he's so much softer, isn't he. do you remember prequelle? the anger, the justified rage and vindication that defined copia from the moment we met him; the first thing we knew about him was that he was mistreated, he was an outsider, and he was finally getting the appreciation he deserved. but perpetua? he doesn't have that edge. skeletá is all love and joy and gentle mystery, this sense of him taking his first steps in the limelight, much more nervous than he is proud. it gives you this image that where copia was raised in overwhelming noise, perpetua was raised in silence. a child of the clergy, and a child sent far away from the clergy. who raised him? who spoke these lessons into him, who taught him how to worship? it must've been someone kind, but distant. with the way he speaks about his faith, he was taught to love satan on a personal level.
copia being a clergy kid, raised deep inside this community, inside the church, gives me the general image of a child raised by a village; he knows everyone's name, he's used to constant noise, he runs around with important papers in his hands and dodges the young ghouls chasing each other through the halls.
but perpetua gives me the image of a child raised in the woods. a quiet, faraway mansion somewhere, with no other kids his age around. empty corridors that he'd explore on his own, tall portraits of antisaints that he'd pray to every night before going to bed. he was never roughed up by his peers the way copia was, he never learned to resent or to covet what others had. all he has in his heart now is fear and love, and that's what he walks out onto the stage with. he's eager. he's nervous. he's so much softer, isn't he.
Summary: A late-night rooftop talk after patrol. Y/N confides that her parents still resent her choice to join the Defense Force instead of university. Reno listens, caught between comfort and confession, watching her in the moonlight and remembering who she was before and who she is now. His heart beats like it’s ready to spill the truth, but fear of breaking their friendship keeps the words unsaid.
A/N: This one’s for @bisexualgirlie 🖤 I’m so glad you’ve officially joined the Reno fan club because boy have I been waiting for the right moment to finally write for him. Also—if you haven’t already, please go check out manga Reno because god, I am on my knees for him. 😭
The rooftop was quiet in the kind of way that made small sounds travel—boot soles scuffing tar, a zipper tooth catching, the soft sweep of breath that left a mouth and vanished into cold. It was past lights-out, the patrol notes filed, the injuries logged, the armor stowed in their lockers with the faint metallic clunk that meant another day had ended without the city crumbling. Down below, the Defense Force compound slept in rectangles of pale security lamp, fences casting careful shadows, antennae drawing lines in the sky, the canteen’s shutters locked and silver. The moon was full and handling its work without hurry, laying a flat wash over concrete and sandbags, turning helmets into domes and the laundry ropes into threads. Reno sat with his back against the low barrier that ringed the roof, knees up, arms looped loosely around them, feeling the sticky ghost of antiseptic under the bandage at his elbow and the dull, well-behaved ache in his ribs that told him the bruise was already settling. He had half a bottle of vending machine tea clipped to his belt and the taste of canned miso soup lingering at the back of his tongue. He wasn’t here for the view. He was here because she was.
Y/N had chosen the roof without even asking—slipped out of her uniform jacket and laid it neatly over one of the vent housings, leaving herself in a black compression tank that fit her like she’d been poured into it and cut out, dark and simple and functional. Sweatpants sat low on her hips, elastic loose from too many washes, drawstring bow a little crooked because she never cared enough to straighten it, the fabric skimming the solid planes of her legs when she moved. Her hair was pulled up but the shorter pieces at her nape had escaped, damp from a quick shower and curling around the hinge of her neck. She touched her fingers to a scrape on her shoulder as if to check that it was still there, then leaned against the barrier a meter from him, tilting her head back so the moon could draw the edges of her face and the line of her throat and the small hollow above her collarbone like a careful outline. Everything about her was obvious in this light: the smooth flex of her bicep when she pushed loose strands behind her ear, the faint, unashamed sheen of clean sweat at her temple, the shallow rise and fall of her chest as her breathing slowed toward rest. She looked like someone who’d worked all day and earned this quiet.
