a feat in itself. Clark is focused, glasses sliding down his nose as he leans over your shoulder to point at something on the screen.

And then- like it’s the easiest thing in the world- he tilts your chin gently with two fingers and gives you a slow, lingering kiss on the lips.

Not a peck this time. Not a blink.

A kiss.

A real, life-altering, friendship-make-or-breaking kiss that injects electricity in your veins and brings all your dead senses back to life. It’s wonderful. It’s passionate. And above all, it is scary.

You freeze. But instead of pulling back like he usually does, Clark stays there, lips pressed softly to yours, patient as ever. Waiting. Wanting in silence, for you to respond.

So, you do.

Your body moves before your brain can protest, before any part of you testifies against the very notion of giving in- your hand curls into the front of his shirt, you tilt upward, and suddenly you’re kissing him back.

Your lips are slow as they move together; at first, awkward. Then, the awkwardness melts into something familiar, something warm.

And finally, it turns absolutely, heart-stoppingly illegal.

Just waiting for her to realise, his words play over and over- incessant, like a broken record- in your mind.

One day.

You fit together perfectly, you and Clark. Your lips do all the work while your minds fight to catch up. He makes a tiny noise- a surprised, happy sound- and you swear you can feel his smile against your mouth.

You pull back first, breath uneven, eyes wide and stunned in a way you can’t even hide. Your hands are still fisted in the front of his shirt like you forgot to let go.

Your grip doesn't loosen on the fabric, too afraid to disrupt the moment you’re both suspended in.

Clark doesn’t move. He just watches you, chest rising slowly, hope written all over him. You can't speak, so you don't.

But something in your face- the shock, the realisation trying to break through and finally shake some sense into you- makes him smile.

It softens as he looks at you, folding into something heartbreakingly tender.

“I told you…” Clark murmurs softly, brushing a strand of hair from your face with the gentlest touch. His eyes graze your lips again, already hungry for more, “that you’d figure it out.”

i have a problem with overexplaining things and i really tried not to w this fic - tried something different!! hope you liked <33

[pencil-n-pen]

—too sweet

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jack abbot x chronically ill! reader

wc: 8.7k

summary: being in and out of the hospital all the time has never been an enjoyable experience. But after meeting a certain ED doctor who you can't seem to get away from, things just might start looking up.

warnings: probably inaccurate medical procedures (i’m usually unconscious or incapacitated when they do this stuff to me) past medical gaslighting (not from Jack ofc) Javadi is ur roommate idc that it’s inaccurate, unresolved sexual tension cause i don’t write smut

a/n: abbot said “is anyone gonna take care of her?” and didn’t wait for an answer. anyways me and my oomfie @leeknowpegger came up with this in the comments of one of my posts cause we both are in desperate need of this man

──────────────────────

"I’d rather take my whiskey neat My coffee black and my bed at three You’re too sweet for me.” —Too Sweet, Hozier

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Being a frequent flier in lots of places gets you perks. Free coffee, rewards points, stuff like that.

Being a frequent flier in a hospital is just depressing.

You’re only about three or four months into your recent move to Pittsburgh when you get sick. And you’re one of those, special, lucky people who has the immune system of an un-vaccinated Victorian orphan, so despite having several hours worth of college assignments waiting for you, you’re currently lying on your bathroom floor, face smashed against the cool tile.

It is, genuinely, the only comfortable place in your shitty apartment. (At the moment.)

You pull the thermometer out of your mouth and slowly blink at the reading:

100.2 degrees.

Like you usually are. Just barely outside the normal range. Well, normal range can eat bricks because there’s no way having a mild fever is making you feel this bad. And you’re not being dramatic. Your throat genuinely feels like it’s on fire, and every breath is laborious and agonizing. Your face and head feel like they’re about to explode, and you’re pretty sure someone or something is stabbing you over and over again in your legs and lower back (which also feel like they’re on fire.)

Time passes in a weird way on the bathroom floor. Not really slow, but the pain and discomfort of each breath keeps it from moving too quickly.

You recognize, distantly, that you’re really sick. Really sick even for you.

There usually comes a certain point in the common cold that never fails to absolutely destroy you when it faces a fork in the road: get better or get much, much worse.

It’s fairly obvious which path your immune system decided to take.

There’s a large puddle of drool wetting your cheek because swallowing hurts too bad, and it’s not like you can breathe through your nose anyway. You don’t even have the energy to be grossed out.

You never really do.

Being sick is all about distracting yourself from how much pain you’re in until the worst of it passes, but right now you’re only getting worse. You can’t keep anything down, not even water, which means you’ve just been digesting snot for the past two hours which is bound to make you throw up (again.) No matter what kind of sickness you get, you always end up throwing up.

You measure how much time has passed by how large the puddle of drool grows. When it surpasses hand-sized, you attempt to haul yourself up, maybe take some more ibuprofen (you really shouldn’t, your liver is honestly toast at this point) but upon making an effort, you find that you can’t.

It feels like executive dysfunction. You want to get up. You need to get up. You cannot get up.

You’re so tired.

Alarm bells are ringing in your head. The same alarm bells that went off the time you had walking pneumonia and genuinely came to terms with dying in your sleep. It’s a spike of panic in your chest, a small dump of adrenaline and cortisol that’s just barely enough for you to haul yourself upright.

The action takes more energy than it feels worth, and you feel like your heart is going to beat out of your chest.

You kind of feel like you’re dying. And honestly, with how bad you feel, you wouldn’t mind going to sleep and not waking up.

And that isn’t a usual thought to have when you’re sick, not to level of sheer apathy and exhaustion you’re feeling now, so you think that maybe it’s time to go to the Emergency Room.

You come to that conclusion about the same time that your roommate, who you aren’t quite friends with, comes into the bathroom and promptly screams when she finds you lying on the floor. (You don’t remember lying back down.)

“Hey,” She says, kneeling down and shaking your shoulder, “I think you need to go to the hospital.”

—

On another day, maybe when you don’t actually feel like death warmed over, you might be thankful that there is at least someone to take you to the hospital, to grab your hospital bag (you’d had to tell her where it was when you first moved in, and being a medical student herself, had understood your need for it) and to already have the route to the ED memorized. Probably because she currently works there.

“You’ll be fine,” Victoria rambles as she pulls into the parking lot with practiced ease, “I’ve worked with the night crew before, they’re great. They’ll make you feel better.”

Unlikely, you think.

Maybe you look particularly awful, or maybe it’s not that busy in the ED, or maybe you get some sort of special treatment as the roommate of a medical student, but before you know it, you’re shivering in a triage bed, still drooling uselessly into a wad of paper towels Victoria had been kind enough to shove into your hands.

It’s weird being in a hospital that doesn’t know you.

Nurses come and go, asking questions you barely answer and poking and prodding and you think, probably, that you should communicate that while on the worse end of the spectrum, this is still fairly normal for you. Being this sick from the common cold.

You think Victoria is talking to whoever is working on you, and then you’re in a wheelchair, and then they run more tests you don’t remember and then you’re in a bed.

“Dr. Abbot is gonna come see you,” Victoria tells you, looking mildly uncomfortable in a chair to your left.

She's honestly been so nice for this whole thing. Like, way too nice, considering that you guys aren't really friends (yet?)

“You should go home,” You tell her, speech really only possible because of the Toradol they gave you a few minutes ago, “You have work in the morning.”

She purses her lips and looks like she’s going to argue, so you painfully swallow and speak again.

“Go. I’ll be fine here. You said it yourself.”

It takes a few minutes to get the words out, and you have to pause more than once, which probably isn’t very reassuring, but logic seems to win out because she makes sure that you have everything you need before heading out.

And then you’re alone.

You attempt to pass the time by sleeping, to no avail. Discomfort, ever the unwanted companion, makes itself incredibly known. The Toradol helps, but since it’s basically just ibuprofen in IV form, there’s only so much it can do.

You’re just about to slip into a doze when a knock on the door frame rouses you. As the current pulls back, you have exactly one thought:

Victoria could’ve warned me that Dr. Abbot is insanely fucking hot.

“Hello there,” The man says, grabbing some hand-sanitizer which only served to extenuate the rippling muscles and veins of his forearms and biceps, “I’m Dr. Abbot. Javadi told me you weren’t feeling so good?”

Okay, focus. He can definitely see the heart-rate spike on the monitor. He’s just another doctor. You’ve had hot doctors before.

(Not like him.)

You shrug with the non-chalance of a twenty-something year old who has designated hospital clothes.

“Been better.” Kind of.

“Well, let’s see if we can’t get you better.”

He asks the same series of questions that Javadi helped you answer before since your brain still feels like it’s stuffed with cotton, but Dr. Abbot is patient and listens attentively while you stumble through answering every single one.

“Any pre-existing conditions?”

“Yes and no.”

He raises an eyebrow, finger hovering over the tablet in his other hand. “That sounds like a story.”

You wince. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be difficult.”

“You’re totally fine,” He immediately soothes before you can continue, voice rich and smooth like high-quality chocolate, “You’re actually the nicest patient we’ve had so far tonight.”

“Really?”

“Yep. No screaming, no cursing, you haven’t asked a billion and one questions or needed anyone to explain every single thing we’re doing.”

He grabs one of the spinny-stools on the other side of the room and wheels it over, sitting down with his tablet in his lap.

“Now. About those pre-existing conditions?”

You slowly and painfully explain your situation— very obviously chronically ill to pretty much everyone except the doctors you need to diagnose you.

Dr. Abbot doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t defend the doctors you’ve seen, just dutifully jots down everything you tell him.

“Any history of heart issues?”

You nod. “I went to a cardiologist last year and did a few tests. Second degree AV block, um, I think Mobitz one? And mild diastolic dysfunction.”

Another eyebrow raise. “And your cardiologist didn’t decide to move forward with any sort of treatment plans?”

“Just diet and exercise. He told me to drink more water.”

“That’s bullshit.”

Your eyes widen. “Sorry?”

He sighs, looking up from his tablet. “I apologize, that was unprofessional of me. I agree that Mobitz one is normally benign, so long as you’re asymptomatic or old. But coupled with that ‘mild’ diastolic dysfunction and the fact that, from you’ve told me, you are experiencing symptoms means it’s something that should be addressed.”

Oh.

Dr. Abbot barrels on. “I’m going to give you a referral for a cardiologist I know. She’s good.”

“Thank you so much,” You croak, barely able to believe what’s happening. "I don't know how to thank you. Um. Other than saying thank you."

He gives you a tiny grin, like this interaction is some sort of secret you're sharing. Is he not aware of the effect he has on patients? On you?

"Don't worry about it, kid. Call it duty of care."

Kid.

The way he says it doesn't make it seem condescending or pitying. It's an acknowledgment.

It makes your skin feel hot.

(That might be the mild fever.)

He breezes through the rest of the preliminary examination, questions all answered and typed into his tablet, which just leaves the physical examination.

He has gloves on, stop freaking out. And there's like, no way he isn't married, and he's literally your doctor for crying out loud. Don't make this weird.

No amount of internal begging to keep your rampant issues under control actually keeps said rampant issues under control. At the very least, you hope it isn't too noticeable when you bask in the feeling of his blissfully warm (you're already running a fever, so really, it should be uncomfortable) hand as it palpates here and there. Checking for internal bleeding, probably. Or an inflamed appendix. Or something like that.

Palpating is likely one of the least sexy touches a human being can experience, and yet, presumably due to the fact that hospitals are actually nostalgic to you and palpating is an experience you go through more often than most other people, and, you know, your issues, you genuinely manage to get a little... hot under the collar.

Like, his hands are right there. Gloved, sure, and he's not actually touching your skin, just the battered band t-shirt you've been wearing since you got sick three days ago, so again, really not hot circumstances, but his deliciously freckled and really enticingly well-muscled forearms are right fucking there.

Can Toradol make you high? Are you having an allergic reaction to the fluids? Has the common cold finally decided to snatch your soul, leaving you the shuffle miserably off this mortal coil?

He glances up at the monitor.

"Bit of a heart-rate spike there."

Oh sweet mother of Christ.

Dr. Abbot gives you a little knowing smile, which does nothing but make you want to crawl in a hole and die, and finally finishes his palpating.

"So from the look of things, you really do just have the common cold--" He winces when you groan, "I know, I know. But you do have a touch of strep-throat, which I think might be contributing to your general awfulness and malaise. Your labs came back a little all over the place, so we're going to send you home with a prescription for some broad-spectrum antibiotics. Have you ever taken Azithromycin before?"

You shake your head no.

"The coarse is only for a week, and you'll take them twice a day. As for your cold symptoms, I'd have to recommend your basic over-the-counter cold medicine and lots of rest. Sound good?"

You nod. "Thank you so much."

Another heart-rate-spiking smile. "Anytime. I hope you feel better, but come back straight back here if you feel any worse, okay?"

You agree, and offer him another thanks and pretend like you're not going to be silently wondering if this is who your roommate works with every day.

—

A few days of antibiotics later, you're staring at yourself in the mirror after a late-night everything shower, and you think you might be cursed.

"Hey Victoria?" You shout through the door to where you know she's studying in the nearby living room. "What are the normal symptoms after taking Azithromycin?"

"Uh, none?"

"Thanks!"

Motherfucker. Who the fuck is even allergic to antibiotics? They're antibiotics.

You stare at the rash-slash-hives that's developed on your arms and legs (you convinced yourself it was razor burn the first two days) and wonder how life threatening it really is. Like, what could even really happen?

You skip lotion and throw on what was supposed to be a cute-pajama set, but now the striped tank-and-shorts combo serve to be functional— no fabric touching the sensitive skin where the rash covers and for ease of access, because of course you're going to run it by Victoria before you jump to any sort of conclusions about severity and allergic reactions.

Maybe this just one of those things. Like when doctors say "Just a little pinch" or "You'll feel some pressure" and then you go on to experience a level of agony previously only experienced by mafia traitors.

Like, maybe you won't even have to go to the ER. It might be a low-level twenty-four-hour-clinic type of deal.

—

So apparently between the rash, your flu-like symptoms (you thought you were just sick) and the fact that your heart rate has been all over the place since starting the antibiotics, Victoria does, in fact, insist that you go to the ER. Again.

At least this time you're lucid enough to drive yourself.

You've only just checked in, settling in the moderately-empty waiting room, cursing your existence when a familiar face walks in the front door, backpack slung over his shoulder and a cup of coffee in his hand.

It's pure coincidence that you happen to be sitting in like, the only seat in his direct eye-line as he glances down and then comes to a full-body stop. You shove down the shiver that threatens to overwhelm your body as a sharp, calculating gaze scans up and down your body before coming to rest on the visible rash on your legs.

He blows out a breath.

"Oh, kid."

Dr. Abbot leaves in the waiting room with the promise to return shortly after he clocks in and does his... whatever it is doctors do upon clocking into work. Rounds? Or is that a general medicine thing?

Before he walks through the door, he points a finger at you and says:

"Stay."

Like the loyal dog you are, you comply. First of all, where would you even go, (do patients jump ship often??) and secondly, like there is any universe in which you are arguing with that man.

YOUR DOCTOR, you mentally correct. HE'S YOUR DOCTOR. THERE ARE LITERALLY LAWS IN PLACE FOR THIS KIND OF THING. HE'S ALSO PROBABLY MARRIED. GET A GRIP.

It doesn't take him long to return to you, and like, isn't that unusual? Don't nurses and whoever usually get patients instead of like, the doctor on shift?

He gets the door for you (which is hot, even though he literally has to since it's only opened via staff-issued key-card.)

You feel kind of bad for skipping the line, cause there's other people in the waiting room, and surely some of them have more pressing medical concerns than your little rash?

You paraphrase this to Dr. Abbot as he leads you down the hallway towards one of the triage rooms, but he just snorts.

"You questioning my triage and risk assessment skills?"

Horror fills every aspect of your being.

"No no no no no, no, of course not, I didn't mean—"

Then he starts laughing.

"Relax, kid," He huffs, shoving his hands in his pockets, eyeing you from the side, "I was just poking at you. I think it's very... sweet, that you're worried about the other patients, even if it's unnecessary. I promise, if someone else had a more pressing medical concern, they would get seen first."

You deflate a little at his reassurance, though you still feel thoroughly mortified.

"Besides," He continues, pulling back a curtain and gesturing for you to take a seat in one of the large triage chairs, "You're having a fairly serious allergic reaction. I'm guessing this started after you started taking the Azithromycin?"

You nod as you situate yourself. "Yeah, sorry. Um, it started—"

He holds up a hand, and you cut yourself off.

"Respectfully," He starts, his hands clasped in front of his mouth. "What the hell are you apologizing for? And don't say being allergic to Azirthromycin."

"Um... For having to bother you again..? Right when you get on shift?"

"Kid," That shouldn't be hot, that shouldn't make your stomach flip-flop around, "Didn't I tell you to come back if you got worse?"

"Yes."

"And did you come back because you got worse?"

"...Yes?"

"Yes, you did. It was good that you came back," He says the second sentence slow and careful, like he's trying to cement it into your brain.

"It says on your intake form that you were experiencing fast and irregular heartbeats and dizziness accompanying the rash and hives, is that correct?"

"Yes. I thought I was just having a flare-up. And I kind of thought the rash and hives was just razor burn, but I don't shave my upper-arms, so."

He nods slowly. "...Right. I know that you've had a lot of unfortunate experiences with doctors and treatment in the past, but that's not going to fly with me, understand? There's a very real chance that if you'd ignored your symptoms you would've gone into anaphylactic shock. And while I trust Javadi to recognize the symptoms of a severe allergic reaction, I also know that she spends most of the day at the hospital or at lectures, meaning that if you had gone anaphylactic, there wouldn't have been anyone home to help you."

