@dramajib: !!!! Just saw some caps on Tumblr and omg do they have sex for real this time?!?!
dramajib: I don't want to watch that!!
@triangularlily: I saw both episodes (tbh I skipped some parts) but I didn't see that
@rocknghorss: no they don't…
rocknghorss: i actually really wanted to talk about Oh Gong with you guys to get your thoughts.
dramajib: In what sense?
rocknghorss: Soo a few eps back when they were dealing with that demon that was killing children and stealing their souls, they didn't show it but Oh Gong punched that demon in the face. This is somewhat in line with his character (I guess?), but it rubbed me the wrong way considering that the other (male-appearing) demons he's helped defeat he didn't beat them up.
rocknghorss: In similar fashion, he loses his temper when Bu Ja takes over SamJang's body and tries to choke her! It seems like a pattern of violence that is made excusable because Oh Gong is technically not human
rocknghorss: Or am I reading too much into it?
triangularlily: Hmmm yeah I think for the two cases you mentioned like I thought it was maybe more cause Sam Jang was threatened by those two which is why he was more violent?? But like idk I don't feel good about it either
triangularlily: Like I just still don't care about the main two
triangularlily: I was only invested in Bu Ja and Ma Wang but Bu Ja isn't around and I'm annoyed by Ma Wang’s story rn idk
dramajib: The violence thing didn't jump out at me. If anything it seems a bit like they're trying to make a point that Oh Gong doesn't differentiate between men and women and demons, but will protect his own at all costs.
dramajib: But now that you've mentioned it, it is interesting that he hasn't gotten that violent with men. Except maybe the henchmen who threw Bu Ja off the roof
rocknghorss: Exactly!
Lagging Leads
dramajib: I like Samjang less and less as the story progresses - we don't get to see her being sassy or smart or anything anymore, she's just this drippy "so in love" mope-er. It doesn't seem fair that Oh Gong gets to be endearing when he's in love by showing his soft side, but she just turns into a wet rag
triangularlily: Yeah like there's nothing wrong with her I just don't care about her story like at all
rocknghorss: Agreed. I think it’s interesting that the Hong Sisters have made Sam Jang less of a person as the story goes along and more of a plot device. They may as well have had Sam Jang be an inanimate object that’s how much her being an actual person with actual feelings matters to the story
rocknghorss: And it’s rather at odds with their previous dramas??
rocknghorss: But at least the writers somewhat shine a light on how bizzare Sam Jang is acting by having her interact with her office manager- he’s the one who’s playing the role of the confused audience it seems to me
dramajib: Maybe they're attempting to distinguish between her Samjang powers and her as a human? So all the importance that anyone places on her is about her lotus blood, but the human Seon Mi is irrelevant?
dramajib: Like I don't think that's coming across very well, but maybe that was the intention?
rocknghorss: Maybe so? But if that’s the case, then why? Like what’s the message here? Is it “Gods/demons etc don’t care about humans”? Cause if so... well that’s been done to death.
dramajib: Maybe Seon Mi rises up above the power of Sam Jang at some point, to give the message of hope and strength or something sappy like that
dramajib: I should become a scriptwriter I'm so amused by my own theories 😂
rocknghorss: Lolol
triangularlily: I like that theory tho Ekta lol. I want to like and care about her as a character cause I feel like the potential is there
triangularlily: And like you said Marie, the Hong sister's usually have really great main characters.
rocknghorss: Yeah! Which is why Sam Jang is so disappointing I guess? Maybe they expended all their energy on Bu Ja lol.
triangularlily: I think it might be that the story is soooooooo complicated and all the side characters have such in depth stories that there just isn't room for a fully fleshed out main couple
rocknghorss: I really think you’re right cause I’m still (despite the shooting stars nonsense and Ma Wang believing in Ah Sa Nyeo’s crap promises 😤) invested in the Iron Fan x Ma Wang plot line
triangularlily: I mean it seems like almost everyone has their own backstory that doesn't necessarily revolve around or have anything to do with the main two.
triangularlily: Which now that I bring that up i realize that there are so many side characters names that I don't know
rocknghorss: Lol. Like the elder! I didn’t know he had a name or any importance until the stars thing!