Reno had seen her in all kinds of lights. The fluorescence of the school hallway that washed color out of everything and left the world the shade of paper and pencil shavings. The greenish tube bulbs over the DF training floor that made everyone look a little seasick. The sodium haze of street patrol where your eyes learned to read the yellow as safety and the darkness as maybe. He preferred the moon. The moon did not ask for anything. It sat there and laid down a thin, cool coat over the world, let a person take it or not. It didn’t punish shadows or reward brightness. It didn’t make her look like anything except herself. And herself, to him, was already almost too much.
She didn’t look at him for a while, and that was fine. He didn’t want to be looked at. Watching her in profile felt like being allowed to read a page over someone’s shoulder. It meant he could collect small pieces without being caught, the neat bracket of her eyelashes when she blinked, the way her mouth softened at the corners when she let a thought go, the notch of tendon that shifted when she swallowed. His heartbeat had been steady when he climbed the last set of stairs; it was not now. It went like a mistake, too quick, a rhythm he couldn’t count on, a hand tapping the underside of a table in a conversation he couldn’t afford to have out loud.
“You ever feel like you’re doing everything right and still wrong?” she asked, finally, without moving her head, and the question went up like a flare and hung in the air between them, bright enough that he had to squint away from it.
He had a dozen answers and none of them would help, so he didn’t touch the shape of it. “Something happen?”
She pulled her mouth into a small line that he knew meant she was trying not to make a face. “I called my parents after patrol. They were still awake. Mom said she doesn’t sleep much anymore. I asked if she’s okay. She said she would be if I were in a dorm somewhere arguing with a TA about a midterm instead of crawling under rubble with you.” She shifted, a reach back to rub at the muscle just under her shoulder blade. “Dad didn’t say much. He repeated that there’s still time to go back, like there’s a bus ticket in my pocket I forgot about. He said they didn’t raise me to chase anyone. Not in that tone. Just…level.”
Reno swallowed and it felt like moving a coin. He saw the card table in her family’s narrow kitchen, the cheap curtains with the strawberries, her mother’s small hands around a ceramic mug, her father’s careful way of not looking directly at hard things too long, always checking the edge of a conversation for exits. He had been there enough times to map it. He knew they liked him, or at least they had liked the version of him with a backpack and summer homework and a family name they could place. He knew it had shifted the day she said she was applying to the Defense Force. He knew his name had become a dot on a map that led their daughter away from the way they had planned her life should feel between their fingers.
“What did you say?” he asked, the words simple and gray and ordinary, because she didn’t need anything else. He did not reach for her shoulder. He did not reach for any part of her. He took the half-bottle of tea off his belt and set it between them like a truce.
“I said I’m where I want to be,” she said. “I said I know they’re scared, because I’m scared sometimes too, but not the way they think. I told them the city needs people who can run toward sounds that make other people freeze. That I can do that. That I want to do that. And I said—” She stopped, laughed once, so quick it was almost only a breath. “I said I followed you here. Which was a stupid way to put it, but Mom knows. She always knew.”
His name was there, thick, without being spoken. He didn’t pick it up. He let it sit between them, heavy as the tea. He felt the old classroom around them for a second, the scraped desks and the light that made paper glow at certain angles. He saw her in a uniform that was all fabric and buttons and lines you had to follow—a white blouse ironed flat, a navy bow that never sat quite centered, a blazer with sleeves she rolled up after five minutes because she was always warm. Her hair had been smoother then, pulled back with a clip that had a tiny chip at one corner, her nails clean and bare because she would chew polish off when she was thinking. The softness wasn’t a costume. It was the way you are when your life is made of schedules and bells. She had walked quickly but not like she was being chased, talked with her hands but never so much that people told her to settle down. There was a sweetness to her that didn’t ask to be tasted; it just sat on the air like something finished baking. He remembered the first time he watched her tie the bow at her collar and felt something under his ribs he didn’t have the right name for yet. He remembered telling himself it was fine to keep looking, because best friends looked out for each other.
He blinked back into the present and it cracked open like a seed and there she was, skin canted toward the sky, the bow replaced by a line of muscle that had forced itself into living through drills and pulls and the shrug of weight across her shoulders. The tank top showed the small arc of clavicle like a measured curve, the sweep of her shoulder a smooth plane with a bright nick where the scrape sat. He could see the place where bra strap should have dug in and didn’t because compression tops didn’t do that, the way her sports tape disappeared under the fabric at her side. The sweatpants looked like softness but he knew the balance hidden under them, the coiled, quiet power in her thighs when she bent and sprang. The memory and the now layered easily, like transparencies aligned by a careful hand. He did not prefer one over the other. He was greedy; he wanted both.
