They married you to him like they were feeding a lamb to a dragon.
You remember the heat of the sept, the scent of incense thick in your throat, the weight of the crown prince’s eyes as he stared past you as though you were glass. Daemon Targaryen stood tall and regal, but the disinterest on his face burned more than hatred ever could. He did not sneer. He did not spit. He did not draw his sword in protest. He simply tolerated your presence, just as he might endure a dull ache in his jaw or a stone in his boot. His hand held yours for the briefest moment during the ceremony, cold and still and impersonal, and when the vows were said, and the crowd erupted into applause, he did not lean in to kiss you. He walked away before your hand had even fallen to your side.
That was the beginning.
The days that followed passed like a slow suffocation. The walls of your new chambers were made of dark stone and darker silences. The servants bowed, but they spoke in hushed tones when you entered. The courtiers smiled with pity you refused to acknowledge. And your husband, your prince, spoke to you less than anyone else.
You would hear his boots in the hall, the low murmur of his voice as he dismissed guards or issued orders. But when he crossed the threshold into your shared spaces, he barely looked at you. He dined without speaking, drank wine until his tongue loosened for others, but not for you. His gaze remained distant, drifting past you, seeing everything but you.
He did not touch you. Not in anger, nor affection. Not even to claim what had been handed to him in marriage. And in a way, that hurt more than any cruelty ever could. Because indifference is its own kind of violence.
You stopped hoping for more after the first fortnight. You stopped dressing to please him. You stopped waiting for him to ask questions about your past, your interests, your favorite poems or perfumes. He did not care. And so you buried the girl who cared beneath layers of courtesy, compliance, and quiet. You learned to live beside a man who wished you were someone else.
The days turned into weeks. You slept alone, even in the same bed. He came and went as he pleased, always shrouded in armor or irritation. The only thing that seemed to spark any emotion in him was a blade, or his dragon, or Viserys’s ever-disappointing council meetings. You became part of the furniture. A shadow in his household. A silent woman in a home filled with echoes.
And then you began to bleed. Not the kind that came with moons, but something darker. Heavier. Something that made your limbs tremble and your head swim. You collapsed once in the corridor, and the maesters rushed to your side with furrowed brows and worried murmurs. They examined, they prodded, they whispered behind closed doors. When you asked for the truth, their voices softened with grief.
Your body was dying. Some sickness in the blood. Something slow, merciless, and beyond their skill to cure.
You kept it to yourself.
You had already grown used to the idea of not being loved. You could grow used to the idea of not being alive.
It wasn’t until the second collapse, in front of a noble visiting from Oldtown, that Daemon noticed something was wrong. You had tried to excuse yourself, to stand, to hide the trembling in your hands, but your legs gave out and the world tilted sharply. And suddenly he was there, catching you before you hit the stone. His arms were stronger than you expected, rough where yours were delicate, and he held you for a moment too long. Long enough for your breath to catch, long enough for his to slow.
He carried you to your chambers without a word.
After that day, something changed. Not immediately. He still vanished for hours. Still spoke little. But sometimes you would look up from your books and find him watching you from across the room, his expression unreadable. Other times he would brush your fingers with his as he passed you a cup, and though it might have seemed accidental, you knew it was not. He began to sit with you at meals instead of eating in the solar. He would speak, just a few words at first, asking after your noon activities or the book in your lap. But his voice no longer sounded like steel. It sounded curious. Careful.
He asked you once if you feared dying. You were lying in the garden, the sun warm on your face, the scent of lemons in the air, and his voice broke the silence like a knife in water.
“No,” you answered softly, eyes on the sky. “But I fear never having lived.”
He did not reply for a long while. Then he lay beside you on the grass, so close your fingers nearly touched.
“I hated you,” he said. “At first. Because you were a cage. Another chain Viserys wrapped around my throat.”
“I know,” you whispered.
“But you are not a chain. You are the only thing in this castle that does not suffocate me.”
The breeze carried your breath away before you could find words.
After that, he stopped pretending not to care.
He brought you wildflowers. He sat with you by the fire and told you stories of Dragonstone’s past. He ran his fingers through your hair when you could no longer braid it yourself. He kissed you for the first time in the courtyard after the rain, your cheeks wet and your lungs tight, and it felt like something desperate, something he had been holding back for too long.
You let yourself hope. You let yourself believe.
And for a little while, you were not just Daemon Targaryen’s wife. You were the woman he wanted. The woman he held when sleep eluded him. The woman he murmured to in the dark.
He touched you like he was afraid you would vanish. He kissed you like he needed to remember the shape of your mouth. He held you close enough that the sickness almost seemed to retreat. Almost.
But the gods are cruel.
They are especially cruel to Targaryens, those born of fire and blood, who walk closer to heaven and madness than any mortal should. They are not meant for peace. Not meant for joy. And so they gave him you, and then they took you away.
You were lying together in the garden that evening.
It was unusually warm for that time of year. The skies had taken on a golden hue, and the sea wind had softened to a gentle hum. The servants had laid out furs beneath the blooming lemon trees, and you had sunk into them like something boneless, your head resting against Daemon’s thigh. His fingers carded through your hair, unhurried, almost absentminded, like he still could not quite believe you allowed it. Or maybe that he allowed himself to do it.
He had been telling you about a boyhood hunt on Dragonstone, his voice rough with smoke and memory. You only listened half-heartedly, too content, too tired, tracing invisible circles on the back of his hand where it lay across your stomach.
You did not feel it at first. Just a tickle in your throat.
Then the taste.
Salt. Metal.
You sat up, one slow motion at a time, blinking. You wanted to say his name, but something rose up too fast from your lungs, hot and choking.
Daemon’s brows furrowed. “What is it?”
Your eyes widened. Your lips parted.
The blood came quickly.
A hot rush flooded your mouth, spilling between your teeth before you could cover it. You turned your head, gasping, but it was already pouring down your chin, staining your gown, the furs, your fingers. You tried to speak but only coughed violently, red splattering across your lap like spilled ink.
He stared at you for one stunned moment. Then everything changed.
“Someone fetch the maesters!” he roared, already gathering you in his arms, your body limp and shivering. “Now!”
You tried to breathe, but each inhale came shorter, sharper, as though your lungs had been turned inside out. Blood bubbled at the corners of your lips. You could feel it dribble down your neck, thick and wet and warm. He pressed his hand against your back, tried to lift you upright, to help you breathe.
You could hear him saying your name.
Again and again.
Frightened. Furious.
“Look at me,” he commanded, voice cracking. “You are fine. Do you hear me? You are fine. Look at me. Look at me, godsdammit.”
But your gaze had already gone glassy. You blinked, slow and languid. The pain in your chest twisted, then dulled, as if the world had been plunged into water. His face swam in front of you. You tried to lift your hand to his cheek, but it slipped down your side, useless.
He held you tighter. His eyes were wild. His mouth moved around prayers he did not believe in.
You coughed again, a terrible, gurgling sound, thick with blood, like a dying animal with its throat cut. The taste of it drowned your tongue. You could not speak. Could not ask him not to cry. Could not tell him that you had known, that you had made peace with it long ago.
Your fingers twitched once. Then stilled.
And just like that, you were gone.
Daemon did not realize it at first. He kept shaking you, calling your name like a man possessed, his voice rising and breaking and turning into something hoarse and broken. He clutched you close, the blood soaking into his clothes, his hands stained crimson.
By the time the maesters arrived, he was on his knees, cradling your body in his arms, rocking it gently, like a father might soothe a sleeping child.
He did not look up.
Not even when they touched his shoulder. Not even when they spoke his name.
He stayed there long after your skin cooled, until the stars came out, and the fireflies buzzed low to the ground, and the entire world felt insultingly unchanged.
His face was wet, though no one ever saw him weep.
He had told you once that he hated cages. That he hated being chained.
But in the end, it was your death that bound him tighter than any crown, any throne, any war.
He had waited too long to love you.
And now there was no time left.
They say Targaryens are closer to gods than to men.
But the gods, in their jealousy, curse them all the same.
————
They dressed you in white.
He had not asked for it, but the servants must have known. Or perhaps they feared what he would do if it wasn’t done right. There were things one didn’t risk with Daemon Targaryen — especially not when his wrath was being held together by a single, fraying thread.
The room where your body lay was filled with flowers. Lilies and hyacinth. Roses from the gardens you loved. Someone had braided your hair with little sprigs of jasmine. He had not touched you since the blood dried. Could not bring himself to clean it from his hands.
He wore it still. Under his nails. In the lines of his palms. A mark he would not wash away.
He had not spoken since that night. Not properly. His brother had written. So had Rhaenyra. He burned both letters unopened.
There was a silence in the castle now. Not the peaceful kind. The kind that crept like smoke through the stones, heavy with waiting. The servants did not look him in the eye. The guards stood stiff at their posts. Even Caraxes kept his distance, pacing restlessly in the pits.
Daemon spent his days in the solar. The room you loved. The one you filled with books and candles and things he used to mock you for, once upon a time. He sat in your chair, legs spread, arms limp at his sides, as if the effort of holding himself upright was just too much.
That was where he found the letter.
Not tucked away. Not hidden in some secret compartment. But right there. On the desk. Beneath the paperweight he had once seen you use.
It was sealed with wax. Pressed with your signet. His name written in your hand.
He stared at it for a long time.
Then he opened it.
Your writing was softer than he remembered. You must have been trembling when you wrote it. The ink in places looked smudged, as if your fingers had dragged over the lines before they dried.
Daemon,
If you are reading this, then I am gone. And you are furious.
Please do not shatter the solar. Or fly to Oldtown and burn the Citadel. Or kill anyone. I know you. I know your fury. And if I could stay, I would have. If I could give you more time, I would have stolen it from the gods themselves.
But I knew. For months, I knew. I felt it in my bones, in my blood. The maesters confirmed it, though they dressed it in kinder words. I chose not to tell you. Not because I wanted to lie. But because, for the first time since our wedding, you began to look at me like I mattered. And I could not bear to take that from myself. From you.
You hated me when we wed. You never pretended otherwise. I had made peace with that. I had made peace with dying alone, unloved. But then you changed. Or maybe I did. And we met each other somewhere in the middle, where the silence broke and your hands finally stopped trembling when they held mine.
It was enough, Daemon. It was everything.
You gave me laughter in my final days. You gave me the warmth of being seen. Touched. Held. I did not want our love to be shaped by grief. I did not want to spend what little time I had watching you fall apart.
So I let myself have you, just as you let yourself have me. And that is how I want you to remember it. Not as a tragedy. But as a mercy the gods rarely give our kind.
You were never a cage to me. You were freedom.
Please remember that.
Yours,
Always,
Your Wife
Daemon did not move for a long time after reading it.
The air in the solar turned thick. The candle flames bent in the wind.
He read the letter again. And again. And again. As if somewhere in the repetition, the truth might change.
But it didn’t.
You had known.
All that time. You had known.
You had lain in his arms, smiled at him, let him whisper promises into your hair, knowing you would never live to see them kept.
He crushed the letter in his fist. Rose from the chair. For a moment it seemed like he might upend the entire desk, splinter it into a thousand pieces, tear the books from their shelves and set them alight.
But he didn’t.
He only turned toward your empty chair.
And knelt.
He pressed his forehead to the place where you always rested your hands. The wood was worn there. He remembered once watching you tap your fingers against it while reading. He had mocked you for it. You had smiled.
Now, he would have given anything to hear that sound again.
“You should have told me,” he said softly. It came out cracked. Barely a whisper. “You should have told me.”
The grief settled into his bones, not like fire, but like frost. Cold and slow and permanent.
You had not died in his arms like a queen, soft and serene. You had choked on your own blood like something hunted. And he had not even known why.
He thought he hated you once.
But nothing compared to how much he hated the silence you left behind.
Summary; The knights of Walpurgis were a secret group within the halls of hogwarts, made up of pureblood heirs and 2nd born sons, all dreaming of a 'brighter' future for their kind. their leader? Tom Riddle, refined cruelty in a human body. nothing mattered more than his goals.
except for one, his beloved (y/n).
who had the ability to make Tom Riddle stop in his tracks and abandon everything for her.
warnings; fluff, more fluff, a garbage load of fluff. use of the Cruciatus curse, physical hurt/comfort, ooc Tom Riddle, Tom Riddle being a freak <3
inspired by @anawritez-posts's Tom Riddle and (y/n) <3
Candles flickered in the dimly lit dungeon room, the faint sound of water dripping onto the stone floor echoed, along with the hushed whispers of a small group that sat in the shadows.
The knights of Walpurgis, a group of pureblood boys that all looked up to someone who had a far more refined palette of darkness and pain. Tom Riddle, soon to be Lord Voldemort, sat before his followers, they were playing a wizarding card game; money, snacks, and small collective items up for bets in the middle of the table, winner takes all.
Through it all, the knights giddily waited for Tom’s next order.
A cruel prank on a mudblood? Sabotaging a potions test for a pathetic Gryffindor? Getting someone expelled for something they did?
It was all too tantalizing, each boy waiting on bated breath for Tom to tell them their next step.
Tom laid out his card in the middle of the table, keeping his eyes glued on his own hand, pale and thin in the candlelight. “Well played my lord,” Druic Rosier said with a low hum, shuffling through his cards before laying his own down-smirking as Revius Lestrange hissed from beside him, scrunching his nose at his cards, tapping the table and the floated stack of draw cards turned to him, throwing out a few cards before it went dormant again.
“Weak hand Revius?” Nicholai Avery teased, throwing down his own card with a sharp grin. Revius glared, swirling his goblet before taking a sip.
“Don’t be crude Nicholai.” Elija Nott grinned, but he set down his cards anyway. “I fold,” he sighed, leaning back in the chair he’d claimed earlier.
“Just like you folded for Emma,” Druic coughed out-grinning as the others either snorted or just burst into laughter, Elija flushing red, sinking into his chair. Tom hid a smirk behind his cards.
“Oh like I’m the only one in love.” Elija snapped, glaring at Alexi Dolohov, who looked away towards the ceiling, pretending he had no idea Elija was talking about.
“Don’t look away like that Alexi, we all know who truly is the worst about his love,” Dmitri Mulciber said with a sharp grin. All eyes turned to Tom, who stared hard at his cards, refusing to give them the satisfaction of a reaction.
His ears were pink.
At that same moment, the door at the darkest end of the room opened slowly, a creak resounding. They all looked up and towards the sound. Tom was on his feet the next moment. (y/n) stood in the light beam of the open door, hands delicately resting on the frame. She didn’t need to say a word, only watching as Tom slipped his coat on, threw his winning cards down-collecting his winnings as the rest groaned and threw their cards down.
“Rotten luck boys,” Tom said with a smirk, snatching the chocolate coins Alexi had thrown down for his bet-sauntering over to (y/n), handing her the coins and taking her waist. She leaned into him, smiling as he kissed her forehead.
“Night Tom, night (y/n)~,” The boys said, their voices tilting into teasing as they said goodnight to (y/n). She gave a smile, and Tom glared at them, covering her with his cloak and leaving the meeting room.
“Did you have a productive night?” (y/n) asked Tom as they walked the corridors back to the common room-curfew being in only half an hour. Tom nodded with a low hum, barely able to keep his eyes off her.
“It was…enlightening, Druic demanded we play some silly card game; bets included. I won, of course,” Tom said with a smirk, showing (y/n) his winnings that were packed into his book-bag. (y/n) laughed lightly, reaching to dig through his winnings-he allowed it, of course, sliding off his bag to allow her to properly look.
“10 galleons, some candy, fancy glass quill, ooooh expensive watch,” (y/n) said, pulling out the silver watch-was probably Dmitri’s. she slung Tom’s bag back over his shoulder-he adjusted-slipping his hand back around her waist, watching as she took her wand and changed the engraving on the back of the watch, smirking as she took his wrist and clipped it on. “looks good,” (y/n) smiled, her grin growing as he took her hand and kissed her hand, inhaling the scent of her perfume.
(y/n) couldn’t help her giggle, biting her lip as Tom dropped her hand-tugging her closer to his side.
(y/n) sat in the great hall during study hour, books and parchment all around her. She huffed lightly, scratching her cheek with the end of her quill, working her jaw. Stupid arithmancy, why’d she even choose this class? She sucked at math!
A note fluttered to land in front of her, charmed to take shape as a moth. (y/n) blinked, glancing up, instantly locking onto Tom, his face resting in his palm, those dark eyes right on her. (y/n) bit her inner lip and opened the note beneath the table.
‘I want to be inside you’
(y/n) choked on her spit. Merlin!
(y/n) looked up at him, blushing, narrowing her eyes as Tom smirked back, that strange glint in his eyes. She looked around for the professor on duty and tore a piece of parchment before scribbling a quick note back.
‘don’t go asking for sex in such a public place!’
She wrote back, charming it back as a butterfly. Tom snatched it out of the air, quickly reading it, only to smirk and look at her-eyes pitch black.
“I didn’t mean sex,” Tom mouthed to her, his teeth looking extra sharp in the afternoon night, his eyes gleaming red from the reflection of the sun.
(y/n) shuddered, her cheeks growing hot.
She forgot she was dating an obsessive freak.
Tom entered the common room after a long patrol around his assigned section of the castle, dark eyes softening at the sight of (y/n) lying on the couch in front of the fireplace, the fire illuminating her from the front as the green/blue moonlight shining through the black lake windows gently shone on her from behind. He dropped his uniform cloak, approaching her quietly. She was reading, turning the page slowly as her eyes tracked from left to read, taking in the printed words that drew her into its world.
Tom sat beside the couch, his hand finding her thigh, rubbing softly. Her hand found his wrist and held. Tom let out a quiet sigh, just, watching her, his elbow finding his knee-supporting his head as he sat there with her, watching her read.
Her legs lifted five minutes later, and Tom quickly stood-slipping beneath her legs, taking her legs into his hands as she lay them back down on his lap, getting more comfortable in the new position. (y/n) hummed softly, her eyes fluttering as Tom massaged her calves, scrunching her nose as his hands wandered to her feet.
She kicked his hand away. “Ah, my apologies, I forgot you hate your feet being touched,” Tom teased, drawing his hand back up to her calf. (y/n) huffed, puffing her cheeks.
“It’s just-dirty-“ (y/n) grumbled, she hated touching her own feet-hell she always had to have her bedding a certain way so the feet side wasn’t up towards her face-why would she want anyone else touching her feet?
Tom chuckled, picking up her leg to kiss her knee. (y/n) huffed softly, ready to twitch away if he got anywhere near her feet.
He didn’t, so they stayed on that couch for longer. The fire dimmed low as 11 pm came around, and Tom glanced at (y/n) again for the fifth time in one minute, his smirk softening. She was nearly asleep, her lashes fluttering as she breathed deep-the book open on her chest. He leaned forward, taking the book and marking it with her bookmark that was set nearby-snapping it shut.
He slipped out from beneath her legs and scooped her up, holding (y/n) close as he made his way to his private dorm room. Perks of being the head boy.
He opened the door with his shoulder and set (y/n) gently on his bed, grabbing the pajamas she left behind in his room forever ago. “Up,” Tom murmured to (y/n), she mumbled that she was sleeping; but sat up, swaying lightly as Tom tugged off her clothes, his dark eyes devouring her soft skin and gentle curves.
He slipped the sleep shirt over her head, threading her arms through the sleeves. He tapped her shoulders and (y/n) lay back down-lifting her hips as Tom slid off her skirt and switched it out with her sleep shorts, mumbling as his lips grazed her knee and up her thigh.
Tom let out a soft sigh, his head dropping onto the bed as (y/n) pulled her legs away from him, tucking herself into his bed. He watched her fall asleep for longer than he realized, only jolting away when the clock on the wall chimed midnight.
Tom sighed, getting up and changing for bed, sliding in beside (y/n)-holding back a smile as she instantly scooted towards him and buried herself in his side.
“Clingy,” he muttered, but he held her anyway, forever denying that he loved her physical affection.
The knights stood in their usual meeting room, as they did every other night, waiting for Tom to arrive and begin their meeting; ready to decide what their next choice of action was.
Alexi checked his watch for the fifth time in the hour.
Druic sat on one of the couches and shuffled through a deck of cards. Elija joined him, and they started playing war.
Nicholai and Revius were snacking on a bag of chocolate pretzels.
It had been an hour and a half now.
“I don’t think he’s coming,” Alexi finally decided with a long sigh, pocketing his watch again.
“I could’ve told you that an hour ago,” Nicholai muttered, throwing pretzels into Revius’ mouth, who nearly fell off the couch trying to catch the snack.
“It’s nearly curfew already,” Druic muttered, winning that round of cards with Elija and grabbing them back into a stack. “he’s either studied himself into forgetting time-“
“Or he’s obsessed himself with (y/n) into forgetting time,” Elija said. The others sighed and packed up, heading back to their dorms, passing by darkened corridors and pitch-black classrooms, missing the one that was faintly illuminated from within, whispers echoing in the dark.
-
(y/n) swallowed harshly, hand trembling at her side as she felt his cold hand draw up her thigh-her skirt catching on his fingers as his other hand traced her body before stretching down her arm; his hand covering hers, drawing it up-her wand tight in her grip.
“That’s it darling,” Tom whispered in (y/n)’s ear. She shivered, biting her lip as his hand went beneath her skirt, holding her thigh. “Focus, put every feeling into it.” his lips grazed her ear as he moved even closer-his front pressed firmly against her back, his foot planted between hers-forcing a proper stance.
(y/n)’s eyes were glued to the large Arachnid Tom had procured just for this moment, its eight beady eyes were right on her, fangs dripping with venom. “Must i?” (y/n) asked him, turning her head towards him. He pressed his lips to her temple, closing his eyes and inhaling her shampoo scent.
“I need to know that you are capable, when I’m not around,” Tom whispered, and (y/n) swallowed hard, turning back to the arachnid, jolting a little as it tried to lunge in defense, but the barrier Tom had cast protected her.
“It’s just a spider,” (y/n) muttered. Tom hummed, arm tight around her waist now-the other still holding her wand hand.
“A venomous one, one of the most dangerous, and an invasive species, if we let it roam free-it would only hurt someone, or harm the circle of life in nature,” Tom murmured, and (y/n) sighed, lifting her wand.
“Crucio,” she mumbled, the spider twitched but only for a moment. (y/n) sighed, pouting at Tom. “I can’t do it,” she murmured, hoping he’d allow her to give up.
“You have to mean it, darling,” Tom whispered, holding her waist with both arms now. “Channel your hate, your frustration, it doesn’t have to be for the spider-but you must want to hurt for the curse to work.”
(y/n) swallowed hard again, looking at the spider. Tom wouldn’t let her stop until she cast it successfully. She closed her eyes, channeling her feelings. “Crucio.” She cast again, red lightning consuming the spider as it writhed and twisted in pain, trying to escape to no avail. She quickly dropped the spell as Tom breathed in sharply behind her, tugging her tight and close, kissing her neck.
“Wonderful, I knew you could do it.” Tom whispered giddily, rubbing her sides as she sank back into him. “I know it's hard, you have too much kindness, but it makes me feel safer for you, knowing you can protect yourself if the time comes,” Tom whispered, flicking his wand and shrinking the spider back down to size. He floated it into a small, clear plastic box.
“What are you going to do with it?” (y/n) asked, turning in his arms as the container closed.
“I hear Avery enjoys rare venomous spiders,” Tom said with a grin, and (y/n) sighed softly, holding his arm as he picked up the container
“You’re not killing it?” (y/n) asked, and Tom pecked the corner of her lips. His sweet, sensitive girl. At least for animals.
“No, I’m not, Avery does collect spiders, and has been wanting one of these,” Tom murmured, and (y/n) nodded, squeezing his arm as they left the dark room, walking through the dim corridors and back to the Slytherin common room. “Goodnight love,” Tom murmured, kissing her properly as a goodnight kiss, and (y/n) slipped up to her dorm room.
Tom stared at her until she completely disappeared, re-routing to Avery’s room, dropping off the spider-much to Avery’s delight-before returning to his dorm room, taking a much needed cold shower before bed.
Her head hurt.
A lot.
It was pounding and aching wildly, and she couldn’t see-everything was muffled and far away.
In the distance, she could hear a familiar crop of voices.
“Oh merlin-Tom’s going to kill us!”
“Us!? No he’s going to kill you! What were you thinking? Throwing curses like a first-year?! Let alone the Cruciatus curse?!”
“Why did you jump out of the way!?”
“Because I didn’t wanna get hit by it!?”
“But now she did, and now we’re gonna die!”
“Dimitri! Elija! Shut. Up! (y/n)? can you hear me?”
(y/n)’s eyes fluttered, oh how her head hurt, her whole body really, everything ached hard, like being hit by lightning.
“Tom?” She whispered, and two boys winced heavily, cursing each other out.
“He’ll be here soon (y/n), don’t worry, you’re okay, fuck.”
A door slammed open, a cold chill overbearing the whole room and she heard two bodies hit the ground as cold magic collided with them.
“What. Happened?” Tom’s voice echoed, cold and angry.
She never wanted to curl up in his arms more.
“Dimitri and Elija were practicing curses, Elija cast Crucio, Dimitri jumped out of the way-she was behind Dimitri.” The third boy explained, his hands leaving (y/n)’s knee and shoulder, and Tom scooped her up, tight and close, and she let out a pained whine-oh that hurt.
“Fucking-“ Tom cursed, but he was far more concerned with her than the idiocy of his followers. “Deal with them. I don’t have time for them.” Tom twisted, taking (y/n) with him as he stormed out of the room, practically speed-walking to his dorm.
“(y/n)?” Tom asked softly, laying her on his bed, brushing back her hair, his brows pinching together hard as she twitched, nearly convulsed; after shock pain from the curse. “Dammit,” he cursed, flicking his wand, and the bathtub started up with warm water. He flicked his wand again, and potions and soap floated into the water-turning it pink, then purple, and then blue.
“Can you sit up, pet?” Tom murmured, gently tugging at her cloak lapels to help her sit up-not wanting to pull at any tense limbs and hurt her further. (y/n) whimpered again, and Tom had to forcefully unclench his jaw, his teeth hurt from it. “C’mere,” Tom sighed, sitting beside her and tugging (y/n) up into his arms in a slow, gentle pull.
He undressed her slowly, massaging every single muscle he could get to as he exposed her skin. As soon as she was naked, he scooped (y/n) up again and carried her to the bathtub, gently laying her inside. Inside was a mix of calming draught, a painkiller potion, and just something that smelled good.
(y/n) sighed, her watery eyes looking up at Tom, and he took no less than 10 seconds to strip down and join her in the bath, moving his fingers over her body until she was fully relaxed.
“Dimitri and Elija will pay for using the Cruciatus curse so carelessly,” Tom whispered in her ear, peppering kisses anywhere he could reach-hoping to give her any sort of comforts to make her feel better.
“They didn’t mean to,” (y/n) mumbled, but Tom scoffed, teeth scraping her shoulder as he spoke-his lip curling over his teeth in an ugly way.
“I don’t care if they didn’t mean to. They still were foolish, they still hurt you. They still carelessly used a curse only meant for enemies. They will learn to respect their own magic, and they will properly apologize once you feel better and my anger has diminished,” Tom muttered, and (y/n) huffed lightly, a soft laugh that barely left her chest.
“So, a year?” (y/n) muttered with a soft tease, and Tom sighed, heavy and amused, wrapping his arms around her-holding her close, kissing her wet cheek.
“More, if they left harm on your body,” Tom whispered, eyes dark as he stared at nothing, imagining all the ways he could punish his two foolish followers.
If they damaged her body, left her muscles spasming, left her with permanent body pain; he’d give them double her pain, make sure they could never exist without pain again.
After half an hour and (y/n) was pleasantly limp, Tom emptied the tub and dried her gently, blow drying her hair with a simple warm wind charm, massaging lotion into every limb, and applying her face moisturizer before dressing her in his extra sleep clothes and tucking both of them into his bed, making sure (y/n)’s favorite blanket was laid atop her.
“Read to me?” (y/n) asked and before she could even finish her sentence, a book flew into Tom’s hand from across the room. He opened it easily-(y/n)’s head finding its spot in the crook of his arm, her leg over his hip.
She was asleep within the hour, Tom followed soon after.
Over the next two weeks, while (y/n) was still experiencing some lingering pain from the curse, Elija and Dimitri were lavishing her with gifts-all approved by Tom of course. On the weekends, they handed her their allowance for the month to go on a Hogsmeade shopping trip, the two carrying all the bags back to Hogwarts while Tom stood at her side, smirking all the while as his two followers did everything in their power to not only apologize to (y/n), but to regain his approval.
How sweet it was to have two purebloods at his feet.
“What do you say pet? Do you forgive them yet?” Tom asked in an almost bored tone-it was breakfast now-two and a half weeks after the ‘incident’. Elija and Dimitri tried their best to not look too eager.
“I don’t know, have you?” (y/n) asked, her head on his shoulder, looking up at him through her lashes. Tom hummed in thought, tilting his head into hers.
“Maybe not,” he mused, smirking as Elija and Dimitri sank in their seats, sure they were doomed to an eternity of suffering for harming their leader's beloved. “What do you think? What should they do to earn your forgiveness?”
“hmmm…a thousand word essay on what happened, what went wrong, why they're sorry, and perhaps some marshmallow caramel chocolates,” (y/n) said with a hum, and Tom laughed, hiding his smile on her temple as the boys groaned. She assigned them homework?!
“Well? Get to it. And don’t forget the chocolates. I believe those will be what finalizes your sentence.” Tom sneered, and the boys rushed to take out their spare parchment and start up the essay, kissing (y/n)’s temple and accepting the strawberry she offered him.