dramajib: I identified so much with the elder when he was complaining about being put in charge of all the crazy demons
rocknghorss: lol. It felt true to life for you? 😊
dramajib: For real
rocknghorss: :) at least they don’t have magical powers lol
i've rotated glazed defects in my mind about once a month since i read it and i want you to know that matt murdock fanfiction is now my favorite method to learn about supreme court cases and if you ever want to write another supreme court crossover i will gladly show up to your lecture with my three-ring binder and different colored pens
oh thank fuck I have truly found my target audience thank you beautiful readers i am absolutely going to be writing more about the Supreme Court in my fanfiction
yall can dislike chloe all you want but she's a good character story-wise in terms of having depth and having potential for growth and you can't just throw her under the bus and leave her totally underdeveloped/horribly mischaracterized in fanworks where she plays enough of a role that it matters just because you dont like her
Summary: Jungkook is your husband who believes he lost his chance with your sister because of you. Now you're married to him, and revenge was the only reason he said yes to this marriage.
Warnings: jungkook is a walking red flag and oc is a dumb girl in love so read at your own risk? again, neither of their brains is fully developed here. toxic relationship, angst.
Word count: 11k
check out my: masterlist
a/n: nine days in the making and here we are.... anon, i hope i did your request justice!! there will be a part two because yall i genuinely don't even know where to begin with this man’s redemption arc.... at this point, i fear the redemption arc alone is going to take over 10k words (lmk if you have any ideas, lend me ur creativity bbgs). all I can say is: please do not date men who do not kiss the ground you walk on!!!
taglist: @jiwikiwi @scriptved
You remembered the first time you saw him.
Your sister, Suji, was two years older than you and ever since you were ten, she brought her friends home nearly every weekend.
There were four of them: Jimin, Yejin, Taehyung, and Jungkook.
They were inseparable and exactly the kind of friendship you only ever read about in books or watched in movies. On weekends, your house was always filled with their voices and you never minded it, especially since two-years was not much of an age gap, hence you were included in almost everything they did.
That only changed after they graduated from high school and scattered across the country. Even then, the distance never truly separated them. They would stay in touch, called regularly, and planned a holiday together at least once a year.
As a child, being included in their group made you feel important. There was something exciting and cool about being ten and spending most of your time with older kids.
It did not take long for you to realise that Suji was the one holding them all together and her friends always orbited around her without noticing they were doing it. That never surprised you because Suji has always been the main character wherever she went, both at home and everywhere else.
You never resented her for it because she was the kindest sister you could have asked for. She never made you feel smaller than her, she invited you to parties you were too young to attend, defended you when Taehyung teased you about your missing front tooth, and let you borrow her clothes without ever complaining about it.
Her friends were kind to you too.
Jimin and Yejin were the first ones you met. You remembered them sitting beside you at the kitchen table, patiently helping you with your maths homework. Now they were married, with a daughter who was as cheerful as the two of them.
Then there was Taehyung, around whom fourteen-year-old Suji started acting differently. She became shy in his presence, more careful with her words, and she would glance at him now and then whenever she thought no one was looking. They were married now and, as far as you could tell, still having the time of their lives together.
And then there was Jungkook.
You, Suji, and the rest of her friends had been playing hide-and-seek throughout the house one Saturday afternoon, and Jungkook was the seeker. You hid behind the living-room curtain, holding your breath as you listened for his footsteps.
You were certain you would be caught first, because you barely had time to find a proper hiding place.
And you were right, Jungkook did find you first.
He pulled the curtain aside just enough to see you. But instead of dragging you out and gloating the way Taehyung or Jimin would have done, he merely smiled at you and ruffled your hair.
Then he let the curtain fall back into place and walked away to find the others.
You stayed behind the curtain for another full minute, your heart beating so loud that you considered asking your mom to call an ambulance.
At ten years old, what was that if not a knight in shining armour?
You have been in love with him ever since.
By fourteen, you assumed the feeling would have disappeared. It was supposed to be puppy love; something harmless and embarrassing that you would laugh about with Suji over wine in ten years time. But it did not just disappear like you thought it would.
In high school, Jungkook became one of the popular boys. His face made insecure boys resent him and hopeful girls imagine they had a chance with him. Yet he never seemed interested in any of it, he only cared about being around Suji and the rest of their friends, and he never seemed to mind having you around either.