“They’ll calm down,” he said, because it was the kind of thing you were supposed to say, but he made himself not say it like a line. He made himself say it like a person who had been around her parents’ table and seen the sour pickles and the way the rice clumped when it sat too long. “They just need time to see you’re not breaking yourself to do this. That you’re learning how to be careful in all the ways that count.”
She turned her head, finally, and looked at him, and it felt like the moon had shifted angles. “I don’t know that they ever will. But I don’t need them to sign a form. I just need them to pick up when I call. I can live with them being mad. I just—” She pressed her lips together and then let them part. “I don’t want them to think I did it for a reason I’m not allowed to have.”
The sentence moved across the roof like a low wave. He caught it at his ankles. He felt the water around bone and then it receded, leaving him damp and cold and more awake than before. He made himself breathe like he knew how. “You mean me.”
She didn’t blush. She rarely did. She held his eyes for a heartbeat he could feel in his fingers and said, level, “You know I followed you here. I always…looked at what you were looking at. It’s not a secret.”
The truth of it slid into him and sat down. He had no right to the relief that came with it, the way some part of him—kid, coward, dreamer—unrolled a sleeping bag on his ribs. Still, he didn’t let it out. He watched her. He watched his own hands stay where they were.
“Does that make it my fault?” he asked, and heard the way it could bend into the wrong shape and pulled his tone flat again. “I don’t mean it like blame. I mean—if they’re mad, are they mad at me?”
“They’re mad at choice,” she said, and shrugged, small, as if that would help it sit. “People get mad at choices they wouldn’t make. It’s easier than admitting they’re scared. My mom’s scared of the phone ringing. My dad’s scared of watching the news and seeing your—” She stopped and cut her eyes away. “Seeing our division number on the crawl. They’re mad because if I were in a lecture hall they could pretend danger is far away.”
Reno nodded because it was true and because he needed to nod to keep his neck from stiffening. He held onto the ordinary. “You eat after patrol?”
She huffed. “Canteen miso. Half of Kikoru’s pickles.”
“She knows you stole them?”
“I traded her a chocolate pudding and an apology for craving those pickles.” Her mouth did that small, private curve he liked, the one that meant this, too, was the life she wanted. “I’m not hungry anymore.”
He swallowed again, the coin sliding smoother now. “You want the rest of this?” He tipped the bottle of tea toward her.
She took it and drank, throat working once, twice, the sound of it small and definite. When she handed it back, her fingers brushed his, and his heart reacted like a clumsy animal, thudding too hard against the inside of him. It wasn’t even skin-to-skin, not really; it was knuckle to knuckle, a bump made by accident, but the heat of it was precise. He took the bottle and clipped it back to his belt because he needed to do something that wasn’t staring at her hand.
“You okay?” she asked, frowning a little. “You got quiet.”
He had always been quiet around her when the thing inside him knocked. In high school, it had sounded like someone throwing pebbles at a window at night; you wondered who would open it. Here, it sounded like the base evacuation alarm when they tested it monthly; you thought about the fastest exit from whatever room you were in. He swallowed and lined up his voice like he would line up a shot. “Just thinking.”
“About what?”
He could tell the truth and also not. He could say, I was thinking about your bow in homeroom and your hands around your bento and the way you looked at me when I said I’d passed the DF entrance exam and you said, ‘Okay, then I’ll see you there.’ He could say, I was thinking about how the moon is making a list of you tonight—hairline, brow, cheek, lip, jaw, neck, shoulder—and I want every item. He could say, I was thinking about how if I tell you that I love you it will turn us into something else, something that could end, and I don’t know how to breathe without knowing where you are. He could tell truths that wouldn’t force anything to change. “About then. About now. About how you look different but not. You don’t need the bow anymore for me to know it’s you.”