His precious, sensitive, but sometimes just as beautifully cruel, (y/n).
pairing: tadashi hamada x fem! reader
W.C: 4k
content includes: awkward reader, awkward tadashi, fred being a menace, honey-lemon and wasabi mention, go-go mention, fluff, slowburn, tadashi crushing real hard, reader crushing real hard, reader being a genius.
day fourteen: the date?
nervous was an understatement. (y/n) had probably paced twelve full circles around her apartment by now, and it was only five pm. she had two hours to pull herself together mentally and physically before tadashi would be standing at her door; and that knowledge only made her jitters worse. there was no reason to be nervous, she knew that, but still her fingers shook as she went to the bathroom with the set goal of taking a shower. she hoped the hot water would provide some kind of clearness to her current mental state.
they had only communicated in friendly and somewhat brief texts over the past two days, their conversations being mainly about the fair and the little details surrounding the plan for that, and it went as such: tadashi would pick her up at seven pm sharp, they would go to the fair, and then he would bring her home by midnight. but yesterday he sent her a photo of himself in his lab, a pencil tucked behind his ear and a tired expression on his face with a text saying: "the grind never stops." she reacted to it with a heart and left it there, because she feared if she said anything else she'd never stop.
upon entering the bathroom she set the water on before anything else and all but ripped her clothes off while it was heating up. when she stepped in, it was only about lukewarm, but that didn't deter her. she stood under the mediocre spray of the faucet head and stared at the wall, her stomach twisting like a pit of vipers. eventually she began the process of washing her body, her hair, shaving, if only being mildly successful at that, and of course overthinking. what if the people at the show thought she was weird? what if tadashi only invited her because he felt bad for her or something? what if--
suddenly the water she stood under turned from scalding hot to freezing cold, and it was then that she realized she had been in there for way longer than her apartments water heater could tolerate. she quickly switched it off and stepped out, effectively soaking her bath rug in the process. she wrapped her hair in a towel with the haste of somebody who was running from cops, swung the bathroom door open and began scittering across the hall to her room, leaving wet footprints in her wake.
it took her all of ten seconds to seat herself in front of her vanity to begin doing her hair and makeup, too preoccupied to even put music on like she usually would when getting ready. mid hair care routine, her phone pinged from where it was charging. she reached over haphazardly and when the device was brought to her eyeline, she was met with a text from tadashi hamada reading: 'super stoked for tonight! see you soon :)'
it was then that her eyes flicked to the time and she realized it was already six thirty. shit. very quickly she abandoned her plans of doing an updo with her hair and instead left it down, pushing it back with a headband to speedrun her makeup. she kept it simple with some concealer, blush, highlighter, mascara and her favorite clear lipgloss. next was to moisturize and get dressed. "what does someone even wear to something like this? a dress? no, that's too fancy." she narrated out loud to herself while slathering her legs and arms with her favorite lotion before hopping to her closet, rummaging through the options. when the clock hit six fifty-five she realized she didn't have any more time to give a damn about the intricacies of an outfit and chose a nice sweater and her favorite pair of jeans.
she pulled those on along with the first pair of underwear she grabbed, which happened to be the kind with the day of the week across the butt. "great. real sexy, (y/n)." she muttered, then mentally slapped herself. "it doesn't matter what underwear i have on! this isn't even really a date! and i will not be doing.. ugh!" she seemed to have a certain affinity for embarrassing herself because mid putting her shoes on, mentally scolding herself, and blushing like a ripe summer tomato; her doorbell rang. "shit!" she only had to put her left shoe, jewelry, and perfume on, but making him wait for any amount of time made her feel like a horrible person. "uh, just one second!" she shouted from her room, praying he'd hear it.
and he did. tadashi stood in front of her door wearing a pair of jeans, an SFIT hoodie and a brown leather jacket over it, his helmet tucked under his arm. he chuckled upon hearing the frantic tone of her voice, shaking his head. on the outside, he seemed perfectly casual and cool, but on the inside he was about to throw up with nervousness. he'd met plenty of smart girls at SFIT, and plenty of them were beautiful, but none were like the girl he was waiting on. he couldn't explain what about her was so intriguing, but it felt like there was an inescapable magnetic force pulling him to her at all times.
before he could dwell on the thought too hard the door before him swung open, revealing the girl he thought oh so highly of. her outfit was simple like his, but he still found her to be the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. he smiled wide, opening his arms for one of those friendly side hugs. "hey! it's good to see you again," her arm wrapped around his torso and his around her shoulders, doing a short squeeze before separating again. "yeah! you too." she smiled, clearly a bit frazzled in the way she'd been the last time he saw her, smiling and eyes sparkling in the cafe, cheeks pink from laughing.
he realized he had been staring for a little too long to be considered normal and cleared his throat, gesturing vaguely to the staircase that lead down to the parking lot. "well! shall we get going?" "well yes, i think we shall." (y/n) giggled, following him as he lead the way. "what's the helmet for?" she asked as they descended one of the two flights of stairs, her hand hovering over the rail for comfort. she wouldn't put it past herself to embarrass herself further by tumbling down these stairs. "my moped?" his tone, though friendly, gave her the impression that she was supposed to have known that. she had not. his words made her nerves start to buzz, and they went full-fledged flying when she laid eyes on said moped.
he noticed her shift in body language immediately and felt that if he didn't help calm her he'd melt into a puddle on the sidewalk. "have you never ridden on one before?" he asked. "no. i've only ever, uhm, been in cars.. and like, buses." she wrung her fingers while she spoke, and it surprised her that they weren't on the verge of falling off with how often she did so. tadashi's eyes softened as he listened to her, sympathizing with her nerves. when he first got the bike it definitely made him nervous, but it really wasn't as scary as it seemed, and he told her as such.
with some light comforting and just a little bit of convincing (y/n) found herself awkwardly situating herself on the back of the vehicle, buckling the helmet he brought for her onto her head. she was grateful she didn't do the updo now. tadashi climbed on after her and they wiggled around to find a comfortable arrangement for a moment before the anticipatory build up finally reached it's peak and she began shaking. "hold onto me like this, okay? i promise i won't let you fall." he said, a soft smile evident on his voice. gently, he took her trembling hands and wrapped them around his middle, holding onto them for a moment longer than necessary. (y/n) swore she felt electricity travel from his body to hers in the best way, and was suddenly very aware of their proximity.
she could smell his cologne mixed with his natural tadashi scent, feel his warmth; she could almost feel his heart beating. she was suddenly very grateful to be sitting behind him with her cheek pressed to his back, because she was certain they could see her blushing from the international space station. she gave a nervous squeeze to his torso and scooted a bit closer for comfort, holding onto him like she'd die if she loosened even the slightest bit, which wasn't entirely wrong.
he laughed at her; but not mockingly. more like 'she is the most adorable thing to ever exist.'. "i've got you, (y/n). i promise. just have fun!" before the snarky comment she had waiting could leave her mouth they were off. she yelped and squeezed impossibly closer, which also made him laugh, full and happy. "not funny!" she squeaked, squeezing her eyes shut tight.
"kind of funny." he shouted back over the wind that rushed around them, taking off towards the school. he weaved them through traffic like a pro, squeezing between buses and cars and getting them there way faster than a normal vehicle would have. somewhere in the in between her eyes opened, and she watched the blur of lights zip by them on their way. she was giggling before she fully realized she was having fun, holding onto him more like a backpack than a titanium chest plate now.
within fifteen minutes they were pulling into the student parking lot. buzzing with adrenaline and looking mildly like she had been on a rollercoaster, (y/n) stepped off the moped with tadashi lending a helping hand. "thank you," her shoes hit the pavement with a light crunch as she took her helmet off, unsure of where to put it. "oh! i've got it." the boy said with a smile, gently taking the helmet from her hands. he placed it on one of the handlebars, his hanging on the other. "do you ever worry about something stealing it?" she asked, falling into step next to him as they began their journey inside.
she began wringing her fingers again, the cool wind nipping at her cheeks and neck all the while. now that they were really there, walking towards the main entrance, and she could literally see the people standing outside and making their way inside, she was having second thoughts. 'i shouldn't be here.' she parted her lips to tell him as such before his voice rang out: "they wouldn't get very far." he swung the ring of his keys around his pointer finger playfully, and she laughed, albeit a bit forced. because it was the socially acceptable thing to do.
again, tadashi noticed. he glanced down at her and saw the look of concern on her face, her eyebrows pinching and her teeth pulling at her bottom lip in the way they always did when she was freaking out. "hey," he said, stopping his stride. she stopped too, standing before him but not meeting his eyes. instead she stared through him, past his flesh and skeleton and to the potential horrors waiting for her through those doors. she was significantly younger than anybody she saw walking inside, they'd probably all mistake her for being his younger cousin or something, or maybe the girl he was babysitting. or-
there was a set of hands on her shoulders now. he blocked the sight of the main doors with his taller body, making it to where she could only look at him. shocked, her wide eyes met tadashi's concerned ones before they flitted around his face, searching it, trying to find his soul, to find what he was thinking. his hands were warm even through the crocheted fabric of her sweater, grounding her in place. "(y/n)." she steadied. his voice was calm and gentle, a tone that you would use to talk to a small animal or something of the like. she met his eyes. "it's going to be okay." she nodded, and the notion got nowhere close to convincing him. he deliberated in his head for a moment about what to do, slightly tilting it in the way he did when he was trying to find the answer to something.
"when we walk inside," he spoke slowly, deciding what words to use as he said them. "there's going to be a lot of open space. we will walk down a hallway to the open lab. people will be set up with their inventions, and people will be looking at them. my friends will be there, and they will be so excited to meet you." he gave her the rundown as best he could, hoping that having a set expectation would calm her mind. and it did, if only a little bit. the wringing of her hands slowed and her teeth released her lip, but his hands remained on her shoulders, gentle and friendly. he could see she still wasn't totally calm. it was time to learn some tricks he picked up from the various psychology courses he took.
"here." he removed his hands to instead hold them out in front of her, cupping his palms between them. "imagine there's a cupcake in my hand." she nodded, imagining. "now imagine there's a candle in the cupcake." she did. she looked to him as confirmation. "okay. now take a big, deep breath and blow out the candle." she blushed, a little embarrassed. "we look silly." "it's not silly if it works." he smiled. she rolled her eyes but ultimately gave in, taking a big breath to blow out the imaginary candle.
he moved his hands away just as she exhaled, holding them just above her head. "oh! the cupcake ran away! looks like you have to try again." he was smiling like an idiot, and now so was she, but she wasn't worrying about the near future anymore. all she had on her mind was the boy in front of her, the dimples he had when he smiled, and this imaginary cupcake he created specifically for the purpose of calming her down. he lowered the 'cupcake' to her once more, grinning with a mischievous glint in his eyes. "don't move it this time!" she huffed, cupping her hands around his to hold them still.
tadashi's eyes widened a bit but he was ultimately unmoved by her unintentional boldness, at least on the outside. on the inside his mind was screaming 'she's holding my hand she's holding my hand she's holding my hand'. he watched her in complete admiration as she took another big breath and successfully blew out the candle, being as she was holding it in place. "there! it's done." she smiled wide, and he wanted nothing more than to lift her up and exclaim that she was the most perfect human being in all of existence. he refrained, if only because it was the socially acceptable thing to do.
she then realized that she was in fact holding his hands and quickly removed her grip, clearing her throat. with a shared look of silent communication, they began walking to the front again. "so.. you talk to your friends about me?" tadashi was caught entirely off guard by the question and stuttered, embarrassed at having exposed himself previously. "uh, well yeah! i just told them that you were interested in the school, you know? that you, you applied and.. and stuff like that." he said lamely, rubbing the back of his neck.
(y/n) giggled at him as they ascended the front steps, a little less nervous about the whole thing. "hi! welcome to the SFIT annual science show. remember, look and don't touch!" chirped an overly perky blonde at the front door. (y/n) nodded in acknowledgment towards her as they stepped inside. immediately she noted how warm it was for it being late-fall early-winter, and deducted the cause to being everyone's compressed body heat. tadashi slowed his steps beside her and she followed suit, looking around in awe. she never thought she'd be seeing this many different kinds of people and creations.
there was someone walking on robotic stilts, a solar-panel powered microwave, a car engine model that ran off of corn seed oil instead of gasoline, and so many other things that made her jealous of the creativity of other people's minds. someone had fire red hair and at least twenty piercings, someone else had tattoos up to their neck, and some guy walking by had a robotic arm. she realized she had been nervous for nothing. no one would be paying her any mind if this was the crowd she blended into the background of.
"do you like it?" (y/n) looked up at the boy to her left with eyes full of wonder, shaking her head to express she didn't even know what to say. "tadashi, this is-" "coming through!" a blur of black and purple zipped by barely a foot away and she yelped, stepping back to avoid being hit. she watched as the flash of movement came to an abrupt stop at a table, removed it's helmet and revealed itself to be a girl. maybe early twenties, short black hair, leather outfit. she took off the wheels attached to her shoes and tossed them in an overflowing box of the same prototype, visibly a bit annoyed.
tadashi walked over to where the girl had parked herself and (y/n) followed behind him like a puppy, eyes gleaming with interest. "looking good, go-go. seems like they've gotten faster." the girl, go-go, rolled her eyes and chewed hard on the bubblegum in her mouth, making small bubbles then chomping them flat. "yeah. but not fast enough." she said as she rummaged carelessly through a box of tools on her work desk. tadashi didn't seem deterred. "this is (y/n). (y/n), this is go-go." (y/n) raised her hand in a shy little wave, giving a soft 'hi'. go-go's eyes looked up from what she was doing but she did not lift her head, regarding the girl with the same amount of interest most people give the dmv.
she looked her up and down silently, which made (y/n) want to sink into the floor. she was now acutely aware of herself. was her hair messy? was her sweater crooked? was there something on her face? did- "so. you're the child prodigy?" go-go was no longer looking at her. she had instead turned her attention back to the toolbox. (y/n) flushed, immediately embarrassed at the label. she put her hands up in a 'no, no' way and shook her head, smiling through the awkwardness she felt. "i wouldn't say that, i mean-" "don't be ridiculous! you're way smarter than you give yourself credit for, (y/n)." tadashi chimed in, smiling at her.
now she really wanted to sink through the floor. 'this is so embarrassing.' she thought to herself, before a glint caught her eye. "are those magnetically enhanced maglev discs?" with a beat, go-go perked up a bit, looking fully at the girl for the first time. she held the object in question in her hands, turning it this way and the next. "yeah.. they are." she said, giving the other girl a look that said 'and what else?' (y/n) observed her workplace closer and noted multiple wires, magnets of varying sizes, and different gears. "those aren't manual gears.." she gasped, eyes lighting up with the realization. "are the wheels electronically charged too?"
go-go smirked, clearly pleased. "yep." "that's so cool!" from the corner of her eye she could see tadashi smiling at her, seemingly more interested in her than what his friend was working on. the thought made her blush, so she pushed it down before anyone commented on it. "yeah," go-go said, tossing the disk in her hands into the box like she had done to the other one. "can't get the balance right. it's throwing the speed off." she grumbled, running a hand through her short, slightly tousled hair. "hm.." (y/n) tilted her head and furrowed her eyebrows in thought, taking a moment to assess the situation.
"have you tried using a different base?" she asked, pointing to the plethora failed beta-version's. "these are heavy. if you break it down and use only the magnets, then incorporate the wires to the inside of it, like, place them around the inner rimes, it could help with gaining velocity." go-go blinked, looked to her failed ones, then back to the girl, and shook her head. she began to walk away, presumably to get the tool she had been looking for previously, and patted (y/n)'s shoulder on her way by. "don't scare her off." she said to tadashi before slipping off into the crowd. (y/n) giggled, feeling a bit awkward and welcomed at the same time.
"i told you." tadashi said, leading her to the next attraction. "you're super smart." next was a guy showing... something? there was nothing physically there except for two vertical, parallel bars. the two of them stood at the front of a throng of people who were listening to his presentation speech, some taking notes on clipboards. "that's wasabi," tadashi leaned down to speak quietly in her ear, and he did so to avoid interrupting the presentor, wasabi; or so she told herself. the proximity, though momentary, had her mind cloudy with the idea of being near him to the point she only registered what wasabi was saying when he looked directly into her eyes. "catch!"
before she could register the command there was an apple coming at her. she yelped and put her hands up to (hopefully) catch it, only to watch it dissipate into a hundred paper-thin slices. the crowd around her ooh'd and awe'd as she recovered from her surprise, chuckling it off awkwardly. he flipped the switch on one of the bars to reveal thin green lasers between them. she watched and listened in awe as he explained his invention, it's purpose, it's setbacks, the kinks he had to work out, and how long it took him to put the prototype together. she was too enamored to realize that she had been shifting gradually closer to tadashi over the past five minutes and was nearly brushing arms with him.
he wasn't. he noticed, but chose not to say anything, if only to enjoy the moment while it lasted. the night continued in a blur of movement, discussions, shared laughter and knowledge, with most of the knowledge sharing coming from (y/n) herself. tadashi introduced her to his other friend, honey-lemon, and seemingly the one friend he had with a normal name, fred. she chatted with honey-lemon for a lot longer than she intended to, easily swept away into a conversation about chemistry and how different elements interact in ways nobody would have thought to even observe. tadashi on the other hand was just happy to tag along. he spent the night letting (y/n) see all the wonders SFIT had to offer, letting her meet his closest friends and favorite teachers, and showing her creations he thought she'd take a particular liking to.
before they knew it, it was ten pm and the show was coming to an end. that same perky blonde from before regarded them as they left, laughing together on their way down the steps. "aren't you glad you came?" he bumped her with his hip playfully, chuckling when she stumbled. "yes. that was so much fun, and all of your friends are so nice! and there are so many brilliant people here, and-" she rambled freely, eyes gleaming with wonder and admiration as she spun on her heel, facing him and the school now. "just, wow. i thought i'd.. y'know.." she shrugged, visibly trying to find the words.
"stick out. like i always do. but i don't feel judged here! i feel like, like.." tadashi watched her with a soft, knowing gaze, letting her find the words for herself. standing here, looking at her stand in front of the school, illuminated by it's lights.. he couldn't imagine her being anywhere else. she sighed and shrugged again, putting her arms out with a breathy laugh. "i love it. i want to go. this is the perfect place for me to continue my old projects."
he hadn't said anything still, only watched her. she became a bit shy under his eyes, giggling awkwardly and putting her hands back to her sides. "sorry. were you going to say something?" he chuckled, light and open before shaking his head. "nope."
"i'm glad you like it. like, so very glad." he stepped towards her and gently took her hand in his, just holding it between them. "i can help you finalize your application and enrollment. you could be in classes for the spring semester." he seemed to always have such a strong look of puppy-love when he was around her. any time she had a problem, he had to solve it. any time she was upset, he had to make it better. he felt like he could barely breathe unless she was smiling at him like she was now. "yes! i would love that, that would be so.. ugh, thank you tadashi!"
she was on him faster than he could blink, wrapping her arms around his nape in a tight hug. he immediately reciprocated, although caught off guard a bit. his arms wrapped easily around her waist, holding her gently. he laughed into her hair, amused by her enthusiasm. "and to think you wouldn't have come if you never met me." he teased. she scoffed and broke her hold, giving him a look of feigned insult. "oh, whatever! don't get a big head about it."
they laughed, and she realized they were still holding each other, if at a distance. "uhm.. well, thank you again." she blushed, looking away but making no move to remove her arms from him. "of course." his voice was soft and so full of something like tenderness as he kept his hands comfortable on her waist, making sure to be respectful of the placement. for a moment they stood, him looking at her and her blushing under his gaze, no words being exchanged. that is, until, a loud voice rang out from about two yards away.
"hey tadashi! honey-lemon is asking if your girlfriend wants to come to lunch with us next weekend! ask her, okay?!" they separated like guilty teens caught kissing and looked up to see fred standing on the front steps of the building. tadashi laughed awkwardly and rubbed the back of his neck, shaking his head. "yeah, okay fred! thanks." he shouted back, groaning in embarrassment. she watched as fred retreated into the building, probably to tell the others he completed the task of telling tadashi. he looked to (y/n) to see her giggling, cheeks pink. "sorry about that.." he mumbled, visibly embarrassed. she laughed. "no, it's okay! don't worry about it."
he shook his head, looking up to the sky. "so.. lunch?" he asked, making her laugh again. "yes. lunch." she stepped to him and bumped his hip with hers, starting to walk to the parking lot. "am i your girlfriend, too?" tadashi sputtered, eyes wide as he looked to her in shock. she laughed, head back in amusement. "i'm kidding! don't choke on your tongue." she teased and he flushed, laughing breathily. "right. sorry."
if only she knew how badly he wanted her to be. and if only he knew how badly she wanted him to say yes.
a/n: sooo I was thinking of Go Kyung-jun and just the whole class, realistically we don't know how long they were in the game but I'm guessing for a couple of months at least, so they were missing, fully. How shocking and heartbreaking would it be for the city to find out the whole class is missing, it would be huge. So what if Go Kyung-jun had a girlfriend outside of his class?
The first time Go Kyung-jun disappeared, it was an ordinary morning.
That was the part that ruined me later.
Not the phone call. Not the police station. Not the funeral with no body, no ashes, no proof, just a framed school photo on a wooden stand and a line of white chrysanthemums wilting beneath fluorescent lights.
It was the morning before all of it, the stupid, normal, careless morning I kept returning to like a loose tooth I couldn’t stop worrying with my tongue. The kind of morning no one respects because nothing in it announces itself as the last. The sky had been pale and thin, the kind of washed-out blue that made the apartment buildings look flat and tired. My uniform collar had been crooked. I remembered that because Kyung-jun had noticed it before I did, had clicked his tongue like I was personally embarrassing him, and reached over to fix it with fingers that were too rough for something so small.
“You go out looking like this?” he’d said, like he was disgusted, like his ears weren’t turning red because we were standing close enough for me to smell the mint gum on his breath.
I’d swatted his hand away even though he was already done. “You always act like you’re my stylist.”
“Someone has to. You dress like you lost a fight with your closet.”
“You dress like you bully mirrors.” He had laughed then, sudden and loud, head tipping back a little, sharp teeth flashing under the weak morning light. Kyung-jun always laughed like he expected the world to flinch from it. Like joy, for him, was another kind of threat.
Then he had walked backward down the sidewalk, hands shoved into his pockets, his schoolbag hanging off one shoulder, too big and too broad and too careless for the narrow street. He had smirked at me when I told him to hurry up before he was late.
“You worried about me?”
“No. I’m worried your teachers might finally realize you’re a lost cause.”
“Liar,” he’d said, pointing at me like he’d caught me doing something embarrassing. “You’re obsessed with me.”
I’d rolled my eyes. He’d grinned wider. And then he’d turned around. That was it. That was the last clean thing. The last version of him I had before the world split open.
By lunchtime, he wasn’t answering my texts. By the end of school, his phone went straight to voicemail. I told myself he was being annoying. I told myself he was probably sleeping through class, probably fighting with someone, probably doing that thing where he saw messages and decided responding too fast made him look pathetic, as if I didn’t already know exactly how pathetic he could be when no one else was watching. I sent him a voice message calling him an asshole. I sent three question marks. I called once, twice, five times, then stared at the screen until the letters of his name blurred into a dark little wound.
The call from his grandmother came at 7:42 p.m.
I remembered the time because I spent months staring at it in my call history until the phone replaced it with a date, and then I stared at that too, as if time itself had done something wrong by moving.
When I answered, her voice was not a voice at first. It was breath. A broken, shallow sound, like she’d been running though I knew her knees hurt too much for running, like she was holding the phone with both hands and still couldn’t keep it steady.
“Halmeoni?” I said, already standing. She said my name once. Just once. And everything inside me went quiet.
There are certain kinds of fear the body understands before the mind does. My hand tightened around the phone until the edges dug into my palm. I could hear the television playing in the living room behind me, some variety show with canned laughter bursting too brightly through the walls. Outside, someone’s scooter whined past the building. Somewhere, a dog barked and barked, sharp and ordinary, furious at nothing.
“What happened?” I asked.
She tried to answer. I heard her inhale. I heard the wet, trembling catch of her mouth opening and closing around words that would not come out right.
“Kyung-jun,” she said. My heart kicked once, hard enough to hurt.
“What about him?”
“He’s gone.”
For one stupid second, I thought she meant he had left the house. I thought she meant he had stormed out after an argument, that he had been rude, that he had slammed a door, that he had done what he always did when something pressed too close to the soft places he kept hidden. I almost felt relief. I almost said, I’ll call him. I almost said, He’ll come back.
Then she said, “His whole class.”
My fingers slipped on the phone. “What?”
“They’re gone. All of them,” she whispered, and then the whisper broke, and suddenly she sounded very old. Older than she had that morning. Older than she had ever sounded pouring me tea, scolding Kyung-jun for eating too fast, pretending not to notice when he sat too close to me at the table and stole fish from my bowl. “The school called. The police are there. No one knows—no one knows where they are.”
I do not remember getting my shoes on.
I remember the floor tilting. I remember my bedroom doorframe under my hand. I remember saying his name, not to her, not really, but into the apartment, into the air, into whatever part of the world had swallowed him. I remember my mother asking what was wrong from the kitchen and the way I could not look at her because looking at another living person would make it real. I remember my throat closing so tightly that my first sob came out silent, my whole chest convulsing around nothing.
Then sound returned all at once.
“No,” I said, and it was ugly. Small. Childish. “No, no, no, no, no.”
His grandmother was crying. I had heard her cry once before, softly, when Kyung-jun got into a fight so bad he came home with his cheek split and blood dried black beneath his nose. She’d cried in the kitchen where he couldn’t see, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist before turning around and yelling at him for being an idiot. That cry had been tired. Worried. Human.
This was different.
This was an animal sound trapped in an old woman’s body.
“I’m coming,” I said.
I don’t know how I got there so fast. I must have run the whole way because my lungs burned by the time I reached the building, and my legs felt strange under me, too light and too weak, like they belonged to someone who had already fallen. His grandmother opened the door before I knocked. Her hair was loose from its usual careful bun. One side of her cardigan had been buttoned wrong. She looked at me, and whatever strength she had been using to stay upright simply left her.
I caught her before she hit the floor.
For a moment we stood there in the doorway holding each other like two people caught in the same wave, her hands clutching the back of my hoodie, my face pressed into the powdery smell of her shoulder. She was crying into my hair. I was crying into her cardigan. Neither of us said his name, because his name had become a door we could not open without falling through.
Inside, the apartment looked exactly the same.
That was cruel too.
His shoes were still by the entrance, kicked sideways because he never put anything away properly unless his grandmother threatened to hit him with a slipper. His jacket hung on the back of the chair. A half-empty bottle of banana milk sat on the table, the straw still punched through the silver top. His grandmother had made stew. I could smell it on the stove, warm and rich and untouched, the scent filling the little apartment like an insult.
“What did they say?” I asked, wiping my face with my sleeve because my hands were shaking too badly to do it properly.
She told me what she knew. It was almost nothing.
The class had left school. The school said there had been a planned activity, but no one could confirm the location. The bus driver had been found unconscious at a rest stop with no memory after a certain point. Phones were dead. The GPS data stopped at the same time for everyone. No ransom. No accident reports. No bodies. No wreckage. Just an entire class folded out of the world like someone had taken scissors to the day and cut them cleanly from it.
His grandmother kept repeating, “He would have called me.”
And I kept saying, “I know.”
Because he would have.
He was careless with teachers and cruel with classmates and loud enough to make strangers turn around in restaurants, but he called his grandmother if he was going to be late. Not always politely. Sometimes it was just, “I’m not dead, stop nagging,” before hanging up. But he called.
He would have called me too.
Even if it was only to be annoying. Even if it was only to send a voice message saying, “Yah, why are you blowing up my phone like a psycho?” Even if he pretended not to like it. Even if he made me want to throw my phone at a wall.
He would have answered.
After a while, I went to his room.
His door creaked the same way it always did. His grandmother kept telling him to fix it, and he kept saying he would, and then he never did because Kyung-jun lived as if every tiny responsibility was a personal attack. The room smelled like him. Laundry detergent and cheap cologne and something warm beneath it, sweat and skin and the ghost of him pressed into the sheets. His desk was messy. Textbooks open and abandoned. A pen without its cap. A receipt from a convenience store crumpled beside his keyboard. His bed was unmade, blanket twisted from the morning, pillow dented where his head had been.
I stood there staring at it until the room blurred.
Then I crawled onto his bed and broke.
Not prettily. Not the kind of crying that belongs in dramas, with tears shining silently under soft lighting. I cried like my body was trying to reject the truth before it could settle inside me. My mouth opened around sounds I could not control. My fingers twisted in his blanket until the fabric burned my knuckles. I pressed my face into his pillow and breathed him in so hard it hurt, as if there might be enough left of him in the cotton to keep him real. As if he was hiding in the smell of his own bed. As if grief was a thing I could outsmart by refusing to lift my head.
At some point his grandmother came in. She did not tell me to stop. She sat on the edge of the mattress and touched my hair with trembling fingers.
“He loves you,” she whispered. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“He’s coming back,” I said into the pillow. The words were muffled. Wet. Desperate enough to humiliate me if anyone else had heard them. His grandmother’s hand stilled.
Then she said, very quietly, “Yes.” But she did not sound like she believed it.
Six months later, the police asked the families to hold funerals.
They did not use the word ask at first. They dressed it up in gentle voices and official phrases, grief counseling language and practical advice, all those careful, padded words adults use when they have run out of answers and want their failure to sound kind. They said the investigation would remain open. They said search efforts would continue if new evidence appeared. They said absence of bodies did not erase hope, but the human mind needed ritual, closure, a place to mourn.
Closure.
I hated that word so much I felt it in my teeth.
The funeral hall smelled like flowers and polished wood and too many people breathing in one room. Every missing student had a framed photograph. Every photo had a black ribbon in the corner. Kyung-jun’s picture was one from school, his tie slightly loose, his expression caught somewhere between bored and irritated. He looked like he might step out of the frame just to complain about how ugly the photo was.
I stood in front of it for a long time.
People moved around me in dark clothes. Mothers collapsed against fathers. Fathers stared at the floor with red eyes and clenched jaws. Someone wailed from the far end of the hall, a raw sound that rose and fell until it became part of the air. The classmates’ younger siblings stood confused and frightened at the edges, dressed in black too big for them, holding white flowers they didn’t know what to do with.
Kyung-jun’s grandmother held my hand so tightly my fingers went numb.
I did not cry at first.
I couldn’t.
I stared at his face until the edges of the photograph sharpened unnaturally, until I could see the tiny strand of hair falling near his eyebrow, the slight curl of his mouth like he was about to say something mean. I kept thinking, he would hate this. He would hate the flowers. He would hate the crying. He would hate people looking at him like he was something sad and finished. He would lean down to me and mutter, “Why does everyone look so ugly when they cry?” and I would hit his arm and he would grin because he got the reaction he wanted.
Someone guided me closer with the incense.
I looked at the portrait.
My knees gave out.
It happened so suddenly that I didn’t feel myself falling until hands caught me under the arms. The sound that came out of me did not feel like mine. It was too loud. Too torn open. It scraped through my throat and filled the funeral hall, and I hated myself for it because Kyung-jun would have teased me, would have called me dramatic, would have said, “Yah, you trying to make my funeral about you?”
And then I cried harder because for one second I heard his voice so clearly I turned my head, looking for him. There was no one there.
After that, time became something I survived rather than lived in.
I graduated.
People said that like it meant something. Like walking across a stage and receiving a paper could close the year behind me. Like the world had not kept moving with a hole in it. I packed my things for university in the city and found one of his hoodies at the back of my closet, black, oversized, the sleeves stretched because he always yanked them over his hands when he was bored. I sat on the floor holding it for almost an hour. It barely smelled like him anymore.
That was the day I understood why people begged ghosts to haunt them.
For a while, I went to his grandmother’s every weekend. Then every other weekend. Then when classes got heavy, once a month. She never blamed me. She said I had to live. She said Kyung-jun would be angry if I didn’t.
“He’d say something awful,” she told me once, pouring tea with hands that had grown thinner. I smiled because she was right.
He would have called me stupid for crying. Then he would have sat beside me and nudged my knee with his until I leaned into him. He never knew what to do with softness when anyone could see it. He acted like tenderness was something embarrassing that happened to other people. But in private, when his room was dim and the city lights cut pale lines across the walls, he would hook a finger through mine and pretend it was nothing. He would rest his chin on top of my head and complain that I was heavy even though he was the one pulling me closer.
A year passed.
Then more.
His case became one of those strange tragedies people talked about in low voices when documentaries needed content. The missing class. The impossible disappearance. The cold case with no bodies and no ransom and no answers. Sometimes people at university brought it up without knowing I had loved one of the boys in the photos. I learned to sit very still when they did. I learned how to hold a pen without breaking it. I learned how to say, “Yeah, I heard about that,” in a voice calm enough to pass as indifference.