Well, mostly because you were his best friend’s little sister.
♡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━♡
At fifteen, you finally told Suji about your little embarrassing crush.
She was not surprised when you confessed that you had a crush on one of her best friends. Jungkook was handsome too so it wasn’t really weird. You learned much later that she had known for years, but that night, she only laughed softly and said, “I’ll help you get together with him when you’re a little older, okay?”
Not long after you told her, Jungkook stopped coming to the house.
The rest of the group continued gathering in your living room every weekend as loud and inseparable as ever, but his usual seat was always empty. You still caught glimpses of him in the school hallways. He never said hello, though that wasn’t really strange since he rarely greeted you at school even before he stopped coming around your house.
Then you noticed that Jungkook started spending time with a different crowd. And it happened around the same time Suji and Taehyung finally started dating. These two quickly became the school’s “it” couple, with every photograph of them posted online always accompanied with the same ‘#CoupleGoals’.
But them getting together never surprised you.
What surprised you was that the moment Suji and Taehyung got together, Jungkook noticed you again, but not the way you wanted him to. The time your paths crossed again, he spat onto the ground in front of you and looked at you as if the sight of you disgusted him.
You didn’t understand it. You’ve adored him for five years by then, and you had no idea what you did to deserve that kind of hatred.
When you asked Jimin whether you somehow offended Jungkook, he only sighed and told you not to take it personally. And that Jungkook started spending time with wealthy, arrogant boys, and he has changed.
To you, it made sense for him to hang out with a different crowd, especially since he came from a different tax bracket than you did.
♡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━♡
You were twenty-two when you received the phone call from your mother.
By this time, Jungkook was somewhere not in your life; he was just a name that came up at your school reunion and nowhere else. You’ve heard things about him; that he helped his father ran their family’s company, then him eventually becoming the CEO.
Your mother has been a single mother almost your whole life, and she has never once, in twenty-two years, called you sounding like she was preparing for you to leave her life.
"Can you come home?" she asked, "tonight, if you can. I need to talk to you about something and I don't want to do it over the phone."
You asked if everything was okay, and she said she'll explain when you were there, which is somehow worse than any answer she could have given you, and you spent the whole drive over with your stomach tightened in knots.
Your mom was waiting at the kitchen table when you arrived, two cups of tea already going cold in front of her like she made them an hour ago and forgot they existed the moment she poured them.
“Mom?” you asked as you sat down in front of her, “this is reminding me of horror movies,” you chuckled.
"I need to tell you something," she said, "and I need you to not hate me."
You immediately became silent and didn’t even dare to say anything. So you let her say whatever she wanted to say in her own time, because she seemed as if she was going to burst into tears.
"I owe some family a great deal of money," she said, finally opening up after what felt like fifteen minutes, "forty million dollars. It's to the Jeon's family. Jeon Jungkook, do you remember him? From when you were kids, Suji's friend.."
You couldn’t help the gasp that followed, "How?" was all you could manage to respond with.
forty million dollars was more money than you have ever seen in your life. Your mother was an investment banker at a small firm, so your family has never been poor, but you were nowhere near forty-million-dollars rich. But then, compared to the Jeon family, you might as well have been poor.
“I’d been at the firm for three years by then,” your mother said, her eyes fixed on the table, “I was young enough to be desperate for a win. I wanted to prove myself, especially in rooms full of men who called me sweetheart and honey during meetings and constantly tease me.”
She paused, playing with her fingers in her lap, “One of my colleagues brought me a deal. It was a startup that was supposedly going to be bought out within eighteen months. It was the kind of tip that could make someone’s career if it worked.”
“And you believed him?” you asked.
“I believed in the startup,” she corrected, “enough to pass it on to a client I’d been trying to win over for months. Jungkook’s parents. I told them it was a sure thing,” your mother said, her voice slightly breaking on the word sure, “I wasn’t lying to them. I believed it too.”
She looked down at her hands, “That’s the part that still keeps me awake. I didn’t do it because I wanted to hurt anyone. I did it because I wanted them to trust me. I wanted it so badly.”
“And it failed?”