Something in her face faded and sharpened at once, like a photo pulled into focus. She leaned back into the barrier and tilted her head again, letting the moon collect her in the same way it had before. “You remember so much.”
“Some things don’t let me forget.” He let a small quiet sit. “Do you regret it?”
“What, not going to uni?” She made a small, unkind sound. “I would have done fine. I’m good at listening and talking back only when it matters. I’m good at staying up late and producing the thing that’s due. I would have had a desk and a planner and a part-time job and I would have taken my parents out for noodles when I got my first paycheck and I would have called you on weekends and said, ‘You sound tired, are you eating?’” She chewed her bottom lip once, briefly. “I think I would have been safe. But I don’t think safety is the same as living. And I don’t think I would have slept well knowing I was asking other people to go out in the night in my place.”
He breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth. The words filled him and didn’t drown him, the way a good meal sat in a stomach and made the body say, okay, we can walk farther now. “You’re good at this,” he said. “You’re better than me at some parts.”
“That’s not a high bar,” she said, and he laughed because she wanted him to, because their friendship had always been partly this—pushing each other’s shoulders lightly to watch the other sway and then step back steady. She sobered. “But thank you.”
They let the quiet grow again, this time in a shape they knew, companionable and wide. He listened to the hum of the generator on the far side of the building and the soft glass tink of someone returning a bottle to a crate two floors down and to her breathing, which he could pick out like a familiar song. The night had a temperature that slid through the tank’s fabric and raised gooseflesh briefly along her arms before her skin settled. He didn’t say he wanted to take his jacket off and drape it over her. He didn’t because he knew she would refuse, and not for pride, but because she liked the feel of air on her arms. He decided he would not be the kind of person who took away something she liked even for the disguise of care.
“You always liked rooftops,” she said after a while, voice softer now, the words choosing not to travel far. “You used to stand on the edge of the school parking garage and watch the trains come in. That’s when I learned to stand next to you and not talk.”
“I like to see what’s coming,” he said, rolling his head against the barrier to look at her again, to memorize the little things that changed every night, the way her mouth grew more serious when she was done with jokes, the way the moon pulled a thin gloss across her lower lip. “It makes me feel like I can get there in time.”
“Do you feel like that now?” she asked. “Like you can get there in time?”
The real answer was always no. The real answer was that the city would always be larger than their bodies, that there would always be corners they could not turn fast enough, that sometimes the best you could do was arrive for the next thing and be a wall against it. He gave her a different piece that was still true. “With you, sometimes.”
“Sometimes is better than never.” She exhaled, almost a laugh, almost not. “Can I lie down?”
He nodded and shifted his legs so she would have space. She spread her jacket on the tar and then changed her mind, balled it up as a pillow, and stretched out with a small groan, arms loose at her sides, the line of her waist suddenly longer, the curve of her ribcage faint under fabric, belly rising and falling in a rhythm his body began to mimic before he told it to stop. He remained sitting because lying down felt like surrendering some guard he needed to keep. From above, she looked younger and older at once, the way the moon flattened age and turned the person you loved into both the kid you met by a locker and the soldier who took the hit meant for someone else.
“You can lie down too,” she said, without opening her eyes. “I’m not going to steal your weapon.”
“I don’t have it on me,” he said. “Regulations.”
“Then I’ll steal your tea,” she murmured, and he heard the smile in it, and that was a weapon too, sometimes more dangerous than any rifle. He eased himself down anyway, careful, leaving a span of space between them that could be crossed by a hand if a hand wanted to. He folded his arms under his head and stared up, and the moon was a glare he let slide off his retinas, and the stars were not the sharp pinpricks you got out in the country but the fuzzed dots a city allowed you. And next to him, a sound, small: her thumb touching the seam of her sweatpants, a nervous habit she had picked up during the final stage of entrance training and never entirely lost. She did it when she was thinking about leaving something unsaid.
“You know,” she said, opening her eyes again to watch the blank of sky as if it would interrupt, “when I told my mom I followed you here, I wasn’t asking her to understand, I guess. I just wanted to stop pretending that I didn’t. I’m not going to tell her who I like. That’s not for her. But I’m not going to lie about the gravity of things anymore.”