But at night, I still checked.
News articles. Police updates. Forums filled with theories so cruel and stupid I wanted to reach through the screen and shake strangers by the throat. I checked unidentified patient lists once. I checked hospitals after disasters. I checked because hope had become ugly inside me, not bright, not pretty, but stubborn and half-starved, dragging itself across every empty day with bloody hands.
I did not believe he was alive in the way happy people believe things. I believed because the alternative was a room I could not enter.
The day I saw him again, it was raining.
Not hard. Just enough to turn the sidewalks dark and make the city smell like wet pavement and exhaust, the kind of cold spring rain that clung to hair and lashes. I had left class early because the lecture hall felt too tight, too full of other people’s bodies and pencil scratches and bright laptop screens. My head hurt. My coat was thin. I stopped outside a convenience store to buy an umbrella I didn’t need, mostly because I wanted something to hold.
The bell above the door chimed when I stepped out. Across the street, an old woman stood beneath the awning of a pharmacy.
For a moment, I noticed only her. Small frame. Gray cardigan. Plastic bag hooked over one wrist. Hair pulled back in a careful bun. My body recognized her before my mind did.
Kyung-jun’s grandmother.
Everything inside me went quiet in that same terrible way it had when she called.
She looked older. Smaller. The rain made the sidewalk shimmer between us, headlights dragging long ribbons of white and red across the wet road. People passed in both directions, umbrellas bobbing like dark flowers. A bus groaned at the curb. Someone laughed behind me, bright and careless.
Then someone stepped out of the pharmacy behind her.
Tall.
Too tall.
Black hair damp at the edges. Shoulders broad under a dark jacket. One hand holding the door, the other wrapped around the strap of a bag like he was still learning how to use his own fingers. His face was thinner than it used to be. Sharper. The lines of it cut deeper, cheekbones more pronounced, jaw tight in a way that looked less like arrogance now and more like something wired beneath the skin. There was a pale mark near his temple. Another at his throat, half-hidden by his collar. His mouth was the same.
That was what destroyed me.
Not the height. Not the shoulders. Not even the eyes.
His mouth.
The same mouth that had smirked at me under the weak morning sun. The same mouth that had called me a liar, a brat, a psycho, pretty when he thought I was asleep and couldn’t hear him. The same mouth I had kissed in stairwells and behind school buildings and once in his grandmother’s kitchen when he was supposed to be taking out the trash.
It opened slightly.
He saw me.
The city stopped making sense.
For a second, neither of us moved.
His grandmother turned, following his stare, and the plastic bag slipped from her hand. Oranges rolled across the wet pavement, bright and absurd, one bumping against the curb and stopping there like the world had chosen that tiny detail to prove it was still real.
Kyung-jun stared at me as if I was the ghost.
His eyes were darker than I remembered. Not in color. In depth. Like something had been carved behind them and left open. The boy I loved used to look at the world like he could beat it into giving him what he wanted. This boy looked at me like he had crawled through hell and found my face at the exit, and now he was afraid that if he blinked, the devil would laugh and take me back.
I stepped off the curb without looking. A car horn screamed. Someone grabbed my sleeve and cursed, but I tore free, because the only thing my body knew was his name. It broke out of me before I reached him, loud enough that people turned.
“Kyung-jun!”
His whole face collapsed.
His jaw trembled once, hard, like he hated it. His eyes went wet so fast it looked painful. He took one step toward me, then another, and then I was running, shoes splashing through shallow puddles, rain needling my face, breath tearing out of my lungs in broken pieces.
He caught me so hard it hurt.
His arms came around me like a lock. One beneath my shoulders, one around my waist, lifting me off the ground with a rough sound punched from his chest. I hit him and held on. My hands clawed at the back of his jacket, bunching the fabric in my fists, searching for proof under layers of cloth and rain and impossible time. He was solid. Warm. Shaking. His hair brushed my cheek. His breath struck the side of my neck, ragged and uneven, and then his face was buried there, pressed so hard against me it felt like he was trying to disappear into my skin.
“You’re here,” I sobbed. His fingers dug into my back. “You’re here, you’re here, you’re here—”
“Shut up,” he said, but the words broke in the middle.
I cried harder.
His body jerked around a breath that was almost a laugh and almost a sob, ugly and strangled and nothing like the boy who used to laugh like a weapon. He set me down but didn’t let me go. His hands came up to my face, rough palms cupping my cheeks, thumbs dragging beneath my eyes as if tears offended him personally. He looked at me with a kind of panic I had never seen on him before, not even in old fights, not even when blood ran from his nose and he grinned through it because losing scared him less than being seen as weak.
Now he looked terrified.
His eyes moved over my face too quickly. Forehead, mouth, jaw, hair, eyes again. Like he was counting pieces. Like he had to make sure time had not taken anything from him. His thumb caught on my lower lip. He swallowed.
“Yah,” he whispered. “Why are you crying so ugly?”
A laugh tore out of me, half-sob, half-hurt.
I hit his chest with both hands.
It should have been harder. I meant for it to be harder. But the second my palms struck him, I felt bone beneath jacket, the unfamiliar sharpness of him, and my hands curled instead. His chest rose under my fingers. He was real. He was breathing. He was looking at me with rain caught in his lashes and tears sliding down his face like he was furious at them for existing.
“You died,” I said, voice splitting. “You died. They had a funeral. I had to stand there and look at your picture. I had to—”
His mouth twisted.
“I didn’t die.”
“You were gone.”
“I know.”
“You were gone.”
“I know.”
His voice snapped on the second one, not at me, not really, but because something inside him could not stand the words either. His hands slid from my face to the back of my head, fingers tangling in my rain-damp hair with no gentleness left. Not hurting. Holding. Possessive in a way that would have made me shove him before, would have made me tell him I wasn’t something he owned.
But his hands were shaking. He pressed his forehead to mine. His breath came hot against my mouth. “I tried,” he said.
The rain kept falling.
“What?”
His eyes shut. For one second, his face changed completely. The street vanished from him. The pharmacy. His grandmother. Me. He was somewhere else. Somewhere bright and cruel and endless.
“I tried to come back,” he said, so quietly I almost missed it under the hiss of tires on wet asphalt. “Every time.”
Every time.
The words dropped between us like something with teeth.
I wanted to ask. I wanted to know. I wanted to peel the truth out of him with my bare hands and also never hear a single word of it. Because whatever had happened to him lived in his face now. It lived in the way he flinched when a car horn blared again. It lived in the way his hands tightened on me when someone brushed past too close. It lived in the hollow under his cheekbones, in the swollen exhaustion around his eyes, in the strange, feral stillness of his shoulders.
Kyung-jun had always been restless. Always moving, tapping, leaning, shoving, laughing, picking fights with the air if no one else volunteered.
Now he was too still.
Like if he moved wrong, something would start over.
His grandmother was crying behind him. Quietly at first, then not quietly at all. I looked over his shoulder and saw her with one hand over her mouth, eyes fixed on us, the abandoned oranges bright around her feet. She looked like someone watching the dead return and not trusting God enough to thank him yet.
Kyung-jun noticed me looking and turned his head slightly.
“Halmeoni,” he muttered, voice rough. “Stop crying. People are staring.” She made a choked sound that might have been a laugh if grief had not ruined it.
“You awful boy,” she sobbed. “You awful, awful boy.”
His mouth trembled.
Then his face hardened like he hated that too, hated being seen, hated that his grandmother’s love could touch him where everyone could watch. He pulled me against his side without asking, one arm clamping around my shoulders, his palm spread wide over my upper arm like he had no intention of letting the city test him. He bent, picked up the bag with his free hand, then snapped at a man who had stopped too obviously nearby.
“What are you looking at?” The man looked away immediately. I almost cried again because that was him. That was my Kyung-jun, cracked down the middle and still somehow capable of being an asshole to strangers.
His grandmother wiped her face with a trembling hand. “We should go home.”
Kyung-jun did not answer right away.
His arm tightened around me.
I felt it before he said anything. The conflict running through him, sharp and silent. Grandmother. Me. Home. Hospital appointments, police questions, recovery, missing years, a life that had apparently returned without asking him if he knew how to live in it. His jaw worked once. His eyes flicked down to me.
I knew that look.
Not exactly. Not anymore. But enough.
He was asking without asking, because asking made him vulnerable and Kyung-jun would rather swallow glass than sound like he needed anything.
“You can come with me,” I said. His grandmother looked at me. Then at him.
Kyung-jun’s face closed too fast. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You never do.” His eyes flashed, and for one second, beneath the trauma, beneath the rain, beneath the impossible years between us, the old irritation sparked alive.
“Still annoying,” he said.
My throat tightened around something almost like a smile.
“Still ugly when you lie.”
His gaze dropped to my mouth.
The air changed.
It was not soft. Nothing about him was soft right then except the way his hand moved from my shoulder to the back of my neck, fingers sliding under my hair, warm against rain-chilled skin. His eyes held there, on my mouth, like he had dreamed of it so often the real thing had become dangerous. Like touching me had already ruined him and kissing me might finish it.
“Kyung-jun, go with Y/N, call me when you want to come home” his grandmother said gently.
He blinked, jaw flexing but nodding. Then he looked back at me.
“You still live in the city?”
I nodded.
“Alone?”
I nodded again.
His expression sharpened immediately. “Of course you do. Stupid.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“You’ve been missing for two years and you’re already insulting my life choices?”
“You made bad ones while I was gone. Not my fault.”
I stared at him through tears. His mouth twitched. Not a smile. Not quite. More like the ghost of one pressing against a bruise. Then his face crumpled again, so quickly that I barely saw it before he pulled me in and kissed me.
The first touch was not careful. It was desperate enough to frighten both of us.
His mouth found mine with a sound that disappeared into my breath, and for a second there was no street, no rain, no grandmother pretending not to cry while watching us like her heart was being torn apart and stitched back together in the same moment. There was only him. His hand at the back of my neck. His other arm locked around my waist. His mouth hot and trembling against mine, tasting like rain and salt and something ruined. He kissed like someone proving a point to the dead. Like he had argued with the universe for two years and finally gotten his hands on the evidence.
I cried into it.
I couldn’t help it. Tears slipped between our mouths, wetting his upper lip, and he made a low, broken sound that would have embarrassed him if he had been whole enough to care. He pulled back just enough to breathe, forehead still pressed to mine.
“Don’t,” he rasped. I shook my head, unable to stop. “Don’t cry like that,” he said, but his own voice shook so badly the command fell apart. His thumb dragged over my cheek again, rougher now, almost angry. “You think I can handle that right now?”
A laugh scraped out of me. “Sorry my crying is inconvenient for you.”
“Yeah. It is.”
“You’re such an asshole.”
His eyes closed. For the first time, he smiled. Small. Real. Devastating.
“I missed you too.”
My apartment looked different with him inside it.
That was the first thing I noticed when I unlocked the door hours later, after his grandmother made us come back so she could feed him first, after she pressed food on me too with shaking hands and watched Kyung-jun eat like every bite was proof, after police called twice and he ignored the second call until his grandmother slapped his arm and told him not to be rude to detectives. After he packed nothing because he had nothing from before except the clothes he’d come back in and a phone the police had given him that he kept staring at like it belonged to someone else.
He stepped into my place and made it smaller.
He had always done that. Taken up too much space. Filled rooms with shoulders and noise and bad attitude. But now there was a strange caution to him, a pause at the entrance as his eyes moved over everything: the narrow hallway, the shoe rack, the kitchen light I had left on, the stack of textbooks on the table, the blanket folded over the couch. His gaze snagged on ordinary objects like he expected them to change while he wasn’t looking.
I closed the door behind us. The click made him flinch. Only slightly but I saw it.
His head turned fast, eyes cutting to the lock, shoulders rising before he forced them down. The movement was so controlled it hurt worse than if he had jumped. Kyung-jun, who used to slam doors just to make people look at him. Kyung-jun, who used to grin when someone startled. Kyung-jun, who used to fill silence before silence could make him think.
I pretended not to notice.
“You can shower,” I said quietly. “I have towels. Clothes might be—”
“I’m not showering.”
I looked at him. His mouth set. I understood too slowly, then all at once.
He did not want a closed bathroom door between us. He did not want water loud enough to hide sounds. He did not want to be alone in a room with steam on the mirror and no way to see what was coming.
“Okay,” I said.
His eyes narrowed. “Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you feel bad for me.” I held his stare for a second.
Then I kicked off my shoes and walked past him. “Fine. Stay dirty.”
His brows twitched.
There. A spark.
“Yah.”
“What?”
“You got mean.”
I put my keys on the counter. “You were gone for two years. I had to develop a personality.”
“You already had one. It was bad.”
I turned around.
He was still by the door, hands hanging at his sides, looking too large and too lost for the little entranceway. The overhead light carved shadows beneath his cheekbones. His hair had dried messily, falling over his forehead in dark pieces. Without rain between us, without the shock of the street, the changes in him were harder to ignore. He was thinner than before, stripped down to sharper edges. His wrists looked too bony where his sleeves rode up. There were marks near the inside of one elbow. Medical. Old bruising faded yellow-green under the skin. His lips were dry from biting.
My throat tightened. He saw me looking. Of course he did.
“What?” he snapped.
“Nothing.”
“Liar.” The word landed between us differently than it had that last morning.
You’re worried about me?
No.
Liar.
I looked away first because if I didn’t, I would cry again, and he had already told me he couldn’t handle it. I went to the kitchen and filled a glass of water. My hands felt strange around the cup, clumsy and too careful. Behind me, I heard him move at last. Slow footsteps. Then nothing. When I turned back, he was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the wall near my desk.
At the photo. I had forgotten it was there.
It was small, tucked into the corner of the mirror, half-hidden behind a postcard and an old university schedule. A picture from before. One of the only ones I had printed. Kyung-jun in his school uniform, scowling at the camera because I’d taken it without warning, one hand reaching toward the lens like he was about to snatch my phone. Behind the fake annoyance, there was a smile beginning in his eyes.
He stared at it for so long the glass nearly slipped from my hand.
“That’s ugly,” he said. His voice was flat. I walked over and held the water out. He didn’t take it.
“Take the water.”
“I said it’s ugly.”
“I heard you.”
“Why’d you keep it?” The question was too sharp. Too defensive. He still wasn’t looking at me. I lowered the glass slightly.
Because it was the only thing I had that looked alive, I thought. Because after the funeral, every official photo made you look dead. Because sometimes I woke up and couldn’t remember your voice right away, but I could look at that picture and remember the exact insult you threw at me after I took it. Because forgetting one tiny thing about you felt like killing you myself.
I said none of that.
“You owed me money,” I said instead. His head turned. I shrugged. “I needed evidence.” For half a second, he only stared. Then the sound that came out of him was almost a laugh.
It broke before it could become one. His mouth twisted, his eyes shining too bright again, and he turned away like I had done something unfair by making him feel a normal thing. His hand came up, rubbing roughly over his face.
“Fuck,” he muttered. I stepped closer. He tensed.
I stopped.
The space between us suddenly felt alive. Full of everything we had not been able to say across two years and whatever nightmare had held him. Full of every unanswered call, every birthday he missed, every night I fell asleep with his hoodie twisted in my hands. Full of every time he must have woken inside that game and realized it had started again. Full of the fact that I had mourned him in black while he was somewhere dying in ways I could not imagine.
“What happened?” I asked.
He went very still.
The apartment changed with the question.
The refrigerator hummed. Rain ticked against the window. Somewhere upstairs, a chair scraped across the floor. Ordinary sounds, thin and harmless, gathering around us as if they too were waiting.
Kyung-jun’s hand dropped from his face.
For a while, he said nothing.
Then he walked past me to the couch and sat down heavily, elbows on his knees, head bowed. The posture did not suit him. Kyung-jun sprawled. Kyung-jun took space. Kyung-jun leaned back like the world had been built for his comfort. Seeing him folded forward like that made something cold slide beneath my ribs.
I sat beside him, close enough that our knees touched. He looked at the contact. Then at me. His knee pressed harder into mine.
“We didn’t go to some class trip” he said.
“I know.” His eyes flicked up. “The police said the trip records were fake,” I said. “Or planted. Or something. They never explained it clearly.”
He scoffed. The sound was automatic, bitter. “Of course they didn’t.”
“What happened?” His hands clasped between his knees. His fingers tightened until the knuckles went pale.
“You won’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
His mouth curved, but there was no humor in it. “Always so confident.”
“Kyung-jun.” The way I said his name made him look at me, like the sound of his name in my mouth pulled something in him loose.
His gaze dropped again, this time to my hands. They were folded in my lap, gripping each other too tightly. After a second, he reached over and pried them apart with rough fingers. Not gentle, exactly. Kyung-jun had never been good at gentle in a way that looked clean from the outside. He hooked his hand around mine and held on. Hard.
“There was a game,” he said. The room seemed to tilt. “Some fucking game we used to play in high school. Not like—” He stopped, jaw flexing, and let out a humorless little breath. “Not some phone game. Not a joke. We woke up in a youth center. It looked real. Felt real. People died.”
His thumb dug into the back of my hand.
“They died, there was a winning team, and then it started again.”
I did not move. I barely breathed. He kept staring at our hands as if my fingers were the only reason the room was still here.
“At first we thought… I don’t know what the fuck we thought. We didn't remember we had played it over and over until they pulled us out. Bodies started dropping and everyone started acting like animals, and every time we got close to figuring something out, it reset.” His voice thickened. He swallowed hard. “You die in there, you feel it.”
My stomach turned.
“You died?” His silence answered before he did. He laughed once. It was horrible.
“Many times.”
The air left me. He looked at me then, eyes sharp with something almost angry, like my fear hurt him and he wanted to punish the room for making me show it.
“Don’t look like that.”
“How am I supposed to look?”
“Not like that.”
“Kyung-jun—”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” he snapped. The words cracked through the apartment. I flinched. He saw. His face changed. The anger vanished so quickly it frightened me, leaving something raw and young underneath. He let go of my hand as if he had burned me.
“Shit,” he muttered. “I didn’t—”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.” His jaw clenched. He stared at the floor. “Don’t say that when it’s not.”
I swallowed.
That sounded like him too. Mean little mouth. Brutal honesty when softness would have been easier. But beneath it, something had shifted. Before, he snapped because he wanted control. Now he snapped because control was all he had left, and even that kept slipping.
I reached for him slowly this time, giving him space to pull away. He watched my hand like it was dangerous. When my fingers touched his wrist, his eyes shut. Just once. Briefly. But the breath that left him shook.
“I thought you were dead,” I whispered. His hand turned under mine, fast, catching my fingers before I could move away.
“I thought you forgot me.” The words were so quiet I almost didn’t understand them. Something inside me tore open all over again.
He looked furious at himself the second they were out, eyes flashing, mouth hardening like he wanted to shove the sentence back down his own throat. But it was too late. It sat between us. Small and naked and bleeding.
“You thought what?”
He stood abruptly.
I startled, looking up as he paced two steps away, then back, then stopped because there wasn’t enough room in my apartment for whatever was moving through him. His hands went to his hair, pushing it back from his face.
“It was two years,” he said. “I don’t know. In there, time was fucked. Sometimes it felt like days. Sometimes forever. Every time it started again, I remembered less at first. Faces got blurry. Voices got—” He cut himself off. His throat worked. “I kept trying to remember yours.”
My eyes burned.
He turned on me suddenly, pointing like he was accusing me of something.
“Your laugh was annoying as hell. That helped.”
A broken sound slipped out of me.
“And your face,” he continued, voice roughening around every word, “because you always looked at me like you wanted to hit me.”
“I usually did.”
“Yeah. I know.” His mouth twitched, then trembled. “I kept thinking, if I forgot that, I’d really die.”
I stood. He watched me, breathing harder now, shoulders rising and falling beneath his jacket. I crossed the little space between us. For once, he did not make a joke. For once, he did not move first.
I reached up and touched his face.
His skin was warm. Real. Slightly rough beneath my palm. A tiny muscle jumped in his jaw. His eyes stayed on mine with a desperation so intense it felt less like looking and more like being held down by it. The old Kyung-jun would have smirked. He would have said something filthy or stupid or mean to cut the tension before it could cut him.
This one only stood there and let me touch him like he needed it more than pride.
“I didn’t forget you,” I said. His lips parted. “I tried,” I whispered, and that hurt him; I saw it land. “Not because I wanted to. Because everyone kept telling me I had to live. They said I had to move on. They said I was young, that you’d want me to be happy.”
His eyes darkened.
“I would not say that.”
I let out a watery laugh. “No. You’d say something awful.”
“I’d say if you got some ugly boyfriend while I was gone, I’d haunt you.”
“There were no boyfriends.” His whole face changed. The relief was so fast, so violent, that he looked away from me as if I had caught him doing something obscene.
I should have teased him.
Before, I would have. I would have laughed and said, What, were you worried? I would have poked at him until he snapped, because that was how we loved each other then, with teeth and stupid little wounds neither of us meant to make deep.
But now I only watched the tendons in his neck shift as he swallowed.
“No one,” I said. His gaze came back slowly. “I couldn’t,” I admitted. “Not when I still—”
The word love hovered at the back of my throat, too bright, too enormous for the small room. Kyung-jun stepped into me before I could finish.
His arms went around me with a force that stole my breath. He bent over me, face pressing into my hair, one hand splayed between my shoulder blades, the other locked low at my waist. He held me like the world had already taken me once and he was not stupid enough to trust it again. His body was shaking. I felt it everywhere we touched. A tremor running beneath muscle and bone, down his arms, through his hands, into me.
“I’m not leaving,” he said. It came out harsh. Almost like a threat. My cheek pressed against his chest. His heart beat too fast under my ear.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” His hand tightened. “You don’t. You go to class, I’m going with you. You go buy water, I’m going. You go to the bathroom—”
I pulled back enough to look up at him. “Absolutely not.”
His eyes were wet again, but his mouth curled. “Why? Shy now?”
“You’re insane.”
“Yeah,” he said, and the smile vanished. “Probably.”
The honesty hit harder than any joke.
His gaze moved over my face, slower now, not counting pieces this time but memorizing them. There was hunger in it, yes, but not simple hunger. Not the easy, cocky kind he used to wear when he wanted me to blush. This was deeper. Worse. A need scraped raw by terror. He looked at my mouth like he had imagined it in the dark. Like he had survived on memory until memory wasn’t enough, and now that I was here, breathing in front of him, his body didn’t know how to be anything but starving.
“Kyung-jun,” I whispered.
“What.”
“You need sleep.”
He gave me a look. “Wow. Romantic.”
“You look like you’re about to collapse.”
“I’m fine.” I stared at him. He stared back. Then his jaw tightened. “I said I’m fine.”
The room filled with all the things that sentence could not hide. The dark crescents beneath his eyes. The way he stood too close to me and still looked afraid the distance might grow. The way he kept glancing at the door even though he had checked the lock twice. The way his fingers flexed whenever there was a sound in the hallway.
“You don’t have to be,” I said.
His expression went cold so fast it was almost impressive.
“Don’t start.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m saying you can sleep here.”
“Obviously.”
“On the couch.”
His face offended itself.
“The couch?”
“Yes.”
He looked at the couch, then back at me as if I had personally betrayed him. “After two years, you’re putting me on the couch?”
A laugh burst out of me before I could stop it. His eyes caught on it. The anger in his face fell fast. For a second, he just stared, and the room softened around the edges.
“What?” I asked, wiping under my eye. His mouth pressed into a line.
“Nothing.”
“Liar.” He looked away, but not fast enough. Color had risen faintly along his cheekbones. I touched his sleeve. “What?”
“Your laugh,” he muttered. My chest hurt. He still wouldn’t look at me. “Still annoying,” he added, weaker, voice shaking slightly.
I stepped closer and wrapped my arms around his middle. He let me. More than let me. His body folded around mine almost instantly, chin dropping to the top of my head, hands finding my back again. He exhaled like he had been holding his breath since the street, since the game, since the first time he woke up and realized dying had not freed him.
“We can share the bed,” I said into his shirt. “But only sleeping.”
“Who said I was thinking anything else?” I tilted my head back to look at him. His brows lifted, almost like before. Almost. “What?” he said. “You think I’m some kind of pervert?”
“I think you’re you.”
“Exactly. So, yes.” I shoved his chest. He caught my wrist and pulled it back around him.
“No,” he said. The word was quiet. My breath caught. He looked down at where my hand rested against him, fingers curled in his shirt. “Don’t move away yet.”
There was no joke after it. No smirk. No insult to cover the soft underbelly of the request. So I didn’t move.
I stood there in the middle of my apartment, wrapped around the boy I had buried without a body, feeling his heart slam beneath my palm as if it was trying to make up for every beat I had missed. Outside, the rain kept threading silver down the window. The city moved on unaware, cars passing, people laughing under umbrellas, neon signs bleeding color into puddles. Somewhere in that same city, police reports were being written. Families were being called. A whole class was being returned to a world that had already mourned them and moved their desks and packed away their uniforms.
But inside my apartment, time narrowed to the shape of his hands.
After a while, he let me lead him to the bedroom. He hesitated in the doorway. I felt it through his hand before I saw it. The slight resistance. The way his fingers locked around mine.
“It’s just my room,” I said.
His eyes swept over the bed, the window, the closet, the lamp, every shadowed corner. “I know.”
“You can leave the door open.”
His mouth tightened. “I’m not scared.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“I’m not.”
“I know.”
He glared at me, but it was ruined by exhaustion. “Stop agreeing with me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m some injured dog you found in an alley.” My eyes moved over him before I could stop them. The bruises. The scars. The hollowed exhaustion. The boy still standing because falling would mean trusting the floor. His gaze sharpened.
“Don’t,” he warned.
I looked back at his face. “Okay.”
He waited, suspicious. I squeezed his hand once and turned down the blanket. He watched like the bed might bite. Then, very suddenly, he said, “I want to marry you.”
My hands froze on the blanket. The silence afterward was enormous. I turned around slowly.
Kyung-jun stood in the doorway with his shoulders tense and his chin lifted, defensive already, like he had thrown a punch and was waiting for one back. His face was serious in a way that made my stomach drop. No teasing curve to his mouth. No theatrical arrogance. Just those dark, damaged eyes fixed on me with too much certainty for the soft yellow light of my bedroom.
“What?” I whispered.
“I said I want to marry you.” My heart lurched so hard it was almost pain.
“You just came back from being kidnapped and tortured.”
“Yeah. I noticed.”
“Kyung-jun.”
“What?” His voice rose, sharp with embarrassment now, with fear disguised badly as irritation. “You want me to wait? For what? So some counselor can tell me my feelings are a trauma response? So people can say I’m unstable? I already know I’m fucked up. Congratulations. Still want to marry you.”
I stared at him.
He rubbed a hand over his mouth, angry at himself, at me, at the room, at whatever had made the words come out before he could dress them in cruelty.
“I’m not saying tomorrow,” he muttered.
“That’s surprisingly reasonable.”
His eyes flashed. “Don’t make fun of me.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
I looked down at the floor, my vision blurring, my heart thumping so loud I'm surprised he hasn't complained about it yet. “I’m just...trying not to cry.” That shut him up. His face shifted again, the anger breaking at the edges.
I stepped toward him carefully. He did not step back. When I reached him, I touched the front of his jacket, smoothing nothing, fixing nothing, just laying my hands there because I could. Because once, for two years, I had only been able to touch cotton that no longer smelled like him.
“You can want that,” I said. His throat moved. “Cause I want it too. But you also need to heal.” His expression hardened. I held his jacket tighter before he could pull away. “And I’m not saying that because I don’t want you. I’m saying it because I do. I want you alive. Actually alive. Not just back.”
The words hit him somewhere deep. His eyes lowered. For a long moment, he said nothing. Then, in a voice so low I felt it more than heard it, he said, “I don’t know how.” I closed my eyes. There it was.
The thing under everything. Under the jokes. Under the snapping. Under the possessive hands and the marriage demand and the way he kept looking at me like I was the last piece of shore after a shipwreck.
I stepped into him and wrapped my arms around his neck. He bent immediately, face dropping to my shoulder.
“We’ll figure it out,” I whispered.
His laugh was bitter against my skin. “That sounds stupid.”
“Yeah.”
“Like something people say when they don’t know shit.”
“Probably.” His arms tightened around me.
“Say it again.” My eyes burned.
“We’ll figure it out.”
His breath shook. Again, I thought he might say. Again, like a boy asking for one more story before sleep. But he only held me, silent and trembling, until the worst of it passed through him.
When we finally lay down, he didn’t take off his jacket at first. He lay on top of the blanket, stiff as a corpse, eyes open and fixed on the ceiling. I lay beside him in the dim light, listening to the rain soften against the glass. The space between us was only a few inches, but it felt cruel.
“You can come closer,” I said.
“I know.”
He didn’t move.
I turned on my side. His profile was sharp in the dark, lashes lowered but not closed, mouth tense. He looked like he was bracing for something. A vote. A scream. A body hitting the floor. The start of another loop.
I reached out and touched his hand. His fingers closed around mine so fast it hurt.
“Sorry,” he muttered immediately, loosening his grip by force.
“It’s okay.”
He turned his head toward me. “Stop saying that.”
“Then stop apologizing.”
“I didn’t apologize.”
“You literally just did.”
“No, I didn’t.” I smiled despite everything. His gaze dropped to it. The room stilled again.
Slowly, as if sudden movement might shatter whatever fragile thing had survived between us, he turned onto his side. His hand came up, hovering near my face. Waiting. That, more than anything, made my chest ache. Kyung-jun had never hovered. He took, grabbed, pulled, crowded. He tested the world with his hands and dared it to complain.
Now he waited. I leaned into his palm. His breath caught.
There was something unbearable about being touched by him after so long. Not because it was new, but because it was familiar in a way my body had almost convinced itself it invented. The rough pad of his thumb beneath my cheekbone. The warmth of his palm. The faint tremor he could not quite hide. His eyes kept moving over me, over and over, like he was afraid sleep would steal the details.
“I used to think about this,” he said.
My throat tightened. “About my bed?”
“Don’t ruin it.” I almost laughed. He brushed his thumb across my cheek. “About your face. Your voice. Stupid things.” His mouth twisted. “You yelling at me. You pretending you weren’t jealous. You getting mad when I bought you coffee because I said your taste was childish.”
“You said only babies drink sweet coffee.”
“You did drink sweet coffee.”
“I still do.”
He stared at me.
Then, very softly, “Good.”
The word broke me more than it should have.
Because it meant I had stayed real in some tiny way. Because it meant the world had not taken every version of us. Because sweet coffee, crooked collars, ugly crying, stupid insults — they had survived too, buried under horror, waiting for him to come back and be cruel about them.
His hand slid to the back of my neck.
“Come here,” he said. It was not really an order. I moved closer anyway.
He pulled me into him, under the blanket this time, his body curling around mine with desperate heat. He was bigger than I remembered. Or maybe I had made him smaller in grief so I could survive the size of missing him. His chest pressed against my back, knees behind mine, arm locked across my waist. His breath stirred the hair near my ear. The whole bed seemed to hold its breath with us.
For a while, neither of us spoke.
Then, barely audible, he said, “I thought I’d never do this again.” My fingers covered his hand on my stomach. He turned his palm upward and tangled our fingers together.
“I’m here,” I whispered. His forehead pressed to the back of my neck.