Dr. Abbot leans down when he notices you staring at your lap, sheepish, avoiding his gaze. "I don't say any of this to scare you. I just need you to understand the seriousness of your reaction."

He snatches the tablet off the cart. "You can't minimize your health issues. They're real. If you do, doctor's won't take you seriously. And you get enough of that without contributing to it or doing it yourself."

There's a few beats of silence while he types some things on the tablet and you digest his words.

"Thank you, Dr. Abbot."

He flashes you a grin, a little sharp. "Like I said before. Duty of care."

—

Victoria is happy that you had such a nice experience at the PTMC —"I told you they were great!"— and both of you are happy that the new antibiotics are working the last dredges of your cold are fading.

Since you finally feel (relatively) well, you decide to go to the coffee shop Victoria has been trying to convince you to go to for ages. Apparently, she loves their coffee so much she gets it there on hospital days and lecture days, despite it being much closer to the hospital than it is to the university. Thankfully, the apartment you share is fairly close to the hospital (a win both for your constant medical issues and for your roommates chosen career) so the coffee shop is within walking distance. Honestly, living in the city like this, there aren't a lot of things that aren't within walking (or bus, depending on the weather) distance.

You arrive to the cafe roughly around the time it opens, desperate to get as many hours studying and playing catch up as you can. Most of your professors were understanding when you explained your frequent health problems and the fact that you had to go the ER twice in the span of a week, and gave you extensions, but there's always a few no-nonsense hard-asses who think a 6,000 word paper can easily be accomplished from a hospital waiting room or bed, even when you explain how incapacitated you were. And to top it all off, in your endless wisdom, you hadn't thought to ask Dr. Abbot for a doctor's note that you could've held over the aforementioned hard-asse's head's, since they have to comply when you have actual evidence of illness, signed by a medical doctor.

So yeah. Lots of work, very little time.

You order yourself a gigantic coffee with several extra shots of espresso, heart-problems be damned, because there's no way you're accomplishing the amount of assignments you have without drugs, and since you can't do drugs, medically inadvisable amounts of caffeine is the next best thing.

Sure, the caffeine kind of makes your chest feel like it's floating, but the study work-flow you manage to accomplish is unparalleled.

With your headphones on and your eyes glued to your laptop screen your neck might as well be made of stone. Which means you don't really notice the man who's approached the table in the corner you've tucked yourself into.

"Do I even want to know how many shots you had them put in there?"

You jump, launching yourself backwards and straightening, causing your skull to crack rather unpleasantly against the wall behind you. You hiss in pain at the same time that Dr. Abbot says "Shit."

"Sorry," He rumbles, stepping forward. "Can I see?"

He really didn't have to ask. He could've just told you that he was going to look and you wouldn't kick up a fuss. You'd like it actually, if he told you what to do. What's that line from Fleabag? “I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like, what to hate, what to rage about." Yeah. Dr. Abbot could do all of that for you.

Still technically your doctor you depraved lunatic.

You must've nodded or made a noise of affirmation or something (or maybe he got tired of waiting for you to respond) but he steps forward and. Well. Okay. You had this idea, in your head about what him 'seeing' actually entails, and conceptually, you understood that it involves him touching you, without gloves or a sterile, anti-septic wall between the two of you, but actually feeling his large, warm hands (is he always this warm, then? You remember how warm they were at the hospital) cradling the back of your head, fingers rubbing along your scalp, checking for a bump or scratch or whatever is a completely different ballpark.

If you thought the palpation was difficult to endure, it doesn't hold a goddamn candle to him leaning over you, dressed in his own clothes that smell like him, hands bare (!!) and actually touching you, skin-to-skin. There's no rumpled band tee or blue latex gloves between you now.

"No bump," He affirms after a few (unrequited and one-sided) sexually charged moments. "Sorry about that."

"No, it's not your fault. Coffee makes me jumpy."

His eyes skate down to the large, mostly empty cup next to your laptop. "And I'm sure the quantity was helpful."

You smile, more than a little embarrassed. He's charted your medical history. He knows exactly how stupid it is for you specifically to be drinking a twenty-four ounce iced cold brew with five extra shots of espresso. Realistically, that is an unhinged and borderline masochistic coffee order for a normal person.

"Enlighten me," He starts, his head tilted to the side, eyes once again looking you up and down. But this time, his gaze isn't clinical. Maybe you're imagining it, making things up to feed your delusions and issues, but right now, it's almost like he's looking at you like he's... hungry.

"Why would little-miss-mild-diastolic-dysfunction be drinking a concentrated heart attack?"

Jesus H. Christ.

"—Little-miss—“

This is genuinely becoming a very serious problem. You might have to leave Pittsburgh forever. Forget your master's program. Maybe your professors will understand that you ended up with a giant, overwhelming, unhinged, and slightly insatiable and completely inappropriate crush on the ER doctor you are definitely going to be seeing a lot of.

That's it. You can never come back to this coffee shop. Or go to the ER again. Ever. You'll just die next time you have a health problem, thanks.

Oh, fuck. How long have you been just staring at him?

He's smiling at you, all teeth and a knowing sparkle in his eyes and you know what, you actually hate him, he's such an asshole--

"You know I'm willing to bet I'd see a spike if you were still hooked up to that heart monitor."

"Oh, fuck you," You laugh, your shoulders relaxing.

"She does bite back," He says, humor clear on his features. "Was wondering if I should start concussion protocol."

You roll your eyes. "If you must know, I have a mountain of homework to do and very little time to do all of it, so."

You gesture to your coffee cup. "Caffeine it is."

"You know, as your former doctor, I'd have to advise you against finishing that. Please tell me you at least ate something with it?"

"... I had a pack of fruit snacks from the bottom of my bag?"

Dr. Abbot sighs, looks heaven-ward and mutters "kids" under his breath and, in a mirror of the week prior in the hospital room, points one finger at you and says:

"Stay."

Again. You're not sure where you would go and you are very inclined to listen. Probably too inclined to listen. Whatever.

He returns after a few minutes with a large iced water, a ham-and-swiss croissant on a plate, and another coffee, this one hot.

Then, smooth and confident, he moves your laptop back to make room, and sets the plate and water in front of you.

"Eat that," He points to the croissant, then to the water. "And drink that. All of it."

Your eyes widen. "Dr. Abbot, you didn't have to--"

"Jack."

"What?"

"We're not in the hospital. And I'm not your doctor."

Your face feels so hot. It has to be on fire. Are you on fire?

“I really can’t—“

“You can,” He assures, self-confident and jeez-us there is no way you’re not thinking about that in bed tonight. Or like, maybe forever?

You want to fight him on this, maybe push back a little, because there’s absolutely no universe in which this means what you want it to mean, but—

There’s a certain temptation to give in. Plus, who knows what other downright sinful things he’d say if you kick up more of a fuss?

“Okay,” You acquiesce (it feels a lot more like melting, though.)

Dr. Abb— Jack doesn’t say anything as you dutifully sip the water and take a bite, he just—

Watches. It’s almost worst than anything that could come out of his mouth.

“There we go,” Okay, you take it back that is a million times worse, “You’d better finish that, you hear me?”

“I will. I promise.”

Jack hums, then pulls a pen out of the pocket of his hoodie and scribbles something on a napkin. He hands it to you, then says:

“Call me.”

And then he just. Turns around, and walks out the door, coffee in hand.

What. The. Fuck.

—

Two things occur after your interaction with Jack in the cafe. Well technically, don’t occur, since the first thing is that you don’t tell your roommate that her kind-of boss maybe possibly flirted with you a teeny bit and gave you his number?

There isn’t really a way to bring that up organically, so you just. Don’t.

The second thing is that after an embarrassing long time about what to even name him in your phone (you settle on Dr. Jack Abbot, keeping the Dr. part as if you’re going to forget) you do not, in fact, call him. Or text him.

So yeah, actually, two things do not occur. There is no occurring. There is a severe lack of occurring.

It’s not that you don’t want to text him (you really do) you’re just not sure how to go about doing so? Like, what does that first text even look like?

‘Hey, thanks for not medically gas-lighting me, wanna get coffee? Except you probably don’t want to get coffee with me, because you’ve seen first hand how neurotic coffee makes me. So, drinks?’

No. Not happening.

You mainly just try to focus on staying busy. Which is easy, because master’s programs are so incredibly good at making sure you never have a waking moment to yourself. It’s so great. (You’re dying.)

Weeks come and go in a blur of late nights, intense study sessions, and minor breakdowns over your workload that turn into major breakdowns about your life (you are now the not-so-proud owner of homemade nose piercing, courtesy of you, Victoria, and two bottles of rosé.)

Soo the nose piercing probably wasn’t the best idea, but now you’re kind of too scared to take it out and honestly it doesn’t even hurt. Victoria made sure that everything was clean and sterile, and honestly she did an amazing job with the placement, so no complaints there.

You just now have a semi-permanent reminder of why not to get drunk when you’re having a bit of a breakdown. At least you didn’t tell Victoria about Jack. You might’ve given yourself bangs.

As it stands, though, the whole “don’t get drunk when you’re having a breakdown” apparently didn’t stick, because a dark Wednesday evening has found you at a bar Victoria told you was great, nursing a a third or fourth beer you really don’t have the money to be drinking.

(It was the cheapest thing the bar sold, anyways.)

You stare at the ring of condensation on the counter in front of you, thinking about the un-texted and un-called contact that’s currently burning a hole in your pocket. For some reason, no matter how busy you get, you never really manage to forget that it’s there.

“Call me.”

God, you think to yourself, pressing the heels of your hands into your eyes, the memory of the low timber of his voice and how warm and nice it felt to be the center of his gaze; the center of his attention.

The memory makes your skin flush, so you throw back the rest of your beer so you can blame the heat on the alcohol.

It’s an unconvincing lie and a miserable action.

“Didn’t know you were old enough to drink.”

You really need to stop taking Victoria’s recommendations. Or maybe remember where she works.

You don’t bother turning to face him, because he sidles up next to you at the empty bar seat.

“I’m legal,” You mumble, the tiniest bit buzzed from the beer.

Glancing over turns out to be a mistake, because he’s wearing a button down with the sleeves rolled up, which means that the arm he has propped on the bar is exposed in all it’s deliciously muscled and freckled glory.

And he’s looking at you. Eyes a little narrowed, tiny smirk tugging at the corner of his lips.

He’s a bad idea, is what he is. Just like the sparkling stud in the side of your nose. Except that tiny piece of jewelry doesn’t look nearly as fucking good as he does.

You might be a little more than buzzed, if how much you want to kiss him is anything to go off.

“You stare more than you talk,” Jack says, curling his fist to prop his head up, absentmindedly waving the bartender over. “Always looks like there’s a lot going on in that pretty head of yours.”

“Don’t say things like that.”

“Why not?”

“Cause I’m not sure you mean them.”

The silence between you too isn’t really silence. Not with the dull sounds of bar chatter and shitty bar music and Jack telling the bartender to pour him a drink.

Whiskey, neat.

Figures.

“I would’ve told you that I meant them,” He tosses back the whiskey, almost all in one go. Leaves a tiny bit at the bottom of the glass, swirls it around before continuing. “If you’d called.”

More not-quite silence.

“I wanted to.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” You turn your body to face him, newly mirroring his position, “…I almost did. A few times.”

“Why?”

“Why didn’t I?”

“Why did you almost call?”

You swallow, nearly choking on the sudden lump in your throat. “Um.”

Very eloquent, you are. Truly, a master of poise and class.

“Need some liquid courage, sweetheart?”

“I’ve been drinking beer all night,” You say, sheepish. Sweetheart. God. It’s like he’s trying to torture you.

Is he?

“That’s not real alcohol. Come here.”

The next chain of events are much too sexually charged to happen in a cheap bar with a man who used to be your doctor.

It happens anyway.

You don’t move closer— frozen stock-still in something like apprehension or fear. But not necessarily the unpleasant kind?

The ‘Come here’ must’ve been figurative or metaphorical or something, or maybe he knows that you’re too nervous to comply (even though something in you desperately wants to) because he moves.

Jack reaches a hand up— slow enough that you could back up or push it away if you wanted to.

You don’t. You don’t want to, anyways.

His fingers ghost up your neck before settling on the edge of your jaw, his thumb pressed firm against your chin. He tilts your head back, just a slight angle, and then—

He takes his glass, the one with that little bit of whiskey in it (oh god, did he plan this? Did he leave that whiskey in there on purpose?) and raises the glass to your lips, letting the rum rest heavy against your mouth.

“You ever had whiskey before, kid?”

You shake your head no. You probably have, at some point, but relaying that would require a certain amount of effort and speaking skills— neither of which you are in current possession of.

“It’s gonna burn a little. Swallow it quick.”

What the fuck? Is—

He—

Then he tips up the glass, and you really don’t want whiskey on your face, so you part your lips enough to let the amber liquid be poured into your mouth, and he’s right, it does burn, and it kind of tastes gross.

You screw up your face at the flavor, but do your best to swallow it quickly, feeling the burn of it lick down your throat before settling like a warm, heavy weight in your stomach.

Like that was a normal thing to do, like nothing out of the ordinary just happened, he sits back onto his stool, releasing your face and resuming his position propped up on the bar.

“So. When did you almost call me?”

You don’t drink often. It’s honestly way too expensive, you despise hangovers (you have headaches and migraines all the time, why induce one?) and you don’t much care for the taste of most alcohols.

All of that to say. You are an embarrassingly easy lightweight. A cheap drunk, if you will.

“First time was two weeks ago,” You mumble, maybe not loud enough for him to hear over the shitty bar music, “Got a tea instead of a coffee to study with. Wanted to text you a picture.”

Jack has this easy, warm, but also simultaneously shit-eating expression on his face, which you take to mean that he’s aware of your incredible intolerance for alcohol.

“And what reason did you whip up in that pretty head of yours as to why you shouldn’t?”

You shrug. “Thought you wouldn’t care. Like, maybe you just want to hookup.”

“I do not want to hookup.”

“Oh.”

He motions to the bartender, who pours him more whiskey. What is it with men and whiskey?

“And the other time?”

This one you don’t really want to tell him, but with the alcohol burning away in your stomach and Jack’s equally burning stare, you give in.

“… Wanted to call you and ask you to yell at one of my professors. Cause he’s a dick and doesn’t believe in giving extensions or allowances even if you go to the hospital.”

He snorts. “And why didn’t you?”

You let your head flop onto your arm, halfway on the bar halfway off. “Didn’t wanna bother you. Seemed stupid. Plus, I managed to catch up on all my homework.”

Jack finishes the rest of his drink, then nudges your head off the bar and back onto your arm with the back of his hand. “Don’t lay on there. It’s gross.”

You whine. Your arm isn’t as comfortable as the solid bar top.

He didn’t really respond to your explanation (at least not in any normal way) so instead you decided to amuse yourself by just staring at his face. It’s a nice face.

You narrow your eyes at him. “Did you get me drunk on purpose?”

“No.”

“Then how come I’m drunk?”

“Because you’re a lightweight and whiskey has a higher alcohol content than beer.”

“Oh. Was that flirting? With the—“

You gesture vaguely to his glass and then to your lips. He just raises an eyebrow.

“Do you really need confirmation?”

“Yes.”

His face makes a funny expression. “Yes, that was flirting. The thing at the cafe was too.”

“Oh. That’s good to know. I wasn’t sure.”

“You weren’t sure?”

“Yeah,” Your neck is starting to hurt from lying there, so you prop it up with your hand. It’s only mildly more comfortable. “People don’t flirt with me very often.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It’s true.”

“Have you ever considered that maybe they are and you just don’t notice?”

“I would notice.”

“Kid, you just asked me if hand-feeding you my whiskey was flirting.”

You shrug, jostling your head and nearly slipping. “I don’t come to bars like, ever. Maybe that’s normal bar etiquette.”

“If you don’t come to bars, then why are you here tonight?”

You arm is too tired to keep holding your head up and your vision feels like it’s processing at a lower frame rate, like an old video game, so you put your head back on the bar top. Jack does a funny little huffing noise, and sticks the palm of his hand under your head right before it lands on the table, so you’re lying on his hand instead of the bar.

“Your hand is warm.”

“Is it now?”

“Yes.”

“Good to know.”

His eyes catch on the piece of jewelry now adorning your nose.

“When’d you get that?”

“Last week. Got drunk with Victoria— uhm, Javadi.”

“I know what her first name is, thank you sweetheart.”

“Right. Anyways, she had some nose jewelry from her mom, and kept drinking rosé and crying about our workload, I mean, hers is like, definitely worse than mine, you know, medical student and all, but we were drunk and we thought why not? Like, she’s a doctor, she knows how to sterilize stuff and keep it clean. She chickened out and wouldn’t let me give her one. Which makes sense. Cause I didn’t give myself a nose piercing. I had her do it.”

“You been keeping it clean?"

“Mhm. Twice a day.”

“Good girl.”

Jack sighs a little, the thumb that’s pressed against your temple beginning to sweep back and forth.

“You don’t belong in a place like this, kid.”

“I don’t?”

“No.”

“Oh. Okay. I think I wanna go home.”

Jack just nods, still rubbing your temple. It feels too intimate for a bar, but it feels really nice, and you don’t really want him to stop.

“Do you have a ride?”

“No. Victoria went to sleep before I left. She has an early morning. She works really hard.”

He hums. “I’ll walk you home.”

“You don’t have to,” You mumble, “I know you’ve got the. The leg.”

Some sort of unreadable look flashes across his face, the kind of look you probably wouldn’t be able to decipher even if you were sober and fully in possession of all your faculties.

“I know I don’t have to. But I’d feel better if I saw you get home safely with my own two eyes.”