Reno’s heart did the thing he hated most about it, the sudden lunge that made the world blur for half a beat. Gravity. He could feel the word settle. It wasn’t a trap. It was a truth you either stepped into or let sit and make your ankles ache. He didn’t turn his head. He looked at space and let his voice steady. “There are different kinds of following. You followed me here, but you’re not behind me. You’re next to me. That’s…not the same.”
“I know,” she said. “I like being next to you. I would choose this over and over.”
He heard it then, the tiny request inside the statement. He could answer it in a way that would change nothing and everything. He could exhale and say her name and tell her that he had loved her since a math teacher lined them up alphabetically and it took him exactly two seconds to realize that sitting next to her felt like luck and relief and a dare. He could put his hand out into the small space between them and let the back of his fingers touch the back of her fingers and let that be the first history of their future. He could do it now, here, on this cheap tar, with the compound humming below, and the moment would be theirs the way a key opens a door and says the room is yours.
He imagined it as cleanly as he could. He saw the line of it: the words leaving his mouth, low and ordinary and unremarkable, the way she would turn her head toward him, eyes careful the way they got when she was lining up her own shot at the range, the breath she would take, the one beat where the world could hold two outcomes, and then the answer. Maybe it would be yes. Maybe she would smile and tuck her chin and say, “Yeah, me too,” as if she’d been saving the phrase like a coin. Maybe she would roll toward him and put her hand on his chest and say it again because once would feel thin. And maybe she would not. Maybe she would go quiet in the way of closing doors, the sound polite but final. Maybe she would say she was not ready or that she didn’t want to lose the thing that had kept her upright in storms since they were fifteen. He could imagine her choosing safety here even if she chose danger out there, and he could not fault her for it. He could not fault her for anything. He could only fall and hope not to break anything they needed.
So he didn’t. He did something else instead, a thing that felt like honesty without being a bomb. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, and he let the words carry more weight than they looked like they could bear. “With me.”
She turned her head, and he turned his, and their eyes met in the thin space between them like two watch faces catching the same light. She smiled, not the private curve this time but the one that lifted something in him and set it down somewhere safer. “Me too,” she said. “You’re my favorite place to be.”
He swallowed, and the coin didn’t stick anywhere this time. He could live on that. He could live on that for a long time.
“I worry I’ll ruin it,” she said, a moment later, so quiet he almost wondered if she meant him to hear. “If I say too much.”
He felt the truth of that hit him like a cuff to the shoulder—friendly, but with weight. “You won’t,” he said, and then he added what he could afford. “We don’t break small. Not you and me.”
“That’s not what your elbow says,” she said, eyes dropping to the bandage, and he huffed an unwilling laugh.
“This is small,” he said. “I’ve had worse.”
“I know,” she said. “I remember.”
He let himself look at her, the way her hair had dried in the night air, the way the baby hairs at her hairline lifted just enough to catch light, the way the moon—unbothered, doing its work—treated her like a thing it wanted to see clearly. He wanted to catalogue her for later, for mornings when he would have to put himself together quickly and go where he was told and keep his hands steady while other things shook. He wanted to remember the precise angle of her left eyebrow when she asked for a thing she wasn’t sure she deserved, the small scar on the inside of her wrist from the time a training drone caught her as she spun, the faint line where an old bracelet used to live back when they were making bracelets out of thread in class and pretending they carried guarantees. He wanted to memorize the shape of her breath when she was almost asleep.
“You’re staring,” she said without looking.
“Yeah,” he said. No apology. She opened one eye and considered him, then closed it again, and that, too, felt like permission he hadn’t asked for and hadn’t earned.
“You ever miss then?” she asked, after a small stretch of night where the rooftop returned to being a roof and not a confessional.
“High school?” he asked, as if it could be any other then.
“Not the hours. Not the uniforms. Not the way everything smelled like pencil shavings and disinfectant. I mean…us. The version that thought we had time to figure it out later. Do you miss that?”