“Yeah,” he said. A minute passed. Then another. His breathing did not slow. I knew he was afraid to sleep.
Maybe he knew I knew, because his hand tightened once, warning me not to say it. So I didn’t. I lay there in the dark with his body wrapped around mine and let silence do what words would ruin. The city lights shone through the curtains in thin silver lines. Rainwater tracked down the window like veins. His heart beat against my back, too fast, too alive, and every time it stumbled into a harder rhythm, I squeezed his hand until it steadied.
Sometime, when my eyes began to shut slowly, his mouth brushed the nape of my neck. Not a kiss, not quite. A touch. A check. A prayer he would deny making.
“You better not disappear,” he murmured, voice thick with exhaustion. My eyes filled again. I turned carefully in his arms.
He resisted for half a second, then let me face him. His eyes were half-lidded, dark and ruined and still so painfully him that I could barely stand it. I touched his cheek. He leaned into it before he could stop himself.
“You disappeared first,” I whispered.
His mouth twitched faintly.
“Yeah,” he said. “My bad.” A laugh broke out of me, quiet and wet. His eyes softened. Then he kissed me again. This one was slower.
Not less desperate. Never that. The desperation was still there, threaded through his fingers in my hair, in the way his body shifted closer, in the way he breathed against my mouth like every inhale had to pass through me first. But there was something else under it now. Recognition. Grief. The ache of two people touching across the grave everyone else had already built.
He kissed me like he was tired of dying. Like he was angry he had lost time. Like he loved me so much it had nowhere clean to go, so it came out in trembling hands and bitten-back sounds and his forehead pressed to mine afterward, his eyes shut tight.
By four in the morning, the room has stopped pretending to be night and has not yet become morning.
It is that strange, thin hour where the dark turns gray at the edges, where everything feels suspended and unclaimed, where the city outside my window has gone quiet enough that I can hear the building breathing around us. Pipes knock faintly behind the walls. Rainwater gathers at the window ledge and drops in uneven little taps against the metal frame. Somewhere far below, a car passes through the wet street with a soft hiss, tires dragging through puddles, then fades until there is nothing left but the low electric hum of the refrigerator and Kyung-jun’s breathing beside me.
Not sleeping. He has been lying beside me for hours with his eyes open. I know because I have been awake for all of it.
At first, I pretend not to notice. I lie still beneath the blanket with my hand trapped in his, my fingers numb from how tightly he keeps remembering I am there. Every few minutes, his grip changes. Not loosening exactly. Testing. His thumb presses into my knuckles, then slides over them as if counting. His palm warms mine, then tightens again like something inside him startles awake without warning. Once, when the pipes groan too loudly in the wall, his whole body goes rigid beside me, the muscles in his arm locking so suddenly that my wrist aches. He does not move after. Does not speak. Does not explain. He just stares at the ceiling as if something has written instructions there in the dark.
I watch him through half-lowered lashes.
His face looks worse in the almost-morning. The shadows are gentler, but somehow less forgiving. In the yellow lamp glow, he looked wounded. In this hour, he looks haunted. Like whatever brought him back forgot to return all of him. His hair is messy against my pillow, black strands falling over his forehead, and his eyes keep fixed upward, dry and too dark, the skin beneath them bruised with exhaustion. His mouth is slightly parted. Not soft. Not relaxed. Ready. As if breath itself is something he might need to fight for.
Every now and then, he blinks too fast. Like he is trying not to see something. Or trying not to sleep because sleep is where it waits. I understand it slowly. Not as a thought at first, but as a coldness spreading beneath my ribs. The game had nights.
The dying would not have waited politely for daylight. The fear would not have given them neat hours to survive in. There must have been dark rooms and locked doors and hallways too silent to trust, clocks crawling toward whatever time meant death, classmates whispering and accusing and waiting for the announcement that would ruin someone. There must have been the terrible moment before sleep, when exhaustion became a trap. When closing your eyes meant surrendering the one piece of control you still had. When waking might mean relief, or blood, or another beginning.
And now he is here, in my bed, in my apartment, in a world that insists it is real because the blanket is soft and the rain is wet and my hand is in his.
But if he sleeps—If he wakes up somewhere else—I turn my face into the pillow to hide the way my mouth trembles. Kyung-jun notices anyway. His head shifts on the pillow. His eyes move to me. Immediate.
“What?” he asks. His voice is rough from disuse and too much staying awake. It scrapes through the dark quietly, but the sharp edge of him is still there, stripped down and hoarse.
I shake my head once.
His fingers tighten around mine.
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Act like I’m stupid.”
I look at him then.
He is already looking at me so hard it feels like being held under light. The old Kyung-jun would have smirked after saying it. Would have made some cutting little comment, something ugly enough to make me roll my eyes and forget the tenderness underneath. This Kyung-jun only watches me with a kind of brittle intensity, as if my face is a language he has been studying in the dark for two years and he still cannot trust his own translation.
I swallow.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m thinking.”
“Dangerous.”
It should be funny. It almost is.
The word comes out faintly, more habit than joke. There is no real bite behind it. He looks too tired to sharpen himself all the way. Too raw to hide under the familiar shape of cruelty. His thumb moves once over my fingers, dragging across the same place again and again until my skin tingles.
I let the silence settle. Then I begin to sit up. It happens fast. Too fast. Before I have even pulled my hand from his, Kyung-jun is upright.
The blanket twists around his waist, his hand clamping around my wrist, not enough to hurt but hard enough to stop me cold. His eyes are wide in the dim room.
Scared. It flashes across him nakedly before he can kill it.
“Where are you going?”
The words are quiet, but there is something terrible under them. A crack. A drop. A boy standing on the edge of losing the room, the bed, the girl beside him, the proof that this has not been another cruel loop designed to let him breathe before choking him again.
I freeze. My heart squeezes so hard my own fear forgets what it was doing.
“I’m not leaving.” His grip does not loosen. I say it again, softer. “I’m not leaving, Kyung-jun.”
His eyes flick over my face, then to the door, then back. His breathing has changed. He is trying to make it quiet, trying to force it down before I can hear how uneven it is, but I can hear it. I can feel it through his hand on my wrist. Each breath comes like it has to push past something lodged in his chest.
“Then where?”
“I want to take a bath.”
He stares.
I wet my lips. “I thought it might help. My nerves feel…” I stop, because the lie is not fully a lie, and that makes it harder to say. My nerves are ruined. My body feels wrung out, hollowed by shock and crying and the impossible weight of having him beside me again. But that is not why I am getting up. “The warm water might help.”
His gaze stays on mine. The room holds still. He knows.
Maybe not exactly. Maybe not the whole small, careful plan forming in my head — the salts under the sink, the big tub I used to love because it made my apartment feel softer than it was, the heat loosening his muscles, the steam making the room warm enough that sleep might creep up on him without feeling like a trap. But he knows there is something gentle in it, and gentleness is the thing that scares him most right now.
His throat moves.
“I’ll come with you.” He says it like he expects me to argue. I don’t. I nod.
Something in his face loosens so slightly I would have missed it if I had not spent two years keeping every piece of him alive in my memory. His fingers slide from my wrist to my hand. He does not apologize this time. Does not pretend he was not afraid. He just holds on and gets out of bed when I do, moving too carefully for someone his size, like the floor might shift if he trusts it too much.
My bedroom feels colder once we leave the blanket behind.
The apartment is dark except for the lamp near the couch and the faint blue wash of city light through the windows. We walk barefoot through the hallway. His hand stays locked around mine. Not romantic in the simple way it used to be when we would walk home after school and he would pretend he was holding my hand only because I was “slow” and “needed supervision.” This is different. His palm is damp. His fingers are cold. Every step he takes beside me feels measured against the possibility of waking somewhere else.
At the bathroom door, he stops. Just for a second. I glance back.
He is looking into the little room with a wariness that makes my chest ache. My bathroom is not frightening. It has never been frightening. It is small but pretty, tiled in soft cream, with a narrow window above the tub and a shelf crowded with bottles I always mean to organize. There is a separate bathtub tucked against the far wall, wide and deep, curved like something made for quiet. I bought eucalyptus salts once because the packaging looked calming and expensive, even though I knew I would probably only use them twice. A little wooden stool sits beside the tub with folded towels stacked on top. A candle I have never lit sits near the sink, dusty around the rim.
It is ordinary. Sweet, even. Kyung-jun looks at it like ordinary things cannot be trusted. I squeeze his hand. He looks down at me. Just those eyes, dark and sleepless, asking something he would rather die than put into words.
“You can keep the door open,” I say. He swallows. Then he shakes his head once.
“No.” The word is barely there. Not because he wants privacy. Because closing the door means choosing to believe nothing waits outside it. Because maybe he is tired of being afraid of doors. I nod and step inside first. He follows.
The bathroom light is too bright when I turn it on, and he flinches before he can stop himself. His jaw tightens immediately, anger rising instinctively to cover the crack, but it dies before reaching his mouth. He lowers his eyes and exhales through his nose, slow and hard.
I don’t say anything. I turn on the bath instead.
The pipes groan, then water spills into the tub, loud at first, rushing and silver under the light. Steam begins to lift almost immediately, softening the mirror, blurring the sharp edges of us. I kneel beside the tub and test the temperature with my fingers, letting the heat bite gently at my skin. Too hot. I adjust the tap. The sound fills the room until there is no need to talk, and maybe that is mercy. Maybe that is why I chose this. Water can cover silence without demanding it be explained.
Kyung-jun stands behind me.
I can feel him there.
Not touching now, but close enough that his shadow falls over my shoulder. When I reach under the sink for the salts, he shifts as if the movement startles him, then stills again. I pour a handful into the water. The crystals disappear in small white swirls, dissolving into the heat, and the faint smell of lavender and something herbal rises with the steam.
I expect him to say something. Lavender? Seriously? Are we old ladies now? Or, What is this rich-person bath nonsense? Or, You always buy useless stuff. He says nothing. That is worse. I turn. He is staring at me.
The bathroom light catches the hollows under his eyes. The steam beads faintly at his hairline. He looks too tall for the room, shoulders nearly filling the space between sink and wall, hands hanging at his sides like he does not know what to do with them if they are not holding onto me. His face has gone unreadable, but not in the old way. Not bored. Not cruel.
Bare. There is no audience here. No classmates to impress. No hallway to dominate. No game to survive by being louder than fear. Just him. Just me. Just the water filling the tub between us like something waiting to be crossed. I stand slowly.
The tile is cool beneath my feet. My oversized sleep shirt clings faintly where my palms are damp from the bathwater. For a moment, neither of us moves. The water keeps running. Steam curls upward. The mirror clouds at the edges until our reflections begin to fade, two blurred figures in a small warm room at the hour when nightmares usually have teeth.
I take one step toward him. His eyes lower to my mouth. Then back to my eyes. I lift my hand and touch his cheek. He closes his eyes.
The reaction is so immediate, so helpless, that I feel it down to my bones. He leans into my palm before pride can stop him. Enough for my thumb to feel the slight tremor in his jaw. Enough for the air to leave him like he has been standing in armor too heavy to breathe inside.
I kiss him.
Softly at first.
Because he feels like something cracked that might cut both of us if I move too quickly. His lips are still beneath mine for half a second, frozen in surprise or restraint or the exhaustion of wanting too much. Then he melts.
There is no other word for it.
His shoulders drop. His hands come to my waist, not grabbing, not claiming, just landing there like he has finally found somewhere to put all the shaking. His mouth opens against mine with a sound so quiet it disappears into the rush of bathwater. He kisses me back slowly, deeply, like speed would make it less real. Like if he rushes, the moment might tear. Like he has imagined this in so many versions of hell that now the real thing has to be handled with both hands.
My fingers slide into his hair.
He shudders.
The sound he makes then is almost nothing. A breath caught too low in his chest. It goes through me anyway, warm and painful, and my eyes sting behind closed lids because this is the boy I mourned and the boy who came back and the stranger made out of everything that happened while I was not there to hold him.
When I pull back, his eyes stay closed. His forehead rests against mine.
“Don’t stop,” he whispers. It is not seductive. It is ruined. I kiss him again because I cannot answer without breaking.
This time his hands tighten, but still not with the old carelessness. He holds me like someone trying to remember gentleness from another life. His thumbs press into my sides through my shirt. His breath shakes into my mouth. I feel him keeping himself still, feel the strain of it in every line of his body. Want and grief and terror have tangled so tightly inside him that none of them know their own names anymore.
I draw back just enough to touch the hem of his shirt. He opens his eyes. For a second, I see the question there. Not refusal. Not embarrassment. Permission. I give him time to pull away. He doesn’t. So I lift the shirt slowly.
The fabric rises over his stomach, his ribs, his chest. I keep my eyes on his face because this feels too tender to watch like discovery, too sacred to turn into anything else. His arms lift when I need them to. His breath catches when the shirt passes over his head. His hair falls messily back into his eyes after, and for one fleeting, devastating second, he looks like the boy from before, annoyed and beautiful and too proud to admit he likes being touched.
Then I see the marks.
Not all of them. Not clearly. The bathroom is warm and bright and full of steam, but my mind refuses to take him apart like evidence. Still, there are things I cannot miss. Faint bruising near one shoulder. A thin healing line along his side. Small round medical marks near the inside of his elbow. The sharpness of his collarbones where they never used to be so sharp. The places where his body has been maintained, restrained, neglected, returned.
My hands still. His gaze drops to them. Then to my face. A muscle jumps in his jaw.
“It’s ugly,” he says. Quiet. Flat. Like he has already decided what I am allowed to think. I step closer and press my mouth to the center of his chest. His entire body locks. Under my lips, his heart slams once, hard.
I stay there for a moment, my hands resting carefully against his sides, feeling the heat of him, the breath he is holding, the life beneath skin that was supposed to be gone. When I lift my face, his eyes are shining again, but his mouth is twisted with something angry and helpless.
“Don’t do that,” he says.
“What?”
He looks away.
“Make it worse.”
I touch his jaw and bring him back to me.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“How?”
His throat works.
“You make me want to live,” he says, and looks furious the second the words leave him. The bathroom seems to go silent beneath the water. I stare at him. He stares back like he wants to fight me for hearing it.
Then his face crumples at the edges, not enough for anyone else maybe, but enough for me. Enough that the boy who once called love embarrassing stands half-undressed in my bathroom at four in the morning and cannot hide the fact that survival has left him more frightened than death did.
I reach for his hands. He lets me.
“You are alive,” I say.
His fingers curl around mine.
“For now.”
The words are barely audible. Cold slides through me.
I want to argue. I want to say no, no, don’t say that, don’t put it in the room. But I understand too well what he means. Not that he wants to die. That he does not trust life to hold. That every time something good appears, he expects the lights to change, the announcement to play, the game to start again.
So I do not correct him. I lift his hand and press his knuckles to my mouth. His eyes shut.
“You’re here now,” I whisper. He breathes out unsteadily. “For now,” I add, because maybe that is the only truth his body can accept. His eyes open. Something in them softens, breaks, stays. I let go only long enough to take off my shirt.
His gaze follows the movement, but it does not feel like being looked at in the way I remember from before, when he would stare too long just to make me blush and then grin like he had won something. This is not that. This is quieter. Reverent in a way he would hate if I named it. His eyes move over me and stop, not hungry or careless, but stunned by proximity. By trust. By skin and breath and the fact that I am standing in front of him, not a memory he had to fight to keep, not a face blurring at the edges of some nightmare loop.
Just me. Real enough to be cold in the steam. I reach behind myself to unclasp my bra. His hand moves before he thinks, then stops halfway. Waiting again. That almost undoes me.
I finish it myself, letting the straps slide down my arms. The air touches me, warm and damp. I do not cover myself. Because he looks as if any sign of shame would kill something fragile in him. Because this is not about being seen beautifully. It is about being seen safely. It is about telling him with my body what words keep failing to prove.
I am here. I trust you. You can be here too.
His eyes lift to mine. There is no smirk. No comment. No old, sharp joke to ruin the softness before it can touch him. He only whispers my name. And it sounds like something he said in the dark to keep from disappearing.
I turn off the water. The sudden quiet is enormous.
Steam drifts around us, softening the room until the edges blur. We undress the rest of the way without speaking, speech feels too rough for what is happening. Clothing falls in small, ordinary sounds. Fabric against tile. A soft scrape. The whisper of a drawer opening when I take out two towels and set them within reach. We do not look away like strangers. We do not stare like lovers about to become reckless. We simply make space for each other’s vulnerability and try not to crush it with our hands.
When I step into the tub, the heat takes me by surprise.
It closes around my ankles, my calves, then my thighs as I sink down carefully. My body, wound tight for hours, resists it at first. Then the warmth reaches my hips, my stomach, my ribs, and something inside me loosens so suddenly that my eyes fill again. I turn my face away before Kyung-jun can see.
Too late. He sees everything now. He steps in after me.
For someone so tall, he moves slowly, lowering himself into the water behind me with a careful breath. The tub is big enough, but still, he fills it. His knees bracket mine. His body settles against the curved porcelain, and for a moment he holds himself away from me, as if the last inch matters. As if even now he thinks restraint is proof of goodness. Or control. Or survival.
The water shifts around us. Warmth rises. My back is almost touching his chest. Almost. Neither of us breathes properly. Then his hands come to my waist. He pulls me back.
My body slides through the water until I am flush against him, back to his chest, his legs around me, his arms folding over my stomach like gates closing. Heat surrounds me from every side: the bathwater, the steam, his skin, the trembling breath he releases against my shoulder. His chin lowers to the curve where my neck meets my shoulder. For a second, he just holds me there. Not kissing. Not talking. Holding.
His body shakes once. Then again. I cover his forearm with both hands. The water rocks gently against the sides of the tub.
“You’re warm,” he murmurs.
The words are so small I almost miss them.
I close my eyes.
“So are you.”
His arms tighten.
“No,” he says, voice rough. “I mean… you’re warm.”
Like that is proof too.
Like in the game everything had become cold eventually. Floors. Skin. Fear. Dead hands. Reset mornings with fake sunlight and no real warmth. Like the mind can be trapped somewhere so long it forgets the simple fact of another living body.
He presses his nose into my hair and inhales.
Not in that teasing way he used to do when he would complain about my shampoo and then bury his face in my neck anyway. This is different. He breathes me in like a person starved of air. Like scent is memory made physical. Like the lavender in the bath and the soap on my skin and the faint trace of rain still clinging to my hair are all anchors he can tie himself to before the world starts drifting again.
“I forgot your shampoo once,” he says.
My fingers still against his arm. His mouth is near my ear, but his eyes are not on me. I can feel it. He is staring at the water, or through it, or at something that is not in the room.
“In there,” he continues. “I remembered your face. Your voice. The way you used to look at me like you were deciding if prison was worth it. I would look at the pictures I had of you in my phone, rewatch the videos over and over until I thought I'd be sick of your voice or laugh, but I never did,”
A breath that is almost a laugh leaves me. His mouth brushes my temple, not quite a kiss.
“But the shampoo—” He stops. His throat moves against my shoulder. “I couldn’t remember it. It was such a stupid thing. I knew it was sweet. I knew I used to say it gave me a headache. I knew I liked it. But I couldn’t remember exactly.”
My chest hurts so sharply I press his arm harder against me.
“I thought that meant you were going,” he says.
The water feels suddenly too hot.
“Like pieces of you were getting taken. First that. Then maybe the way you looked at me. Or the way you felt against me. Then one day I’d wake up and know I was waiting for someone, but not who.” His voice thins. He swallows and presses his mouth to the side of my head, hard, as if stopping himself from saying more might physically hurt less. “I got scared.”
Kyung-jun saying scared is worse than crying. It is the bravest thing I have ever heard him do. I turn in his arms.
The movement makes water spill against the sides of the tub, a soft slap against porcelain. His hands loosen just enough to let me shift, then tighten again the moment I am facing him. I settle between his legs, knees tucked around him, water lapping at my ribs. His face is close now. Too close for hiding. Steam clings to his lashes. His hair curls slightly damp at the ends. His eyes are red-rimmed, furious with himself and still unable to stop.
I touch his cheek.
“You remembered enough.”
His jaw tightens.
“You don’t get it.”
“Then tell me.”
He looks away. I wait.
The old Kyung-jun hated waiting. He would fill silence by force, slash it open with mockery, make someone else uncomfortable before discomfort could settle on him. This Kyung-jun sits in the water with me at four in the morning and lets silence gather because there are no jokes strong enough to carry what he has brought back.
When he speaks, his voice is lower.
“At night, it was worse.”
My thumb stills against his cheek. He looks past me, toward the tiled wall.
“The game had rules. Times. Votes. Executions. People screaming at each other like screaming made them less likely to die.” His mouth twists. “Everyone got ugly. Me too. Maybe I was already ugly, so it wasn’t a big change.”
“Don’t.”
His eyes flick to mine. I do not look away. His expression shifts — irritation, old and familiar, rising for half a heartbeat — then it fades because he is too tired to pretend he does not understand why I stopped him.
He exhales.
“At night, you’d sit in a locked room with someone, not knowing if they'd kill you while you were passed out. We didn't even sleep, we just dropped the second the clock turned 12. Sometimes, before it was midnight and everyone had hid I would hear crying through the wall. Or someone praying which was stupid cause God had clearly not been there to save us...” His gaze drops to the water. “Sometimes you woke up and someone right next to you was dead.”
My throat closes. The water ripples between us.
He drags his wet hand up my back, not sensual, not searching. Grounding. His palm settles between my shoulder blades. His fingers spread there.
“One time,” he says, and the words come slower now, like each one has to be pulled through something thick, “I knew I was going to die. It was already happening, and all I could think was that I hadn’t said it to you.”
The room blurs. His eyes return to mine.
“I love you.”
The words land without performance. No smirk. No defensive bite. No embarrassment twisted into cruelty. Just truth, raw and plain and almost violent in its openness.
“I love you,” he says again, as if the first one might not count if he does not carve it deeper. “I loved you before. I loved you when I was acting like a piece of shit. I loved you when I picked fights over stupid things because I liked when you looked at me. I loved you when I said you were annoying. I loved you when you cried at that movie and I pretended I wasn’t watching you instead of the screen. I loved you when I didn’t say it because I thought saying it made me look weak.”
His mouth tightens.
“I was so fucking stupid.”
I shake my head, tears slipping silently now, warm down my face despite the steam. He wipes one away with his thumb. His hand is wet, so it does nothing except smear more warmth across my skin.
“I regret that,” he says. “More than dying. I swear to God. Every time I thought it was over, that was the thing. Not the pain. Not them. Not even being scared. It was you, standing somewhere outside all of it, not knowing. Maybe thinking I didn’t love you enough. Maybe thinking I was gone with all those stupid words still stuck in my fucking mouth.”
A sound breaks in my chest. He leans forward and kisses my cheek where the tear fell. Then the other. Then my forehead.
Each kiss is slow. Careful. Heavy with something that makes my hands tremble against his shoulders. He is not trying to lead us anywhere. Not trying to turn the moment into heat because heat would be easier than grief. He is kissing me like apology can be physical. Like love, if repeated enough against skin, might erase the silence he left behind.
“You don’t have to regret it,” I whisper. He stills. “You’re here now.” His eyes close. My fingers curl at the back of his neck. “You’re here,” I say again, because he needs it more than he needs air. “And I know. I knew then too.”
His eyes open. I swallow around the ache in my throat.
“I knew you loved me.” His face changes. It twists, almost in pain. I hurry before he can look away. “Not because you said it. You didn’t. Obviously.”
A broken little breath leaves him.
“But you’d walk on the outside of the sidewalk and pretend it was because I was too dumb to avoid cars. You brought me medicine when I had a fever and left it at my door. You remembered what convenience store drink I liked but made fun of it every time you bought it. You fixed my collar. You called me annoying when I cried but stayed until I stopped.”
His eyes are full now. He looks furious at them.
“So yeah,” I whisper. “I knew.”
For a moment, his face is so open I almost cannot look at him. Then he pulls me into him.
Water surges around us, spilling over the edge in a small wave that neither of us cares about. His arms lock around me, one hand cradling the back of my head, the other spread over my spine, pressing me against him until there is no space left for grief to sit between us. My face fits into the crook of his neck. His skin is hot from the bath, damp beneath my cheek. His heartbeat hammers against my chest.
“I’m going to say it all the time now,” he mutters into my hair.
I close my eyes.
“Okay.”
“You’ll get sick of it.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. You’re like that.”
“I’m really not.”
“You are.” His voice shakes. “And I don’t care. I’ll say it anyway.”
His mouth finds my shoulder. A kiss. Then another, higher, against the curve of my neck.
He kisses like someone counting places he thought he would never touch again. Shoulder. Neck. Jaw. Temple. The corner of my eye. My forehead. He kisses the tears before they can cool. He kisses my hairline and breathes there, raggedly, like he has found shelter beneath my skin.
“I love you,” he says against my temple. My hands slide up his back. “I love you,” he says again, lower. The words tremble through him. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
I begin crying harder, silently at first, then not silently. My shoulders shake. He holds me tighter immediately, one hand cupping the back of my head, fingers threading through wet hair. He does not tell me to stop this time. Does not say I look ugly. Does not panic at the sight of it. He just presses his mouth to my forehead and takes every sound like punishment he has decided he deserves.
I pull back enough to look at him.
“You don’t have to earn staying,” I say. His brows draw together. “You don’t have to say enough perfect things to make up for being gone.”
“I wasn’t gone by choice.”
“I know.”
His eyes flash.
“No,” he says. “You don’t.”
The words hit harder because they are not cruel. Only true. His hand slides from my hair to my cheek, holding me still, not forcefully but with a desperate focus that makes my breath catch.
“I tried to get out,” he says. “I tried so many times. I wasn’t just sitting there thinking about you like some sad drama lead.”
A tiny laugh breaks through my tears. His mouth curves for half a second, then disappears.
“I fought. I lied. I threatened people. I did stupid things. I did smart things too, sometimes.” His expression darkens. “I hurt people. Sometimes because I had to. Sometimes because I was scared and angry and didn’t know what else to do. And then it would reset, and they would look at me like nothing happened, and I’d forget what I’d done, or what they’d done, and everyone just kept… starting again.”
His breathing roughens. My hands tighten on his shoulders.
“Do you know how crazy that makes you?” he whispers. “Looking at someone eating breakfast after you watched them die? Hearing someone laugh after they begged? Wondering if this time they’ll kill you first, or if you’ll do it to them because you remember something they haven’t remembered yet?”
My stomach turns. He looks down.
“I wasn’t good in there.”
The confession falls between us quietly. The bathwater laps against my back.
I think of the boy he was before. Cruel, yes. Sharp-tongued. Violent. A bully when he wanted power and attention. Someone who laughed at fear because fear in other people made him feel larger. I think of what a place like that would do to him. A game built out of suspicion and death. A world where being mean might feel like armor. Where guilt would reset but memory would not always be merciful enough to vanish completely.
I touch his face again. He flinches at the tenderness, barely.
“You’re here with me now,” I say.
His eyes close like the words hurt.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” I whisper. “It’s not.”
His lashes lift.
“I don’t know what happened in there yet. I don’t know what you did. I don’t know what was done to you.” My voice shakes, but I keep going because he deserves truth more than comfort dressed as lies. “But I know you came back carrying it. And I know you’re telling me instead of pretending nothing happened. That has to mean something.”
He stares at me for a long time. Then his face crumples.
He fights it. His mouth presses tight. His chin trembles once. His eyes shine and his brows pull together like anger can still hold the pieces in place if he just hates himself hard enough.
“I don’t want to be like before,” he says. My heart gives one hard, painful beat. His hand drops to the water, fingers flexing beneath the surface. “I don’t mean—” He stops, frustrated, searching for words he has never had practice using. “I’m still me. I’m not going to come back all nice and polite and bowing to every bastard who looks at me wrong.”
Despite everything, my mouth trembles toward a smile. His eyes catch it. A faint spark answers, then dims.
“But with you,” he says. “I don’t want to waste time being a coward.”
“You were never a coward.”
He gives me a look.
Even traumatized, exhausted, naked in a lavender bath at four in the morning, Go Kyung-jun can still make disbelief look insulting.
“I was,” he says. “With you, I was. I acted like wanting you didn’t scare the hell out of me. I acted like if I made you mad first, you couldn’t see how bad I had it. I picked fights because if we were fighting, at least you were looking at me.”
“You were terrible at romance.”
“I know.”
“You once threw a snack at my head because I said another boy was cute.”
His eyes narrow faintly. “He was ugly.”
“He was a kid.”
“He breathed through his mouth.”
I almost laugh again.
This time, he watches it happen with something like wonder and grief mixed together, like my almost-laughter is a thing he wants to put somewhere safe.
Then the softness returns to his face, solemn and stripped bare.
“I don’t want to do that anymore,” he says. “Not the stupid parts.”
“You’ll still fight with me.”
“Obviously.”
“Obviously,” I echo, and the corner of his mouth moves.
“But not like before.” His thumb traces the wet curve of my shoulder, absent and careful. “Not leaving things unsaid because saying them feels embarrassing. Not acting like I don’t care when I do. Not making you guess if I love you.”
My throat tightens. He leans forward, pressing his forehead to mine.
“I love you,” he whispers again.
I close my eyes.
The words are beginning to change the room. It doesn't erase the two years of death and impossible loops and police files and empty funerals. But it changes something. Making the bathroom warmer than the water. Making the dark outside the window less endless. Each time he says it, the silence that lived between then and now loses one small inch of power.
“I love you too,” I whisper. His breath catches. As if he did not know. As if the whole night has not been built from it.
His hand comes up to my neck, palm warm and wet, fingers curving carefully beneath my jaw. He kisses me slowly. So slowly the kiss becomes less a kiss than a place to rest. His mouth moves against mine with a tenderness that feels learned in pain. There is no hunger pushing it forward, no urgency except the urgency of staying. I can taste salt on him. Tears, maybe mine, maybe his, maybe both of ours until it no longer matters.
When he pulls back, he does not go far. His nose brushes mine.
“You really kept that ugly picture?” I let out a tiny, watery laugh. The old shape of him flickers there, fragile and familiar.
“Yes.”
“Should’ve picked a better one.”
“You wouldn’t let me take better ones.”
“Because you take pictures like someone’s grandmother.”
“Your grandmother liked that picture.” His mouth softens at the mention of her. For a moment, he looks down at the water.
“She cried a lot?”
The question is almost too quiet. I nod. His jaw tightens.
“I was all she had,” he says.
I touch his arm.
“She still has you.”
His eyes close.
“Yeah.”
But it does not sound like relief yet. It sounds like a debt. Like another person he came back to wounded by his absence. Like living has given him everyone’s grief to hold in his hands.
“She never gave up,” I tell him.
He opens his eyes.
“Neither did you,” he says. I look away before I can stop myself. His hand catches my chin, gently but firmly, turning me back. “Don’t.” I blink. “Don’t act like it was nothing.”
The words settle heavily. I try to swallow, but the ache will not move.
“You had the worse part,” I whisper.
His eyes harden.
“No.”
“Kyung-jun—”
“No.” This time there is anger in it, but not at me. At the unfairness. At the years. At the idea that pain must be ranked before it is allowed to matter. “You buried me.”
I stop breathing.
His face changes as he says it, like the words have shown him a picture he cannot bear.