You huff. “This isn’t some sort of sex thing, right? Like, you get me drunk so you’ll have to take me home, and then you know where I live, and then you take me to my room and then I’m drunk so i’m easier to coerce—“

“Fuck, no. Has someone ever tried that with you?”

“No. I’ve heard about it, though.”

“Look at me,” He raises your head a little with his hand, eyes searching your face. “You ever feel uncomfortable or unsafe, in any way, call me. I don’t care what time it is or if you think you’re bothering me. You’re not. Okay?”

That’s probably too intense for… whatever thing you guys have going on. But you’re not really normal, and it just sounds so nice, having someone to call.

“Okay.”

Jack nods again. “Alright. Let’s get you home. Come on, up we go.”

He manages to get you too your feet after a minor amount of stumbling on your part —“Jesus, kid, you are a lightweight”— and keeps one stabilizing arm around your waist as he helps you home.

“Your arm feels nice.”

“Thank you, sweetheart.”

He doesn’t talk very much except little mutterings here and there.

“Careful— there’s a big crack there.”

“Don’t walk into that trash can.”

“Keep your eyes open.”

“Almost there.”

The walk back to your house isn’t far, like most of the places you go to since moving to Pittsburgh.

“I can get up there myself,” You say, motioning to the stairs that lie in front of you and lead up to you and Victoria’s apartment, “Thank you, though. I’ll text you in the morning. I promise.”

Jack let’s go of you and shoves his hands in his pockets. “Don’t forget to drink water before you go to bed. At least a full glass.”

You clasp your hands behind your back. “Goodnight, Jack.”

“Goodnight, kid.”

—

Two days later finds you sitting at your tiny table, phone sitting face-up, Jack’s contact open and painfully empty.

You forgot to text him in the morning, because your hangover was fucking awful (You can’t even think about whiskey without getting nauseous again) and then you had school and… well. Now it’s been two days, and you still need to text him.

Victoria walks past you, two steaming mugs of coffee in her hands. She sets one down in front of you and sits down at the table.

“Still haven’t texted him?”

Apparently, Victoria had set an alarm on her phone to check if you’d made it home okay and ended up seeing you and Jack outside the apartment. She’d had the kindness to wait until the next morning before asking:

“So, you and Dr. Abbot?”

Vomiting had saved you from answering immediately, though you did end up telling everything that had happened after you finished worshiping the porcelain altar. Talking and throwing up don’t mix.

“No,” You answer her miserably. “I just don’t know what to say.”

“I mean, it’s pretty obvious that he’s into you. Based on,” She winces, “Past evidence. I doubt a text is going to put him off. Probably?”

“I told him I’d text him yesterday morning.”

“In your defense, you spent pretty much all day yesterday dying, so. I’m sure he figured that might happen.”

You take a generous gulp of coffee. “Should I just say hi?”

“I’m really not the person you should be asking for romantic advice.”

You take her by the shoulders. “You’re all I have, Victoria.”

“Um,” She sets her mug down. “Maybe something like, hello? Say sorry for not texting?”

You hum, typing out the sentiment, then slide the phone over to her. “Does that sound awkward?”

“Again. I really do not think you want to ask me.”

You chew on your lip, drink the last of your coffee in one go, totally burn the shit out of your tongue, then send the text.

You promptly stand, your chair screeching loudly as it nearly tips over, and run over to your fridge.

“Fuck. Do we have any of that rosé left?”

“It’s seven in the morning?”

“Desperate times, Victoria.”

She leans over, glancing at your phone, then gasps. “He’s typing!”

“Already?!” You screech, running back over to the table and hunching over your phone. Sure enough, the little bubble is on your screen, little dots jumping.

“What’s he saying?”

“I don’t know! You read it!”

Victoria snatches your phone and stares at it with the same amount of focus that you’ve previously only seen when she’s an hour deep into some medical textbook.

“Oh my god.”

“What? What?!”

She shoves the phone into your face.

Don’t worry about it, kid. Thought you might be hungover. You could always make it up to me, though.

“Oh my god,” You repeat. “Is it weird that I think it’s hot when he calls me kid?”

“Like, in the grand scheme of things? No. But probably.”

You pick absentmindedly at your hangnails. “I’m gonna text him back."

You type out a quick message and hit send before you can chicken out.

How am I supposed to make it up to you?

The dots reappear for a few seconds.

Let me take you on a real date.

You slam your hands (and phone) onto the table and whip your head to Victoria.

“He wants to take me on a date!”

The apartment becomes filled with the shrill squeals and screams of hysterical joy.

“Say yes!” Victoria screams. “You have to say yes. Please. For both of our sakes.”

“Shouldn’t I play hard to get? Don’t guys like that?”

“I don’t know. Haven’t you like, already unintentionally done that? Plus, Abbot is a pretty straightforward guy.”

“You’re right.”

When are you free next?

Tomorrow. You?

I have class until 3 :/

I’ll pick you up at 5.

You squeal again, practically jumping out of your seat and running to your room, throwing yourself on your bed.

Victoria follows a few minutes after, though in a much calmer manner.

“I can’t believe this is happening. You’re going on a date with my boss—“

“Oh my god, don’t say it like that.”

“So we’re ignoring the age gap?”

“No.”

“No judgement here, I know some people think experience is quite the kink—“

“Shut up—“

She laughs, leaving your room but leaving your phone on the nightstand by your bed.

You’re actually going to do it. You’re going on a date. With Jack Abbot. He wants to go on a date with you.

You only manage to stop screaming into your pillow when the downstairs neighbors shout for you to stop.

—

5 pm the next day arrives in a whirlwind of panic, about two million outfit changes, desperate makeup application, and way too much deliberation over what panties to wear for somebody who never has sex on the first date. Or like, ever, really.

By the time Jack has arrived (bearing a bouquet of flowers. Not roses, not the cheap dyed ones, but the kind of selection that takes time to make and time to choose) you’ve worked yourself into a frenzy about possibly being both under and over-dressed at the same time.

All Jack says, however, when meet him downstairs is a sort of winded:

“You look beautiful.”

And then you’re off.

The date itself is actually relaxing and easy, like being in Jack’s presence usually is. He asks about your schoolwork and classes and actually listens when you tell him what you’re studying. He doesn’t belittle your major or make himself seem self-important, like his job and career are better than yours. He actually says that he’s impressed that you manage to balance your health and workload so well, to which you respond by pointing at your nose stud and say “Not all that well.” which makes you both laugh.

He glares at you when you even glance at the check, which kind of makes you want to punch him and kiss him senseless.

He walks you home and, when you hesitate to initiate, pushes you against your apartment door and kisses you so hard your lips are tingling when he whispers a breathless:

“Goodnight, sweetheart.”

After that, Victoria bans you from speaking about anything beyond talking or hanging out that happens on your dates, because: “I still have to look him in the eye at work, and I really don’t want to hear about how good my boss’s tongue feels in your mouth.”

You can’t exactly blame her for that.

One date becomes two which becomes three, then four, and then you start staying over at his place a couple times a week because it’s way nicer than yours anyway.

One of the adjustments of your boyfriend (can you call him that? Are you guys dating? Or just going on dates?) being a doctor, and also apparently caring about you as a human being on a fundamental level, is that he actually worries about your health. Like, always.

“Put the ibuprofen bottle down, you’ve already had five today.”

“Are you tracking my medication usage?”

“Yes. Who else is going to stop you from giving yourself liver failure?”

Or:

“What’s your heart rate average been today?”

“…One-forty?”

“So do you think having an energy drink for breakfast is a good idea?”

“…”

“That’s what I thought.”

In some ways, it’s annoying. But in a lot of other, overpowering ways, it’s so… relaxing, to have someone around to think of you. You don’t really understand why or how he gets fulfillment out of helping you manage your life day-to-day, but he does, and does anything else really matter?

There are, of course, hiccups. There is the awkward moment where a two-week long flare sends you to the PTMC because you faint at school and school protocol requires they dial 911, and then even after the paramedics arrive and you explain to them that your body just hates you, your heart rate won't lower from the low 120's so then they insist they take you to the hospital, where Dr. Robby gets to meet you for the first time. And the entire day shift. It's about as awkward as it sounds.

Sometimes Jack has bad pain days too. He gets a little waspish, a little snappy, because being the man that he is (and just a man, at the end of the day) he doesn't like acknowledging that not having a leg means he has limitations. But just like he doesn't pity you or make you feel incapable when you hate your body or get sick for the thirty-millionth time, you do your best to make sure he knows that you get it, and he's still the ridiculously hot doctor you wanted to bang even with a 100.4 degree fever.

"It was actually 101.4," He likes to correct from the bathtub, steam curling around his neck and shoulders. "Your heart rate would spike every time you looked at me."

You bear through the reminders of your own awkwardness for his sake. Plus, it's hard to hate him for it, especially when he's always coming up with new and inventive ways to thank you for taking care of him (even though you insist he doesn't have to, because he's literally been taking care of you since the day you met.)

And, you know. There are worse ways to spend one's time.

₊⊹

[cursedheartsclub]

Congratulations on Your New Improvements

dick grayson x reader

Summary: You knew Dick Grayson when you were kids, back when he was Robin and you were the journalist’s daughter sneaking after stories you weren’t supposed to. He was awkward, gangly, more earnest than smooth, and you had a crush anyway. Then you left Gotham, and life moved on. Years later, you’re back in the city with a press badge of your own, chasing leads and running headfirst into trouble. Except this time, it’s not Robin who finds you, It’s Nightwing. Taller. Broader. Unfairly charming.

Content Warnings: 18+, MDNI, childhood Friends to strangers to Lovers, Slow Burn, Explicit sexual content (PIV sex, fingering, oral implications, dirty talk, praise kink, light begging), Overstimulation / multiple orgasms, Sexual tension, grinding, dry humping, ruined panties, Banter & Flirting, Dirty Talk & Praise Kink

word count: 16k notes – not proofread. first time writing for dick !!!!

— reblogs comments & likes are appreciated

The first thing you learn about Gotham at night is that it never shuts up. The city hums, rattles, and groans. A low, constant sound, like the world grinding its teeth. You’d grown up listening to it through your bedroom window, lullabied by sirens and laughter that never sounded quite right, but it feels different when you’re actually in it, sneakers scuffing against wet pavement as you trail after your dad.

You shouldn’t be here. You know it. 

Your dad said he was going to meet a source and you’d been told, ordered, not to follow. But curiosity eats at you the way the Gotham chill eats at skin, and when you saw him grab his notebook and duck out the door, you slipped out ten minutes later, coat too thin and pulse thrumming with the thrill of doing something forbidden.

You’re close enough to keep his hat in sight, not close enough to hear the scribbles of his pen. He cuts down a side street, one you recognize from whispered family arguments: Crime Alley. A place name said like a warning, a curse, a story that ends badly every time.

You think you’ll just watch. Stay hidden. Go home before he ever notices.

And then a car door slams. Men step out, shadows too broad, voices too low. The scrape of a gun being drawn is so distinct it punches the air out of your lungs. You’re frozen before you can even think to run.

“Hey,” one of them snaps, “who’s the guy with the notebook?”

Your dad. They move faster than you thought men that big could, and your father stumbles back against a wall, palms up, words coming out too fast for you to catch. You can’t look away. You don’t even notice that you’ve crept closer, feet dragging you toward him like gravity.

Then a hand grabs you from behind. A sharp yank, and you’re pulled into the gap between two crumbling brick buildings. You suck in a breath to scream, but a gloved hand clamps over your mouth.

“Don’t,” a voice hisses. Young. Annoyed. And weirdly… theatrical?

You blink up at the figure in the dim light. Red tunic, green gloves, a cape that swishes against your legs. A mask. The only thing you can really see are his eyes, impossibly blue, narrowed like you’ve just ruined his entire night.

Robin. Holy crap. Robin has his hand over your mouth. 

When he finally lets go, you gasp, “What the hell?”

“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” he cuts in, voice cracking with the force of it. “Following a bunch of mobsters into Crime Alley? Real smart.”

Your heart is still jackhammering, but indignation flares hotter than fear. “I wasn’t! I was just—”

“You were just about to blow his cover,” he snaps, jerking his head toward the street. Your dad’s voice drifts faintly over the noise; he’s still talking, still buying time. “Do you have any idea what happens if they see you? You’d be leverage. A liability. Deadweight.”

“Wow.” You cross your arms, trying to hide the way your hands are still shaking. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. I didn’t know Batman’s sidekick was such a charmer.”

His shoulders stiffen. “You’re lucky I even noticed you before they did.”

You tilt your chin up, eyeing him fully now. He’s shorter than you thought he’d be. Still taller than you, but not by much. Younger, too. His jaw hasn’t settled into itself yet, his voice has that awkward in-between crack, and his boots squeak when he shifts his weight. He’s a kid. A crime-fighting, cape-wearing kid.

“You’re… smaller than I expected,” you blurt before you can stop yourself.

His head whips toward you, affronted. “Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” You bite back a grin, heat bubbling up despite the danger. “It’s just, everyone always makes you sound… I don’t know. Taller. Broodier.”

He glares. “I’m not here to live up to your expectations.”

You can’t help it. You laugh, a nervous little sound muffled against your sleeve. “Okay, sorry, don’t get your tights in a twist boy wonder.”

His scowl only deepens, and then a crackle from his comm has him turning his head. A man’s voice, Batman, you realize with a shiver, low and commanding. Robin mutters something back, sharp and clipped, before his gaze settles on you again.

“Go home,” he says, more tired than angry this time. “This isn’t a game.”

“But my dad…” You hesitate. Your dad is still out there, talking fast, and you can’t tell if he’s winning or losing.

“Your dad’s fine,” Robin adds quickly, softer now. “Batman’s got him. But if you stay, you’ll make it worse.” 

You study him for a beat, and beneath the impatience, you catch it: the edge of worry. Not just about the mission. About you. Something inside you twists.

“Fine,” you mutter. “But only because you’re bossy.”

He doesn’t dignify that with an answer. He just takes your wrist and tugs you down a different alley, cape brushing your arm as he half-drags you back toward the safer streets. He doesn’t let go until the noise has faded and the streetlamps burn steady again.

When you reach the corner near your house, he finally stops. Folds his arms. “You’re gonna stay put this time?”

“Yes, mom,” you shoot back, rolling your eyes. For the first time, he cracks a smile. Just a twitch of his mouth, quick and bright, before he shakes his head like he can’t believe you.

“Unbelievable,” he mutters. “You’re lucky you’re not grounded for life.”

And then he’s gone, a flash of cape against the skyline.

You stand there on your street corner, heart pounding for reasons that have nothing to do with mobsters, and think, So Robin is shorter than expected. Bossier. Maybe even kind of annoying.

But also…he might just be the most interesting person you’ve ever met.

-

The second time you see him, it’s by accident. At least, that’s what you tell yourself. You weren’t looking for him. You swear you weren’t. You were only out walking because your apartment felt suffocating and Gotham, for all its broken glass and shadows, still felt like it might offer air. But when you cut down Burnside Avenue, past the flickering neon of the diner, he drops from the fire escape two feet in front of you. The cape swishes. The boots hit concrete.

“Seriously?” he mutters. “What are you doing out here again?”

You nearly jump out of your sneakers. “Oh my god! Do you always sneak up on people like that?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of my thing.” He’s glaring, but it doesn’t land right. His mouth is tight, sure, but his voice sounds more like a boy caught between annoyance and…something else. Worry, maybe. “You don’t learn, do you? Crime Alley ring any bells?”

You cross your arms. “I wasn’t in Crime Alley. I was, like, three blocks over.”

“That’s not the point.” He sighs, the sound way too old for his age. “Gotham’s not safe for late-night strolls.”

You almost tell him it’s not safe in daylight either, but then you catch it; the way his shoulders hunch, like the weight of protecting a whole city has been shoved into bones that haven’t even finished growing. And suddenly you don’t feel like arguing. Instead, you shrug, pretending casual. “You always hang around diners waiting for girls to wander by?”

His mask tilts toward you, eyes narrowing. Then, to your surprise, he huffs a laugh. It’s short, almost embarrassed. “You think I was waiting for you?”

“Well, were you?”

“No.” Too fast. “I mean…no.”

But later, when you climb the fire escape to your roof and find him sitting there, swinging his legs like he owns the place, you realize you don’t actually believe him.

-

The roof of your building isn’t glamorous. Tar paper bubbled from rain, rust stains streaking down the side of the water tank, the occasional pigeon that refuses to be intimidated by you. But when you push the heavy door open and step out, the air feels different. Gotham’s hum is still there, sirens, horns, the buzz of neon, but up here it doesn’t press as hard against your ribs.

And more often than not lately, he’s already there. Robin sits cross-legged on the ledge, or sprawled on his back with one arm thrown over his eyes, cape fanned around him like he doesn’t care how ridiculous it looks. Sometimes he drops down a few seconds after you arrive, startling you with the scrape of boots on metal. Either way, it starts to feel like a routine: your door creaking, his head lifting, both of you pretending not to be waiting for each other.

“Busy night?” you ask one evening, sliding down to sit a safe distance away.

“Busier than yours,” he deadpans. “You know, most people spend their nights doing homework. Watching TV. Not scaling fire escapes.”

“Homework doesn’t come with a view.” You tilt your head at the skyline. Gotham glitters in a way that almost tricks you into thinking it’s beautiful.

He snorts, but when you glance sideways, you catch the corner of his mouth twitching like he’s trying not to smile. That’s how it always goes. You jab at him, he pretends he’s above it, and somewhere in between, you both soften.

-

Over time, the conversations stretch longer. You tell him about your dad, how he’s never home, how he burns through notebooks and cups of stale coffee like they’re oxygen. How you’re not sure if you admire him or resent him, and how sometimes it feels like Gotham chews your family as much as it does everyone else.