He thought about the uneasy kindness of later, how it made you careless, how it made you think you could always say a thing tomorrow and it would land in the same place. He thought about her leaning over a desk and pushing her hair back with the back of her hand because her fingers were inked, and about the way she had laughed with her head tipped back, not like the TV girl who laughed to be seen, but like herself, unashamed of her throat, and how he had filed that sound away next to the first time he had fired at a moving target and hit where he meant to. “Sometimes,” he said. “But not in a way that makes me want to go back. I like who we are now better.”
“Me too,” she said, and then she yawned, and the sound of it tugged at something small and tender in him that had nothing to do with the moon or with fear. “Sorry. That wasn’t for you, I guess training finally got to me.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll keep watch.”
“You always say that,” she said, and her mouth tilted and then relaxed, the words slurring slightly as if they were sliding down a wall into rest. “And you always do it but you can rest too, you know.”
He did. He lay there and kept his eyes open, and when they wanted to close he let them and then opened them again, and he counted breaths, and when he lost count he started over. He didn’t need to watch the perimeter for kaiju tonight; there were enough other eyes on that. He watched the small perimeter of their bodies instead, the place where her shoulder lay near his arm, the place where her knee tented the fabric of her sweatpants and cast a round shadow on the tar, the place where the rise and fall of her chest was steady and untroubled. He watched to make sure no thought crept in that would take this away from either of them.
He let himself think of the future in pieces small enough that they didn’t scare him. He thought of mornings where she would be the first person he saw and he would hand her a coffee and she would take it without thanks because the thanks was in the way she looked at him over the rim. He thought of afternoons where they would run drills until their lungs burned and then sit on the floor and pass a bottle of water back and forth and argue about who had to log the training numbers. He thought of nights like this, not too many because you couldn’t be greedy with luck, but enough that it would become a thing they could name. He let the larger futures hang back, blank as the sky, not a lie, just an outline he wasn’t ready to fill.
His elbow throbbed once, a small reminder he was a body. He shifted carefully and the motion brushed his forearm against the warm air over her skin, and his heart did the jog again, the clumsy skip that made his breath catch, and he told it, enough. He told it, this is what we’re doing. He told it that patience wasn’t a punishment. It was a choice that kept the things he loved from falling off the table.
She was not fully asleep. He could tell by the way her breath wasn’t as deep as it got when she dropped. She was hovering, the way people did when they didn’t want to miss the last thing the other person might say. He looked at the sky and said it, because it was small and it was true and it wouldn’t break them. “I was scared today,” he said, voice quiet, even.
“I know,” she murmured, not opening her eyes. “Me too.”
He didn’t ask which part of the day she meant. There had been three places you could be scared and still keep moving. He let the admission sit. It made the rooftop feel more like a place and less like a stage.
“Thank you for—” she began, and stopped. He did not ask for the rest of the sentence. He supplied his own, a fill-in-the-blank he could live with. Thank you for being there. Thank you for letting me follow and not following me back blindly. Thank you for making my parents mad in a way I can own. Thank you for standing next to me when the drills felt like questions I couldn’t answer. Thank you for looking at me like the moon is for me too.
He turned his head one more time and looked at her, and the pieces were all still there—the tank top, cut clean as a line; the slack mouth of someone almost asleep; the shoulder that would bruise and be a different color tomorrow; the sweatpants wrinkled at the knee; the hair that would smell different wet in the morning. He thought, I love you, and it felt both like opening a door and like closing one gently for now, the way you save heat in a room. He did not say it.
“Best friends, right?” she murmured, and the words brushed him like wind at the hinge of a door, light and cool and dangerous because of the way they could lift everything and drop it again.
He could do anything with that. He could break on it. He could build with it. He chose to stack it neatly with the other truths he kept for when he needed to make himself brave. He made his voice steady. “Yeah,” he said. “Best friends.”
She exhaled, and with the exhale something in her let go, and he heard the shift in her breathing that meant sleep had found her and claimed its portion. He lay beside her and let his body go on doing its work, breath in, breath out, eyes open, eyes closed, open again. The moon kept doing its job without asking for thanks. It kept writing her name in light across the roof in a script only he would read this way. It kept making lists and he kept learning them. If he was a coward, then he was a coward who knew the value of keeping something whole until he could set it down without dropping it. If he was brave, it was not the kind you could see from the street. It was the kind that stayed quiet next to a sleeping girl he had loved for years and did not make a sound that would wake her into a different life.