“You stood there,” he says slowly. “At some funeral with my picture. People saying I was dead. You had to—” His voice breaks, and he looks away, but his hand stays on me. “Don’t tell me that was nothing.”
The bathroom blurs.
I remember the white flowers. The black ribbon. His school photo. His grandmother’s hand crushing mine. The way my knees vanished beneath me. The ugly sound I made in front of everyone. The shame of crying for someone who should have been there to mock me for it.
“I hated you a little,” I admit. His eyes snap back to mine. I wipe my cheek with the heel of my hand, but it is useless. Everything is wet in here. My face, my hands, the air itself. “Not really,” I say quickly. “Not in a way that made sense. I just… you were gone. And I didn’t know where to put it. Everyone kept looking at me like I was sad, and I was, but I was angry too. Because you left me with all this love and nowhere to put it. I couldn’t call you. I couldn’t yell at you. I couldn’t tell you I missed you. I couldn’t even be mad at you properly because everyone thought you were dead, and you’re not supposed to be mad at dead people.”
Kyung-jun stares at me. The water cools around us by degrees, but neither of us moves.
“I was mad that you weren’t there to be awful about your own funeral,” I whisper.
His mouth trembles.
“I would’ve been awful.”
“I know.”
“I would’ve said the flowers were tacky.”
“They were.”
“And that everyone looked like shit.”
“They did.”
His eyes shine.
“And I would’ve told you to stop crying.”
I nod, tears slipping again. “Yeah.”
He leans forward and kisses them.
“I wouldn’t now,” he whispers against my cheek. My breath catches. He kisses the other cheek. “I wouldn’t.” His mouth rests at my temple. “I’d let you cry,” he says, voice raw. “I’d probably be useless, probably say something stupid. But I’d stay.”
I close my eyes and fold into him.
He holds me like he is trying to prove it retroactively. Like he can somehow go back to that funeral and stand beside me, alive and warm and scowling, and undo the black ribbon on his own picture. Like if he keeps his arms tight enough now, he can reach every version of me who slept in his hoodie and woke with his name already hurting in her mouth.
The bathwater is no longer as hot.
Steam fades slowly from the mirror, revealing us in blurred fragments. His shoulder. My hair. His arm around my back. The curve of the tub. Two faces too close together to see clearly.
Kyung-jun notices the change before I do.
“You’re getting cold.”
“I’m okay.”
He gives me a look that is pure, exhausted disdain.
“You’re shaking.”
“So are you.”
His mouth tightens. Neither of us moves.
Then, after a moment, he says, “Can we stay a little longer?”
I nod immediately. His relief is quiet but visible. A small loosening around his eyes. A deeper breath against my hair.
We shift again so I am back against his chest, his arms around me beneath the cooling water. I turn the hot tap on with my foot, just enough to warm the bath again, and he huffs softly behind me.
“What?” I ask.
“You’re weirdly skilled at that.”
“I’ve had years of practice surviving without you.” The words slip out before I can soften them. His arms tighten. I feel his mouth press against the back of my head.
“Don’t,” he murmurs.
“I’m sorry.”
“No.” His voice is low. “Say things like that. I need to hear it.”
I stare at the water. It shimmers under the bathroom light, broken by our breathing.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I whisper.
“You think not hearing it makes it better?” I say nothing. His chin settles on my shoulder. “I need to know what I missed,” he says. “Even if it makes me feel like shit. I need to know you were here. That you kept going. That you hated me a little.” His breath trembles. “That you loved me anyway.”
My fingers trace the back of his hand under the water.
“I loved you the whole time.” His chest rises sharply against my back. “I hated that too sometimes,” I admit. “It felt pathetic. Like everyone else knew how to move forward and I was still standing in your room waiting for you to come home.”
His lips touch my shoulder.
“Not pathetic.”
“You would’ve called it pathetic before.”
His silence lasts long enough to answer.
Then he says, “Yeah.”
I close my eyes.
“I was an idiot.”
“You were seventeen.”
“I was an idiot at seventeen.”
“Still are a little.”
His mouth brushes my skin, and this time I feel the faintest smile there.
“Careful.”
The word has no threat in it. Only memory. Only the softest ghost of who he was before the world took him apart. The quiet stretches.
For the first time all night, his breathing begins to slow. Not sleep. Not yet. But the rhythm changes. His chest against my back rises and falls less violently. His hand stills over my stomach, fingers splayed, thumb resting near my ribs. The heat, the salts, the water, the dark hour turning slowly toward dawn — all of it begins to gather around him. Not forcing rest. Inviting it.
His head lowers until his forehead rests against my shoulder.
“I don’t want to wake up there,” he says.
The sentence is so soft I almost think I imagined it. My eyes open.
The bathroom is dimmer now, or maybe my eyes have adjusted. The light above us hums faintly. Outside the little window, the sky has begun to turn the color of watered ink.
“You won’t,” I say.
His hand tightens.
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” I whisper. “I don’t.” He goes still. I turn my head enough that my cheek brushes his hair. “But if you wake up scared, I’ll be here.” His breath shakes against my shoulder. “And if you wake up and you don’t know where you are, I’ll tell you.”
His fingers curl against my skin.
“And if you wake up and think it was a dream, I’ll be really annoying until you believe me.”
A faint, broken sound leaves him. Almost a laugh. Almost a sob.
“Promise?”
I turn in his arms again.
The water moves around us, warmer now, softer. I cup his face in both hands. His eyes are heavy but terrified beneath it, exhaustion dragging at him while fear claws him awake. He looks at me like a boy at the edge of a dark room, refusing to step in unless someone promises to hold the door open.
“I promise,” I say.
His eyes search mine.
“Say my name,” he whispers.
“Kyung-jun.”
His face tightens.
Again, his eyes say.
“Kyung-jun.”
His hands come up over mine, pressing them harder to his cheeks.
“Again.”
“Kyung-jun.” His eyes close. The breath that leaves him is not relief exactly. But it is close.
I lean forward and kiss his forehead. Then the bridge of his nose. Then his mouth, gently enough that he does not have to kiss back if he is too tired.
He kisses back anyway. Because he is Kyung-jun. Because even broken, he reaches. Because need has always been the most honest thing about him, even when he used to dress it up as arrogance. When I pull away, his eyes stay closed.
“I love you,” he murmurs.
“I love you too.”
His mouth moves faintly. “Good.”
I almost smile.
“Bossy even half-dead.”
His eyes open a sliver.
“Not half-dead.”
“No?”
“No.” His hand slides to the back of my neck, heavy and warm. “I came back.”
My throat tightens.
“Yes,” I whisper. “You did.”
He looks at me for a long moment, and something in his gaze settles. Enough that when I shift back against him, he lets his head fall to my shoulder again. His arms close around me beneath the water. The world narrows to heat and breath and the slow pale line of dawn growing behind frosted glass.
He does not sleep yet. But he rests. And for Kyung-jun, for this hour, for this first night after the dead gave him back, that is enough. His lips move against my shoulder one last time.
“If I start acting like an asshole again,” he murmurs, voice thick and fading, “hit me.”
I turn my face toward his hair.
“I already do.”
A faint breath touches my skin. This one is almost a laugh.
“Yeah,” he whispers. “Harder next time.”
Then he goes quiet.
Held against me in cooling bathwater, his heartbeat steadying slowly at my back, his fingers still tangled with mine beneath the surface like even rest has to be learned through touch. I stay awake with him as the night thins. I keep my hand over his. I keep breathing where he can feel it. And when the first gray light of morning slips into the bathroom, soft and uncertain and real, Kyung-jun is still there.
Content warnings: drug use, addiction, overdose, neglect, suicidal ideation, major character death. This is a tragedy. No comfort, no redemption. Please read with care.
---
you are dying in a house full of heroes.
This is not a metaphor. You feel it in the brittle architecture of your bones, in the tremor that lives beneath your skin like a second heartbeat. Your body has become a haunted thing, a repository for all the poisons you’ve poured into it, and still—still—no one has noticed that you are disappearing right in front of them.
You sit on the floor of your bedroom, back pressed against the foot of an antique four-poster bed that has never felt like yours. The curtains are drawn, heavy brocade that swallows the late-afternoon light and spits it back in shades of amber and rot. Somewhere in the cavernous belly of Wayne Manor, laughter peals like a bell. It echoes through the heating vents, distorted and tinny, a transmission from a world that has no space for you.
Your fingers curl around a prescription bottle. Oxycodone. The label is worn, the name smudged—someone else’s pain, stolen from the medical bay three weeks ago when Alfred was busy suturing a gash in Jason’s shoulder and Bruce was already back at the Batcomputer, already lost in the next catastrophe. You remember walking through the cave with the silence of a ghost, barefoot on cold stone, plucking the bottle from a drawer of neatly organized catastrophe supplies. No one turned around. No one said your name.
You dry-swallow two pills and chase them with the flat dregs of a soda you left on the nightstand three days ago. The carbonation has long since died. It tastes like sugar and oblivion.
Downstairs, they laugh again. You can pick out the individual threads: Dick’s bright, easy warmth, the kind of laugh that makes people fall in love with him. Tim’s quieter chuckle, a little awkward, as if he’s still surprised he’s allowed to be part of the joke. Even Damian is there—you hear the precise, clipped cadence of his voice, less a laugh and more a reluctant acknowledgment that something is amusing. And Bruce. Bruce’s laugh is so rare it cuts you every time, because it is a sound that has never been offered in your direction. It is a relic of a man you do not know.
You tilt your head back against the mattress and let the opioid crawl into your bloodstream with the patience of a lover. The edges of the world soften. The laughter becomes bearable, then beautiful, then nothing at all.
This is how you survive. This is how you die.
...
The first time you realized you were ignored by your family, you were twelve years old.
You’d been living in Wayne Manor for two years by then—your whole life, technically, but the years before Bruce’s return from his training were a blur of boarding schools and nannies who called you miss with the kind of professional distance that made you feel like a piece of expensive furniture. Then Bruce came back, and for one glittering, impossible moment, you thought you might become real.
He was your father. Your biological father. The only child born from his short-lived, ill-fated marriage to a woman whose face you had to reconstruct in your memory from photographs because she died when you were two years old. You had his (.....) hair, his stubborn jaw, and his tendency to withdraw into silence and contemplate. That must have meant something. It must have meant that you definitely belonged there.
But then Dick came, and then Jason, and then the cave opened up beneath the manor like a second heart, and you understood: Bruce did not want a child. He wanted soldiers. He wanted mirrors that reflected his own grief back at him, sharpened into weapons. And you—you were just a girl who cried when she skinned her knee, who was afraid of thunderstorms, who wanted to be held. You were soft. You were useless.
You remember the night you asked him to train you. You were twelve, small for your age, wearing pajamas with little stars on them. You’d crept down to the cave after hearing the roar of the Batmobile returning from patrol. Bruce was still in the suit, cowl pulled back, sweat darkening his hair. He looked like a god. He looked like your father.
“I want to help,” you said, and your voice echoed in the cavernous space, thin and reedy. “I want to be like Dick. I want to fight.”
Bruce turned to you, and for one breathless second you thought you saw something soft in his eyes. But then his expression shuttered, became the mask he wore even without the cowl.
“No.”
“But I can learn. I can be good. I can—”
“This isn’t a game.” His voice was not cruel, but it was final. It was a door closing. “You’re my daughter. I won’t lose you. Go back to bed.”
I won’t lose you. What a beautiful lie. He’d already lost you. He just hadn’t noticed yet.
You went back to bed. You didn’t cry. You were too hollow for tears. The next morning, Dick taught Jason how to throw a Batarang in the gymnasium, their laughter ringing against the high ceilings. You watched from the doorway for seventeen minutes before anyone noticed you were there, and even then, it was only Alfred, who offered you a cup of tea and a sad, knowing smile that did nothing to fill the chasm opening in your chest.
That was the year you learned that love in this house was a finite resource, and you had been deemed unworthy of it
...
By fourteen, you had stopped trying.
This is what the history books will never record: the slow, quiet erosion of a girl who lived in the margins of a legend. The way you stopped setting a place for yourself at dinner because no one remembered to call you anyway. The way you learned to move through the manor’s hallways without making a sound, a skill born not of training but of the desperate, animal need to avoid the pain of being seen and then ignored. It is worse, you discovered, to be acknowledged and then dismissed than it is to never be acknowledged at all.
You remember the afternoon Damian first arrived at the manor. He was ten, imperious, all sharp angles and sharper words. Bruce introduced him to everyone—Dick, Jason, Tim, Alfred, even Barbara, who had come by to assess the new addition to the chaos. They stood in the grand foyer, a tableau of fractured family, and you watched from the top of the staircase, half-hidden behind the balustrade.
No one introduced you.
Later, you found Damian in the library, examining a first edition of The Art of War with the critical eye of a general. You hovered in the doorway, trying to find the right words. I’m your sister. I know you don’t know me, but I’m here. I’ve always been here.
Before you could speak, he glanced up and fixed you with a stare that could have cut glass. “You’re the civilian,” he said. Not a question. A designation.
“I—yes. I’m your—”
“Tt. Don’t get in my way.”
He turned back to his book. You stood there for a long moment, the air pressing in on you from all sides, and then you walked away. You didn’t blame him. He was a child raised by assassins, taught that value was measured in utility. In his world, you were useless. He was just the first person to say it out loud.
That night, you stole a bottle of wine from the cellar and drank it alone in your room until the walls stopped closing in. It was the first time you used a substance to mute the noise inside your head. It would not be the last
....
The escalation happened so gradually that even you didn’t notice until it was too late.
At fifteen, you broke your wrist falling down the grand staircase—a genuine accident, not a cry for help, though you’d be lying if you said you hadn’t been tempted by those before. Alfred drove you to the emergency room because Bruce was in the middle of a Justice League operation and couldn’t be reached. Dick was in Blüdhaven. Jason was off on one of his brooding self-exile stints. Tim texted you a single “u ok?” and didn’t follow up when you didn’t respond. Damian didn’t even glance at the cast when you returned home.
The doctor prescribed Vicodin. You remember staring at the bottle in the harsh fluorescent light of the pharmacy, the orange plastic warm in your palm. You’d never taken anything stronger than ibuprofen before. You were scared of it, a little. But the pain in your wrist was a relentless, grinding thing, so you swallowed one pill and waited.
The relief was not just physical. It was existential. The Vicodin didn’t just mute the ache in your bones—it muted the ache in the hollow of your chest where your family was supposed to be. It wrapped you in cotton wool. It made the loneliness feel distant, like a storm on the far side of a thick window. For the first time in years, you felt something that might have been peace.
You finished the prescription in five days. When the bottle was empty, you felt the absence like a physical blow. The noise came back—the laughter, the silence, the unbearable weight of being invisible. You needed it gone again.
So you went looking.
The medical bay in the Batcave was a treasure trove of chemical solutions. Morphine, fentanyl, oxycodone, codeine—a pharmacopeia of battlefield medicine kept stocked for the inevitability of violence. Security was tight, but you’d lived in this house your whole life. You knew the blind spots. You knew that the cave’s motion sensors were calibrated to ignore anyone under a certain height threshold—a leftover from when Damian was small and prone to wandering where he shouldn’t. You had never been a threat, so you had never been a variable worth accounting for.
Stealing became a ritual. You’d slip down in the small hours of the morning, when patrol was still underway and Alfred was asleep, and you’d take just enough to keep the silence at bay. One pill at a time. Two. Three. You told yourself you could stop whenever you wanted. You told yourself it wasn’t a problem because a problem required someone to notice, and no one did.
The first time you ran out before you could steal more, the withdrawal hit you like a freight train. You spent a night curled on the bathroom floor, shivering and sweating, your stomach cramping so violently you thought you might die. You didn’t die. You just wished you would.
The next day, you went to school for the first time in a week—Gotham Academy, where you were enrolled under a fake name because Bruce was paranoid about kidnappings but couldn’t be bothered to remember which fake name belonged to which child. You moved through the hallways like a wraith, hollow-eyed and trembling, and a boy named Leo found you in the parking lot, leaning against the brick wall, trying to remember how to breathe.
“You look like shit,” he said, not unkindly.
Leo was seventeen, tall and lanky with nicotine-stained fingers and eyes that had seen too much. He sold weed to the scholarship kids and harder things to the rich ones who wanted to feel dangerous. He didn’t ask why a Wayne—because he recognized you, despite the fake name, because everyone eventually recognized you—was shaking like a leaf behind the gymnasium. He just pulled a joint from his pocket and offered it to you.
“This won’t fix it,” he said. “But it’ll take the edge off.”
You smoked with him behind the bleachers, coughing on the first inhale, and when he asked if you needed something stronger, you said yes without hesitation.
That was the beginning of the end
....
By sixteen, you were no longer a girl who used drugs. You were an addict.
The word sits ugly in your mouth, but you’ve learned to swallow it like everything else. You smoke weed to sleep. You take pills to function. On the bad days—and there are so many bad days now—you let Leo inject you with heroin in the dingy back room of his apartment, a place that smells of mildew and old cigarettes and the particular desperation of people who have nothing left to lose.
Leo is not your boyfriend. He’s not even really your friend. He’s a transaction in human form, a pair of steady hands and a ready supply, and you pay him in cash and jewelry stolen from rooms in the manor that no one ever enters. You’ve taken a diamond bracelet from a drawer in the master suite that probably belonged to your mother. You’ve taken cufflinks from Bruce’s study, a silver letter opener, a handful of antique coins from a display case in the library. No one has noticed. No one has ever noticed.
Sometimes, when Leo’s pressing the needle into the crook of your arm, you close your eyes and pretend his touch is love. You pretend the warmth spreading through your veins is the warmth of being held, of being wanted. It’s pathetic. You know it’s pathetic. But it’s all you have.
You’ve stopped going to school. The Academy sends letters home, but Bruce is in the middle of a war with the League of Assassins and Alfred is too busy keeping the household running to follow up. You intercept the letters when you can, forge Bruce’s signature on the responses, and when you can’t, you just throw them away. No one asks where you go during the day. No one asks why your eyes are glassy, why your hands shake, why you’ve lost so much weight that your clothes hang off you like they belong to a stranger.
Once, Dick corners you in the hallway, his hand gentle on your shoulder. You flinch. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“Hey, kiddo,” he says, his smile the same easy, practiced thing he gives to the press. “I feel like we haven’t talked in a while. How’s school?”
“Fine.” Your voice is a croak. You haven’t spoken to another person in three days.
“That’s great. Listen, I’m sorry I haven’t been around much—Blüdhaven’s a mess and the Titans are running me ragged—but we should do something soon. Just the two of us. Sound good?”
You nod. You know he won’t follow through. He never does.
He pats your shoulder once and is gone, leaving behind the faint scent of his cologne and the hollow echo of another broken promise. You lean against the wall until the shaking stops, and then you go to your room and crush a pill on the nightstand with the flat of a silver hairbrush that hasn’t been used in months.
The powder burns when you inhale it. The burn is the only thing that feels real
....
Your bedroom has become an observation deck, a silent perch from which you watch the family that isn’t yours.
You’ve learned the rhythms of the manor the way a prisoner learns the rhythms of a jail: the creak of the third-floor floorboard at 4:37 a.m. when Bruce returns from patrol. The clatter of pans in the kitchen at 5:30 when Alfred begins preparing breakfast. The precise moment—6:15—when Damian’s alarm goes off and he begins his morning training, his footsteps a metronome of discipline in the gymnasium below your window.
You are not part of any of it. You are a ghost haunting the margins, a smudge on the periphery of their vision. But you watch. You can’t stop watching.
There is a particular cruelty in the way they orbit each other, a gravitational pull that excludes you with the casual precision of physics. They don’t mean to shut you out. That’s the worst part. You are not a victim of malice—you are a victim of irrelevance. You are the variable that doesn’t factor into the equation. The side character in a story that was never about you.
You watch them from the top of the stairs on movie nights, when Dick commandeers the entertainment system and makes everyone watch old musicals that Jason loudly complains about but never actually leaves. You watch Damian pretend to hate the musicals, his small body wedged between Bruce and Tim on the couch, his mouth pressed into a thin line of disapproval even as his eyes track the dancers with reluctant fascination. You watch Bruce, the cowl gone, the weight of the city temporarily set aside, his arm draped over the back of the couch in a gesture of casual affection that makes your chest ache.
You watch and you are not invited.
You tried, once. Months ago. A lifetime ago. You’d come downstairs in your pajamas, drawn by the sound of laughter, and hovered in the doorway of the media room like a moth at a window. Tim glanced up, saw you, and offered a small, distracted smile before turning back to the screen. No one else acknowledged you. The couch was full. The space was full. There was nowhere for you to sit.
You stood there for five minutes, waiting for someone to make room, to say your name, to do anything. No one did. Eventually, you went back upstairs, and no one noticed you were gone.
Now you don’t go downstairs at all. You sit on the floor of your room with your back against the door and you listen to the distorted echoes of their happiness through the vents, and you tell yourself it’s enough. It has to be enough.
The first time you overdose, it’s an accident.
You’ve been using heroin for six months now, but you’ve been careful. Careful in the way that addicts are careful—measuring doses, testing potency, telling yourself that you have it under control because the alternative is admitting that you don’t. But the supply Leo gives you this week is different, stronger, cut with something that hits your bloodstream like a fist, and suddenly you’re on the bathroom floor with your cheek pressed to the cold tile and your heart stuttering in your chest like a dying bird.
You can feel your body shutting down. It’s not painful, not really. It’s like sinking into warm water. Like falling asleep after a lifetime of insomnia. Part of you—the part that’s been screaming into the void for five years—whispers that this wouldn’t be the worst way to go.
No one finds you. No one comes.
You wake up three hours later, alone, your face crusted with dried vomit and your arms covered in bruises you don’t remember getting. The house is silent. No one has noticed you were missing. No one has come looking for you. You lie on the bathroom floor for a long time, staring at the ceiling, and you feel nothing at all.
The next day, you call Leo and ask for more
...
The invitation appears on the kitchen island on a Tuesday morning, written in Alfred’s precise copperplate on heavy cream stationery: Family dinner this evening at 7 p.m. All are expected to attend. RSVP not required.
All are expected. You stare at the word all for a long time, tracing the elegant loops of the script with your fingertip. It’s been months since you last sat at the dining table. You’re not sure anyone noticed your absence then, either.
You spend the afternoon in a state of low-grade panic, cycling through the contents of your closet like a woman preparing for battle. Your body is a ruin. You can see it in the mirror: the sharp jut of your collarbones, the hollows beneath your cheekbones, the bruise-dark circles under your eyes that no amount of concealer can fully disguise. Your arms are a roadmap of track marks, some fresh, some faded to silvery scars. You choose a long-sleeved blouse in deep burgundy. You pull your hair back into a neat ponytail. You practice smiling in the mirror until your reflection looks almost human.
You are ready. You are terrified.
At 6:58, you descend the grand staircase and walk toward the dining room. Your heart is a war drum. Your hands are shaking—withdrawal is starting to creep in, a familiar ache settling into your bones—but you clench them into fists at your sides and keep walking.
The dining room glows with candlelight. The table is set with the good china, the crystal goblets, the silverware that’s been in the Wayne family for six generations. And there they are: Bruce at the head of the table, Dick to his right, Damian to his left. Jason is slouched in his chair, flicking a bread roll at Tim, who’s trying to explain something about a case while simultaneously defending his plate. Even Barbara is there, seated next to Dick, her wheelchair tucked neatly beside the table. They are laughing. They are beautiful. They are a family.
You step into the doorway.
The laughter falters. Not dramatically—it’s not a record-scratch moment. It’s subtler than that, a brief hiccup in the flow of conversation, a flicker of confusion that crosses Bruce’s face as he registers your presence.
“Oh,” Dick says, recovering first, his smile bright but faintly puzzled. “Hey, you’re here.”
You don’t know what to do with your hands. You shove them into the pockets of your pants. “Alfred said there was a dinner.”
“Yes, of course.” Bruce’s voice is neutral, but there’s something in his expression that you can’t read. Surprise, maybe. Or something closer to guilt. “I didn’t realize you were—take a seat. We saved you a spot.”
There isn’t a spot. There are exactly enough chairs for the people already at the table. You watch Tim and Jason exchange a glance, a silent negotiation, and then Jason sighs and scoots over, dragging a chair from the corner of the room and wedging it between himself and the wall. “Here,” he says, not quite meeting your eyes. “Sit.”
You sit. The chair is cold. The space is too small. Your elbow knocks against Jason’s as you reach for your water glass, and he doesn’t say anything, but you feel him shift slightly away from you. A small, unconscious recoil. It shouldn’t hurt. It still does.
The conversation picks up again, tentatively, like a car engine sputtering before it catches. Dick tells a story about a mission with the Titans that you don’t have the context to understand. Tim and Barbara launch into a debate about encryption protocols. Damian insults Jason’s fashion sense, and Jason fires back with something about Damian’s height, and Bruce chides them both with the weary fondness of a man who has done this a thousand times.
You sit in the middle of it all, silent, invisible even in your visibility. No one asks you about your day. No one asks why you’ve lost so much weight, why your eyes are glassy, why you keep scratching at the inside of your wrist beneath the table. You push food around your plate and count the minutes until you can escape.
Halfway through the meal, Bruce’s phone buzzes. He glances at the screen, and his expression shifts—the father receding, the vigilante taking over. “We’ve got a situation,” he says, standing. “Riddler’s left a trail of clues across the financial district. I need everyone suited up in ten.”
The table explodes into motion. Chairs scrape. Plates are abandoned. The family that was laughing together moments ago transforms into a tactical unit, efficient and synchronized. They sweep out of the dining room in a blur of dark hair and determined expressions, and not one of them looks back at you.
Not one.
You sit at the table for a long time after they’re gone. The candles gutter. Alfred appears silently at your elbow, his face creased with a sadness that you can’t bear to look at directly.
“Shall I clear your plate, miss?”
You nod. You don’t trust your voice.
He takes the plate—still mostly full—and hesitates. For a moment, you think he’s going to say something, something that might change everything or nothing at all. But the moment passes. He retreats to the kitchen, and you retreat to your room, and the gap between you and the rest of the world widens another inch.
...
That night, you hear them come home. The cave entrance rumbles open around 3 a.m., and voices drift up through the vents—tired but triumphant. The Riddler is in custody. The city is safe. Someone—Tim, you think—lets out a whoop that’s half exhaustion and half exhilaration. Bruce’s laugh rumbles like distant thunder.
You lie in your bed, curled on your side, staring at the wall. The withdrawal has become a creature living inside your skin, gnawing at your nerves with tiny, relentless teeth. You need a fix. You need it, with a desperation that eclipses hunger, thirst, even the ache of your loneliness.
But you don’t go to the cave. You don’t steal more pills. Instead, you reach under your mattress and pull out a small velvet pouch—the last piece of your mother’s jewelry that you haven’t sold. A locket, delicate and gold, with a tiny photograph of her inside. You’ve kept it through everything. It’s the only thing you have left of her. The only proof that you were ever part of a family that wanted you.
You hold it in your palm, the metal warm from your body heat, and you make a decision.
....
Three days later, you pack a bag.
It’s not a big bag—just a worn duffel you found in the back of a closet, stuffed with a change of clothes, a toothbrush, and the locket. You’re not running away, you tell yourself. You’re just… leaving. Leaving implies agency. Leaving implies choice. And after years of being a passive observer in your own life, you need to feel like you have a choice about something.
You write a note. You don’t know who you’re writing it for.
I’m sorry. I tried. It wasn’t enough.
You don’t sign it. You leave it on your nightstand, tucked beneath an empty pill bottle, and you walk out of your bedroom without looking back.
The manor is quiet at this hour—late afternoon, the golden light slanting through the tall windows in dusty shafts. Alfred is in the city, running errands. Bruce and the boys are in the cave, prepping for patrol. You can hear the low murmur of their voices as you pass the grandfather clock that conceals the entrance, and for a moment you pause. Your hand hovers over the wood. You could open it. You could go down there, one last time, and say everything you’ve never said. You could scream. You could cry. You could make them see you.
But you’ve tried that before. You’ve tried it in a hundred small ways, and it’s never worked. So instead, you press your palm flat against the clock face, feel the vibration of their voices through the ancient wood, and you whisper, “Goodbye.”
No one answers. No one ever answers.
You slip out through the kitchen door and into the dying light. The grounds of Wayne Manor stretch before you, impossibly green, impossibly beautiful. A world you have never been allowed to inhabit. You walk down the gravel drive with your duffel slung over your shoulder, and you don’t look back.
...
Leo’s apartment is in the Narrows, a part of Gotham that the tourists never see and the newspapers only mention in the context of body counts. The building reeks of damp plaster and stale cigarette smoke and the particular hopelessness of people who have been failed by every system meant to protect them. You fit right in.
Leo opens the door with a cigarette dangling from his lips and raises an eyebrow at the duffel bag. “Running away, princess?”
“Something like that.” You push past him into the apartment. It’s a mess, as always—takeout containers piled on the coffee table, a mattress on the floor with sheets that haven’t been washed in weeks, a needle and spoon on the nightstand that makes your skin itch with anticipation.
“I need a place to crash,” you say. “Just for a while.”
Leo shrugs. “Sure. But it’s gonna cost you.”
You pull the locket from your pocket. The gold gleams in the sickly light of the bare bulb overhead. Leo’s eyes flicker with interest—he knows quality when he sees it. “This is real,” you say. “Twenty-four karat. Worth a couple thousand at least.”
He takes it from you, turns it over in his fingers. Opens it. Glances at the photo inside—your mother’s face, younger than you are now, smiling at the camera with a joy you’ve never felt. He doesn’t ask who she is. He doesn’t care.
“Yeah, alright,” he says. “I can move this. You can stay.”
He pockets the locket, and something inside you splinters. The last piece of your mother. The last piece of a life where you were loved. You’ve traded it for a filthy mattress and a man who sees you only as a transaction, and you don’t even have the strength to mourn.
“I want a hit,” you say. “Something strong.”
Leo grins. “I’ve got some new stuff. Fentanyl-laced. Be careful with it—this batch is no joke.”
You don’t want to be careful. You don’t want to be anything.
...
He ties off your arm with a rubber strap. The needle slides in with a familiar sting, and you watch the blood bloom into the syringe before he depresses the plunger. The heroin hits your bloodstream like a wave of light.
This is what you’ve been chasing. This is the silence. This is the peace that the manor never gave you, the love that your family never offered, the belonging that was always just out of reach. Your head lolls back against the mattress. The ceiling swims. Your heartbeat slows to a languid, syrupy rhythm.
Somewhere in the back of your mind, a voice whispers that this dose was too strong. That something is wrong. Your breathing is too shallow. Your limbs are too heavy. The warmth that was so comforting moments ago is starting to feel like drowning.
But you’re not scared. That’s the strangest part. You’ve been dying for years—slowly, invisibly, in a house full of people who were supposed to love you. At least this way, you get to choose the ending.
Your eyes slip closed.
The last thing you think of is the grandfather clock, the vibrations of their laughter humming through the wood. The last thing you feel is the phantom weight of a hand on your shoulder, a touch that was never really there.
And then nothing.
....
Alfred is the one who finds the note.