“Not at first. For a few months, everything looked promising, then the company’s lead investor pulled out after a fraud investigation. None of us saw it coming and the entire company collapsed within six weeks.”
She paused before continuing, “Jungkook’s parents lost almost everything they invested. And because I was the one who brought them the deal and told them their money would be safe, they came to me. forty million dollars was what they believed they would have earned if the deal had succeeded, added to everything they had lost.”
“They expected you to pay all of that?” you asked in disbelief.
“They said I could take as long as I needed and I could repay it at whatever pace I could manage, and they would never tell anyone what happened,” she said, before finally looking up at you.
"How much have you paid so far?" you ask, though some part of you already knows the answer will hurt you.
"Five hundred thousand. A little more, actually, slowly but steadily I was paying it off, but it has been years since the deal, ____," she said, her eyes filled with tears.
You have never seen her crying this much, not even at your father's funeral where she held back her tears for her children, "I didn't want you or Suji to know. It’s a debt I don’t want the two of you to carry.”
"And the rest of it?" you finally asked, "you wouldn't have called me here just to tell me about the debt or the amount. There's something else, right?"
Your mother's hands tighten in her lap, "They want to erase the whole forty million debt, if.. "
"If what?" you asked nervously.
"If you marry their son, Jungkook."
You laughed at your mother, because what she just said sounded like an opening line of a story or a cringe fan fiction you read on Wattpad years ago.
Then you looked at her face and understood she wasn’t trying to fool you at all.
“Mom,” you quietly said, your voice shaking out of anger, confusion, and sadness, you couldn’t really tell.
“I barely know him anymore. We haven’t spoken in years, and he’s not the boy from my childhood anymore. I don’t even know who he is now.”
“I know,” she said, and she sounded as if she dreaded saying the idea aloud, for even thinking of asking you to do this, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for even considering asking this of you,” her voice trembled, “I’ve thought it over in my head for weeks, and I feel so bad as a mother, it feels as if I’m selling you to fix my own mistake.”
She drew in a breath, “It’s fine, you don’t need to do this. I’ll find another way. I will not make you responsible for a debt that belongs to me.”
“Jungkook is a good-looking man, Mom. He’s rich too and he could have anyone he wanted,” you hesitated before asking further, “so why would he agree to this? Why me?”
“He’s refused everyone his parents have introduced him to,” she said quietly, “for years, apparently he has refused half a dozen women. From what I understand, he turned every one of them down.”
She paused before adding, “But this time, his parents told me it was his idea,” her eyes lifted to yours, “he chose you.”
You thought it was bullshit, why would Jungkook choose you out of all people? It was clear as days that his eyes were never on yours, and all of the sudden he has chosen you?
Jungkook was an old friend you spent years hoping never to see again. What could someone like him possibly want from you now?
You couldn’t help but wonder if being chosen meant being wanted by Jungkook, or if you were simply the easiest answer to him; something he agreed to because saying yes was easier than arguing with his parents over a marriage he did not care enough to refuse.
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You said yes.
Because when you did the math more than once that week, lying awake in the dark, trying to picture your mom at seventy still working even during the weekends to pay down a debt that is almost impossible to pay off.
You just couldn’t make yourself accept a future that looks like that when you have the power to end it with a single word.
You said yes because you have spent your whole life being the person who helps everyone around you. The little sister who never made anyone feel lacking in anything, the daughter who learned early not to add her own weight to a household already struggling with just one income. You were always the person who takes care of others when they are sick and never asks anyone to do the same for you.
It is the only thing you have ever known what to do. And some part of you just does not know how to look at someone who needs you and say no, even when the person who needs you most is yourself.
Then there is the other reason.
That small part of you that is still ten years old, still standing behind a curtain while Jungkook smiled at you, has never fully stopped hoping there might be a version of this where Jungkook looks at you without hatred.
You know how ridiculous that sounded.
You know it is not the kind of reason anyone sensible enough should agree to a marriage. But you were ten when you fell for him, and somehow, despite everything, a part of that girl never really went away. When your mother said Jungkook had chosen you, that little girl came rushing back.
You understand, even as you agreed to the marriage, that this is a stupid reason to ruin your life. Yet you said yes anyway, because you have never been as rational as you would like to believe when it comes to Jungkook.