Robin doesn’t laugh, doesn’t brush it off. He just sits there, chin in his gloved hand, listening like every word is weighty. When you finish, he nods once, sharp and certain, like he’s filing it away as important.

And then, in quieter moments, he lets pieces of himself slip through. Not many, always measured, always cautious, but enough. How Batman trains him until his bones ache. How his armor never feels like it fits, how the bruises bloom in places no one ever sees. How sometimes he doesn’t know if he’s saving Gotham or if Gotham is slowly eating him alive.

His voice is always lower when he says those things, almost lost to the hum of the city. Like he’s afraid of being overheard by shadows.

You never tell him, but that’s when the crush starts. Not the giggling, diary-scrawled kind your friends whisper about. This is quieter. He isn’t even cute, not really. His ears stick out, his voice still cracks if he laughs too hard, his nose looks like it’s been broken once already. But he carries himself like every problem in Gotham belongs to him, and when he looks at you, you feel like you matter in a way the city never lets you.

-

Some nights you talk about nothing at all. Pizza debates that spiral into full-blown arguments.

“New Trioni’s is better than Angelo’s. Don’t argue with me, I’m right.”

“You’re so wrong,” he shoots back, mock-offended. “Trioni’s slices flop over like wet paper. Angelo’s can hold its shape when you fold it.”

“Who folds their pizza?” you demand, eyes wide.

“Real Gothamites,” he says with all the gravitas of someone who’s fourteen and just learning what the word “gravitas” means.

The bickering lasts twenty minutes, ending with you scribbling “TRIONI’S > ANGELO’S” on the back of your notebook and holding it up in his face until he swats at you.

Other nights, you complain about teachers. Yours, who you swear has made it their personal mission to fail you, and his, who he can’t talk about too much but still slips through in hints. “It’s like… training disguised as lessons. Fail and you do push-ups until your arms give out.”

You tell him that’s got to be child abuse. He rolls his eyes. “It’s Gotham.”

-

It happens on a night when Gotham feels especially sharp. The air smells like rain on copper pipes, and somewhere far off a siren wails, long and low. You’d promised yourself you wouldn’t sneak out again, but promises don’t hold much weight in this city. You’d only been a few blocks from home when the shouting started. Two guys fighting over a busted radio, the kind of thing you should’ve ignored. You’d frozen, pulse climbing, when one of them noticed you watching.

It doesn’t take long. Heavy footsteps. A hand grabbing too close to your arm.  And then he’s there. Robin drops from the fire escape like a shadow snapping into place. A blur of red, green, and anger. His boot catches the guy’s chest, sends him sprawling. The other one bolts.

“You again,” he grits out as he drags you behind him, voice cracking just enough to remind you he’s not much older than you.

You mean to thank him, but the words catch when you see him stumble. Just a hitch, a fraction of a limp as he turns. His arm is tight against his side, hand flexing like he’s trying not to use it.

“Are you hurt?” you blurt.

“I’m fine.” He tries for firm, but it’s more defensive than convincing.

“You’re bleeding,” you insist, catching the dark smear seeping through his tunic.

“I said I’m fine.”

“You’re not.” Your voice sharpens, louder than you mean it to. “And you’re not going back out there until you let me look.”

He stares at you, eyes unreadable behind the mask, like he’s calculating the odds of you actually tackling him if he refuses. Finally, with a long, theatrical sigh, he mutters, “Fine. Five minutes.”

-

Your apartment is embarrassingly small. Peeling wallpaper. A couch with stuffing trying to claw its way out of the seams. The bathroom’s worse, barely enough room for the sink, the tub, and both of you crammed inside.

“Sit,” you order, tugging at his wrist until he perches awkwardly on the closed toilet lid, cape spilling over the floor like dark water.

“This is unnecessary,” he says, though his voice wobbles when you press a towel against his ribs.

“Unnecessary is bleeding out in a back alley,” you snap, trying to hold your hands steady. The towel comes away red. Too red. “God, do you even know how to take care of yourself?”

His eyes flick up at you then, sharp, defensive, but there’s something softer underneath. Something that makes your stomach twist.

“You sound like him,” he mutters.

“Batman?”

He doesn’t answer, but the silence is enough. You grab the first aid kit from under the sink, bandages, alcohol wipes, the kind of things your dad keeps for paper cuts and clumsy accidents, not vigilantes. Still, you make it work.

“Hold still,” you warn, tearing open an alcohol pad.

“I am still.”

“You’re fidgeting.”

“You’re bossy.”

“Better bossy than dead.”

That finally earns you the tiniest smile, quick and crooked, gone almost before you register it.

You’re close now, too close. Kneeling in front of him, hands braced against his side as you patch what you can. The smell of leather and sweat clings to his tunic, the faintest hint of smoke in his hair. His breathing evens under your touch, like he’s not used to anyone bothering to fix him up.

When you look up, his eyes are already on you. The mask gleams under the bathroom’s weak light, distorting him into something untouchable. And suddenly it feels wrong. Wrong to be this close to someone whose face you can’t really see.

“You ever get tired of it?” you ask quietly. “The mask?”

His shoulders tense. He looks away, down at the cracked tiles. For a second you think he won’t answer. Then his hands lift, hesitant and slow.

The domino comes off.

You freeze. It’s not some hardened soldier under there. Not a myth. Just a boy. Hair damp and stubborn where sweat’s plastered it to his forehead. Eyes too big, too tired, too human. A face you recognize from posters years ago—the acrobat from Haly’s Circus.

“…you’re Dick Grayson,” you breathe, the name spilling out before you can stop it.

His chin tips up, defensive. “You gonna tell anyone?”

“Of course not.” The words fall out fast, desperate to close the space between you. “I’d never.”

He studies you, eyes searching your face like he’s bracing for betrayal. Whatever he sees must be enough, because his shoulders ease, his breath lets out slow. “I shouldn’t have told you,” he mutters. “Batman would kill me if he knew.”

You nudge his knee with yours, a tiny grin tugging at your lips despite the tight knot in your chest. “Guess it’s a good thing Batman doesn’t know everything.”

For the first time, he laughs. Really laughs. It’s uneven, boyish, and it shoots straight through you, leaving you dizzy. And in that cramped little bathroom, with the hum of the city seeping through the cracked window and the smell of antiseptic sharp in the air, you realize this isn’t just Robin anymore. It isn’t just Dick Grayson either. It’s both.

And it feels like a secret only you get to keep.

-

The day you find out you’re leaving, it doesn’t feel real. Your dad doesn’t sit you down or soften it, he just mutters over cold coffee and half-packed files, “It’s not safe anymore. We’re going. End of discussion.”

That’s all you get. No details, no vote. By nightfall, cardboard boxes are stacked in the living room, your whole life folded and taped shut. Gotham shrinks to the size of a trunk and a suitcase. You don’t cry. Not right away. But when the apartment gets quiet, when your dad slams another box closed and the walls echo hollow, you slip out the window and climb.

The roof is empty at first. No cape on the ledge, no boy dangling his boots. Just the hum of the city below, as if it doesn’t care you’re about to vanish. You wrap your arms around yourself and stare out at the skyline, hoping, willing, he’ll show.

And then, like he always does, he drops into place beside you. “You weren’t gonna say goodbye?” he asks, voice soft under the gravel.

Your throat goes tight. “I didn’t know how.”

He doesn’t say anything. Just sits there, mask half-lit by the flicker of a neon sign, waiting.

So you talk. About how your dad’s stories finally drew the wrong kind of attention. About how Gotham feels like it’s about to spit your family out after chewing through you all so thoroughly there will be nothing left, and this time there’s no choice but to run. About how much you hate leaving; not the apartment, not even the city, but this. These nights. This secret. Him.

He listens like he always does, quiet and intent, the kind of quiet that means he’s holding every word.

Finally, you look at him and whisper, “I don’t want to forget this.”

Something flickers in his expression, too quick to name. He shifts, pulling the domino mask off and turning it in his hands until the edges press little crescents into his palms.

“Then don’t,” he says simply. “Don’t forget me.”

Your heart lodges in your throat. You want to tell him you won’t, that you couldn’t if you tried. You want to tell him that the crush you’ve been burying is bigger than you can hold, that you’re leaving with a piece of yourself you didn’t know you’d given away. But you’re fourteen, and the words are too big, too heavy.

So instead you nod, fiercely, until the tears blur the skyline. “I won’t.”

For a moment, you swear he leans like he might say something else. Might ask you to stay, might admit he doesn’t want to forget either. But then your dad’s voice calls up from the street, sharp and impatient, and the moment shatters.

You stand. He stays seated, mask still in his hands, like he can’t quite put it back on. You want to hug him, to make the promise tangible, but you’re not sure if that’s allowed, so you just hold his gaze for one more beat and whisper, “Goodbye, Dick.”

“Goodbye,” he echoes, voice raw around the edges.

You don’t look back as you climb down the fire escape, suitcase handle cutting into your palm. The car door slams, your dad starts the engine, and Gotham begins to slide past the windows like a dream smearing at the edges.

But when you finally let yourself glance back, there he is, perched on the rooftop, cape trailing behind him, mask dangling loose in his hands.

A boy too small for the weight he carries, silhouetted against a city that will never stop asking more. Watching you leave like it’s the last thing he’ll ever let himself do.

And then the car turns the corner, and he’s gone.

-

You’d always told yourself you weren’t keeping tabs, not really. But the truth is you couldn’t help it. Gotham’s headlines are hard to ignore. Batman never vanished; he’s a permanent fixture in the background of every crisis, every scandal, every blurred photograph of a cape against a floodlight.

Robin was there too, at least for a while. But not your Robin. This one was smaller, sharper, someone else’s kid in colors that weren’t his. The news never explained the swap. Gotham doesn’t explain anything.

As for Dick Grayson? You never let yourself look too hard. Some nights in Metropolis, you’d type his name into a search bar, just to hover over the letters. Circus boy, ward of Bruce Wayne, rumored dropout. Then you’d slam the laptop closed before the results could load. It felt like breaking some unspoken promise, like trespassing on a secret that had only ever been yours.

So you let him fade into the background of your memory. Or tried to. Life went on. You grew up. Metropolis U gave you a degree you’re still not sure you earned. You dated a little, kissed boys who didn’t make your chest ache the way rooftop laughter once did. You told yourself you were moving forward, not circling back. And yet, here you are. Returning to Gotham with a job at the paper, retracing your father’s path like a shadow.

Your dad isn’t with you this time. He’s staying behind, insisting he’s too old for Gotham’s grind. So it’s just you and your boxes, your byline, and the faint echo of footsteps on tar paper that you never really forgot.

You pause on the corner outside your new apartment, suitcase wheels caught on a crack in the sidewalk. Gotham breathes heavy around you; neon flicker, taxi horn, the muffled thump of bass from a club down the street.

You wonder, not for the first time, if you’ll see him. And just as quickly, you remind yourself: probably not. Gotham eats people. It chews them up, spits them out, and even the ones who survive don’t always stick around.

Still, when you climb the steps and let yourself into the dim little apartment, you can’t help glancing out the window at the rooflines beyond. Half of you expects to see a flash of cape, the silhouette of a boy you once knew.

But the skyline is empty.

-

By now, Gotham has settled into your bones again. It’s been months since you unpacked your last box, months since you stopped flinching at the way the city exhales smoke and sirens instead of air. The novelty wore off fast. Gotham is like that; she lets you think she’s offering something new, then reminds you it was always just grit and rot under the paint.

Your nights taste like coffee grounds and exhaustion, your mornings like stale bagels eaten while jogging across crosswalks. The newsroom smells of burnt ink and anxiety, and it clings to you even when you leave.

So when your editor sent you chasing whispers across the river, you didn’t think twice. Blüdhaven, he’d said, a smuggling ring near the docks. Gotham’s smaller, meaner cousin, the kind of place your dad used to warn you about but still sent you to buy fireworks from when you were twelve.

You’d told yourself you could handle it. Gotham-born, seasoned on backstreets and rooftops, no stranger to shadows. You’ve always been too curious for your own good.

Turns out curiosity doesn’t count for much when the alley closes in on you.

-

Blüdhaven smells worse than Gotham. Like saltwater left too long in a rusty bucket, sharp and sour all at once. The alley is narrow, brick pressing close on either side, graffiti bleeding into one another under the yellow smear of a streetlamp. You’d only meant to skirt the block, maybe snap a photo of the cargo crates stacked like crooked teeth along the waterline. Instead, you’ve got three men cutting you off, their boots heavy, their breath reeking of stale beer.

The wall is cold against your back.

“Where you think you’re going, sweetheart?” one asks, voice slick. He’s taller than you, bulkier too, the kind of man who’s never been told no in a way that stuck.

Your pulse kicks hard. Your mind tries to measure exits, two steps left, maybe a sprint to the chain-link, but they’re already tightening the circle. The sound of their shoes on wet concrete echoes too loud, too final.

Your hand clamps around your notebook, knuckles white. For one mad second you consider swinging it like a weapon. And then the air splits.

He comes from above. A shadow drops out of the night, suit a streak of ink, boots hitting the first man’s chest with a crack that rattles the brick. The impact sends him sprawling, air rushing out of his lungs in a howl. The second man barely has time to register movement before a blur of blue arcs through the dim. The escrima stick connects with his jaw, a clean, efficient crack that folds him sideways.

The third curses, steel flashing as he pulls a knife, but it’s useless. The stranger moves faster, duck, twist, wrist locked and wrenched. The blade clatters uselessly to the ground. A sharp elbow, a spin, and the man collapses onto the damp concrete, groaning. It takes less than a minute. You don’t breathe until it’s over. Then theres silence.

The three men groan in a heap, nursing their bruises, and you’re left standing in the mouth of the alley with your notebook pressed to your chest like a shield.

He straightens. Under the weak streetlight, he looks unreal. Black and blue armor clings to broad shoulders, the stylized bird spreading across his chest in sharp, gleaming lines. He spins one escrima stick in his hand like it weighs nothing, the move so casual it’s showy. The mask gleams, eyes whited out, hiding everything but the shape of his mouth, the curve of his jaw.

And then he turns to you.

“Still can’t stay out of trouble, huh?” The voice hits first. Familiar enough to send a jolt through you. It’s smoother now, deeper, no trace of the cracks it used to have, but you know it. You know it like you know your own pulse.

Your knees nearly give. “I-what?”

He steps closer, head cocked, smirk curling at his mouth like he’s been waiting years to use it. Except there’s nothing boyish about him anymore. His shoulders fill the armor like it was built for him, lines sleek and lethal. His movements hum with confidence, a looseness earned from years of knowing exactly what he can do and knowing everyone else is a step behind.

The mask hides half his face, but what it doesn’t hide is worse. The jawline is sharper, cut like someone sculpted it with glass. His mouth is curved in a smile that’s both infuriating and magnetic. His body radiates energy, command, like he could take on the whole block if you dared him.

Your brain scrambles. This isn’t the boy you knew. This isn’t the awkward kid who smudged ink into your margins and laughed too hard at your jokes. For a second you’re convinced you’ve conjured him out of memory. That your exhaustion and the shadows stitched together a hallucination just to taunt you.

And then, like he knows you need proof, he lifts his hands and peels the mask away.

The world tilts.

“…Dick?” It’s his eyes that betray him. Blue. Bright. The exact shade you’d memorized years ago under the moonlight on your roof. But steadier now. Sharper. Older.

“Hi.” His grin spreads slow, deliberate, every inch of it self-satisfied. “Miss me?”

You forget how to breathe. Because this…this is really not the boy you left. Not your awkward crush with too-big ears and a voice that squeaked mid-laugh. Not the kid who leaned stiffly when you first bumped his shoulder.

This is a man. He’s taller, towering over you in a way that makes the brick wall at your back feel unnecessary. Every inch of him looks carved, built, honed. His arms ripple with muscle that wasn’t there before, his chest fills the blue emblem like it was made to draw the eye. His hair is longer, darker, his mouth sharper, the grin edged with confidence you don’t know how to stand against.

He looks like someone who walked out of a fantasy you never would’ve dared to put on paper.

You blink once. Twice. Three times. Your brain refuses to reconcile the two images; the scowling boy with smudged gloves and this unfairly gorgeous man standing in front of you. “What… what happened to you?” The words fly out, strangled, mortifying. Heat floods your face before you can stop it.

His eyebrow arches. He tucks the mask into his belt, casual. “Puberty?”

It should be funny. And it is funny. The corner of your mouth twitches in betrayal, a laugh half-born and dying in your throat. But your chest is twisting, hard, because you can still see him underneath it all. Still see the boy who leaned too far forward on ledges, who let his laugh crack when he forgot to control it. The boy who told you secrets in the dark and asked you not to forget.

And now here he is, all swagger and charm and jawlines that should be illegal. Handsome in a way that would be arrogance if he couldn’t back it up with every move he just made. Your pulse is hammering, and the spiral is real. What do you do with a crush that was built on personality, on earnestness and laughter and responsibility, when it comes packaged now in a body like this? When it’s sharpened into something magnetic, commanding, impossible to look away from?

You stare at him, dazed, like you’re trying to catch up to reality. “You… you were not this good-looking when we were kids.”

His grin only widens, cocky and warm all at once. “So you were paying attention.”

You want the ground to open up and swallow you whole. Because Gotham didn’t just chew Dick Grayson up and spit him back out. It reforged him into something you are absolutely not ready for.

For a few stunned seconds after he speaks, you stand there and do nothing but hear your heart in your ears. The alley is wet and ringing; distant gulls, a siren far-off, the tinny drip-drip of a faulty gutter. One of the guys on the ground groans, rolls over, thinks better of it, and stays facedown. The streetlamp above you flickers like it’s chewing glass.