He returns from his errands at 6:47 p.m., precisely on schedule, and begins his usual routine of preparing the evening meal. It is only when he goes to collect the laundry from the upstairs bedrooms that he notices your door is ajar—a small irregularity, but an irregularity nonetheless. You have kept your door firmly closed for years.
He steps inside. The room is too tidy. The bed is made. The clutter that usually accumulates on your nightstand—books, empty soda cans, the detritus of a life lived in isolation—has been cleared away. All that remains is a single piece of paper, the empty pill bottle serving as a paperweight.
Alfred reads the note. His hands, steady for decades of combat and crisis, tremble.
He descends to the cave.
The family is gathered around the Batcomputer, reviewing satellite footage of Black Mask’s latest operation. Bruce is in the chair, cowl down, his expression the focused intensity of a man who has no room for anything but the mission. Dick is perched on the edge of the console. Tim is typing. Jason is cleaning a gun with methodical precision. Damian is sharpening a knife.
“Master Bruce,” Alfred says, and something in his voice—something quiet, something broken—makes every head in the room snap toward him.
“Alfred?” Bruce is already on his feet. “What is it?”
Alfred hands him the note.
The silence that follows is the loudest sound you have ever not heard.
Bruce reads the words once. Twice. His face, that impenetrable mask, cracks open like a fault line. “What is this? When did she—where is she?”
“I don’t know, sir. She’s not in the house. I’ve checked every room.”
“Track her phone,” Tim says, already typing. His fingers fly across the keyboard, and within seconds a map blooms on the screen, a blinking red dot in the heart of the Narrows. “She’s there. An apartment building on Kane Street.”
Bruce doesn’t wait. He pulls the cowl up, his movements sharp and mechanical, the Batman taking over because the father doesn’t know what to do. “Let’s go. Now.”
The drive to the Narrows takes eight minutes. Bruce breaks every traffic law in the city. Dick is in the passenger seat, phone pressed to his ear, trying to call a number that goes straight to voicemail. In the back, Jason and Tim are silent. Damian’s hands are clenched into fists, his expression unreadable.
They burst into the apartment building like a tactical breach, scattering startled residents, climbing the stairs three at a time. The door to Leo’s apartment is flimsy. Bruce kicks it open without breaking stride.
The smell hits them first: sweat, mildew, the metallic tang of old blood. And then the sight.
You are on the mattress, your body curled into a fetal position, your face slack and pale. The rubber strap is still tight around your arm. The needle is still on the floor. Your eyes are closed.
“No.” Bruce’s voice is not his own. It is a raw, guttural thing, torn from somewhere deep in his chest. He crosses the room in two strides and drops to his knees beside you, his gloved hands pressing against your neck, searching for a pulse that isn’t there.
“Call an ambulance,” Dick says, and his voice is shaking. “Tim, call an ambulance, now, now—”
“It’s too late.” Bruce’s words are a death knell. He gathers your body into his arms, cradling you against the armored chest of the Batsuit, and the sound he makes is not a cry. It’s a howl.
The others stand frozen in the doorway. Jason’s face has gone white. Tim is on the phone with emergency services, his voice a monotone of shock. Damian takes one step forward, then stops, his gaze fixed on the track marks on your arms, the evidence of months—years—of suffering that none of them saw.
Dick sinks to the floor. He doesn’t say anything. He just stares at you, his little sister, the one he promised to spend time with, the one he never got around to calling back.
The ambulance comes. The paramedics do what they can, which is nothing. You are declared dead at the scene.
...
They find your diary three days later, wedged between your mattress and the box spring. Alfred discovers it while stripping the bed, and he does not read it—not at first. He carries it to Bruce with the solemnity of a man delivering a coffin.
Bruce reads it alone, in his study, with the door locked.
He reads about your first attempt to join the family, your twelve-year-old hope crumbling under the weight of his rejection. He reads about Damian’s dismissal, Dick’s broken promises, Tim’s distracted smiles, Jason’s indifference. He reads about the first pill you stole, the first needle you let a stranger press into your vein, the first time you overdosed and woke up alone on the bathroom floor. He reads about the locket—your mother’s locket—and how you sold it for a final hit, a final night, a final silence.
He reads the last entry, written the morning you left:
I used to think that if I just tried harder, they’d see me. I used to think that love was something you earned. But I’m so tired. I’m so tired of watching them be a family without me. I’m so tired of being a ghost in my own home. I don’t know if I’m running away or if I’m just finally admitting that I was never really here at all. Either way, I don’t think it matters. They won’t notice I’m gone. They never have.
Bruce closes the diary. He sets it down on his desk with the careful precision of a man handling a bomb. And then he does something he has not done since his parents died in a pool of blood and pearls on a rain-slicked Gotham street: he weeps.
....
The funeral is small. The family stands in a tight cluster around the grave, dressed in black, their faces carved from stone. The Gotham sky is a bruised purple, threatening rain but never delivering. It’s the kind of day you always hated, the kind that made the manor feel like a mausoleum.
Alfred reads a eulogy that he wrote in the small hours of the morning, his voice steady but his eyes rimmed red. He speaks about your kindness, your quiet resilience, the way you used to follow him around the kitchen as a child, begging to help with the cookies. He does not mention the drugs. He does not mention the neglect. He does not need to.
Bruce stands at the front, his head bowed. He has not spoken in three days. The cowl hangs heavy in his mind, a shield he no longer knows how to take off. He keeps replaying moments—the night you asked to be trained, the dinner where he didn’t save you a seat, the thousand tiny betrayals of absence and inattention that accumulated like snow until they buried you alive. He wonders if there was a single moment when he could have saved you. He knows there was. He knows there were a hundred moments, a thousand, and he missed every single one.
Dick stands to his left, his arm around Barbara, who is crying silently. He is thinking about the hallway conversation, the easy promise he made and then forgot. We should do something soon. Just the two of us. He never did. He never will.
Jason stares at the coffin with a hollow expression. He’s thinking about the way you flinched when he shifted away from you at the dinner table, the way he never bothered to ask why. He’s thinking about all the times he brushed past you in the hallways, too caught up in his own ghosts to notice the living one right in front of him.
Tim is running through the data in his head, the missed signs, the pattern of thefts from the medical bay that he’d dismissed as inventory errors. He’s the detective. He’s supposed to notice things. He didn’t notice you.
Damian says nothing. His face is a mask, but his hands are trembling. He remembers calling you a civilian. He remembers every time he looked through you like you were furniture. He was a child, he tells himself. He didn’t know. But he did know. He just didn’t care.
The coffin descends into the ground. The first clod of dirt hits the lid with a sound like a door closing.
And the family that was never really yours stands in the silence, and they grieve, and they will carry this grief for the rest of their lives. It will not bring you back. It will not fix what was broken. It is too late for apologies, too late for love, too late for anything but the slow, corrosive knowledge that they failed you in every way that mattered.
You were seventeen years old. You were dying in a house full of heroes. And now you are dead, and they are still heroes, and the world will never know your name.
The rain never comes. The sky just stays purple, bruised and waiting, and somewhere in the distance, the Bat-Signal cuts through the gloom like a razor.
Life goes on. It always does.
But in Wayne Manor, a bedroom door stays closed, and a chair at the dining table stays empty, and the silence you left behind is louder than any scream.
in which… Juhoon and y/n loved each other through every stage of life…until time began taking y/n away from him.
𑣲 warnings — terminal illness, major character death, grief, heavy angst, sad ending
𑣲 a/n —before reading, please remember this story is very heavy and focuses on grief, illness, and loving someone through every stage of life. i wrote this with the feeling of the song “through the years” (as u can tell by my name) by kenny rogers sang by juan karlos in mind — the kind of love that stays even when time doesn’t. please read gently ♡ (i recommend listening to that song while reading.. w/ luv, THROUGHYRS
The first time Juhoon met you, he was seventeen and exhausted.
Rainwater dripped from the sleeves of his hoodie as he sat outside the training building at nearly midnight, bruised knees pulled to his chest while the city blurred gray around him. He had failed another monthly evaluation. Again.
He remembered hearing your voice before seeing you.
“You look like somebody just told you the world ended.”
He glanced up.
You stood there holding a convenience store umbrella too small to fully cover yourself, hair damp from the rain and expression caught somewhere between concern and amusement.
Juhoon laughed quietly through his embarrassment.
“Maybe it did.”
You stared at him for a second before sitting beside him on the cold steps anyway.
“You’re dramatic.”
That became the first thing you ever gave him:
someone willing to stay.
Years later, after sold-out tours and flashing cameras and headlines with his face plastered everywhere, Juhoon would still think about that rainy night.
Because before the world loved him..
You did.
Back then, life was painfully simple.
Juhoon spent his days dancing until his legs trembled and nights wondering if his dream would ever amount to anything. He owned three hoodies, slept four hours a night, and survived mostly on convenience store ramen.
But somehow, in the middle of all that uncertainty, you became constant.
You studied together in silent cafés.
Shared earbuds on crowded buses.
Walked home beneath flickering streetlights while Juhoon talked endlessly about music and fear and all the things he never admitted to anyone else.
“You know what scares me most?” he asked one winter evening.
Snow collected softly in his dark hair while he shoved cold hands into his pockets.
“What?”
“That one day all of this finally works out…” He smiled weakly. “And I still end up lonely.”
You looked at him for a long moment before bumping your shoulder lightly against his.
“You won’t.”
At the time, you believed it.
So did he.
When CORTIS debuted, the world changed overnight.
Suddenly Juhoon’s face appeared everywhere.
On giant screens. Magazine covers. Airport photos.
Fans screamed his name loudly enough to shake entire arenas, and reporters followed him through every city like shadows.
But behind all the fame, some things stayed untouched.
Every night after schedules ended, no matter how exhausted he was, Juhoon still came looking for you.
Sometimes at two in the morning with tired eyes and messy hair hidden beneath a cap.
Sometimes silently, collapsing beside you on the couch while you played with his fingers until he fell asleep.
“You smell like practice room,” you mumbled once against his shoulder.
Juhoon laughed quietly.
“You still let me in your apartment anyway.”
“Unfortunately.”
“Wow.”
But he smiled afterward in that small, genuine way he only ever did with you.
And in moments like that, fame disappeared.
He wasn’t idol Juhoon.
He was just yours.
Years passed gently at first.
You loved him through injuries and tours and scandals that nearly broke him apart.
You watched him win awards with trembling hands and tears caught in his lashes.
And every single time, no matter how bright the spotlight became, Juhoon searched for you first in the crowd.
Always you.
As if success meant nothing unless you witnessed it too.
One night after a concert in Tokyo, he stood with you on the hotel balcony overlooking the glowing city below.
“I used to think being loved by millions would fix everything,” he admitted softly.
“And?”
Juhoon looked at you.
“It only mattered because you were there.”
The cold night air stung suddenly behind your eyes.
You leaned into him quietly while his arms wrapped around your waist from behind.
And for a while, everything felt endless.
Then came the hospital.
Not dramatically.
Not all at once.
Just small things.
You getting tired more easily.
Falling asleep in strange places.
Bruises appearing where they shouldn’t.
At first Juhoon blamed stress.
Then overwork.
Then fate became cruel enough to hand him the truth instead.
Cancer.
Aggressive.
Late-stage.
The doctor spoke carefully, but Juhoon barely heard any of it after that word.
Cancer.
He remembered staring at the white hospital walls thinking how ridiculous it was that the world still existed normally outside that room.
Cars still moved.
People still laughed.
Someone somewhere was probably drinking coffee right now.
Meanwhile his entire future had just shattered quietly beside him.
When the doctor finally left, silence filled the room.
You looked smaller in the hospital bed somehow.
Juhoon sat beside you slowly before taking your hand into both of his.
For a long time, neither of you spoke.
Then finally…
“Say something,” you whispered.
His face broke immediately.
“No.”
Tears slipped down his cheeks before he could stop them.
“No, because if I start talking about this then it becomes real.”
You started crying too after that.
Not loudly.
Just enough to ruin each other slowly.
The months afterward felt painfully fragile.
Juhoon canceled schedules constantly despite arguments from management.
Nothing mattered anymore.
Not awards.
Not fame.
Not numbers.
Only time.
Time became precious in terrifying ways.
He memorized the sound of your laughter.
Memorized how your hand fit into his.
Memorized every detail because somewhere deep down, he already understood what grief was preparing to take from him.
Sometimes late at night, after you fell asleep in the hospital bed beside him, Juhoon sat awake listening carefully to your breathing.
Just to make sure it was still there.
One evening while rain tapped softly against the windows, you found him crying alone in the hallway outside your room.
He quickly wiped his face when he noticed you watching.
But it was too late.
“You promised you’d stay strong for me,” you teased weakly.
Juhoon let out a broken laugh.
“I lied.”
You reached for his hand.
He held on so tightly it almost hurt.
“I’m scared,” he admitted finally.
Not idol Juhoon.
Not the confident performer loved by millions.
Just the boy from rainy bus stops years ago.
Terrified.
You squeezed his hand gently.
“So am I.”
The last week arrived quietly.
Like the world pitied you enough not to announce it loudly beforehand.
Juhoon spent every moment beside you.
Reading to you when you were too tired to open your eyes.
Brushing your hair away from your face.
Holding your hand constantly, as if love alone could anchor you here.
One night near dawn, you turned toward him weakly.
“Juhoon?”
“Hm?”
“If there’s another life after this…” Your voice trembled softly. “I hope we find each other early.”
His breathing shattered instantly.
“Don’t talk like that.”
“But if we do,” you continued quietly, “promise you’ll still love me through all the years again.”
Juhoon buried his face against your hand and cried harder than you had ever seen before.
“There was never going to be anyone else.”
You died on a rainy morning in April.
Peacefully, the doctors said afterward.
As if there were anything peaceful about watching the love of your life disappear right in front of you.
Juhoon sat beside your hospital bed long after the monitors stopped.
Still holding your hand.
Still waiting for you to wake up.
Outside, rain struck the windows softly.
Just like the night you first met.
Years later, fans still wondered why Juhoon never fell in love again.
Why his smile always looked a little sad now.
Why every love song he wrote sounded like mourning.
They didn’t understand.
Because they never knew the truth.
That before the fame, before the crowds, before the world belonged to him—
Batboys Reacting To Their Kid Disrespecting Their Wife
Bruce Wayne:
It had been a long day. Bruce was exhausted and dragging his feet up the stairs when he heard it.
"Leave it alone mother!" Damian yelled.
"Dami, honey-" You tried to reach out to him but his swatted your hand away. You gasped in pain- He was usually good with controlling his strength or holding back so the sharp pain shocked you.
His hand hoovered in the air, mouth open, eyes wide- He couldn't even find the words to apologise when Bruce appeared in the doorway. You immediately hid your hand behind your back.
"Babe!" You smiled, blinking away the tears that had gathered due to the pain. "I didn't expect you home until-"
"Damian." His voice was low and gravelly. "Did I see what I saw or was I hallucinating due to exhaustion?" The tone Bruce used, Damian had never heard that from him. Ever.
"Father- I-" He swallowed, looking up at him.
The way Bruce's shoulders loomed over him. He wasn't Bruce Wayne, or Batman. He was worse. He was Batman without the mask.
"Apologize. Now." There was no room for argument.
"I'm- I'm sorry Ummi." Damian turned to you. "I didn't-" Bruce cleared his throat and you swore you saw the boy shiver. "I should have controlled my anger better- I'm sorry."
"Now, go to your room. I'll be there in a while." Bruce stated and Damian all but ran out of the study. Once he was gone, Bruce's shoulders dropped and he sighed. "What was the reason?"
"He was annoyed that I was babying him by rechecking his injuries from yesterday's patrol." You explained as Bruce wrapped himself in a hug with you.
He hummed against your neck. "Did he hit hard?"
"It was an accident." You downplayed it.
"Yes but still. He should have had better control. He's growing up- Getting stronger. He needs to be careful and I'm not raising a boy that thinks this behaviour is okay- No matter the circumstances." He explained and you nodded.
"I know. Just... Just be gentle. He's never done anything like this before." You pulled back a little, touching Bruce's face.
He smiled against your palm. "I'll try."
Damian was sitting on his bed, head cradled in his hands when he heard the door open then close. He watched Bruce pull up a chair and sit infront of him.
"Father I-" He began but Bruce put his hand up to stop him.
"Damian, I'm disappointed to begin with." Bruce stated simply, tiredness obvious in his voice. "I did not raise you to disrespect my wife."
Damian's eyes widened. You were his mama. Not just- Not just Bruce's wife. Right?
"No patrol for two weeks. And you will tend to your mother until her hand heals." Bruce explained, "If anything like this happens again-"
"It won't." Damian interjected. "It won't. I swear."
Dick Grayson:
"Honey-" You sighed, "You know last night was important for your dad. He got the key to the city. We were there to show support and-"
"Dad's gotten keys before too!" Your son whined, "I missed out on a once in a lifetime kind of party last night. I was the only one who didn't go- I'm going to become a social outcast!"
"John-" You tried again.
"Jesus fuck mom! You don't understand!" He yelled and you blinked in shock.
He'd never spoken to you that way, let alone with that language.
"John. Room. Now." Dick's voice carried through the house.
John's spine straightened rigidly. Dick was the fun parent. Jokes, adventures, always the the person to lighten the mood. So, for him to use a tone he's never experienced before, John shrank away from the voice alone.
He tried to shuffle behind you, his hand reached to grab your wrist to safety- for protection when Dick walked into the kitchen.
"Do I need to repeat myself?" He asked and John shook his head. "Good. Go. Now."
"Yes, sir." John swallowed and quickly left.
"What the hell was that?" Dick whispered to you. "How can- What?"
"I don't know." You looked down, your eyes full of absolute sadness.
"Are you okay, baby?" He cupped your face and made you look at him. You nodded, a deep frown on your face. "My girl." He sighed, pulling you into a hug and rubbing your back. "I'll talk to him. This can't happen again." He whispered into your hair. "Either he gets his act together or he's spending summer with Bruce instead of his little trek through East Asia."
John was nervously pacing his room when Dick entered. His eyes skitted to the door that closed behind his father. He'd never seen Dick upset- Even remotely so. So this was jarring for him.
"Dad-" He began but Dick wagged a finger at him, earning complete silence.
"Do you have any idea how much my wife does for you?" Dick asked slowly. "One party, John. It was one party. You have privlidge beyond words- You get to experience life that most people don't even get to dream of and you yell and curse because you missed one party?"
"I'm sorry- I am! But-" John tried, earning a chuckle from Dick. Uh oh.
"But?" He raised a brow, an eerie smile on his face. "You're defending your behaviour?"
"No!" A deep unsettling feeling gathered in John's stomach.
Dick's gaze narrowed. He hated that he had to use his body language reading skills on his own child but he had to. "Apologize to your mother and mean it. If I have even an inkling that you're not in it 100%, you're spending the summer with grandpa Bruce."
"Yes, sir." John nodded numbly, watching his father leave his room.
Jason Todd:
Jason took off his boots by the door when he heard the commotion. He could hear you and your daughter arguing. She was a teenager now- So, naturally, the world was against her and she was against her mom for everything.
"Woah- Where's the fire?" He joked, entering the lounge, kissing your cheek.
"I found this in her room." You sighed, showing Jason the domino mask, along with some gear. "She's the new vigilante."
"Why were you in my room in the first place?!" She yelled. "It's an invasion of privacy!"
"Okay- First- Let's not yell." Jason tried to mitigate.
"I was there to pick your laundry. Not snoop." You said again. "And we've already had this discussion multiple times. I have told you- I don't want you in this life."
"Dad!" She looked to Jason, "Can you tell mom to not be such an uptight bitch?! I'm doing good in this city!"
You sucked in a sharp breath. "Calliope-"
Whereas, Jason had gone dangerously still. "What did you just say?" He looked at her, his green eyes pulsing a glow.
"I didn't mean-" She backtracked, colour draining from her face.
"Not the question. What did you just call my wife?" He repeated.
Maybe the scary part was that Jason never raised his voice. But his scars and eyes glowing did the fear for him.
"A bitch." She swallowed, looking down.
"Right." Jason folded his arms. "For worrying about you- For picking up after you- For having reasonable concerns. For loving you enough to not want you to get hurt. And this is how you behave?"
"I'm doing real good." She argued back.
"Let me say this once because if I have to repeat it, there will be cosmic consequences. Do you understand?" Jason said softly and she nodded once, "Good. Now, you will never be a vigilante in this or any city. If you want to do good, use your trust fund to give back to the community. Secondly, if you ever speak to your mother- and most importantly, to my wife that way again, you will go to your Uncle Damian's at Nanda Parbat for every vacation and holiday. You know. Since you want to be a vigilante so bad. You should have the proper training."
"Yes, dad." She nodded, horrified.
"Good. I'm gonna go shower." He kissed your temple again then turned to his daughter. "Apologize to your mother and when I come down for dinner and there's even the tiniest bit evidence that she's still upset or hurt- Like I said. Cosmic consequences."
Tim Drake:
"Babe?" Tim called out, dragging his feet to your shared bedroom. "I can't even start to explain how bad today was-" He entered the room, loosening his tie. "Tell me why the board is so-" He paused, you were sitting on the bed, wringing your fingers togther, eyes full of tears. "Uhh- What happened? Someone die in one of your books again?" He teased.
You sniffed, wiping your tears. "No- It's nothing." You gave him a weepy smile. "Sorry I-"
"Don't. Don't do that. Tell me what happened?" He caressed your cheek gently.
"Something Teddy said. It's really nothing- Just my insecurities." You brushed it off but alarm bells were already ringing in his head.
"What did he say?" He asked softly, already knowing that right after this conversation, he'd be going to his son's room.
"It's stupid. Kids say stupid things." You tried again.
"He's 22. So... no. What did he say?" He asked again.
You sighed deeply. "He's been stuck on this Tort Law assignment and I guess he was just frustrated- I said I could help and he-" You bit the inside of your cheek, "He said that if he wanted to ask help from a dropout, he'd ask."
"Right." Tim rubbed at his temple. "Okay. Um- Yeah-" He stood up and left the room.
Teddy was in his room, still hunched over his desk, trying to work out the assignment. He heard the door open then close, he didn't pay much mind to it until Tim cleared his throat.
"Oh, hey dad. What's-" He looked over his shoulder and paused. Tim looked... off. "Is everything okay?"
"I don't know. You tell me." He smiled and sat on his son's bed. "Anything interesting happen today?"
"Uh- No? Why?" Teddy's brows furrowed.
"No? Really? Then you didn't behave rudely to your mother?" He asked, the smile still there.
Teddy groaned and rolled his eyes, swivelling his chair to face Tim. "I didn't say anything wrong. She doesn't understand what I'm studying-" He doubled down.
"Funny. Because she was my tutor in college. That's how we met." Tim shrugged. "And if my wife hadn't gotten pregnant, she would've had a degree right now instead of a rude and ungrateful son."
Teddy suddenly felt very sick. "What?"
"Yup. She was your age. Whole life planned. And you know what she did? She picked you. And she's picked you ever since that day. And you?" He let out an exhaled laugh, "Today, I come home to find out that you took one of her biggest sacrifices and threw it back at her because you were frustrated."
"I didn't know." Teddy said shamefully.
"It's not about knowing. You shouldn't have something so cruel to begin with." Tim corrected. "You made her cry."
Teddy blinked and looked at Tim. "Mom cried?" His voice was tiny. "I- I didn't- Fuck-" He shot out of his chair, stumbling, almost falling, running to the door. "I'm sorry- I'm sorry-" He ran out of the room to find you. "Mama! I'm so sorry!"
Damian Wayne:
"Absolutely not. Your father will flay you alive." You shook your head, going back to your book.
"Mom, please. It'll be fun!" Alfred begged, "Come on."
"Honey- It'll be your funeral." You laughed and turned the page.
"Please!" He whined again, "It'll be fun. I've never seen Baba flip out."
"And for good reason." You rolled your eyes and looked up from your book. Damn, those puppy eyes. "Ugh- Fine. But I'm not saving you when he goes all Demon's Head on you."
"Ah! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!" He said gleefully, giving you a hug and running off.
You sighed. This was going to be a disaster but a part of you wanted to see how it would play out. So, here you were, sitting in the study, Alfred setting a camera on the shelf.
"Okay, ready?" He whispered with giggles.
"I still don't approve." You said, "But I won't lie- I am curious..."
Alfred smiled brightly then straightened up. He took a big breath in and then yelled. "Shut up, mama!!"
Before he could even react, a ninja's star wizzed past his ear, lodging itself in the wall.
"Baba!" He squeaked, "You-"
"You dare speak to my wife like that?" Damian growled, "You dare to disrespect the woman that gave you life?"
"Baba! Wait! I can expla- ah!" He dodged the next ninja star. "Wait! Mama!"
"You will not intervene me disciplining him-" Damian whipped his head at you.
"I'm not, my love. Carry on-" You said lazily, watching with amusement.
"Mama!" Alfred yelped, dodging another attack from Damian. "It was just a prank! Just to get a reaction from you!" He scrambled away on the floor.
Damian went still, his gaze narrowing. "You wished for my wrath for a video?" He took one look around and caught the phone propped between books. He threw a ninja star at it, breaking the phone into pieces.
"Mama! Please!" Alfred begged.
"Nope. I told you it was a bad idea." You laughed, then turned a page.
"You chose to not listen to your mother?" Damian hissed.
"Okay, my bad! My very bad! This is escalating too fast!" Alfred ran between the shelves.
"Apologize. Now." Damian's voice carried in the shadows.
"I'm sorry- I'm so sorry- Mama!! Help me!" He cried out.
You sighed softly and put your book aside. "My love?" You said sweetly and Damian hummed. "I think he learned his lesson."
"He did not." He huffed. "Come out. Now. I won't attack you anymore." Alfred shuffled out in full view. "So, you decided to not listen to your mother and then disrespect her for a prank to get a reaction out of me?" He nodded weakly. "You do know that if it had been anyone but you, the first start would have lodged itself in your heart. Yes?"
Alfred gulped. "Yes, Baba."
"Good." Damian nodded. "Now- You will write a 3000-word essay explaining that you understand what you did was wrong. And then you were clean the training room of the assassins."
Alfred's eyes bugged out of his head. "The assassins' training room?" He whispered. "But that's-"
"Quite big. I'm aware." Damian smiled. "Should take just enough days as your spring break?"
"Should've listened to me." You said softly as he groaned and left the study.
warnings: nothing really, having hair is mentioned sooooo if you’re bald i apologise, reader is definitely implied to be more feminine looking but doesn’t directly state it
summary: a girl from a random library catches seungmo’s attention, and he’s determined to win a date with her, even if he ends up embarrassing himself to do so.
word count: 1,182
──────
seungmo didn’t plan this.
he didn’t want to camp out at the library, feigning attention to the book he randomly picked up.
this was dumb—he knew it was. he’s been seated at one of the tables for what, 20 minutes now? 21 minutes, 37 seconds, and an iced coffee but who’s counting?
he didn’t tell anyone what he was doing. didnt mention the spontaneous need to dive deep into the world of fiction. he couldn’t risk his members catching sight of his goal, they’d never let him live it down.
where were you?
2:47, tuesday, 27th of july. that was the first time seungmo had fallen in love met you. well kinda—you hadn’t spoken much, but you had the most stunning smile he’d ever seen.
he came in to buy a book for his mum. a small gift but one he knew she’d appreciate. the line to the front was longer than he’d expected for a random weekday afternoon, and he could feel his patience shrinking by the second.
“next waiting!” a tune brought him back to life, luring him towards the register. seungmo looked up and felt a blast of wind blow in his face. you were glowing—like genuinely radiating joy.
he froze. stunned by the prettiest girl seungmo’s ever seen. he’d heard about silly stories from his members about love at first sight, but he never imagined it to be real.
he stumbled slightly when speaking, a trait he thought he’d lost long ago. though it was worth the slight embarrassment when he heard your gentle laugh under your breath, he could’ve leaped with joy.
when you asked if the book was for him, he simply shook his head and explained it was for him mum, a birthday present. and when you said how sweet he was seungmo felt the air leave his lungs. were you this nice to everyone or was he just special? he really hoped it’d be the latter.
that was a week ago.
a week of seungmo seeing your face in his head, hearing your laugh through his ears, and eyes yearning to gaze upon you again.
which is how he ended up here. gnawing on the straw from his iced americano, in a random library of a tuesday afternoon. maybe he was early, you hadn’t clocked in yet. yea, that made sense.
he promised to try and not read to deep into it. but how could he not? you were just so sweet and pretty and breathtaking and perfect and—
yea he’s gone.
✄┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈
3:05pm you finally show up.
hair perfectly curled up into a plait, falling onto your collarbone. a tote bag hanging off your shoulder. makeup done in a way that made your face light up within the dim library atmosphere.
seungmo had to plan this right. look cool, act cool, be cool.
he’d walk up to you, say hi, introduce himself, compliment you, and finally, ask you go to on a date with him.
was it a long shot? yes. did he know this? yes. was he still going to try? absolutely. if what his heart was telling him was right, then you’d accept his proposal. and if you didn’t, then he’d disappear off the face of the earth.
he watched as you headed off into one of the aisles, dragging a cart of book alongside you.
he gathered all his courage with five deep breaths, before he stood up and walked over to aisle 8, where’d he’d finally see you again.
✄┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈
he froze, again. his body working separately from his mind had stopped right before entering the aisle. opting to instead stand still like an idiot and stare straight at you.
you didn’t notice at first—and thank goodness for that—giving seungmo time to spin and run to a neighbouring aisle, seeking refuge against one of the shelves.
his ruckus resulted in a small stack of books being knocked over, scaring seungmo as he hopes you didn’t hear.
as he bends down to stack the books as quickly as possible, he hears footsteps behind him.
“are you okay? let me help you with that.”
no no no no no no no no. this cannot be happening. the second interaction seungmo is ever gonna have with you is because of his clumsiness.
however, he can’t process anything as your frame slowly makes its way into his line of sight. your hands begin to help pick up the books and carefully place them on top of one another.
“s-sorry about that.” he rushed out in a last minute attempt to start any conversation, and potentially make this moment less awkward than it already was.
“don’t worry about it. there’s been worse. at least you stayed to help. trust me, the amount of people who don’t even have the decency to pick up after themselves is shocking.”
seungmo was convinced. you were an angel sent down to find him, cure him of his loneliness. even after he gave you more work to do, you put effort into making sure he didn’t feel bad about it.
“go out with me.”
“i’m sorry?”
did he really just say that out loud?
“sorry, no i didn’t mean that. not that i wouldn’t want to go out with you—any guy would be lucky—but i don’t want to make you uncomfortable, i just didn’t meant to blurt it out like that—”
your laugh cut him off. you were laughing. at him yes but laughing nonetheless, which counted as a win in his book.
he simply stared. something he’d done a lot of when it came to you.
“sure.”
what?
“huh?” if you weren’t in a library his question wouldn’t have been audible.
“i’d love to go out with you….”
“seungmo.” he spoke, without stuttering for the first time while speaking to you.
“okay seungmo, give me me your phone so we can trade numbers and you can let me know a time and day for when you want to see me next, kay?”
seungmo just nodded, worried that if he spoke it would break the illusion of whatever spell was cast on him. this was just a dream right? next he’d wake up to the disappointing reality that you didn’t know he existed.
but as he walked out of the library, phone clutched in his hand. the contact on the screen stared right back at him.