When the generator on the far side kicked up a notch and the night rearranged itself around the new hum, he checked the line of the horizon on habit and then let it blur again. He thought of the morning, of her awake and pushing hair from her face and making a face at the stiffness in her back from the tar, of the way she’d complain about it and then refuse the offer of his jacket because she didn’t like the smell of oil it carried. He thought of calling her parents later, of how she would stand out by the stairwell with her phone pressed to her ear and her chin stubborn and sweet, and how he would sit on the bottom stair and not listen but be there anyway. He thought of the small places he could be a good thing in her day. He saved the larger places for later.
The sky dulled a little at the edges, or maybe that was his eyes giving up for a second. He let them, then opened them, and the moon was right where it had been, writing and writing. He shifted enough to ease a pinch in his lower back and froze for a second when the movement made her roll toward him a fraction, not touching, but closer, the space between them narrowing to the width of a breath. He held still and let his heart hammer in his throat and then slow, and when it did slow he felt like someone who had ridden out a wave without losing the balance they had spent years training into their legs.
He smiled into the dark because no one could see it. He saved the confession the way you save a message draft you can’t send yet. He put it somewhere he could find it when he was done being afraid of ruining what already existed. He promised silently that he would not save it forever. He let the night rest its cool hand on his forearm and the roof hold his weight and her breathing reassure him that the important things were proceeding as they should. He kept watch until the shape of tiredness he could trust finally came for him, and when it did he let it take him only as far as the edge, where he could hover with her and not miss the last thing she might say if she woke, ready to catch it before it hit the ground.
Y/N agreed to go with Rangiku to go shopping before the group beach trip. She thought everything would be fine. It’s only shopping! …Things are not fine.
⋆ Week 2 of Pride Event
⋆ Rangiku Matsumoto x Female!Reader. 387 words. Drabble. Canon Universe. Descriptions of Female Body in Swimwear, Little to No Plot, Pinning, Secret Crush, Suggestive.
⋆ A/N: It felt so weird writing something like this since this is not my usual type of thing. 😂 Fluff is more my style versus ig thirst?
Y/N swallowed the lump in her throat, eyes focused on every little inch of exposed skin Rangiku blessed her with as the lieutenant turned just for her. The redhead's perfectly rounded and plush butt was on full display in the thong like bikini bottom leaving hardly anything to the imagination. It was unfair really. Not only is Rangiku's personality amazing and she has an amazing chest, but also an ass to die for? Some people were just blessed with all the luck. It was too hard to be envious though, at least in that moment, when she was able to freely admire those traits without any repercussions.
Rangiku is truly a work of art.
"What do you think?"
Pulled from her thoughts, Y/N's gaze shifted to Rangiku's whose was already fixed on her, a bright smile painted across her lips. Y/N nodded hazily, swallowing harshly again.
"I-It looks g-good." She managed out.
"I think so too!" Rangiku's smile widened.
The lieutenant spun around, striking a dramatic pose, further modeling the bikini. As much as Y/N tried, her focus did not remain on only the bikini. As Rangiku moved, so did her heavy assets, swaying and bouncing below her neck. The bikini top hardly covered her, leaving her one wrong movement away from revealing it all.
Her skin looked so soft even from where Y/N sat from a few feet away. From her head all the way down to the bottoms of her feet, Rangiku looked absolutely beautiful and tantalizing. She is so sexy. It was taking all of Y/N's willpower to not do something she'd regret later. The thought though of risking their friendship was tempting, however, imagining ripping away the thin layer of fabric that hardly covered Rangiku's breast and rear. Holding them in her bare hands, fondling them while her lips locked with the lieutenant in a passion filled kiss. Peppering reverent kisses down her perfect skin, capturing her nipple between her lips, her tongue twirling around it while her hand played with the other. Hearing Rangiku's lewd moans as—
"Onto the next one~" Rangiku sang, once more recapturing Y/N's attention.
"NEXT ONE?!"
"Yeah?" She laughed. "I'm not just getting one, you silly."
Lord give her strength, Y/N thought, watching Rangiku retreat back into the dressing room.
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