“Okay,” you manage finally, voice rasped thin. “Okay.”

“Yeah,” he says, softer now. He tips his head, searches your face like he’s tracing the years there. Then, practical as a tide, he tucks the mask back over his eyes. The Nightwing look clicks into place with a finality that makes your stomach dip. “Walk with me,” he adds. “This block’s loud for all the wrong reasons.”

He offers a hand. Warm leather. Callused palm. The glove creaks when you take it, and you try very hard not to catalog the new details; how much larger his hand feels than it used to, how steady it is, the easy strength under the restraint. He doesn’t tug so much as guide, falling into step beside you like your bodies remember the distance they’ve always kept.

You exit the alley into air that smells like engine oil and salt-stung wood. The docks breathe: winches clicking, a forklift grumbling, water slapping pilings in a thawed rhythm. Nightwing angles you toward the brighter avenue, keeping himself between you and the shadows without making a show of it. His presence folds around you the way his cape used to on rooftops; same instinct, different body.

“You’re really here,” you say, because it’s the only sentence that keeps starting in your brain.

“So are you,” he answers. “Thought I was hallucinating when I saw you in that alley. Journalism, huh?”

“It runs in the family,” you say, apologetic and defiant all at once.

He hums. “I noticed.”

“You noticed?”

“Hard to miss,” he says, like it’s obvious. “Bylines. Two pieces on the housing ordinance, a profile on the Jackson Street food pantry, a fire that shouldn’t have spread as fast as it did. Your ledes are cleaner. Fewer adverbs.”

You blink at him. “You… read them?”

He shrugs one shoulder. The motion makes the blue stripe arc over muscle in a way that should be illegal. “I keep an eye on Gotham. And people who used to live on rooftops with me.”

It takes a few steps to realize your face is doing the warm thing again. You look away, huff out a laugh like you can steam the heat into the Blüdhaven night. “Still a critic.”

“Still right,” he says, and there’s the grin; quick, bright, and edged with something fond. “You got sharper.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning,” he says, tilting his chin, “you’re not the kid who followed trouble because it glittered. You followed it in there because you had a plan. You clocked their shoes before their faces. You kept your notebook hand free. You put your back to a wall.”

You glance up at him. “You saw all that in, what, thirty seconds?”

“Ten,” he says, entirely too pleased with himself. “Give or take.”

The walk bleeds you out toward the waterfront road. Nightwing crosses you behind a stack of palettes with the same unthinking choreography he used to have on rooftops. One hand light against your elbow, a check for traffic, the quick tilt of his head as his comm crackles something at him you can’t hear. He answers it without breaking stride, then flicks the channel off and comes back to you like you’re the station he meant to tune to all along.

“Your dad?” he asks after a beat.

“Back in Metropolis,” you say. “He says he’s retired. I give it six months.”

His mouth pulls wry. “Retirement never sticks.”

“Does it for you?” The question flies out before you can leash it. You mean it to be casual; it lands heavier, threaded with too many years, too many unsent searches of his name at one a.m.

He doesn’t flinch. “Didn’t for me,” he says. “I needed… different air. A city I could learn without being measured against a cape that walks like thunder.”

“Blüdhaven,” you say. “Gotham left out in the rain.”

He huffs a laugh. “Something like that.” Then he glances at you from under the curve of the mask, gravity sliding back in. “It grows on you if you let it. Like mold. Or a stray.”

“Romantic,” you deadpan.

“Hey, I never promised romance,” he lies very badly, because even his walk is a little romantic now, loose-hipped and careful in the dark, shoulder brushing yours when the sidewalk narrows, the night clicking into place around him like it’s learned the shape of his stride.

You pass a shuttered bait shop with a neon marlin blinking. A stray cat watches you from a garbage can lid, eyes pearls in the lamplight. Your shoes squeak; his steps don’t make sound at all. Every few yards he scans the roofs with that lifted chin. You remember the gesture, how it used to be smaller on a smaller body, and you picture the mental map overlaid on what your eyes see: viable fire escapes, plausible ambushes, routes-out stitched in blue light.

“How long were you on that roof?” you ask. “Before you dropped in.”

He contemplates the question like it has a proper answer. “Long enough to count three sets of footsteps and a knife. Not long enough to forgive you later if you’d been stubborn enough to run.”

“I wasn’t going to run,” you start, then hedge, “for long.”

He barks a laugh. It slides into something softer before it’s done. “You’re… different,” he says, the word careful, as if he’s testing the edges to make sure it won’t cut.

“Older,” you offer.

“That, yeah.” The corner of his mouth tugs. “But it’s not just that. You walk like you own your space now, not like you’re renting it. You look people in the eye longer. You… speak headline and copy without thinking.” He flicks his gaze over you, deliberate enough that you feel seen rather than scanned. “You still don’t fold your pizza, I bet.”

“I will die on that hill,” you say gravely.

“You will die incorrect,” he returns, equally grave, and a piece of rooftop-laughter that you thought you’d boxed up somewhere years ago shakes itself awake and trots between you like it never left.

“Okay, Mr. Puberty,” you say, putting a hand to your chest as if to ward off the unfairness. “Since we’re making observations, what exactly are you eating to look like you could bench-press a yacht?”

“Protein bars and spite,” he says, deadpan. “Mostly spite.”

You trip on a cracked tile and he catches you without thinking, a warm bracket at your elbow and the lightest pressure of his other hand at your hip to steady you. It lasts half a blink, then he’s gone again, space restored, the afterimage of touch ringing in your nerves like a bell. The alley stench loosens for a second, and you catch the smell of him beneath leather and city: clean soap, ozone, summer heat trapped in fabric that moves like skin.

“Thanks,” you say belatedly, and hope he can’t see the flush doing somersaults up your throat.

“Occupational hazard,” he says lightly. “Saving journalists who don’t fold their pizza.”

“I saved the notebook,” you argue, brandishing it. “That counts as self-preservation.”

His eyes crinkle. “God, I missed that.”

You were not prepared for those words. They land like a warm hand on your sternum, like the exact right weight after too many years of empty space. You swallow once, twice. The docks open into a long, bleak avenue where the streetlights flock in nervous clusters. He steers you toward the brighter end.

“I kept tabs,” you admit, voice tucking itself small. “Not… really. Not like a creep. Just… Batman was always there, and then there was a Robin who wasn’t my Robin, and I didn’t…” You shake your head, chase off the tangle. “Sometimes I typed your name and closed the laptop before the results could load. It felt wrong, like prying at something that was mine because you gave it to me.”

He walks a few slow steps without answering. The night stretches, thin and elastic. When he finally speaks, it’s soft, the timbre reaching you beneath the noise. “I’m glad you didn’t,” he says. “Go looking, I mean. Part of me… needed to earn being found.”

You glance up. His expression is harder to read with the mask back on, but the mouth, older now, yes, and built for trouble, goes gentle in the corners. He kicks at a pebble; it skitters into the gutter. “The leaving was messy,” he says. “I had to be more than a shadow to a shadow.”

“And now you’re a bird,” you say. “Blue suits you.”

“Figures you’d appreciate the re-branding,” he says lightly, then, “yours does too, though.”

“What?”

“The re-brand. It suits you,” he says, and there’s a smile in his voice now that didn’t exist when he was fourteen. “You grew up into your name. Your bylines. Your whole… thing. It looks good on you.”

You stare at him, cheeks doing that heat thing again. “My… thing.”

“Your spine,” he clarifies, and the tease bumps to the side to let the truth through. “You always had one. It just… fits you better now.”

The ridiculous urge to cry chooses that exact moment to crest, so you let out a little choking laugh instead and look at a billboard for a discount mattress warehouse like it’s fascinating art. “You’ve gotten complimentary in your old age,” you mutter.

“It’s the protein bars,” he says, solemn, and you trip into laughter that tastes like your rooftop nights, cold air, the city in your lungs, the right person at your shoulder. A night bus sways past; he slow-blinks away the wind grit. You fall quiet for a block, footsteps scuffing in sync. Somewhere inland, someone’s playing a radio too loud. It spills a chorus that means nothing and everything past the brick and rebar.

“You’re staying?” he asks eventually. “Gotham, I mean. Not a six-month and run?”

“I’m staying,” you say, and feel the words set in your body like a foundation finally poured. “When I told my dad, he said it’s my turn to decide what Gotham is to me.”

He nods, thoughtful. “Blüdhaven’s an extension of the same storm. We share weather fronts.” His mouth twists, fond and rueful. “I’ll be around.”

“You always are,” you say before you can help it.

He glances sidelong, and the grin that takes his face then is uncomplicatedly pleased. It should be arrogant; somehow it just looks like sunlight found a gap in the boards. You wonder how many people get to see that one and decide maybe you don’t want to know.

A woman behind a plexiglass window sells cigarettes and bus passes. The night wind lifts the edges of the taped notices, makes them whisper. You stop under the awning, the two of you edged into the white noise of the fluorescents, and the city swivels into a gentler key.

“I can call you a car,” he says. “Or,” He hesitates, then crooks two fingers. From somewhere you don’t see, a motorcycle growls to life, a sleek, low thing that rolls obediently out of the gloom to settle at the curb like a well-trained animal. He pats the seat with absent affection. “I can take you back.”

You stare. “Did you name it? Like the Nightcycle or something equally as lame?”

“I absolutely did not,” he lies, horrendously, then swings a leg over and steadies the bike with a boot. Up close, he’s too much again; too many lines and angles that weren’t there the last time you catalogued him, too much easy strength, too much blue. “Helmet,” he says, offering one out. It’s heavier than you expect; when you take it, your fingers brush, leather over skin, static jumping.

You hesitate. “Are you going to drive like a responsible citizen?”

He gives you a look that is eighty percent angel, twenty percent criminal. “Define responsible.”

“Alive when we get there.”

“Deal.”

You settle onto the bike behind him with the kind of care that admits you are about to do a reckless thing on purpose. Your knees fit against his hips like there’s only one way to sit; your hands find the line of his jacket and pause, hovering. He reaches back without looking, takes your wrists, and draws your arms around his waist until your palms meet. The gesture is matter-of-fact and wildly intimate. You can feel him laughing, silent and low, at your ear.

“Still bossy,” you say, because your voice needs somewhere to put the tremor.

“I remember you like being told what to do,” he says, and then, so quick and soft you almost miss it, “Sometimes.”

It shouldn’t hit the way it does. It shouldn’t make heat pool low in your stomach, shouldn’t make your pulse trip against your throat, shouldn’t leave you wondering if the helmet’s padding is enough to hide the color climbing up your cheeks. But it does.

You laugh, helpless, a little breathless, because if you don’t laugh, you might actually whimper. The sound crackles in your throat and goes thin in the rush of the night air. You can feel the vibration of the engine through your thighs, the leather of his jacket under your hands, the solid line of his body in front of you, and now, layered over all of that, his words, humming through your nerves in a way that feels dangerously good.

He glances back once, eyes catching yours over his shoulder, mask bright in the streetlight. The look is quick, but it’s enough. He knows what he said. He knows how it landed. And then the bike glides into the street, smooth and certain, as if nothing in the world has shifted, even though everything inside you just did.

The city rushes at you, neon and shadow blurring into ribbons. You clutch harder without meaning to, breath hitching, and he adjusts his posture just enough to shield you from the first hard push of wind. The shift presses your chest closer to his back, your knees locking tighter against his hips.

Your chin bumps the back of his shoulder. There’s damp salt there, leather warmed by body heat, and the sound of him breathing, steady, rhythmic, the same cadence you used to fall asleep to on rooftops when he kept watch.

The bike thrums beneath you, vibration rolling up through your thighs, settling into your stomach, buzzing in places you don’t want to admit are suddenly very awake. Every curve of the road asks you to lean with him, to trust the drop of his weight and the strength in his shoulders, and every time you do, you feel him there under your hands; solid, certain, unshakable.

He doesn’t go fast. He goes sure. The kind of riding that says I know this grid with my eyes shut and my hands tied, and I am choosing to bring you home. But the steadiness only makes it worse; it gives you time to notice everything.

The way his body heat seeps into you through layers of leather. The flex of muscle when he shifts gears, the ripple of his stomach under your forearm as he leans into a turn. The casual way his hand adjusts the throttle, so close you imagine what it would feel like if he used that grip on you.

At a light, he puts a boot down, head turning just enough that you catch the angle of his jaw beneath the mask. He checks on you without a word. You don’t know if he can see the flush burning under your helmet, but you feel seen all the same, and it does nothing to calm the pounding in your chest.

When the light changes, he rolls forward, and you press into him again, tighter this time, because the vibration and the closeness are unraveling you inch by inch. Small things, all of them, his steadiness, his quiet, the way his body seems to know yours is there and adjusts like it belongs pressed against him.

They add up to something you don’t let yourself name yet, but you feel it everywhere.

The bike growls to a halt a block from your building. The engine cuts, and in the sudden hush the night feels sharp, like the air itself is watching. The silence rings in your ears after miles of vibration. He doesn’t move right away. He reaches back instead, gloved fingers brushing over yours where they’re still hooked around his waist. A silent reminder: you can let go now.

You don’t. Not immediately. Your fingers unclasp a second too late, reluctant to surrender the heat of him, the solid line of his body. He feels it, he has to, and yet he doesn’t call you out, just slides his hands free of the handlebars with a kind of deliberate patience.

He swings one leg over and plants his boots on the ground, bracing the bike steady with practiced ease. Then, before you can fumble an exit, he turns and holds a hand out. “Careful,” he says. His voice is rougher than you remember, steady but edged with something lower, something weightier. “It’s a little taller than you think.”

You could protest. Tell him you’ve managed steps taller than this since kindergarten. But the way he’s standing there, broad and sure, palm open, the easy invitation of it, undoes you in a way stairs never could.

You take it. His hand is warm through the leather, steady as you swing your leg back over the bike. You slide down too close, body brushing his chest for the briefest moment. The contact snaps across you like static. You feel the give of his armor under your shoulder, the heat rolling off him in a wave, the faint tang of leather and sweat that clings to him.

It should be over in an instant. Just a hand-off. But his grip lingers, a fraction longer than necessary, fingers tightening almost imperceptibly around yours. Enough that you notice. Enough that your breath catches, shallow and sharp, before you tug back.

You’re on your own two feet now, the pavement gritty beneath your shoes, but your body is still buzzing from the bike, from him. Your pulse is thudding in your ears, your palms hot where his gloves touched.

“Still trouble,” he says at last, because he can’t help himself.

“Still bossy,” you volley back, because you can’t either. But this time, it doesn’t feel like banter tossed across a rooftop. It feels like a line pulled taut between you, humming with something you’ve both pretended not to hear for years.

He studies you for another long, unapologetic moment. His voice, when it comes, slips a layer down. “You grew up, you know.”

You swallow. “So did you.”

“Yeah,” he says, and it sounds like he’s acknowledging an ocean and a bridge and a lot of half-built scaffolding. His mouth curves, not the cocky smirk he used in the alley, but something older, carved from relief and surprise and the joy of recognizing someone in a crowd. “Feels like we should…” He gestures, uselessly, as if the city might supply the word.

“Pizza,” you say, because the universe clearly wants callbacks. “So I can prove you’re wrong.”

“You won’t,” he says immediately, but his eyes go bright, pleased, like you just handed him the right answer to a test he wanted you to enjoy taking.

He reaches into a belt pouch, produces a small black rectangle you’d charitably call a phone if phones weren’t usually made by people not afraid of the apocalypse. He toggles it awake, thumbs something in. When he looks up, he’s all business again, but the softened corners remain. “Same roofline,” he says. “Different skyline. You call, I land.”

“Is that your way of giving me your number?” you ask, amused and a little breathless.

“It’s my way of saying I read your ledes and I don’t want to do that from far away anymore,” he says, and that’s it. That’s the line that carves through every defense like they were drawn in chalk.

“Okay,” you say, because a bigger word would crack your throat right now. “Nightwing?”

“Mmm?”

“Thanks for the rescue.”

He dips his head once, like you just pinned a medal on him he didn’t expect to care about. “Anytime, Trouble.”

He fits the mask better on his face, swings onto the bike, and then he’s gone, blurring back into the dark with a roar that falls away quick, swallowed by Blüdhaven’s wet lungs. You stand there in the sodium light, hair mussed by a wind you’ll be thinking about for hours, hands stupidly empty of leather and heat, and you try to file this under something. Reunion. Whiplash. Beginning again.

The city exhales. Somewhere a gull laughs like it knows something. You look down at your notebook; rain freckles have started to drink through the top page. On instinct, you flip to a clean sheet, jot three words at the top: Familiar. Stranger. Home.

-

You fall into a new rhythm without meaning to.  It starts with accidents, running into him on rooftops, in alleys, when your investigations overlap his patrols. But it stops feeling accidental when he begins showing up at your office at the end of your shift, leaning against the wall like he belongs there. When he texts pizza? before you’ve even decided if you’re hungry. When you start leaving your fire escape window cracked, because somehow you know he’ll be there.

It isn’t dating. Not really. But it also isn’t not.

He has made it clear, in every way except saying it out loud over the past few months, that he wants to be in your life. And you? You haven’t decided if you’re brave enough to admit that you want him in yours just as badly.

-

The first time he picks you up after work in his civilian clothes, it knocks you sideways. You’re shuffling out of the newsroom with ink on your fingers, hair pulled back in a half-hearted bun, when you see him leaning against a lamppost. No mask. No armor. Just Dick Grayson in jeans, forearms bare, sunglasses tucked into the collar of his shirt.

He waves like it’s the most normal thing in the world, like he hasn’t just shattered the delicate line you’d kept between “him at night” and “him in the day.”