‘____ (library girl)’
as if he’d forget who you were.
now it hit him. he had your number. you had his. he asked you out on a date. you said yes.
you said yes. now he was actually going to get to know you, and you were going to get to know him. all his thoughts and worries flooded his brain, but were drowned out by the notification coming from his phone.
“i noticed you’re still outside and my shift ends in five. walk me home?”
before he knew it seungmo had turned around to see you waving at him from inside, and like a programmed robot, he simply turned and walked towards you, his angel.
✎﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏
notes: woohoo first fic ever !! honestly though there is a serious lack of ampers fics. you know it’s bad when i have to start writing them myself // fun little take i had with seungmo as a down bad slightly awkward teen
btw it's so fucking stupid you can be anxious physically in your body even after you've decided mentally you don't care. I'm supposed to be in charge here
❪ 滑る ❫ fluff newly est. rs first love seungmo x f!reader 568 cw ノ kissing, they're so shy, not proofread 〃 ♡ ⸝⸝⸝ written as part of @fish-and-cake-net's spring memories event! this fic is inspired by the first kiss prompt!! / 𝐂𝐀𝐓𝐀𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐔𝐄
Seungmo's heart catches in his chest when he notices how close you are to him. Then, it drops to his stomach when he sees you move even closer and lean into him.
And holy fuck.
You're about to kiss him.
You're about to kiss him.
He shouldn't be so nervous. You've already confessed, been on a few dates, and started feeling more confident about actually admitting that you're dating. He knew this moment would come, and he's had weeks to prepare.
But kissing feels… new. Not scary in an unwanted way, but terrifying because it's something he's never done before. Seungmo is nineteen already, but he still hasn't had his first kiss. In terms of dating experience, he's as fresh as you can get.
He's still too embarrassed to admit he's been saving his first kiss for you all these years. Ever since you were in high school and he started secretly crushing on you, he's promised himself that you would be the first girl he would kiss. He's had years to dream about this exact moment, but now that it's happening, he can hardly process it.
You're moving too fast, yet not fast enough at the same time. A million thoughts rush through his head. He's scared he won't be a good kisser. He's scared you won't like it. But he's also excited. The past few weeks have been a countdown to this; building anticipation to something that will surely last in his memory forever.
The moment, in actuality, is over quite fast. You don't linger long against his lips. You stand on your tiptoes to reach him, cupping his face gently and brushing against him tenderly. Sparks fly, and Seungmo finally understands what it feels like to be the main character in a first love romance.
But as quickly as it starts, it's over.
You pull back with a shy smile on your face and the tips of your ears tinging pink. Seungmo thinks he's in love, but that isn't new. He also thinks he's forgotten how to breathe—that is new, but not important enough to spare any of his attention for.
Not when you look so adorable, so sweet, so perfect. You're unable to look away from him, even though you're fidgeting with your fingers and bouncing a little on your heels—a nervous habit of yours that he adores.
"Was that… okay?" you ask nervously. Seungmo has his head in the clouds. "Seungmo?"
"Huh? Oh, I… yeah. I… really liked it," he whispers.
You grin. "You're such a dork."
"You like this dork," he laughs, grabbing your arm when you try to turn away.
"I do not!" you insist and try to wriggle your way out of his hold. Of course, he easily overpowers you, and your attempt to escape only ends with you pressed against his chest.
"You just kissed this dork," he reminds you seriously. You shake your head. Your jaw is starting to ache from smiling.
"You're denying it?" Seungmo brow raises in surprise, but his lips quickly jump to grin at you. "There were witnesses, Y/n."
You giggle. "What witnesses?"
"For starters, me."
"You're the victim, not a witness. It doesn't count!"
"A victim? So you're saying that kissing me was you committing a crime?"
You flush and hide your face in his chest.
"Do you think you'd risk becoming a repeat offender?" Seungmo whispers against your ear.
summary: Loving Damian Wayne wasn't as hard as loving Damian Al Ghul, grandson of Ra's Al Ghul himself and heir to the League of Assassins. But no one knew just how complicated it could be—until his girlfriend ended up paying a price she didn't deserve.
word count: 4.4k
warning(s): English is not my first language, not proofread, no use of y/n, angst, kinda hurt/comfort but not for long.
author note: btw, I don't know who created that draw of Damian, but if anyone knows, please let me know so I can give them proper credit!
Love was not something Damian could afford.
Ever since he was a baby, he had been taught that love was a weakness.
Loving and being loved were not part of his vocabulary. The closest he ever came was his mother’s love, but even that wasn’t the kind of love he needed.
Until life—or, as you liked to say, fate—finally decided to bring them together.
Their relationship wasn’t something that happened overnight. It had required work and patience on your part—even more than that.
Damian wasn’t the kind of person who could feel comfortable around strangers, and she had been no exception.
However, she hadn’t given up when he left her talking to herself on several occasions. There was something deep in her heart that made her feel sad every time she saw him alone everywhere at school.
From the moment she arrived, during every break, every class period, right up until dismissal, the girl’s eyes were on him and his loneliness.
As time went on, she realized that Damian wasn’t the kind of person who enjoyed noisy company. So she decided to start from scratch, keeping it simple and giving him space to relax in her presence.
She started simple and from the heart, with chocolate chip cookies. Even though most of them ended up burning the night before, forcing her to start over, she reminded herself it was for a good cause.
Every morning, even if the cookies were inside the Tupperware, you could smell the delicious aroma they gave off. The smell drew everyone in the room; everyone wanted to take a bite of those delicious chocolate chip cookies, but as soon as someone tried to take one and got swatted by the girl, everyone learned that those cookies belonged to only one person: Damian Wayne.
That was just the beginning.
Damian began accepting your gifts, even if they weren’t as exquisite as Alfred’s. At least they were… acceptable.
In the blink of an eye, the two of you were at each other’s houses, working on group projects or spending every hour of the school day together.
“Have you ever ridden the bus?” asked his new friend.
They were both finishing up their latest assignment. It had become a habit that, since she had free rein to choose her partner, she would show up by his side with a smile, as if she’d found her favorite introvert in an adoption store.
On the table were various snacks, courtesy of Alfred, along with a pitcher of juice.
“No.”
He replied simply so that her attention would return to the work and she wouldn’t get distracted by trivialities.
“Hmm,” she murmured thoughtfully. “Well, sometimes the drivers leave the door open while the bus is moving. You know, ”Damian had no idea what she was talking about, but he didn't deny it anyway," when the bus approaches your stop, you go up to the door to let them know in advance that you're getting off. But sometimes they don’t close the door after the previous stop, and that’s when your intrusive thoughts about jumping while the bus is moving come in.”
Damian’s hand stopped writing. He frowned in disbelief at her confession and looked at her in dismay, while she refocused her attention, humming a song, on the project as if she hadn’t just said something troubling.
Damian blinked once. Then again. And again. Until he had an idea.
He would make sure Alfred included her on the round trip to school, or else he would get a driver for her. Of one thing he was sure: she would never get on a bus again. Or at least not alone.
Even in the face of the silly things you might say when you were bored or needed to fill the awkward silences, no spell, blow, or bruise could stop his heart from beating differently for her.
It had probably been her smile; or how her eyes always sparkled when they spotted him in the crowd; or how she had learned to love him regardless of who he was or the legacy he carried.
Their confession of love?
It was a bit strange…
It had been after a gala hosted by the Waynes. Damian still remembers it to this day.
He remembered seeing her come down the stairs, after getting ready at Wayne Manor, the emerald-colored dress highlighting her figure, her body adorned with golden jewelry, and her shiny hair half-up, adorned with a small golden butterfly.
“You look beautiful,” he exclaimed aloud.
That confession brought a genuine smile to her face, lighting it up even more.
The night passed quietly. There were no emergency calls for Gotham’s vigilantes that night.
Damian’s hands fit perfectly around her waist. Meanwhile, her hands gently touched his shoulders and hands.
It seemed like a perfect night, as they both silently encouraged the love they felt for each other to grow in their hearts.
Until he happened.
In a moment of carelessness, the son of an important, long-established Gotham family pulled her away from Damian to ask her to dance.
One dance turned into two, then three, until, politely, she exclaimed that she had to leave the gala, seeing that her family was waiting for her.
A lie.
Her family didn’t care about those dances. When it came to donating, they were happy to oblige, but pretending to have fun with people who talked about themselves and their achievements? No, thank you.
For the rest of the night, Damian hadn’t been able to hide his displeasure completely. His answers were short and curt, gradually dampening the excitement the girl felt about spending time with him that night.
Soon, the ballroom was empty. The only lights on were those in the second-floor hallway and a few in the rooms.
“Damian?”
The girl’s voice broke the silence in Damian’s room.
Still wearing her emerald dress, her hair tousled, she approached him until she was a safe distance away.
“What’s wrong with you? Is everything okay?”
“I’m perfectly fine,” he replied listlessly, but with a hint of sarcasm.
“Why shouldn’t I believe you?” she asked sarcastically, moving closer.
She sat down beside him, sinking into the comfort of the mattress.
“Come on, you can talk to me,” she insisted. “We were having such a good time, and then… It’s like we’re back to when we first met.”
“Maybe now you can use your tactics and win over that daddy’s boy.”
The girl frowned at the comment.
“What are you—?” A sudden silence filled the room. “Oh, Damian.”
A soft laugh broke the boy’s composure.
“Are you jealous of him?” she asked, amused.
Damian exhaled sharply.
“Why would I be? Who is he, compared to me?” Although Damian’s tone was cutting, the girl didn’t wipe the amused smile off her face. “You could go back and dance with him all night, and he’d still be a nobody.”
“I danced with him out of courtesy, Damian,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Besides, you’d gone off with your father to greet a couple of people. I was going to be bored until you got back.”
“And the other two? Were you mesmerized by his ugliness?”
The woman bit her lip, trying to hold back a laugh.
“That was good,” she murmured, nodding. “But no. You know I still have a problem saying no to people.”
Damian looked away from her.
But the girl wasn’t going to give up on getting back the Damian she’d worked so hard to win over.
She took his hand in hers, accepting the warmth radiating from his body.
“Damian,” she said, cupping his chin with her other hand, forcing him to meet her gaze again.
If there was one thing that remained from the first time she’d met him, it was how easily she could lose herself in the green of his eyes.
They conveyed not only wisdom and experience, but also that Damian was capable of loving uniquely and exquisitely.
His eyes had an incredible ability to leave her speechless. They silenced any words she’d formed in her head.
Damian raised an eyebrow when he didn’t hear a single word come out of her mouth.
That brought her back to reality for a moment, causing her to blink once to snap out of her reverie.
“Goddammit,” she muttered to herself.
Without a second thought—not wanting doubts and fears to creep in—she pressed her lips against his. With Damian’s body just inches from hers, she felt him tense at the action.
Finally realizing the gravity of her actions, she pulled away slowly and opened her eyes gradually, meeting Damian’s gaze as he watched her, slightly flushed.
Noticing the faint trace of fear beginning to form in the girl’s eyes, Damian took her cheek in his hand and pulled her into another kiss, where they allowed themselves to relax and explore each other’s mouths.
“If you’re going to start something, you have to do it right,” he murmured as soon as they parted.
Their foreheads were pressed together, embracing the intimate moment created just minutes ago.
The woman laughed softly.
Of course, Damian would say that after their first kiss.
“I know you prefer to take charge of that.”
The boy raised one corner of his mouth and kissed her again, taking all the time in the world. One of his hands rested on her cheek, and the other wrapped around her waist, pulling her body close to his.
A little over a year had passed since that moment that marked the beginning of their relationship.
Both were about to turn twenty when chaos broke out.
Ever since Damian decided to move to Gotham with his father, Talia had always kept tabs on her son’s life and his friends—one way or another.
When she found out her son was in a relationship with a civilian, it wasn’t exactly something she considered a good thing.
Talia believed that this relationship, these feelings, would cloud Damian’s judgment and make him abandon his life’s purpose.
That is why things had come to this: His girlfriend kidnapped on Talia’s orders, and Damian on his way to Nanda Parbat to rescue her.
Damian wasn’t stupid, but he had let his guard down when it came to his mother and her lessons—even as an adult.
Talia believed Damian needed to get his priorities back on track, and the best way to do that was to scare him.
However, things didn’t turn out the way either of them expected.
“So… you must be my son’s girlfriend.”
The young woman lifted her head, meeting her boyfriend’s mother's eyes. Standing before her was a tall, slender, and beautiful woman, but beyond her eyes, one could sense the danger that lurked within her soul.
It was as if she were warning you not to approach and to run in the opposite direction.
Talia Al Ghul.
The name echoed in her head.
Damian had told her about her, and about his life before Gotham. Once Robin’s secret was revealed, he decided the right thing to do was to be honest about everything—the good and the bad—and that included his life before becoming Robin.
“Hmm,” Talia murmured to herself, taking her time to examine her face in detail. “I see my son has good taste. You’re quite beautiful. But that isn’t always important.”
“What do you want?” the girl asked. “I doubt it’s money in exchange for my ransom.”
The two of them were alone in a room. The heat radiated from the floor. The walls were perfectly decorated, with only the bare essentials, but that didn’t make it any less elegant. The colors chosen were simple, but black, gold, and emerald green predominated, which answered the girl’s question about why her boyfriend was so obsessed with that color.
“It’s not something we need,” Talia replied simply, pacing the room while the girl sat on one of the single beds. “But more wealth never hurts, am I wrong?”
Talia raised an eyebrow when she received no answer.
“However, no,” she answered the question. “My son is forgetting who he is and who he will be in the near future.”
“So you’re blaming me,” she surmised, where her boyfriend’s mother’s words were leading.
“That’s right.”
The girl nodded slightly, letting her continue with her explanation.
“You’re here to remind him of his duty.”
The younger woman frowned at the remark. She looked up just enough to see her. Remind him?
“Are you going to kill me to prove your point? Because if so, I have a few suggestions.” Talia frowned, and both of them fell into a brief silence. “Although, come to think of it, I don’t think there are any buses around here.”
The older woman shook her head, snapping out of her confusion.
“I’m not going to kill you,” she clarified. “We’ll just work together to… set my son straight.”
“Together?”
The hours passed in silence.
The girl wasn't sure what time it was, but judging by the darkness that was beginning to envelop the room even more, she assumed it was nighttime.
From the contrast in light outside the room, she could tell that guards were stationed outside to prevent anyone from entering or leaving.
The door burst open, and two men entered. Their faces were covered by black garments, except for their eyes.
Each grabbed one of the girl’s arms, forcing her to stand up and start walking.
“Hey, hey!” she exclaimed, raising her voice higher and higher. “Who do you think you are, touching me? Let me go!”
Amid the girl’s struggles, the men finally made their way to the main hall, where Talia was waiting for them.
“You sure took your time,” she remarked dismissively, walking over to where the young woman stood.
Both men stepped away from them, and a new one approached—under Talia’s silent orders—and took the girl in his hands.
“We’re sorry,” one of them apologized on behalf of both. “But she bites.”
If it weren’t for the gloves covering his hands, Talia would have been able to see the teeth marks on the men.
The woman glanced back at the girl over her shoulder.
“What?” the girl asked, feigning innocence. “I told you not to touch me. I warned you. It wasn’t like it came as a surprise.”
Talia shook her head and sighed.
“Stay alert. My son will be here soon. You know what to do.”
The man’s grip on the girl’s arms tightened. With one arm, he seized both her wrists, while with the other he drew a dagger from his belt.
The young woman’s eyes widened in surprise as she felt the cold metal against her neck.
That wasn’t part of the deal.
A deal she had never agreed to.
She tried to wriggle from side to side, trying to break free from his grip or at least move away from the weapon; but there was no way.
The massive doors swung open abruptly. The figure of Damian, dressed in his Robin costume—except for the domino mask—was breathing heavily, his gaze fixed on his mother.
“Son,” the woman greeted him. “It’s good to know you’re still in one piece.”
Behind the boy lay a trail of unconscious people, and the rest who were still conscious were moaning from the ground.
Damian remained silent, a katana in one hand. His gaze shifted momentarily to his girlfriend, who was in the hands of one of them. Noticing the glint of the dagger against his girlfriend’s neck, he tightened his grip on the katana.
“You shouldn’t have brought her.”
There was a deep line of tension etched across his son’s jaw. His body was also rigid and tense as he assessed the situation in the room, taking his time to think of the best way to keep her out of reach of anyone but him.
Damian made eye contact with the man.
“Let her go.”
However, it was to no avail.
The man didn’t bat an eye. He didn’t move a single muscle in his body; as if Damian’s orders—the future leader of the League—were of no consequence.
“See, Damian?”
He turned his gaze back to his mother.
“None of them will listen to the orders you have to give. You’ve lost your focus; you’ve forgotten what you were trained for. And they know it.” His mother clasped her hands behind her back. “They know you don’t have enough power to be the leader the League needs.”
“Mother,” Damian clamped his mouth shut. He tried to ask. He wanted to ask. But Damian Al Ghul did not beg. “I will resume my training in the League if necessary. It’s not her fault.”
Talia smiled imperceptibly.
“It will take you quite some time to regain that level, Damian.”
Damian’s tense expression didn’t change. He didn’t even blink under his mother’s gaze.
Talia spoke again. “Move the dagger away from her neck.”
In the blink of an eye, the dagger moved away from the girl’s neck. His girlfriend took a deep breath, unaware that she had forgotten to breathe for a few minutes.
“Block her body from Damian’s view.”
Soon, his girlfriend’s figure disappeared beneath the man’s massive frame.
“Press the dagger into his stomach,” she continued without pausing to breathe. “Stop.”
In that split second it took his mother to give the order to stop, his breath caught in his throat. From head to toe, his body went numb. There were limbs he could no longer feel, and others that felt as if they were floating.
“Do you see it, Damian?” his mother asked. “That is power. The power you’ve lost while you’ve been with her.”
There was no reply.
There was no scream.
No arguments.
All it took was a gasping breath and the glint of the shiny dagger covered in red to put an end to that talk of power.
Damian’s mind went blank.
Talia’s muffled voice echoed in his head as he moved toward his girlfriend.
“I told you to stop!” she exclaimed angrily.
Damian’s hands pulled his cape from his back. He took his girlfriend in his arms and laid her down on the ground. He pressed the cape against the wound that kept staining everything crimson.
“The plan wasn’t to hurt her.”
“Beloved,” The nickname slipped out of his mouth in a sigh.
The girl was breathing heavily, her eyes darting restlessly, betraying the fear she felt.
Okay. She used to joke about her intrusive thoughts of jumping off a moving bus. But she didn’t want to die. Not now. Not like this.
Reality hit her like a bucket of ice water.
Damian’s pressure wasn’t enough. She could feel her clothes getting wet with blood.
“You’re going to be okay,” the boy murmured. Although the comment was meant to reassure her, it was also meant to reassure him. “You’re going to be okay, beloved. Breathe, please.”
“Damian,” his girlfriend sobbed, choking on her words.
Damian’s emerald eyes met hers. His girlfriend had always been good at reading the emotions he kept hidden, even in that moment.
Damian was scared.
He knew the pressure on the wound wasn’t enough. His hands trembled as his mind filled with fear. His eyes glazed over with every passing second; with every second that his girlfriend wasn’t breathing properly or as her fear grew relentlessly.
“Dami…,” she sobbed again. “I don’t want to die. Please, I don’t want to die. My parents…”
Damian swallowed hard. He couldn’t get that huge lump out of his throat.
“You’re not going to die. I won’t let that happen.”
She died.
She died in her boyfriend's arms, while he begged her not to leave him.
Ever since her chest stopped rising, Damian hadn’t uttered a single word. Much less had he let go of his girlfriend’s body, which was growing cold beneath his touch.
The knot grew tighter.
And from dwelling so much on his fears, they came true.
She was dead because of him.
Because of his family.
Because of who he was and who he was supposed to be.
She had paid a price that wasn’t hers to pay. A price that wasn’t her responsibility.
“Damian.”
His mother’s voice echoed in his ears.
As his only response, he pulled his girlfriend’s body closer to him. As if his mother speaking could cause him more pain than she had already inflicted.
His eyes slowly fell upon the girl’s face. Her beautiful, closed eyes denied him a glimpse of the color he had fallen in love with. Her cheeks, which were always adorned with a rosy hue, had lost their color.
How could he have let that happen?
She had been the only person who had been able to see past Robin, past the fact that he was an Al Ghul, a Wayne. She had seen him for who he really was.
And now there was no one who would.
And there wouldn't be anyone who would, either.
She had died because of the League.
Because of something he was supposed to lead.
She died far from everything she knew. Far from her family.
She died in his arms, with him being the only thing that could bring her comfort.
There was nothing that could bring back her warmth. He would never again see her eyes shine every time they saw him enter a room. He would never again hear her laughter every time he kissed her.
Nothing could bring her back.
Nothing.
Damian should have listened. He should have stopped at the first person who told him no. He should have left behind his fear of being alone.
But he couldn’t.
He was aware of what it would do to her. He was aware of what he would have to do once she returned.
But as soon as his girlfriend’s body sank into the depths of the Lazarus Pit, he should have known things wouldn’t turn out as he expected.
He had seen his grandfather return so many times that he already knew the procedure.
Not this time.
As she sank, the pit disappeared with her. The green liquid vanished, fading into the air, until the only thing visible was her in a huge empty tank.
"No," he murmured.
His body moved quickly, going down to where she was.
"No, no, no."
The plan had not gone as he expected.
She hadn’t risen from the depths with anger. With the rage of being revived and brought back into a ruthless world.
No. She had returned with something worse than anger.
"It seems the Lazarus Pit was absorbed into her body," exclaimed Batman. After they realized the Pit had brought her back to the world of the living, there was a price to be paid for it. "After seeing what happened with Damian, no one who has been exposed to the Pit should have physical contact with her."
Damian frowned and clenched his jaw at his father’s words.
Both he and his girlfriend had returned to Gotham. Including his mother.
The girl was in the Batcave’s stretcher, connected to a machine that revealed her heart was beating again.
However, as soon as Damian heard that sound, his hands went directly to his girlfriend’s; but as soon as he touched them, parts of his soul tore away from his body. They tore away as if someone was peeling off layer by layer, opening every wound the Pit had closed.
"You can’t ask me that," the boy exclaimed. If it hadn’t been for Alfred tending to his wounds that had begun to open, he would have stood up abruptly. "She’s my girlfriend."
"You’ve been exposed to the Pit, Damian," his father replied. "And apparently she absorbs everything the Pit has touched. If you remain under her touch, you could die. She will take what the Pit gave you."
"Then let her take it."
Bruce shook his head.
"You should have listened when we told you the Pit wasn’t the answer. You should have left things as they were."
"She’s my girlfriend!" The anger in his voice was evident.
"I’m sorry, son," Bruce replied.
He really was sorry. Bruce had seen the happiness she brought to his son. He had seen how he opened up and allowed himself to be a normal teenager.
“Beloved.”
“No,” murmured the girl. “Don’t come closer, please.”
A few minutes after waking up confused, under the Batcave’s light, Bruce explained what had happened, and what had happened to her.
“Beloved, you won’t hurt me.”
“You don’t know that, Damian.”
The woman looked at both her hands.
She didn’t want to admit it, but they felt different. She felt different.
“You should have let me die.”
Damian frowned, annoyance growing in his chest at her confession.
“Don’t say that. I wasn’t going to let you go knowing I had the chance to bring you back. You said it yourself, you didn’t want to die.”
“This is worse than dying, Damian,” she whispered.
The boy tried to approach her again.
His chest hurt at seeing her suffering. All he wanted to do was wrap her in his arms and whisper in her ear that everything would be okay; that they would find a solution, and everything would go back to how it was before.
But he couldn’t do it.
“I told you not to come closer!”
Damian stepped back at her scream. His chest tightened seeing her so distressed because of him.
“Why can’t you see it from my point of view?” she inquired, looking at him with tearful eyes, hurt to be in that situation. “I love you, Damian,” she whispered. “I love you so much.”
“I love you too.”
“But… do you know what it’s like to know I can never kiss or touch you again, knowing I could kill you in the process? Even if it’s an accident.”
“We’ll find a solution.”
She smiled slightly, bitterly. “And what if there isn’t one?”
Damian remained silent.
“I love you, but I can’t be with you knowing I’ll never be able to kiss you without hurting you in the process.”
“You must be thrilled,” the girl’s voice reached Talia’s ears. “Now Damian has a clear path to become what you want him to be.”
Both were alone. Far from curious eyes and ears.
Talia was good at hiding what she felt. Hiding the emotions that could work against her.
However, she didn’t, and the girl noticed it.
But she didn’t care.
She didn’t care what Talia thought. She didn’t care if she felt guilty or not. She didn’t care if she felt remorse.
In her eyes, she was to blame for everything.
Talia got what she wanted.
Damian would become the leader of the League of Assassins.
She was doomed to have abilities she never wanted. To never again have the man she loved.
And that was the aftermath of loving Damian Al Ghul.
pairing: jason todd x fem! reader, platonic!damian wayne x fem!reader, platonic!tim drake x fem!reader, platonic!dick grayson x fem!reader
summary: Teaching Jason's girlfriend self-defense didn’t turn out as they expected.
word count: 890
warning(s): English is not my first language, not proofread, no use of y/n. Only dick, damian and tim on this fic, sorry! fake gun and knife
author's note: my ig's feed keeps popping this account, and i knew i had to do something with this hahah
˗ˏˋ ♡ fic inspired by this video and this one tooˊ˗
Boredom had arrived at Wayne Manor.
Everyone was gathered for a family lunch. It was customary for the whole family to get together at the Manor once a month to spend some family time—away from their vigilante lives.
It had been a couple of months since Jason had introduced his girlfriend to the family. Or rather, formally introduced her; after his siblings had invaded his apartment looking for answers about his disappearances.
The group was in the living room. Each one held a drink in their hands or had one by their side.
It had been a while since boredom had swept over the group, and now they were talking about the first thing that came to anyone’s mind.
“We could teach you some moves,” Dick said to the girl.
The conversation had drifted toward the lack of coordination among Gotham’s criminals.
Jason’s girlfriend turned to look at one of her brothers-in-law, frowning in confusion.
Jason laughed under his breath, the bottle of beer just inches from his mouth.
“Yeah... good luck with that.”
For space reasons, they moved several pieces of furniture so they could move around freely without worrying about breaking something and getting a scolding from Alfred.
“What is this?” the woman asked, referring to an extendable wooden ruler Tim had handed her.
“It’s a ruler.” Jason’s girlfriend looked at him, stating the obvious. “But we’ll use it as a knife.”
Dick leaned against a table next to Jason, crossing his arms.
“Bruce used it with us at first to train us,” the boy explained. “After that, he moved on to real knives.”
“Huh,” she muttered under her breath, inspecting the ruler. “What a nice family,” she murmured sarcastically, raising both eyebrows.
“And yet you’re still here, doll.”
The girl winked at her boyfriend.
“All right. First I’ll show you how it’s done, then you’ll try,” Tim announced. “Extend your left arm forward with the ruler.” The girl did as asked. “Perfect. I’ll block your move.”
With a nod, the woman extended her arm forward again.
Tim raised his left forearm upward to prevent her from attacking him by pulling her arm toward him. With his other arm, he would strike the girl’s wrist with his elbow to disarm her.
However, the girl raised the ruler upward, pretending the blade was up.
Faced with the new movement, Tim stopped his arm.
“What just happened?”
Jason smirked and took another sip from his bottle.
Dick’s turn.
“After that weak job from Red Robin, Nightwing will show you how it’s done.”
The three boys rolled their eyes and sighed tiredly.
“Go ahead, Wonder Boy!” Jason exclaimed with amusement.
“All right,” Dick said, mentioning her name. “You’ll attack me from above and I’ll block your move, okay?”
The girl nodded.
Dick had given fewer instructions than Tim, which showed he wanted to catch her by surprise and prevent her from making a move he didn’t expect.
“Now.”
With her left hand, she raised the ruler above her head. Dick, with a quick movement, blocked the action by forming an X with his arms, preventing her from lowering her arm any further.
However, the girl dropped the ruler, quickly catching it with her other hand, and hit Dick on the head with it, taking advantage of the fact that he was distracted by the unexpected move.
Jason burst out laughing at that.
“Another wonderful job by the incredible and marvelous Nightwing.”
“Tt. I’ll show these fools how it should be done.”
Pff... it didn’t turn out as the boy expected.
Unlike his brothers, Damian hadn’t even given her instructions.
The boy let her approach to secure victory.
The girl, just as she had done with Tim, extended her left arm.
Damian grabbed that arm to immobilize it and take the weapon away.
However, when the boy turned his head, Jason’s girlfriend pulled a toy gun from her pants and pressed it against his head.
“Bang!”
The room was suddenly plunged into silence, as three out of four vigilantes blinked, assessing the situation that had just occurred.
Damian looked up to observe the woman, who was smiling at him while still holding the toy gun against his head.
“Impossible.”
Damian’s eyes went to the toy gun.
“How do you do that?”
“Where did you get that from?!”
The girl laughed, handing both things back and moving closer to her boyfriend.
“I took it from the box while Dick was thinking about what move to make.”
Jason extended his arm around the girl’s waist, pulling her closer to him.
“I used to take self-defense classes when I was a kid,” she said, feeling Jason’s fingers slowly caressing her waist.
“Before I knew he was Red Hood and before I could do anything, she stopped us from being robbed with a broomstick.”
Damian looked at the girl and narrowed his eyes.
“Would you be interested in being a vigilante?”
Before the girl could say anything, Jason began pushing her away to get his girlfriend away from his crazy family.
“We’re leaving, it’s time for our son’s dinner.”
When both disappeared from the room—which happened incredibly quickly thanks to Jason—to say goodbye to Alfred, Dick frowned and tilted his head in confusion at what had been said.
𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐑 𝐒𝐄𝐂𝐑𝐄𝐓 𝐆𝐈𝐑𝐋𝐅𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐍𝐃 ─── juhoon was streaming when his viewers noticed you behind him, so he reveals you
★ bf ! juhoon × fem!reader
word count ── 1.9k
˖᯽ ݁˖ 𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑’𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄 coco speaking here! I PUT EXTRA EXTRA LOVE INTO THIS AND LOWKEY ADDED MOST OF MY MOOTS AS THE CHAT'S USERNAME SO IF YOU SEE IT LMK HEHEHEHE 𖧧 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓
The soft hum of Juhoon’s setup was the first thing you noticed.
The faint clicking of his keyboard. The quiet murmur of his voice. The low glow of LED lights casting a dim, cozy atmosphere across the room.
“…chat, I’m telling you, that play was clean.”
Your eyes fluttered open.
Right. He was streaming.
You froze instantly, still half-buried in his blankets, your body warm and heavy with sleep. You didn’t move, didn’t breathe too loudly, just listened.
Juhoon sat at his desk, back facing you, headphones resting comfortably over his dark hair. His posture was relaxed, slightly slouched, like he always was. One hand moved effortlessly across his mouse while the other tapped lightly on his keyboard.
He looked completely normal, like there wasn’t a whole person in his bed.
“…wait, what?” he muttered, glancing at his second monitor. A soft laugh slipped out of him, quiet, breathy, the kind that always made your chest feel warm. “No, there’s nothing behind me. You guys are tripping.”