“What are you doing here?” you demand, adjusting the strap of your bag.

“Picking you up.” He shrugs, casual, like the ground didn’t just shift. “What, you’d rather take the bus?”

“I’m perfectly capable of taking the bus.”

“Sure,” he says, grin tugging at his mouth. “But where’s the fun in that?”

It’s disorienting, walking beside him in broad daylight. You keep expecting people to notice, to point, to whisper Nightwing…but no one looks twice. They just see Dick Grayson, easy in his own skin, fitting himself into your day like he’s been there all along.

And when he slings a leg over the motorcycle and offers you the helmet with that cocky tilt of his head, you don’t argue. Not really.

-

The rhythm builds. Some nights it’s him dropping by your apartment, sprawled on your couch in a t-shirt while you rant about deadlines. Some nights it’s you stitching him up again, fingers brushing skin that’s too warm, too scarred, your pulse thundering at the contact.

“You’re staring,” he says once, voice sly, eyes glinting.

“I’m working,” you snap, fumbling with the gauze.

“You’re staring,” he repeats, softer this time.

You don’t deny it. You can’t. Because sometimes it hits you out of nowhere, the sheer physicality of him. The breadth of his shoulders when he leans against your counter. The casual way he tosses his escrima sticks onto your table, muscles flexing as if they’re part of the furniture. The way his laugh curls low in his chest now, rich enough to make your skin prickle.

You’d had a crush on him once, built on personality and laughter and the relief of being seen. But now that crush is packaged in arms and jawlines and a body that moves like it knows exactly how much power it has…and you don’t know what to do with that.

You catch yourself looking more often than you should. He catches you every time. And the worst part is, he doesn’t seem to mind.

-

Pizza becomes your running joke. Trioni’s booth, sticky varnish under your elbows, slices steaming on paper plates. He folds his, smirking at you the whole time, waiting for your inevitable groan of horror.

“You’re not going to win me over,” you say, waving your floppy slice at him.

“You’ll cave eventually,” he counters, leaning back in the booth, grin sharp and pleased. “I can be very persuasive when I need to be.”

“Not this time.”

He doesn’t break eye contact as he takes a slow bite of his folded slice, chewing like he’s proving a point. It’s ridiculous. It’s infuriating. It’s so goddamn attractive you want to scream.

“Stop looking at me like that,” you mutter.

“Like what?”

“Like you know something I don’t.”

He smirks. “Maybe I do.”

You throw a napkin at him. He laughs, catches it easily, and the sound rings through you like a struck bell.

-

He hadn’t planned to follow you. He hadn’t. His patrol had taken him toward the Narrows, toward the docks, a dozen other places that needed him more than one crowded strip of nightlife where you were laughing too loud in a dress that glittered like you’d stolen the stars.

But the second he spotted you, he stopped. You were walking in the middle of your pack of friends, arm hooked through one of theirs, head thrown back in a laugh that made your hair slip down your shoulders. Your dress caught every scrap of neon, sequins winking like Morse code, and for a second it was all he could see. Sparkling. Distracting. You, right there, alive and incandescent. He told himself to keep moving. To stick to patrol. 

He didn’t. He slipped into the shadows above instead, tracking you from rooftop to rooftop, his body humming with an uneasy mix of irritation and awe. You shouldn’t be out here this late, drunk and stumbling. Gotham eats people like that alive. And yet seeing you bright and unguarded, cheeks flushed, smile wide, it does something to him. Like he’s watching a life he doesn’t belong to but can’t look away from.

Then he hears it.

“Wait, wait, wait,” one of your friends slurs, catching your arm as you teeter on the curb. “You had a crush on Robin? Little Robin? Short shorts and all?” The words hit like a sucker punch. His boots still on the ledge, heart lurching up into his throat.

You groan, dramatic. “Don’t say it like that.”

Laughter erupts, loud and merciless. “I mean, Batman was literally right there,” another says. “Broody, mysterious, tall. And you went for the kid in green?”

“Listen,” you argue, slurring but determined, your hands slicing through the air as you stumble forward with them. “It wasn’t even because he was, like… hot.”

Dick goes still. Breath locked. Not hot. Not Batman. Not Superman. But… him. His fingers curl tight around the edge of the roof until the stone bites through the gloves. The city noise fades under the thunder of his pulse.

Your friends don’t let up. “You were in Metropolis for years! What about Superman? Have you seen him? Gorgeous. Dimples. Arms. Literal sunshine.”

“That’s not the point!” you insist, cutting them off with a shout, your heels clicking unevenly against the pavement. “Robin, he was… earnest, okay? Thoughtful. Responsible. He listened. He…” Your voice softens. Fragile and fierce at the same time. “He made me feel like I mattered.”

The words gut him. Because he remembers. He remembers every night on rooftops, every time you sat beside him with your knees pressed together, every secret you whispered into the dark because you trusted him to hold it. He remembers the way you looked at him like he was more than Batman’s shadow. Like he was enough. 

He’s gripping the ledge so hard he thinks it might crack under his hand.

Your friends are howling again, teasing, “God, you really do have a type. What’s next, Green Lantern?” But he’s not listening anymore. He’s locked on you, on the way your laughter shakes loose and dizzy into the night, on the memory of the boy he used to be, the boy who never believed anyone would pick him.

And here you are, years later, admitting you had. He doesn’t care that you’re drunk. Doesn’t care that you might not remember this tomorrow. Because he will. He’ll remember the conviction in your voice, the way you doubled down, the way you said he made you feel like you mattered.

Up on the ledge, hidden in shadow, Dick feels it burn through him. A match struck in the dark. And he knows he’s not letting you run from this. Next time his eyes linger, next time his hand presses at the small of your back, next time his voice drops lower than it should, you won’t get to brush it off as banter. You won’t get to hide behind excuses. Because you said it. You chose him. You always had. And he thinks you still might. And God help him, he’s not about to let you pretend otherwise.

-

The problem with Dick Grayson isn’t that he doesn’t know how to look at you. It’s that he does. He knows exactly how long to let his eyes linger before you catch him. He knows how to tilt his head so it looks like he’s teasing when it feels like something else. He knows when to let his gaze soften, how to press just enough warmth into it to make you think about things you shouldn’t, not when you’re supposed to be friends.

And this morning, as you’re face-planted into the couch cushions in a tiny, sparkly black dress, head throbbing, stomach rolling, the last thing you need is for Dick Grayson to be looking at you.

Unfortunately, he is.

“Rough night?” His voice is bright, smug, like sunshine filtered through something wicked.

You groan into the cushions. “Go away.”

“No can do.” You hear his boots cross the floor, the quiet shift of weight as he crouches beside the couch. “I figured you’d need a little… moral support. Or maybe electrolytes.”

“I need you to shut up,” you mutter.

He laughs low, warm, and irritatingly fond. “You look like roadkill.”

You lift your head just enough to glare at him. He’s crouched at your side, forearms resting on his knees, hair damp from a shower, dressed down in a t-shirt that clings a little too well. His eyes take you in shamelessly; your hair a mess, mascara smudged, sparkly dress creased from sleep.

“You’re not cute. Don’t look at me,” you mumble, shoving your face back into the couch.

“Too late.” He leans his chin into his palm. “It’s seared into my brain now. You, draped over a sofa like a tragic starlet.”

“Kill me.”

“Nah.” His grin sharpens. “Not when you give me material like this.” You don’t remember how he got in your apartment. You don’t remember much, actually, past stumbling in the door last night and half-collapsing onto the couch. But you do remember the way your friends had teased you on the walk home. Robin. Batman. Superman. And your stubborn, drunken insistence that it had always been Robin.

Heat flushes through you even now, a full-body cringe. God, what if you’d said too much? What if someone had recorded it? What if—

“You snore,” Dick says, breaking into your spiral.

Your head snaps up. “I do not.”

“Like a chainsaw.” He smirks, infuriatingly pleased. “It’s cute, though. Endearing.”

You throw a pillow at him. He catches it one-handed, effortless, then tosses it back onto your stomach, knocking the breath out of you. “Jerk,” you wheeze.

“Roadkill,” he volleys back like he is affirming his earlier statement. The banter is easy, familiar, but there’s an edge to it today. You feel it in the way his eyes keep tracking over you, softer than they should be. In the way he hasn’t moved from his crouch, too close, knees brushing the couch.

You shift, meaning to sit up, but your limbs betray you. Instead you flop sideways, head landing on the pillow, legs still dangling over the armrest, knees bent awkwardly on the floor. Your dress rides higher, glitter catching in the sunlight slanting through the blinds. His gaze flickers, quick and sharp, before snapping back to your face.

“You’re staring,” you accuse.

“You’re imagining,” he shoots back. But his voice is a shade too low, and it twists something in your stomach.

You try to change the subject. “So what, you just decided to drop by and harass me while I’m defenseless?”

“Defenseless, huh?” He leans in, close enough that you smell his soap and the faint tang of leather clinging to him. “Funny. Last night, you didn’t sound very defenseless.”

Your heart stutters. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

His smile turns slow, wicked. “Oh, nothing. Just that you’ve got… interesting taste.”

It hits you like a bucket of ice water. Oh. Oh, no. He heard. He had to have heard.

“Shut up,” you say quickly, too quickly, your cheeks blazing.

“Robin, huh?” he presses, voice feather-light but edged with something deeper. “Not Batman. Not Superman. Me.”

You bury your face in your hands. “I’m never drinking again.”

His laughter curls low in his chest. He nudges your knee with his hand, playful. “Relax. I’m flattered.”

“That makes one of us,” you groan, wishing the couch would swallow you.

But when you peek at him through your fingers, his eyes aren’t just amused. They’re intense, sharp, gleaming with the memory of your drunken confession. He’s not going to let you forget it.

The comedy of errors continues when you try to sit up. Your foot catches on the armrest, your heel slips, and you pitch forward, straight into his chest. He catches you easily, an arm banding around your waist, the other braced on the couch. Suddenly you’re nose-to-nose, his grin right there, his heartbeat loud against your palm where it’s landed on his chest.

“Careful,” he murmurs.

“I hate you,” you whisper, breathless.

“Liar,” he says softly, “You have a crush on me.” And it feels like a strike.

For a second, neither of you moves. The air between you hums, heavy, loaded. His eyes flick down to your mouth before darting back up. You feel it, every millimeter, like a live wire under your skin.

“Had,” you whisper. His eyes followed the shape of your lips as they formed around the word. 

“Have.” He says again, voice more firm this time. Your gaze traces his lips this time.

Your head tilts closer, like instinct, like your body is done pretending it doesn’t want him. His arm is still locked firm around your waist, holding you steady, keeping you pressed against the heat of his chest. Your palm flattens against him, feeling the steady thrum of his heartbeat, the give of muscle under cotton, the impossible warmth of him seeping straight through your skin.

He doesn’t pull away. Just looks at you, steady, unblinking, eyes so blue they feel like they could cut you open if you let them. His breath brushes your mouth, warm, uneven. You can taste coffee and something darker on it, and your lips part without permission, every nerve in your body straining toward the last millimeter of space.

The air thickens, heavy as syrup. His fingers at your waist flex, just once, enough to draw you an inch closer. His chest rises against yours, and you feel the faintest shiver where his nose grazes your cheek, his forehead brushing yours, testing the contact without closing it.

You don’t think. Your hand slides higher on his chest, tracing over the solid line of his collarbone, up the curve of his shoulder, fingers brushing the back of his neck. His hair is still damp from his shower, soft and warm under your touch. He exhales raggedly, his whole body tightening like he’s holding back a wave.

Because the problem with you isn’t that you don’t want Dick Grayson. It’s that you do.

“You’re not fooling me,” he says, voice low, rougher now that your lips are so close you can taste the warmth of his breath. “Not with that look on your face. Not with your hand all over me.”

Your fingers twitch against his chest, traitorous, pressing into solid muscle as though proving his point. Heat curls low in your stomach, sharp and insistent, and you hate that he can read it so easily.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” you manage, though your voice shakes.

His eyes darken, his thumb tracing slow circles into your hip where his hand grips you. “Say it again. Say you don’t still want me. Say it while you’re this close.”

You can’t. The words lodge in your throat, choking on the truth you’ve been dodging for weeks. His smirk softens, just barely, eyes narrowing in satisfaction as he leans in until your noses brush, your pulse stuttering wildly under his stare.

“Had,” you whisper again, desperate, as if repeating it might make it true.

“Finish the sentence if you mean it, sweetheart.” The words vibrate out of him, certain and unshakable. His gaze dips to your mouth again, slower this time, deliberate, and the sound you make is soft, caught halfway between a breath and a plea, and it has his jaw flexing tight like he’s fighting himself.

“Dick…” His name leaves your mouth broken, trembling, and he shudders like you’ve just lit a match against his skin.

His forehead tips to yours, contact so small but devastating, heat bleeding from him into you. “You can lie all you want, Trouble,” he murmurs, his breath ghosting across your lips, “but you don’t let someone this close unless you want it.”

Your head tilts, your lips part, your palm sliding up to his collarbone in a silent answer. For one perfect, electric second, the whole world narrows to the inch of air left between your mouths, heat, and his heartbeat under your hand.

Your lips brush his, so faint it’s almost not contact, just the ghost of it, but the shock of it rattles you down to your toes. His breath shudders out, shaky and hot, and when you lean in that last fraction, his mouth finally meets yours. It isn’t clean. It isn’t careful. His teeth catch your bottom lip, tugging just enough to make your stomach flip and a whimper catch in your throat. The sound seems to break something in him, because suddenly his arm around your waist tightens, dragging you fully into his lap.

You straddle him before you realize you’ve moved, dress riding high on your thighs, his heat pressed solid between your legs. His hands slide down, big and certain, cupping your ass through sequined fabric, pulling you flush against the thick line of him. The spark between you roars into fire.

He kisses you like he’s been waiting years for it, messy, hungry, devouring. Your palms splay across his chest, clutching at the muscle under his shirt, your fingers curling into the warm skin at the nape of his neck. His tongue slides against yours, slow at first, then harder, deeper, until you’re gasping into his mouth, moving against him without meaning to.

His hands squeeze, firm and sure, guiding you into him, hips arching up to meet yours. The friction makes your head spin, your pulse pounding everywhere at once. He tastes like wine and want, and the low sound he makes into your mouth vibrates all the way down your spine.

For a breathless stretch of moments, there’s no Gotham, no rain, no history. Just this. Just you and Dick, tangled up, finally giving in, kissing each other like you’ll never get enough.

Your lips part beneath his, and he takes the invitation greedily, kissing you deeper, tongue stroking against yours with a hunger that has your head spinning. It’s clumsy in places, teeth clicking, mouths chasing, but that only makes it worse, better. It feels alive, electric, like every ounce of restraint you’ve both held onto has finally gone up in flames.

You rock into him, desperate for more friction, and he groans low in his throat, the sound vibrating into your mouth. His hands tighten on your ass, dragging you down against him, grinding you into the thick, unmistakable weight straining against his sweats. The pressure makes your breath hitch, your body clenching around the ache building low in your belly.

You clutch at him harder, fingers fisting into his t-shirt until the fabric rides up, exposing hot skin. You smooth your palms over his stomach, the ridges of muscle flexing under your touch, and he shudders, biting your lip again as though to punish you for it. You moan into him, nails digging lightly into his sides, and he hisses through his teeth, kissing you harder, like he can pour every ounce of his want straight into your mouth.

The kiss tips sideways, and suddenly you’re gasping, laughing into him when his stubble grazes your jaw. He doesn’t let up. His lips trail fire down the line of your throat, teeth scraping lightly over the delicate skin there before sucking hard enough to make your toes curl. You arch into him, dress shifting higher, sequins scratching his hips where your thighs cage him in.

“Dick,” His name rips out of you, broken and desperate, and his mouth is back on yours before you can say more, swallowing the sound like it belongs to him.

Your hips roll against him, helpless, chasing the friction, and he meets you halfway, thrusting up into you in short, sharp motions that make you whimper into his mouth. His tongue tangles with yours again, messy and wet, and your vision sparks at the edges. His hands are everywhere, palming your ass, sliding up your spine, threading into your hair to tug your head back so he can kiss you deeper, rougher.

You’re dizzy with him, his taste, his weight, the sheer size of him under you. Every breath you drag in is filled with him, every nerve alight with the demand to get closer, closer, until there’s nothing left between you at all.

When you finally break for air, your foreheads slam together, both of you panting like you’ve run miles. His lips are swollen, glistening, his pupils blown wide, his chest heaving under your palms. He looks wild. Starved. Perfect. And then he’s pulling you back down, kissing you again, hungrier than before, open-mouthed, filthy, like he’s making up for every year he didn’t.

Your body can’t stop moving against him, chasing every drag of friction. The sequined dress has ridden high on your thighs, hem bunched at your waist as you straddle him. His hands are greedy now, sliding over bare skin, thumbs digging into the soft bare curve of your ass like he’s waited his whole life to touch you here. He drags you down harder, grinding you over him, and the blunt thickness straining his sweats makes you gasp into his mouth.

He’s huge. You knew he was, the outline impossible not to notice whenever he sprawled careless in those pants, but feeling it pressed solid against you, hot and heavy even through layers, makes your stomach twist and your core clench with want. You rock down on him harder, helpless, and the sound he makes is low, guttural, and almost pained. It shoots straight between your legs.

“Fuck,” he groans against your lips, kissing you harder, tongue driving deep like he’s trying to drown himself in you. His hips surge up in answer, rutting against you, the thick head of him catching just right against the soaked center of your panties. Your cry muffles into his mouth, nails scraping down his chest until you find skin, dragging up his shirt until it’s bunched under his arms.

His abs are hot and hard under your palms, slick with sweat, muscles flexing as he thrusts up into you. You break from his mouth to gasp down his throat, and he’s on you instantly, lips latching to your jaw, your neck, sucking and biting bruises into your skin like he wants to mark every inch he can reach.

“Say it,” he rasps against your throat, his teeth grazing your pulse. His hands knead your ass, grinding you down over him, the thick bulge in his sweats perfectly aligned with your clit. “Say you still want me.”

You can’t speak, not with the way he’s rolling his hips, relentless, the pressure building sharp and unbearable. You whimper his name instead, broken and needy, and he groans like the sound undoes him.

“Fuck—yeah, you do,” he breathes, pulling you down harder, guiding you to rock over him faster. The sequins of your dress scratch at his bare stomach, your panties soaked through, clinging to your folds as you grind over the obscene bulk of him. Each pass drags his thickness right against your clit, each grind shooting sparks down your spine until you’re gasping against his mouth, trembling in his lap. “She’s honest with me, even if your mouth won’t be,” he pants. 

He kisses you senseless again, filthy and wet, tongues clashing, teeth tugging, his hips never stopping. You roll against him desperately, chasing it, chasing him, your thighs trembling where they cage him in. His cock strains against the thin cotton, massive, the outline pressed hot and unyielding against your swollen pussy, and all you can think is how good it would feel inside you.

His hand slides up your spine, into your hair, yanking your head back just enough to bite at your throat again, his breath ragged. “Thatta girl. Keep grinding, Trouble. Wanna feel you cum all over me.”

The words hit harder than anything. You moan brokenly, hips stuttering against him, the rhythm sloppy but desperate, pleasure winding sharp and tight in your belly. His hands hold you steady, dragging you over him in rough, perfect circles until you’re shuddering, mouth open against his, every nerve screaming as you teeter on the edge.

And he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t let you run. He keeps you pressed to him, grinding against the thick, straining length of his cock until you’re shaking apart in his lap, soaking through your panties, every pulse of your orgasm spilling hot and messy against him.

He kisses you through it, swallowing your cries, biting your lip until you can barely breathe. When you finally slump forward, wrecked and trembling, his hands are still on you, still firm, still wanting. And he’s still hard, throbbing against you, sweatpants damp with your release, the sheer size of him twitching under you like a promise. 

His mouth breaks from yours only to press wet, biting kisses down your jaw, your throat, your collarbone, muttering against your skin like he can’t stop himself. “Feel how wet you are,” he growls, his voice rough and ruined. One hand slips lower, his long fingers sliding under the edge of your ruined panties. You whimper as his knuckles brush your slick folds, every inch of you drenched and swollen. His groan vibrates against your neck when he feels just how soaked you are.

“Fuck, Trouble…” His middle finger drags up through your wetness, slow, obscene, parting you until he finds your clit. You jolt hard against him, crying out, and he swallows the sound in another bruising kiss. His finger circles you once, twice, then dips lower, pressing inside with a stretch that makes your whole body seize. He’s so much bigger than your own hand, so much deeper, curling at the knuckle just right until your thighs clamp tight around him.

“Look at you,” he rasps, pumping in and out, his thumb pressing cruel circles to your clit. “Soaked for me. Always were, weren’t you?”

You can’t answer. You can only grind helplessly into his hand, your hips jerking against him, your mouth open and gasping against his. He slips a second finger in beside the first, the stretch sharp, delicious, filling you in a way that makes you sob into his mouth. His thumb works you mercilessly, dragging another wave of pleasure out of your trembling body.

Then he pulls his fingers out, sudden, leaving you clenching around nothing. You whine at the loss, but before you can protest, he shoves his slick fingers into his mouth, sucking them clean. His eyes lock on yours as he groans low in his throat, tasting you, devouring you.

“You’re so sweet, baby,” he murmurs, voice dark and reverent. “Could live on this.”

Your whole body shudders. You surge forward, kissing him hard, tasting yourself on his tongue, swallowing his groan as his hands drag at your hips again. But it’s not enough. The thick weight straining his sweats is pressed solid against your soaked panties, and you need more—you need him.

“Dick,” you gasp against his mouth, clawing at the waistband of his sweats. “Out. Now.”

His laugh is harsh, breathless, wrecked. “Now who’s bossy.” But he obeys, shoving his sweats down just enough for his cock to spring free, thick and heavy and already slick at the tip.

Your breath catches. Even soft he’d been obscene; hard, he’s devastating. Long, flushed dark, veins ridging the shaft, the broad head flushed and dripping precum. Your cunt clenches just looking at him, your thighs shaking with the need to feel it.

“Fuck,” he mutters, wrapping a hand around the base, stroking once, slow, groaning through gritted teeth. “Been dying to feel you on me.”

You grind down against him, soaking panties dragging over the thick length of him, smearing wetness across his cock. The slide makes you both groan, your clit catching against his head with every pass.

He curses again, gripping your hips so hard you know he’ll leave bruises, guiding you to rock on him. His cock drags along your soaked center, fat and hot, the head bumping your clit with every grind. You can feel the pressure of him catching against your entrance, the blunt head pushing at your soaked panties, teasing what you both want.

“You feel that?” he groans, eyes wild, forehead pressed to yours as his cock slides thick and heavy under you. “So wet you’re gonna ruin me. Gonna let me in, Trouble? Let me split you open on this cock?”

Your moan is answer enough. You grind harder, desperate, the head of him pushing your panties aside just enough to catch against your opening, stretching you slightly before slipping away again. He groans raggedly, pumping his cock once against your soaked fabric, precum smearing across the sequined dress bunched at your waist.

“Gonna make you feel so good,” he pants, kissing you hard, messy, teeth clashing. “Gonna bury this cock so deep you won’t be able to say my name without cumming.” His hands slide down, fingers curling under the edge of your panties, tugging at the damp fabric. “These coming off, or can I rip ‘em?”

“Rip,” you gasp, dizzy, desperate. And he does. The lace tears with a sharp sound, shredded by his long fingers like it’s nothing, the ruined fabric dragged aside as he growls into your mouth. The sudden cool air against your bare cunt makes you shiver, but then his cock is there, thick and hot and real, dragging through your soaked folds, smearing your slick up his length.

“Fuck,” His voice breaks, guttural. “You’re dripping. Been dreaming about this for so long sweetheart, about feeling you like this.” Your hips jerk forward, chasing it, and the broad head of him catches at your entrance. He holds you still with hands locked bruisingly tight on your ass, forcing you to feel it, just the heavy pressure of him nudging in, stretching you wide, parting you slow.

The stretch steals your breath. He’s so big your body fights to take him, and the sting makes you gasp into his mouth. But underneath is heat, thick, overwhelming heat, like your whole body’s been waiting for this exact moment.

“Christ,” he groans, forehead slamming to yours, sweat dripping down his temple. “So tight. Gonna ruin me.”

You claw at his shoulders, nails biting through cotton, panting. “More…please, Dick.”

He whines softly, and then he thrusts, hard. The thick length of him drives into you, slow enough to split you open, deep enough to make you cry out. Your walls seize around him, clenching helplessly, trying to adjust as inch after inch slides into your body. The stretch burns, pleasure laced sharp through pain, but he’s groaning against your mouth, kissing you through it, muttering ragged curses into your skin.

“Taking me…fuck, you’re taking all of me so well,” he grits out, his hips jerking up, forcing the last thick inch inside. His cock bottoms out deep, the blunt head pressed right against your cervix, so deep it makes your vision blur. You sob against his mouth, your body clutching him, trembling. The fullness is as unbearable as it is addictive; like he’s rewired you from the inside out.

“Look at you,” he pants, dragging back an inch only to slam forward again, grinding deep. “My pretty girl. So good for me.”

You moan brokenly, your hips rocking without thought, meeting him. The friction is devastating; bare, raw, his cock dragging against every swollen inch of you. Slick gushes down his shaft, wetting the base of him, smearing against his stomach where your dress is bunched. His rhythm builds fast, messy. Years of wanting crashing into each thrust, hips snapping up into you hard enough to jolt the couch under you. You cling to him, legs trembling around his waist, your cunt gripping him so tight he groans with every stroke.

“Oh baby,” he whines, mouth crushed to your jaw, teeth scraping. “You’re so fucking wet, gonna make me cum so deep inside you.”

You can only gasp, moan, sob against him, every thrust lighting you up. His hands cup your ass, dragging you down onto his cock harder, grinding you into him until your clit rubs against the base, sparks exploding in your belly. You’re close again; too close, the pressure building sharp and fast. You roll your hips against him, desperate, and he feels it, feels the way your walls flutter and clench around him.

“Gonna cum?” he rasps, voice breaking, his cock driving into you relentlessly. “Gonna soak me like a good girl? Let me have it, c’mon.” Your body shatters. Pleasure rips through you, hot and unbearable, your cunt clamping down on him as you scream his name into his mouth. Slick gushes around him, soaking him, dripping down your thighs, and he curses, rutting into you harder, chasing his own end.

His rhythm falls apart, hips slamming up into you in ragged, desperate thrusts, his cock throbbing inside you with every grind. His forehead presses to yours, sweat dripping, breath coming in short, broken gasps. “God, you feel so good,” he groans, the words spilling without thought, low and raw against your mouth. “So tight around me, so wet for me. Fuck, sweetheart, you’re perfect. Perfect.”

Each word is a strike, praise so filthy and reverent your whole body shivers around him. You moan into his mouth, clutching at his shoulders, rolling against him, your cunt clenching tighter every time he speaks. He thrusts deep, almost to the hilt, then stops, shaking with restraint, his cock swelling thick inside you. His voice cracks when he mutters, “I can’t…I’m gonna cum. Please. Please, let me…inside you, I want to.”

The sound of him begging makes your breath catch, your walls fluttering around him. You feel him shaking under you, his control frayed to nothing, but still he doesn’t let go, doesn’t cross the line until you give him the word. His mouth crashes to yours, messy and frantic, his tongue tangling with yours as he whispers against your lips, “Say yes. Tell me I can. Please, Trouble, I need it. Need to fill you up.”

The plea wrecks you. Heat coils sharp in your stomach, the pressure unbearable. You tighten around him, nails raking down his back, and gasp, “Yes, yes, Dick, cum inside me, please!” The sound he makes is broken, guttural, like you’ve torn the air from his lungs. His hips jerk up violently, his whole body locking under you as he buries himself deep, cock swelling as his release rips through him. 

“Fuck, oh, fuck, thank you,” he gasps, his voice sick with praise, chanting it against your mouth as he spills inside you. Thick heat floods your cunt in heavy pulses, and the sensation drags your orgasm out all over again; you clench down hard, milking him, crying into his kiss as he moans your name like prayer.

He holds you down on him, grinding up into you, desperate to push every drop deeper. “So good…so good for me, fuck, you’re perfect. Taking all of it, all of me.”

You collapse against his chest, trembling, both of you panting hard, still joined, his cock still twitching inside you as his release drips hot between your thighs. His forehead presses to yours, his voice wrecked, almost breaking. 

His forehead presses to yours, both of you still trembling, breaths dragging in uneven gasps. His voice is wrecked, almost breaking.

“Years,” he whispers, softer now but still aching, still desperate. “Wasted years not feeling you like this.”

Your chest tightens, words lost somewhere in your throat. So you kiss him instead, messy, deep, your lips swollen and clumsy. He kisses you back with equal fervor, but slower now, as if he wants to savor, to commit the taste of you to memory. His cock is still sheathed deep inside you, twitching faintly as he softens, but neither of you makes a move to part.

You shift against him, and his hands instantly tighten on your hips, keeping you down, keeping him buried inside. His laugh is low, roughened by exhaustion and bliss. “Don’t even think about it. Not letting you go yet.”

You groan against his chest. “You’re heavy.”

“Good,” he mutters, dropping his lips to the damp slope of your shoulder. “Means you’ll stay put.” He breathes you in, deep, reverent. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve wanted you?”

You pull back just enough to search his face. His eyes are glassy, unguarded in a way you’ve never seen. “How long?” you ask quietly, brushing his long dark hair out of his face.

He swallows, thumb brushing slow along your cheek, still cupping your face as if you’re fragile. “Since fourteen,” he admits, voice soft, bare. “Since the first night you sat on that roof and talked to me like I wasn’t just Robin. Like I was… a person.” His jaw flexes, like saying it out loud costs him something. “I never stopped, even when you left. Even when you came back and seemed distracted by my face.”

Your breath catches. The weight of it hits you hard, heavy and bright all at once, knocking your chest open. You don’t have to think. You know, suddenly, fiercely, that you’re falling in love with him. Not just the boy who once unmasked for you, not just the man currently buried inside you, but all of him.

“Dick…” you whisper, cupping his jaw, thumb brushing over the rough stubble there. “You’re ridiculous.”

His lips twitch, a crooked grin breaking the tension. “What, because I’ve been in love with you since I was a scrawny circus kid?”

“Because,” you correct softly, rolling your eyes even as your chest aches, “I liked you when you were gangly and angry at the world, and awkward with your kindness. That’s what got me.” Your thumb brushes the edge of his jaw. “Not… all this.”

His smile gentles, the teasing melting into something shy, almost boyish. “Doesn’t hurt, though, right? The face.”

You huff a laugh, shaking your head, but it comes out tender instead of sharp. “No. It doesn’t hurt.”

“Good because you,” he says, kissing your forehead, your nose, the corner of your mouth in quick, playful succession, “are stuck with me now. So remember that when I get on your nerves.”

You sigh, pretending exasperation, but you can’t stop smiling. “Guess I am.”

-

You stay like that for a while, tangled and warm, the storm outside softening into a steady patter. His thumb strokes along your cheekbone, lazy, reverent, like he can’t quite believe you’re real. Eventually, though, the ache in your thighs reminds you both of reality. You shift, wincing slightly, and he feels it immediately.

“Hey,” he murmurs, kissing your temple, “don’t move. I’ve got you.”

You make a soft noise of protest when he finally pulls out, the stretch easing but leaving you empty in a way that makes your chest squeeze. Heat spills between your thighs, sticky and messy, but he’s already tucking you back against the cushions, murmuring, “Stay,” before disappearing down the hall.

When he comes back, he’s barefoot, carrying a damp towel and a glass of water, his hair even messier from running a hand through it. “Lift,” he says gently, and when you blink at him, dazed, he smiles. “C’mon. Let me take care of you.”

You do, cheeks warming as he crouches between your knees, wiping you clean with careful, unhurried motions. His hands are steady, reverent, as though the act itself is holy. He kisses the inside of your thigh when he’s done, soft and fleeting, before standing to hand you the water.

You take a sip, your throat dry, then glance at him over the rim of the glass. “You always this bossy after sex?”

“Back to bossy again?” His brows lift in mock offense as he sinks back onto the couch beside you. “But, please. I’m efficient. There’s a big difference.”

You laugh, weak but real, tucking yourself into his side. “You were efficient at fourteen too. Efficiently broody. Efficiently avoiding eye contact.”

He groans, dropping his head back against the cushions. “God. Don’t remind me.” Then, softer, with a smile that curves like memory, he adds, “And somehow you still liked me.” His face warms with a smile as he says it, looking more boyish than you’ve seen him look, like the thought of you having felt something for him all these years makes him giddy.

“I didn’t like you because of the brooding,” you tease, tilting up to meet his gaze. “I liked you because you couldn’t hide how good you were. Not from me.”

His eyes soften, his hand smoothing gently over your hip. “You’ve always seen too much.”

“And you’ve always pretended it bothered you,” you shoot back, but your smile is quiet, your chest aching.

He presses his lips to your hair, lingering there. “Never bothered me,” he admits into the crown of your head. “It scared me. That’s different.”

His lips linger in your hair, warm and steady, until your eyes slip closed. The storm outside has softened to a drizzle, a steady hush against the glass, and the room feels like it’s holding its breath with you. You set the glass of water aside, curling instinctively into him. His arm comes around your shoulders without hesitation, hand smoothing slow circles over your arm. It’s grounding, the weight of him, the heat of his body still seeping into yours.

“You should sleep,” he murmurs against your temple.

“So should you,” you mumble back, your voice heavy with exhaustion.

“Not tired,” he lies, and you can feel the smile pressed into your hair.

“You’re full of it,” you whisper, but the fight is already gone from you. Your head sinks against his chest, ear over his heartbeat. It’s steady, strong, the sound you didn’t know you’d missed all these years until now.

He shifts, adjusting you both, and before you realize it, you’re stretched across the couch together, tangled under the throw blanket. His hand stays at your hip, fingers curled there like an anchor, as if he’s afraid you’ll slip away in the night.

You reach up, tracing lazy circles over his chest. “Dick?”

“Mmm?”

“I think,” you murmur, words already blurring at the edges of sleep, “I might be falling in love with you.”

He stills, then exhales slow, his lips brushing your hair. “Good,” he whispers. “Because I’ve been in love with you for half my life.”

Your throat tightens, but your body relaxes, the truth settling into you like warmth. You smile against him, soft and certain. Outside, Gotham exhales under the rain. Inside, you let yourself drift, safe in the arms of the boy you once knew, the man you’re choosing now.

-

The city looks different from up here. It always does, under his arm.

You’re sitting on the ledge of a Blüdhaven rooftop, legs dangling over the streetlights, the night air cool against your bare skin. Dick’s beside you, mask pushed up into his hair, the blue symbol catching the glow of the skyline. His hands are warm where they rest on your hips, steadying you like you might slip, even though you both know you never would with him here. Both his thighs bracket yours. 

“Déjà vu,” you murmur, glancing at him over your shoulder.

His grin tilts sideways, boyish and wicked all at once. “Except this time I get to kiss you instead of lecture you.”

“Mm,” you hum, leaning back into his chest. “Not sure which one you’re worse at.”