Your heart skipped, the chat noticed. You slowly shifted, just a little, trying to sit up without making noise, but the blanket rustled anyway.
[meeoowchi]: WAIT DID YALL SEE THAT???
[miaiki]: MAMA A GIRL BEHIND YOU
[realseanshady]: JUHOON THERE IS LITERALLY SOMEONE THERE??
[hollyyoonge]: imagine if it was his girl 😹✌️
Juhoon paused, just for a second. His shoulders tensed slightly before relaxing again.
“…it’s literally nothing,” he repeated, but this time his voice was softer. Almost careful.
Your eyes met the back of his head, like he could feel you staring. You pressed your lips together, trying not to laugh. The chat probably went crazy.
A few seconds passed. Then a minute.
Then, “Okay, you guys are actually not gonna shut up, huh?”
He sighed, leaning back slightly in his chair, one hand coming up to rub the back of his neck. You could see the faintest hint of a smile tugging at his lips.
That smile. The one that was small, a little shy, but so soft it made your stomach flip every single time. “…fine.”
Your eyes widened. Before you could react, Juhoon turned his chair slightly, and looked at you.
There it was, that look. Like you were the only thing in the room that mattered.
His gaze softened instantly, sleep still clinging to your expression, your hair messy, blanket loosely wrapped around you, and somehow, he looked at you like you were the prettiest thing he’d ever seen.
[pearlywhitefics]: THERE IS A GIRL?????
[fshionalien]: HELLO???? HELLO?????
[j4eyxn]: WHO IS THAT???
[afternoontea]: BRO HAD A GIRL THIS WHOLE TIME??
“…hi,” he murmured, his voice was softer than usual.
Your face burned instantly. Heat rushed up your neck, settling deep in your cheeks as your fingers tightened around the edge of the blanket still draped loosely over your lap.
“Hi…” you whispered back, your voice barely there. It came out smaller than you meant it to. Sleep still clung to you, your thoughts slow, your body warm and heavy, your senses just beginning to catch up with everything happening around you.
Juhoon noticed, of course he did. A quiet chuckle slipped past his lips, low and breathy, the kind that always made your chest feel tight in the softest way. His shoulders relaxed as he leaned back slightly in his chair, turning toward you just a bit more.
He lifted one hand toward you, palm open, fingers curling slightly in a silent invitation. “C’mere.”
You hesitated for half a second, not because you didn’t want to go to him. But because suddenly, you were very aware, of the camera, of the stream, of the thousands of people on the other side of the screen.
Still, you moved. Slowly slipping out from the warmth of the blankets, your feet touching the cool floor as you padded toward him.
Each step felt careful, almost shy, your body still waking up, your mind trying to process everything at once.
Juhoon watched you the whole time. His gaze never left you, not even for a second. When you finally got close, his hand gently wrapped around your wrist.
He didn’t pull harshly, didn’t rush you, just guided you with a soft firmness that made your breath catch slightly as he tugged you closer, right onto his lap.
A quiet, startled sound slipped out of you, soft and embarrassed, your body instinctively tensing for half a second before melting against him.
His arm came around your waist immediately.
Your heart was racing now, your face burning as you instinctively leaned into his chest, trying to hide even though you knew it was pointless.
“Guys,” Juhoon said casually, like this was nothing. “This is my girl.”
Your brain short-circuited. Your entire face went hot, completely, overwhelmingly hot, as his words settled into you.
You didn’t even realize you were holding your breath until it left you in a small, shaky exhale.
Your hand lifted hesitantly, fingers stiff as you gave a tiny, awkward wave toward the camera.
“…hi…” Your voice came out quiet, and completely unprepared for the chaos you knew was happening on the other side of the screen.
The chat exploded, you didn’t need to see it. You felt it.
In the way Juhoon’s chest vibrated lightly against your back as he let out a quiet laugh, low and amused.
In the way his arm tightened just slightly around your waist, pulling you closer into him like he was shielding you from it, even while technically being the reason for it.
[saevss]: SHE’S SO CUTE HELLO???
[teacuplps]: MOM AND DAD FR 😭😭
[jjuhyeon]: JUHOON EXPLAIN YOURSELF RN
[martiniholic]: HOLY FINE SHYT 😻😻
“They’ve been begging me to check behind me,” he murmured, his voice dipping lower as he leaned in closer.
His lips brushed near your ear.
Your breath hitched.
The proximity made your entire body warm, a shiver running softly down your spine as his presence wrapped around you.
You hid your face instinctively in the soft fabric of his hoodie, your fingers curling into the sleeve near his wrist.
“They’re probably staring…” you mumbled, your voice muffled.
“They always stare,” he said softly, amusement lacing his tone. “You’re just new.”
That didn’t help. If anything, it made your embarrassment worse.
Your grip on his sleeve tightened, your body curling slightly inward as if you could somehow make yourself smaller.
But Juhoon didn’t let you disappear. His thumb began tracing slow, absent-minded circles along your waist. “…you’re okay?” he asked quietly.
You nodded against him, still half hiding, your cheek pressed lightly into his shoulder. “Mm.”
[tw0star]: SHE’S SHY STOP THIS IS SO CUTE
[eohyeons]: IS THAT HIS HOODIE??
[ramenoil]: PROTECT HER AT ALL COSTS
[eomlinn]: JUHOON YOU WON AT LIFE
He smiled. In the way his chest rose slightly beneath you, in the way his arm tightened just a little.
Then, his fingers came up to your chin. He tilted your face upward, guiding you out of hiding without forcing you. “Don’t hide, pretty,” he murmured.
Your heart melted completely.
You looked up at him, your eyes still soft from sleep, your thoughts hazy, your emotions too big to fully process.
“…they’re saying you’re cute,” he added, glancing briefly at his chat.
You groaned softly, immediately dropping your face back into his shoulder. “Juhoon…”
Your voice held a quiet whine now, embarrassed beyond saving. He laughed softly.
His arms wrapped around you fully now, both of them, holding you securely against his chest as if you might try to escape.
“Relax, baby,” he murmured. “They’re not wrong.”
You lightly hit his chest in protest, your movements weak and unconvincing. “Stop…”
“Mm. No.” The vibration of his voice against you made your breath catch.
Then, a soft kiss pressed against your temple. Lingering just a second longer than necessary.
[amorassz]: SHES BLUSHINGGGGG
[kaikaikoi]: HE CALLED HER PRETTY IM GONNA CRY
[08mrtin]: IVE NEVER SEEN HIM LIKE THIS???
[lovhyeon]: THEYRE SO SOFT IM SICK
He pulled back just enough to look at you again, his gaze warm, soft, filled with quiet amusement at how flustered you’d become. “…you woke up at the worst time,” he teased lightly.
You pouted, your brows knitting slightly as you looked up at him. “I tried to be quiet…”
“I know,” he said, smiling. “You were cute.”
You stared at him, disbelief clear on your face.
“You’re literally streaming.”
“And?”
“…and you’re saying stuff like that.”
He shrugged, completely unbothered. “They already know.”
Your face burned again, there was no winning with him. Before you could even think of a response, he leaned in slowly.
Giving you time, giving you space to pull away if you wanted to. But you didn’t, you stayed right where you were.
His lips met yours, the kiss wasn’t rushed, wasn’t overwhelming, it was slow, like he wanted to take his time, like he wanted you to feel every second of it.
His hand came up to cradle your cheek, his thumb brushing lightly against your skin in soft, comforting strokes while his other arm kept you secure against him.
You melted instantly, and everything else faded.
The room, the stream, the noise. All of it disappeared, there was only him.
The warmth of his lips, and the way he held you like you were something precious. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you knew, the chat had probably lost it.
But you? You were gone.
[hyuneskkami]: THEYRE KISSING????
[i-kai]: I JUST WITNESSED THAT LIVE IM NEVER RECOVERING
[pbananalover]: HE’S SO GENTLE WITH HER IM GONNA SOB
[stagbarnes]: SOMEONE CLIP THAT RN
[coconhovr]: IT SHOULDVE BEEN ME
When he finally pulled back, your eyes were wide, your lips slightly parted, your entire face flushed a deep, burning pink.
“Juhoon—!”
He just smiled, that quiet, soft smile.
The one that felt like it was only meant for you. “…what?” he asked innocently.
You covered your face with your hands, completely overwhelmed. “You’re so—” you cut yourself off, your voice muffled. “Oh my god.”
He laughed under his breath, leaning in to press another soft kiss, this time to your hair.
“Cute,” he finished for you.
You groaned. “I hate you.”
“No you don’t.”
“…no I don’t,” you admitted quietly.
He hummed, satisfied, his arms tightening around you just a little. Then, after a moment, he glanced back at his screen.
“Alright,” he said casually. “I think that’s enough for today. Chat’s gonna focus on her anyway.”
Your head snapped up. “Wait—”
“Say bye,” he whispered, his lips brushing lightly against your ear again.
You peeked at the camera reluctantly, your face still flushed beyond recovery. “…bye…”
Juhoon smiled, then looked back at the camera.
“Later.”
And just like that, the stream ended. Silence settled over the room.
Your heart was still racing. Your hands still slightly shaky as you looked up at him. “…that was so embarrassing,” you muttered.
He tilted his head slightly. “Why?”
“You just—kissed me in front of everyone.”
He blinked, like it hadn’t even crossed his mind as a problem. Then he smiled, completely unapologetic. “…so?”
You stared at him, speechless. He leaned in again, slower this time, his nose brushing lightly against yours.
“Couldn’t help it,” he murmured. “You looked too pretty.”
Your breath caught again.
That voice, that tone. So soft it felt like it wrapped around your heart and squeezed.
You sighed quietly, your resistance melting away completely as you leaned into him, your arms slipping around him in return. “…you’re lucky I like you.”
He let out a quiet laugh, the sound warm and fond as he pressed one last kiss to your lips, short, gentle, lingering just enough to make your chest ache.
⤿ JOHN LOGAN was a firm believer that love at first sight was fake, then he saw you get checked into the boards at full strength. That was enough to convince him you were his soulmate.
!! wc: 4.5k. fluff. fem!reader. yearner!logan. hockey player!reader. dean and tucker cameos of course. should i make a mini series about logan x hockey reader. taglist open. ENJOY. COMMENTS ENCOURAGED.
The rink smelled like cold air, sweat, and freshly resurfaced ice, the familiar combination settling heavily into your lungs every time you pushed off the bench and stepped back onto the surface.
Your legs already ached.
The game had turned aggressive halfway through the second period after one shitty call spiraled into another, and now every shift felt sharper around the edges. Faster. Meaner. The kind of game where players stopped caring about penalties and started caring about pride instead.
You preferred games like that, if you had to be honest.
Your ponytail stuck damply to the back of your neck beneath your helmet while you skated toward center ice, adjusting your grip against your stick as the referee dropped the puck between you and the opposing center.
The collision happened almost immediately after that.
Sticks clashed. Skates carved violently against the ice. Somebody shouted from the bench behind you while bodies slammed together hard enough to rattle the boards, but your focus narrowed the way it always did during games until the rest of the rink became background noise.
You stole the puck cleanly and pushed forward.
A defender cut toward you from the left.
You dipped your shoulder, trying to slip around her.
Instead, she drove straight into your side.
The impact sent you hard against the glass with a crack loud enough to echo through the arena, pain blooming sharply along your ribs as the boards shook beneath you.
The crowd reacted instantly, and so did your teammates.
But you barely had time to register any of it before irritation outweighed the pain completely.
You shoved off the glass immediately, stealing the puck back before the defender could recover properly, and skated straight down the ice with enough force behind your strides to make your thighs burn.
Somewhere behind the opposing bench, somebody yelled, “Holy shit.”
The puck left your stick seconds later, and the goal light flashed red.
You barely had time to breathe before gloves slammed against your helmet and arms wrapped around your shoulders, the team crowding around you near the bench while the arena noise swelled louder overhead.
“You’re insane,” your captain laughed breathlessly against the side of your helmet.
You grinned despite yourself, adrenaline still racing violently through your system.
The celebration around you lasted only a few seconds before the line changed again and everybody scattered back into position, skates carving sharply across the ice while the energy in the rink climbed even higher after the goal.
You pushed a hand briefly against your ribs while skating backward toward center, testing the ache already beginning to settle beneath your padding.
It hurt.. not enough to matter, yet.
Across the arena, Logan still had not looked away from you.
He sat forward in his seat slowly, forearms resting against his knees while the rest of the crowd blurred into noise around him. The game continued moving at full speed beneath the arena lights, players shouting over one another while the referees reset the faceoff, but his attention stayed fixed entirely on you.
Dean noticed first, because of course he did.
“You good, bro?” he asked, glancing sideways from his seat beside him.
Logan barely blinked. “Who is that?”
Dean followed his line of sight toward the ice where you were circling near center.
“The defenseman?”
“The one that just got launched into the glass.”
Tucker snorted from Logan’s other side. “That doesn't narrow it down at all. They've been nasty tonight.”
Logan ignored him completely.
You pushed your helmet back slightly while talking to one of your teammates, visibly unfazed by the hit you had taken less than a minute earlier, and something about that seemed to irritate Logan further.
He wasn't irritated with you.
At the fact that nobody else on the ice appeared nearly as bothered by it as he was.
“She’s fine,” Dean said casually, mid bite of his overpriced arena pretzel. “Women’s team plays mean as hell.”
“That wasn’t a casual hit.”
Dean shrugged. “She got back up.”
“Not the point.” Logan groaned, leaning back in his seat and letting his legs spread a bit.
Tucker looked over slowly then, eyebrows lifting slightly as realization started creeping into his expression.
“Oh my God,” he muttered. “You’re obsessed with her.”
Logan finally tore his eyes away from the ice long enough to glare at him.
“I’m not obsessed.”
“You looked ready to fight somebody for checking her.”
“She hit the glass hard.”
“She also scored immediately after.” Dean piped up with a shrug and a wink.
Logan’s jaw tightened slightly.
The game resumed again before Dean could say anything else, but Logan’s attention kept drifting back toward you no matter how hard he tried to focus elsewhere. Every shift you played seemed sharper than everyone else’s. Faster. More aggressive.
You didn’t hesitate.
Most players slowed right before impact without even realizing they were doing it, bodies instinctively bracing against pain before collisions happened.
You didn’t.
You kept driving forward like fear genuinely never occurred to you.
Halfway through the third period, you slammed another player into the boards hard enough that Tucker actually winced.
“Jesus Christ,” he laughed. “She’s terrifying.”
Logan said nothing.
Your helmet turned slightly while backing away from the boards afterward, and for a brief second the arena lights caught the side of your jersey clearly enough for him to see the number stretched across your back.
Twelve.
Before he could make out the name above it, you skated off toward the bench again.
Logan leaned forward immediately.
“Twelve,” he repeated.
Dean stared at him. “What?”
“Her number.”
Dean burst out laughing. “You’re actually trying to identify her right now?”
Logan reached into the pocket of his hoodie and pulled his phone out without answering.
“Oh, this is bad,” Tucker said, grinning openly now. “He’s gone.”
Dean leaned over slightly while Logan opened the Briar women’s hockey roster, scrolling quickly with his thumb while the game continued in the background.
“Twelve,” Logan muttered quietly to himself.
The roster loaded slowly.
Tucker watched him with open amusement. “You don’t even know this girl.”
Logan’s eyes stayed fixed on his phone. “Working on it.”
Dean laughed under his breath. “You got all this from one hit into the boards?”
Logan finally looked back toward the ice.
You were standing near the bench listening to your coach, one glove hanging loosely from your hand while you nodded along absently, cheeks flushed from exertion and baby hairs sticking damply to your forehead beneath your helmet.
Then you smiled at something one of your teammates said.
Five minutes ago you had looked vicious enough to start a fight in the middle of the rink. Now you looked warm and relaxed. The contrast was something that Logan understood and admired.. something that was also making him constantly reconnect his wifi in the hopes that it would load faster.
Logan looked back down at the roster immediately.
“There,” Dean pointed suddenly, leaning closer. “Number twelve.”
Logan’s thumb stopped scrolling.
Your name sat there on the screen beneath your player photo.
Defense. Junior. The same number stitched across your jersey.
For some reason, finally knowing your name only made the strange tight feeling in his chest worse.
Tucker looked between Logan and the phone before laughing again.
“You’re done for, bro.”
Logan barely heard him.
Down on the ice, you stepped back into play again, completely unaware that a man several rows above the rink had just memorized your name like it was something important.
By the final stretch of the third period, Boston College had stopped looking organized and started looking frustrated.
Every pass they attempted felt rushed, every hit carried just a little too much irritation behind it, and Briar only seemed to feed off the shift in energy. The game had become brutal in the way rivalry games always did once pride got involved, fast and physical and loud enough that the sound of skates carving into the ice blended together with the roar of the crowd overhead.
Your lungs burned every time you pushed off into another sprint, exhaustion settling heavily into your legs beneath the adrenaline, but it barely registered anymore. The ache in your ribs from earlier pulsed every time you twisted too sharply, yet even that felt distant compared to the rush of momentum building around your team.
The scoreboard hanging above the rink read 5–1.
Boston looked furious about it.
You stole another pass near center ice before one of their forwards could recover properly, intercepting it so cleanly that she nearly lost her footing trying to turn around after you. The crowd reacted immediately, noise erupting through the arena while you accelerated down the ice with one of your teammates racing alongside you.
A defender moved toward you.
You waited until the very last second before sliding the puck across the ice.
Your teammate buried it immediately.
The red goal light flashed, and before you fully registered it, the arena exploded.
By the time you reached the boards again, your teammates were already swarming you, gloves smacking against your helmet and shoulders while somebody nearly crashed hard enough into your back to knock you forward.
You were laughing before you realized it, adrenaline making everything feel sharp and electric beneath your skin while the Boston goalie snapped her stick against the post in frustration somewhere behind you.
Several rows above the glass, Tucker stood abruptly from his seat with the kind of dramatic excitement only hockey players seemed capable of.
His hands coming together with immense force as his claps echoed alongside the rest of the cheers in the arena.
Dean laughed immediately beside him, though his attention shifted toward Logan a second later once he realized there had been absolutely no reaction.
Logan had not looked away from the ice.
Not once.
His forearms rested against his knees while his eyes tracked you, a small grin tugging at his lips despite the intent behind his eyes.
Dean noticed it first.
Or maybe he had noticed earlier and only now found it entertaining enough to comment on.
“Y'know,” he said slowly, “most people blink occasionally.”
Logan barely reacted.
“You’re staring at her like you’re scouting for the NHL,” Tucker added, dropping back into his seat.
“She’s good,” Logan answered simply.
It came out quieter than either of them expected.
Not dismissive. Not casual. He was just certain.
Dean glanced sideways at him then before looking back toward the ice again where you were circling near the bench waiting for the next line change.
“That is not a normal amount of interest for someone you’ve watched exactly one game of.”
Logan didn’t answer immediately.
The truth was he had stopped paying attention to the rest of the game almost twenty minutes ago. Every time you stepped onto the ice, his focus shifted toward you without thinking. The speed, the aggression, the complete lack of hesitation every time another player came near you. You played like somebody who trusted herself completely, and there was something about that confidence that had rooted itself beneath his skin almost instantly.
The final buzzer sounded not long after.
Briar won 7–1.
The entire team spilled onto the ice immediately afterward while music blasted through the arena speakers and students crowded harder against the glass cheering. Your helmet disappeared during the celebration at some point, leaving your hair flattened messily around your face while one of your teammates jumped against your side hard enough to throw both of you off balance.
You caught her automatically, laughing hard enough that Logan could see it even from the stands.
Dean leaned back in his seat slowly.
“Oh, you are fucked,” he muttered.
Logan finally dragged his attention away from the rink long enough to frown at him slightly. “Fuck off." He shoved Dean's shoulder while the two of them laughed as Logan's eyes wandered back to the ice.
You were standing near the bench now talking to your coach, your gloves tucked beneath one arm while you nodded along absently. The arena lights reflected faintly against the sweat still shining along your forehead, and even exhausted, you still looked completely awake somehow. Alive in a way that made it difficult to stop looking at you once he started.
After a short victory lap, the team slowly started disappearing through the tunnel beneath the stands while the energy in the arena softened into postgame noise. You lingered near the ice longer than most of your teammates, still talking to someone through the glass while tossing a puck over for a kid with a little Briar hockey jersey on.
Then your head turned slightly toward the stands.
Toward him.
Logan went still.
Even from this far away, he could see the brief flicker of awareness cross your expression as your eyes passed over the crowd and paused for half a second too long in his direction.
It wasn't recognition, despite the fact that he wanted it to be. It was really just awareness.. like you had felt someone watching you.
Before either of you could hold the moment long enough for it to become anything real, one of your teammates grabbed your arm and dragged your attention away again, pulling you toward the tunnel with the rest of the team.
Logan kept looking toward the empty space you had left behind long after you disappeared from sight.
The next morning felt painfully slow after the energy of the game the night before.
Campus had settled back into its usual rhythm by the time Logan crossed the quad toward his lecture hall, students moving in uneven streams through the cold while coffee cups steamed between gloved hands and backpacks bumped against shoulders in crowded walkways.
He barely noticed any of it, all he could think about was crawling back into his bed after his classes wrapped up.
Not because anything was wrong, which honestly only irritated him more, but because every time he closed his eyes he kept replaying flashes from the game in frustratingly vivid detail. The sound of skates against the ice. Your laugh during the postgame celebration. The way you kept getting back up after every hit like it genuinely offended you to stay down.
Dean had called him pathetic three separate times already that morning.
Logan still wasn’t entirely convinced he was wrong.
He pushed open the door to the lecture hall a few minutes before class started, stepping into the familiar low buzz of conversation and keyboards tapping. The room smelled faintly like coffee and winter air dragged in from outside, students already settling into seats while the projector glowed dimly against the front wall.
Logan started down the steps automatically, his hands settled in his pockets while he made his way towards the usual row he sat in.
Then, his steps came to a screeching halt.
Three rows from the front sat a navy blue Briar athlete backpack slouched beside one of the seats.
Women’s hockey was embroidered, and small along the top of the front pocket.
His eyes caught on the small keychain hanging from the zipper almost instantly.
#12.
For a second, he just stared at it. Then his gaze lifted higher.
You sat half turned in your seat talking quietly to the girl beside you, one sleeve pulled over your hand while you absentmindedly highlighted something in your notebook with the other. Your hair was perfect, and despite being beneath a helmet earlier that morning for practice, he was sure it smelled like vanilla.
Without all the gear and arena lights around you, you looked softer somehow. Still pretty enough to make his chest tighten annoyingly hard. Just… real now. Close enough to touch.
Logan stood there long enough that somebody behind him had to awkwardly step around him to get down the stairs.
He moved automatically after that, though his attention stayed fixed on you the entire way down the aisle.
You still had not noticed him.
Part of him almost preferred it that way, because now that he was actually standing in the same room as you instead of watching from the stands, he realized he had absolutely no idea what to say.
Which was new.
Logan was not usually nervous around women. Confident, relaxed, occasionally arrogant if Dean was being honest, but never nervous.
Yet suddenly he was hyperaware of everything. The sound of his shoes against the lecture hall floor. The fact that his heartbeat felt stupidly loud. The way your fingers tapped absently against your pen while reading over your notes.
He passed your row. Kept walking. Then, immediately regretted it and pretended to take a phone call to abort back up a few rows.
By the time he dropped into a seat a few rows higher, Dean — who had walked in behind him at some point — looked close to losing his mind laughing.
“Holy shit,” he whispered while sitting beside him. “You panicked.”
“I didn’t fucking panic.”
“You literally walked past her like a Victorian dude seeing an ankle.”
Logan stared straight ahead. “Shut up.”
Dean leaned back in his chair, visibly delighted. “You’re down horrendous.”
Logan ignored him, though not very successfully considering his attention had already drifted back toward you again.
You were still focused on your notebook completely unaware of the crisis currently happening several rows behind you.
Then, as if sensing it somehow, you glanced over your shoulder.
Your eyes landed on him immediately with a flicker of recognition swiping across your face almost instantly.
Logan watched the exact second you noticed him noticing you. You looked away first, and that was enough to make warmth crawl unexpectedly up the back of his neck.
Dean saw the entire interaction and looked ready to combust.
“You made eye contact,” he whispered dramatically, his eyelashes batting in a playful fashion.
“Please be quiet.”
“Are you in love?”
Logan rubbed a hand slowly over his face.
Class started before Dean could keep talking, though that honestly did not help much, considering Logan spent the first twenty minutes hearing absolutely none of the lecture.
His focus kept drifting. He noticed how you chewed lightly on the end of your pen while reading. The way you fidgeted with your necklace while listening to the professor. You wrote quickly, confidently, barely ever crossing things out or hesitating before moving onto the next line.
At one point, you stretched slightly in your seat and winced.
Subtle and quick. But Logan noticed immediately, of course he did, he was noticing everything you had done for the past 30 minutes.
Your ribs.
The hit from yesterday had clearly bruised you worse than you’d acted like it did. The thought of that was enough to bother him for the rest of class.
When the lecture finally ended, students started gathering their things immediately, backpacks zipping loudly while conversations picked up around the room.
Logan watched you zip your backpack shut carefully before standing. Then he watched two different guys notice you at exactly the same time.
One of them moved before he was able to finish fumbling to put his laptop away.
Of course he did.
Tall, confident-looking business major type. The kind of guy that was probably in a frat with a snap score of at least 2 million.
Logan felt irritation spark instantly.
The guy smiled at you while adjusting the strap of his backpack. “Hey, you’re on the hockey team, right? You played last night?”
You looked up politely. “Oh-.. uh, Yeah.”
“You were really good.”
Logan hated how genuine the compliment sounded, he was expecting this douche to be superficial and just ask for your snap to add to his roster.
You smiled softly anyway. “Thank you.”
The guy opened his mouth again, clearly gearing up to continue the conversation.
Then Logan stood.
Dean looked up immediately with the kind of excitement usually reserved for live sporting events.
“Ho-ly shit,” he muttered.
Logan ignored him completely before heading down the stairs.
He wasn’t entirely sure what his plan was, only that the idea of walking out of this room without talking to you suddenly felt impossible.
The guy was still talking by the time Logan reached the bottom of the stairs.
Something about study groups, or maybe coffee. Logan honestly was not listening closely enough to tell the difference.
Your attention stayed politely fixed on him while you adjusted the strap of your backpack higher onto your shoulder, though there was something slightly distracted about your expression, like your mind was already somewhere else entirely. Exhaustion lingered faintly beneath your eyes from the game the night before, softened only slightly by the fact that you still looked unfairly pretty standing there in your Briar hockey sweatshirt and sweatpants.
The small keychain hanging from your backpack zipper knocked lightly against the fabric every time you moved.
#12.
Logan’s eyes caught on it again before he could stop himself.
“You play unbelievable, by the way,” the guy continued. “That goal in the third period was insane.”
You smiled politely, surprised that this guy actually had gone to the game, and wasn't just using it as an excuse to hit on you. “Thanks, Boston's never an easy opponent.”
The conversation should have ended there.
You clearly wanted to end it there.
But the guy kept standing in front of you anyway, lingering just enough that Logan recognized the strategy immediately. Stretch the interaction out long enough and eventually it becomes something else.
Normally he wouldn’t have cared.
Except now he did, annoyingly so, at that.
Before he could overthink it, he stepped closer.
“You should probably ice your ribs.” The words came out naturally, low and calm, though the moment they left his mouth, you turned toward him immediately.
Recognition crossed your face faster, and it wasn't just vague familiarity, but rather memory this time.
You had seen him in the stands last night, and Logan got to watch the exact second it clicked for you.
“The guy from the game,” you smiled before seeming to realize you had spoken out loud.
Your voice sounded rougher than he expected, slightly worn at the edges from yelling over rink noise the night before.
Something about it settled heavily in his chest.
“Yeah,” Logan answered quietly.
For a brief second, the other guy still standing beside you looked deeply confused by the interaction happening in front of him.
“You know each other?” he asked.
“No,” both of you answered at the exact same time.
That seemed to catch you off guard a little because your mouth twitched faintly afterward, like you were trying not to laugh.
Logan felt warmth spread unexpectedly through his chest at the sight of it.
The other guy looked between the two of you again before apparently deciding he was suddenly no longer part of the conversation.
“Well,” he said awkwardly, adjusting his backpack strap, “I’ll see you around.”
You smiled politely again. “See you.”
The second he disappeared into the crowd of students leaving the lecture hall, silence settled briefly between you and Logan.
Up close, he noticed details he hadn’t been able to see clearly from the stands. A faint bruise near your jaw partially hidden beneath your hair. The exhaustion lingering beneath your eyes. The slight stiffness in your posture every time you shifted your weight too quickly.
You were definitely hurting more than you wanted people to notice.
“You really should ice those ribs,” he repeated more quietly this time.
Your eyebrows lifted slightly. “You could tell?”
“You flinched during class.” The answer seemed to surprise you, no one besides your roommate paid enough attention to notice when you had an injury you were insistent on downplaying.
Heat crawled faintly into your expression before you looked away for half a second, adjusting the sleeve pulled over your hand.
“It’s fine,” you murmured. “Just bruised, at least nothing's broken. ”
Logan frowned slightly. “That hit looked bad.”
“It was bad.”
“Yet, you got right back up. Scoring after nearly breaking the glass is some insane shit.”
Something softer flickered briefly across your face then.
“Kind of have to in hockey.” You shrugged in amusement, a smile tugging at your lips that was much more genuine than with the frat guy from a few moments ago.
And Logan was taking that as a win.
Students continued filtering loudly around the two of you while the lecture hall slowly emptied, but Logan barely registered any of it anymore. His attention stayed fixed entirely on you, on the way you shifted your backpack higher against your shoulder or how your fingers tapped absently against the strap while thinking.
“So, you came to the game? There was more turnout than usual for our game's last night, it was fun.” you asked after a second.
The question sounded casual, though curiosity lingered beneath it.
Logan nodded once. “Yeah, I went with some of my roommates, we decided last minute because one of them wanted a fucking pretzel.”
“And now you’re giving medical advice to strangers?”
A smile tugged unexpectedly at his mouth. “You don’t really feel like a stranger.” The sentence slipped out before he could stop it, and immediately his eyes squinted a bit in regret, and his brows furrowed.
Your eyes lifted back to his immediately.
For one horrible second, Logan considered the possibility that he had just sounded insane, but your expression softened instead in a very subtle way.
“Well,” you hummed quietly, “you still don’t know me.”
“I know your name.”
The moment he said it, your eyebrows lifted again.
“I-... uh, looked up the roster.” Logan had the decency to look slightly guilty as the words left his mouth.
You stared at him for half a second longer before laughing softly under your breath, and the sound hit him with the same force it had the night before in the arena.
It was soft and warm, to anyone else it would be like music to their ears, but to Logan? It was dangerous.
“That’s a little insane,” you told him, playfully putting on a disapproving face that quickly dissolved into a smile.
“Yeah, no, for sure.”
The honesty of the answer seemed to catch you off guard enough that you laughed again, shaking your head while starting toward the aisle leading out of the lecture hall.
Logan naturally fell into step beside you without thinking about it. From across the aisle, Dean held up two thumbs-ups and mouthed 'Fuck yeah,' which Logan was happy to drown out with the conversation that was slowly building between the two of you.
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