He gasps, mock wounded, then dips his head to mouth at your neck. “Harsh. And here I was thinking I’ve improved since the green tights days.”

“You have,” you say, fighting a smile. “Marginally.”

“Marginally?” He nips lightly at your skin, enough to make you squirm. “You wound me.”

“You’ll live,” you tease, twisting in his hold until you’re facing him. His hands slide automatically to your waist, thumbs stroking slow against the fabric of your jacket, and his eyes soften in a way that makes your stomach flip.

“You know what hasn’t changed?” he says quietly.

“What?”

“You.” His smile curves, tender under the tease. “You still sneak out when you shouldn’t. Still get yourself into trouble. Still make me chase after you.”

You snort. “Admit it. You like it.”

“Like it?” He laughs low, kissing you once, quick and sure. “I live for it.”

The kiss deepens, sweet and unhurried, the city buzzing around you, forgotten. When he finally pulls back, his forehead rests against yours, his voice soft enough for only you to hear. “Feels like we’ve been waiting years for this,” he murmurs.

“Maybe we have.” You smile, brushing your thumb along his jaw. “Worth it, though.”

He grins, eyes bright as the city lights. “Definitely worth it.”

And when he kisses you again, laughing into your mouth, the rooftop doesn’t feel like a hiding place anymore. It feels like home.

[kristina100000]

the lonely idgafer starts giving a fuck late at night

[atwistoffate]

You're the one that I want

Dean x Reader Summary: Dean flirts with everyone… except you. Suddenly, the guy who’s usually so smooth can’t seem to string two words together, and Sam has to step in to keep things from getting completely out of hand. Genre: Fluff ♡ Word Count: 3.1K

Sam should really get out of the bunker more, maybe get an actual hobby that isn’t research or running laps before breakfast. Most importantly, he should probably spend less time around you and his brother before his last functioning brain cells decide to mutiny.

He’s blending a pile of vegetables in the kitchen when Dean walks in and… just stands there. Staring.

Sam can feel it, Dean’s gaze boring into the side of his head. He keeps blending. If he ignores it, maybe, just maybe, his brother will go away.

He does not.

There’s only so much liquefying you can do to a zucchini, so eventually Sam gives up and turns around. “What?”

Dean doesn’t miss a beat. “Do I look approachable to you?”

There it is.

Sam exhales through his nose. “What are you talking about?”

Dean isn’t even looking at him; his eyes are fixed somewhere over Sam’s shoulder. “I mean, I think I am. I guess. But maybe I’m not. Maybe I look… I dunno… standoffish.”

Sam blinks. “Standoffish.”

“I’m just saying, there’s a line, okay? Too friendly, and you look like some creepy guy offering free candy. Not friendly enough, and people think you’re gonna stab ‘em.”

Sam shuts off the blender, grabs his smoothie, and sits. Dean drops into the chair across from him, and he stares expectantly, eyebrows up.

“Dean, man... I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Okay, if you were a girl and saw me at a bar—”

“Great. Can’t imagine a better start,” Sam mutters.

“—would you think I was approachable? Like… someone you’d walk up to?”

Sam looks down into his glass, searching for the strength to keep going. Nothing. No strength. Just spinach.

“Dean… where is this coming from?” 

Dean Winchester, the man who has picked up so many women he's lost count. And yet here he is, acting like he needs a pep talk.

Finally, Sam sighs, giving his brother at least the courtesy of an honest answer. “You’re approachable. You’re… you. People like you.”

Dean’s expression doesn’t ease at the reassurance. If anything, he looks more frustrated, brow furrowed, mouth in a pout that he’d absolutely deny making. “Then what the hell was she talking about?”

“…What? Who?”

Sam’s eyes widen. Oh. Oh.

You.

He lets out a long, exhausted sigh. Shakes his head. “Dean… dude. Just talk to her.”

“I talk to her,” his brother insists.

“Uh-huh. And that’s why you’re in here interrogating me about your ‘approachability,’ right?” Sam deadpans, leaning back with the weary authority of a brother who has lived through this many, many times.

“Whatever,” Dean grumbles, immediately hating where this is going. He pushes up from the table and heads for the coffee machine, chewing on his bottom lip like he’s trying to think a hole through it.

Two minutes later, you step into the kitchen, heading straight for the fridge like you always do. And Sam sees it. God, he sees all of it. Front-row seats.

Dean cuts a glance at you from the corner of his eye, stands a little straighter, then his hand shoots up to flatten his hair. Sam just shakes his head. He swears he’s going to start avoiding the kitchen entirely when the two of you are in here together.

“Would you hand me a spoon, handsome?” you ask, completely unaware of what you just triggered.

Sam watches Dean freeze at the pet name. 

“Spoon. Yeah. We, uh… we have spoons,” he stammers, somehow producing one like it’s a rare artifact. He hands it to you with the confidence of a Victorian maiden having her first conversation with a man.

Then he retreats to the safety of the coffee machine.

Yogurt and spoon in hand, you head out of the kitchen. Dean’s eyes track you the whole way, drawn like a magnet. The instant you disappear down the hall, something in him lights up.

The man beams.

“Handsome,” he says to the empty air, chest puffing up. “She thinks I’m handsome.”

Then he spins on his heel and strides out of the kitchen, riding the high.

Sam shakes his head, muttering, “Unbelievable.”

Two seconds later, Dean reappears, deflating the dramatic exit. “Forgot my coffee,” he says, grabbing the mug with forced nonchalance. He doesn’t make eye contact.

Sam just snorts. 

—

It’s been around two hours when you spot Sam in the library, typing away on his computer.

You sit down across from him and wait.

When his eyes finally lift from the screen, one eyebrow raised, you say, “Can I run something by you real quick?”

“Sure,” he replies, tone calm. “What’s up?”

You hesitate. Usually, maybe you wouldn’t even ask. But it’s Sam, and you trust him. “How would you… rate me, on a scale from one to ten?”

“What?”

“Like, hypothetically… let’s say you walk into a bar and I’m sitting there. What’s your first impression of me?”

Sam, who doesn’t even like bars, has already been dragged into two bar hypotheticals today, and it’s barely ten in the morning. He resists the urge to sigh. “Just… talk to Dean,” he says. “Trust me.”

“How did you know I—”

“Really good intuition,” he interrupts.

You stare down at the table, lips pouting. “It’s just… He flirts with everyone, literally everyone – even the old lady at the market. He just… never flirts with me. So I try to be casual. But this morning... it sort of got out before I could stop myself, and I called him handsome. And he, uh – I don’t think he liked that.”

Sam lets out a quiet snort. 

“What?”

“Nothing,” he mutters quickly, eyes darting back to the computer. “Just… maybe ask him to grab a coffee sometime. Keep it casual. Start small, you know?"

You hum thoughtfully, weighing the advice. “Yeah… maybe I could do that.”

Sam smiles faintly, satisfied, and goes back to typing. He can survive this, probably. 

—

Dean is sweet.

Okay, maybe he doesn’t flirt with you. Not the way he does with everyone else.

But if you’re being even a little logical, you know he cares. A lot.

He worries about you no matter what you’re dealing with: hunt injuries, a headache, a papercut, a sneeze. One fragile little “achoo” and he’s glancing over all concerned. 

And he pays attention.

You mention things offhand like your favorite snacks, a brand of tea you like, or that one candle scent you can never find... and the next time he comes back from the store, they’re sitting on the table like they magically appeared.

He never says it was him.

Probably thinks it’s nothing.

But it isn’t nothing. Not to you.

And sure, old Joanne at the market gets called “sweetheart,” and you don’t. But Dean has never bought her chocolate before.

…Wait. Has he?

Doesn’t matter.

Because the point is: you’re going to follow Sam’s advice and ask him out for coffee.

Even if he doesn’t like you back, Dean is sweet, and he deserves good coffee.

And you’re brave enough to offer it.

With this thought in mind, you walk into the kitchen the next morning.

Sam is already blending something green. You hover in the doorway until he finally shows mercy and switches it off because you really don’t want the sound of zucchini being pulverized to mark the beginning of whatever is about to happen.

Only then do you cross the room and sit down right across from Dean, who still hasn’t noticed you’re there.

He’s cradling his coffee, eyelids heavy, hair sticking up in five different directions. But the moment you enter his line of sight, he nearly jumps. His back goes straight, and he immediately smooths a hand over his hair, one stubborn piece still popping right back up.

God, he’s adorable.

“Mornin’,” he says softly, still half-asleep, voice rough like gravel, and your brain just… fries. Completely. 

Not a thought up there for a good minute.

You had a speech planned, had summoned enough courage for it, and now there's just… nothing. 

Soon enough, Dean’s hands are on the table, pushing him to his feet. “All right, I’mma—head to the store,” he says, nodding vaguely toward the door.

Sure. Go flirt with Joanne, you think. Bet she likes that a lot. 

But then he turns those big, hopeful eyes on you. “Wanna come?”

“What?" 

“Yesterday,” he adds quickly, “you said you wanted to go…”

Your chest melts a little. You only said that to Sam, and Dean… still paid attention.

You manage to smile. “Yeah. I’ll come.”

Dean smiles back before he tries to cover it up with a half-suppressed nod. “Cool. Yeah. Uh—let’s go then.”

He nearly walks into the doorframe on the way out.

—

“Joanne, looking incredible this morning,” Dean practically whistles at the older lady at the counter the second you step through the door.

“Right back at you, gorgeous,” she beams.

Of course she’s beaming. You’d beam too if he said you looked incredible.

Then she leans in conspiratorially, glancing around like she’s sharing state secrets. “Placed an order for that pie you like. Should be here tomorrow.”

Dean grins. “Sweetheart, you sure you wanna keep your husband? Competition’s fierce… just sayin’.”

You glare at the mismatched floor tiles and make your way toward the fridge aisle, while Joanne giggles behind the counter. Again, who can blame her? 

Then they start talking in hushed tones, leaning in toward each other. You’re pretty sure they’re talking about you because of the way she keeps sneaking glances your way. You strain to hear while pretending to examine the products, but you’re too far away to catch a word. By the time you edge closer, the conversation cuts off, and Dean doesn’t even glance in your direction.

When you finally reach the till, Joanne leans in and whispers, “Darling, you gotta snatch that before it’s too late.”

She nods toward Dean, who’s hovering near the snack aisle. “I mean, look at him,” she adds, shaking her head with exaggerated approval. Your eyes follow hers, taking in everything from head to toe. “Seriously. If he looked at me the way he looks at you, I wouldn’t just stand there doing nothing.”

“The way he looks at me?” you echo, because apparently that’s the only sentence your brain can manage.

Joanne stares at you. “Sweetheart… are your eyes just for decoration?”

“What?" 

Before she can say anything else, Dean returns with a bag of chips and puts it down gently on the conveyor belt. “Got the ones you like,” he murmurs, not quite meeting your eyes.

Aww, he's so cute. 

You glance at Dean.

Then at the chips.

Then back at Joanne, who lifts her eyebrows in a ‘see what I mean?’ kind of way.

Okay.

Yeah.

You do have to snatch that before it’s too late.

—

The way he looks at you.

You’ve been chewing on that the whole ride back, trying to decode what the hell Joanne meant.

Sure, Dean glances at you, checks if you’re okay, keeps track of you the way he keeps track of Sam, Cas, his car, everything he cares about. That’s just… Dean. Nothing special about it.

Right?

“What were you and Joanne talkin’ about?” he asks suddenly, low and careful. His eyes flick over to you, then right back to the road. “What’d she say?”

He sounds almost… worried. 

“Uh, nothing,” you lie, light as possible. “She might have a crush on you, though.”

That gets a small smile out of him, soft and relieved. Then he glances again. “That's all she said?”

“Why?”

He shrugs one shoulder, eyes fixed ahead. “Just… wonderin’.”

You do not bring up her actual comments, because dying from embarrassment in this car is not on your bucket list. “What about you?” you ask, as casual as possible. “What were you two whispering about?”

“Uh… she, uh… has this niece she wanted me to meet.”

“Oh.” It falls out of you flat and tiny.

“Yeah,” he adds, rubbing the back of his neck. “She thought I might be interested.”

“Really?”

“I’m not,” he says immediately, too immediately. “Interested, I mean. But Joanne kinda figured that out right away,” Dean finishes. “So it’s all good.”

The old lady wasn’t joking. Someone less insecure is going to snatch him up one of these days, and you’re going to regret all this waiting around doing nothing.

But the question is, how are you supposed to live in the bunker with him if you go all in on your feelings and he doesn’t feel the same? That’s just a recipe for disaster.

But then again… The way he looks at you. 

You make it your personal project to figure out just what the hell that means. 

Truthfully, it doesn't even take long to gather hints, one after the other. 

He does look at you, more than you’d realized. Not the teasing, smirking kind of glance he gives literally everyone else. Not even the playful, flirty looks. No, this is different. His eyes linger, soft, careful, like he’s making sure you’re okay, or memorizing something only he can see.

And maybe you’re reading too much into it. Maybe. But every time he flusters when you tease him, or he scratches the back of his neck when you hand him a simple compliment, your brain takes notes. You start keeping a mental tally, just to make sure you’re not imagining things.

You’re also pretty sure you’ve seen him blush around you a couple of times. Enough to make your heart skip.

Dean Winchester, master of casual charm and reckless confidence, gets… flustered. Around you. And it’s the smallest, most perfect kind of proof.

After weeks of quietly gathering evidence and comparing notes with Sam, Cas, and even Jack, your case feels airtight. And with it comes a little surge of courage.

And then, out of nowhere, you stumble onto the final piece.

The big one.

You weren’t even supposed to be in the bunker.

You were meant to be at Charlie’s for the weekend: movies, junk food, girl talk, a detox from the job, and the crises that come with it. But she comes down with a brutal flu and refuses to get you sick, so the whole plan gets pushed back.

You were going to text the boys and let them know you were still home, but you never got the chance. 

Because the second the front door slams, you hear Dean’s voice echo down the metal stairs: “That’s just stupid,” he grumbles. “I’m not doin’ that. I don’t even know if she likes me.”

You freeze mid-step.

Sam’s answer comes fast, like he’s run out of patience for the year. “Dean. Be serious. Are your eyes just for decoration?”

Sam and Joanne could be good friends, you think. They’re both full-time members of the Dean Appreciation Squad anyway.

Dean huffs loudly. “She lives here, Sam. What if you’re wrong? I don’t wanna make her uncomfortable.” His voice dips, softer, almost guilty. “God knows I probably already do.”

Your heart drops.

He actually thinks he might be making you uncomfortable.

Dean Winchester.

A man who apologizes when you bump into him.

A man who brings you your favorite snacks without a word.

A man who looks at you with care and devotion.

He thinks any of that is unwelcome.

You press back against the wall, breath catching in your throat, because the truth finally lands and it's undeniable. 

He likes you.

Really likes you.

And he’s holding himself back because he’s afraid his feelings might somehow upset you.

...Well.

You’re going to have to show him exactly how wrong he is.

—

You stroll into the garage one slow morning, no hunts, no plans – just a little time to make yourself feel… well, you. No flannel. No worn-out boots. Today, something that hugs your curves just right, a touch of makeup to bring out your best features. You even had time to make your hair cooperate.

Dean’s under the car, elbow-deep in something greasy, when you lean against the wall, arms crossed casually.

“Whatcha doin’, handsome?” you murmur, voice soft but teasing.

Metal clangs to the floor. “Son of a—” He scrambles out from under the car, rag in hand, eyes widening as they travel up and down you, and he almost freezes. “You… uh… you going out?”

“That depends,” you say, tilting your head. “Are you busy?”

“Huh? Me?” Dean stammers. “Why? You… you need a ride somewhere?”

"No, not really. Wanted to take you out.”

For a moment, he just blinks. The words don’t seem to register. “Take me out?”

“A date,” you say, trying to keep your voice steady, though inside you’re practically combusting. 

“A date,” he repeats slowly. “You… and me?”

“Yeah. If you want to.”

A faint blush spreads across his cheeks, just enough to reveal his heart. "For real?"

"Yeah," you nod. "Do you want to?"

“God, yes,” he says, voice almost too fast. “I… uh… I’mma go change, real quick.”

Before you can even react, he’s already rushing to the garage door, as if he hesitates another second, you might change your mind. He pauses, hand on the handle, then spins back with a quick glance. “I don’t think I mentioned it, but you look... amazing. Just…” He shoots you an approving look, the kind that makes your chest tighten, before finally ducking out. 

—

Sam should really get out of the bunker more, maybe get an actual hobby that isn’t research or running laps before breakfast. Most importantly, he should probably spend less time around you and his brother before his last functioning brain cells decide to mutiny.

Actually… scratch that.

It might already be too late.

He did start looking at local classes: pottery, pilates, and even a book club. But he never registered for any of them. And now? Now he deeply regrets it.

Because the poor man walks into the kitchen, thinking only about making a smoothie, and instead walks into—

Yeah.

That.

There you are.

There Dean is.

And you’re kissing him like you’re both about to start something Sam definitely doesn’t want to picture.

Right in front of the blender.

And - oh no - your fingers slip beneath the waistband of Dean’s jeans, and his breath itches. And then he's all like, “Oh baby, if you keep this up, I’m gonna put you right on this counter and—”

Sam slams his ears shut and salutes the blender for its bravery. Then he bolts from the room, muttering something about bleach and possibly moving to another state.

The next day, the blender is quietly relocated to the war room, where it can recover from trauma in peace, and Sam doesn't venture back into the kitchen for at least two weeks. 

And you… Well, you’ll owe Sam a proper thank-you someday... Once he can glance at the two of you without immediately questioning every decision that has brought him here.

And, yeah… maybe a new blender wouldn’t hurt.

---

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