Because some part of you would rather walk willingly into the fire than spend the rest of your life wondering what might have happened if you had turned away.
♡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━♡
Two weeks later you were standing in a hotel lobby, your hands were trembling despite the summer heat outside, because his mother suggested or insisted, really, that the two of you meet before anything was finalized.
You spent forty minutes deciding what to wear and hated yourself for even caring about it.
Jungkook was already there when you arrived, sitting at a corner table with his jacket off and his sleeves pushed up, and his phone in his hand. He didn't stand up when you sat down.
Up close, he still looked familiar, only older now. He had tattoos all over his right arm and there was very little left of the boy who used to smile at you like the two of you shared a secret.
"You're late," Jungkook said, not even looking up to look at you.
"By only four minutes," you answered.
"Four minutes I didn't have."
"Then you should've told your mother not to schedule this in the first place," you scoffed.
That finally made him look up from his phone. Something changed across his face, you could tell that Jungkook was surprised that you answered back at him instead of backing down like he seemed to expect you to do.
You remembered, vaguely, a boy who was gentle to you. There was very little of him left in the man frowning at you now, and you hated that some part of you still mourned the loss of someone you barely knew anymore.
"You don't remember me, do you?" Jungkook asked.
"Oh, I remember you," you said, “though you used to be nicer."
"You used to be shorter," Jungkook said, rolling his eyes at you.
You ordered coffee neither of you touched and spent the next forty minutes arguing about the wedding neither of you wanted.
And some small, foolish part of you enjoyed that meeting because arguing with Jungkook meant he was looking at you. It meant you mattered enough to annoy him.
It meant, for those forty minutes at least, you managed to take up space in his mind.
♡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━♡
You married him six weeks later, on a bright Saturday in August, in a dress that cost more than your mother's monthly salary, in a ballroom filled with flowers your mother-in-law chose without consulting you.
The man standing in front of you was not the boy who once found you behind a curtain during a hide-and-seek game.
Jungkook shook your hand instead of kissing you when the officiant told him he could. He even came up with a charming joke about how shaking hands was an inside joke between the two of you, which made the room laugh.
When you told Suji and Taehyung that you were marrying Jungkook, neither of them believed you. It happened too quickly, you have never told them you were in a relationship, there was no engagement or anything that might have explained how the two of you have gone from never speaking to planning a wedding.
You could not tell them about the debt. You didn’t want them to be angry with your mom, so you insisted it was a long time coming. You told them you have always loved Jungkook and that, somewhere along the way, he secretly started to feel the same way.
Suji and Taehyung did not believe that either, of course they didn’t, they knew Jungkook has always liked Suji. They just didn’t want you to know it, that was what they have been protecting you from since you were ten. So, at the wedding, neither of them cried. Even Jimin and Yejin didn’t bother to congratulate you either.
Suji only held your hands for a moment, while Taehyung stood beside her with an expression you couldn’t bring yourself to read.
“We’re here for you,” Suji said.
“Anytime,” Taehyung added.
You couldn’t tell whether that was a warning, but you knew then that they knew something you didn’t.
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Jungkook’s hand on your waist during the first dance felt cold, because he was touching you only because the event expected him to. He never pulled you closer or whispered something sweet in between of the dance. His eyes stayed fixed somewhere over your shoulder, while you moved together with the applause of people who believed they were watching two people in love.
Later, in a hotel suite far too large for two people who had nothing to say to each other, you and Jungkook sat at opposite ends of the couch, still dressed in your wedding clothes.
Jungkook's tie had been pulled loose and the top buttons of his shirt were undone. Your veil was folded beside you and the hand bouquet of flowers were placed right between the two of you.
“Just so we’re clear, we’re only married on paper,” Jungkook eventually said.
Jungkook didn’t think he was being cruel to you. If anything, he believed he was doing you a kindness by being honest from the beginning.
“I won’t cheat on you. I can’t afford to have my company being caught up in a scandal,” he continued, “but I’m not going to treat you like a wife. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just my roommate.”
“Okay,” you said.
It was the only word you could utter at that moment.
You did not know how to explain how his words made you feel. You only knew that you already decided Jungkook would never see you cry over something he clearly would never think was worth grieving.
You changed out of your wedding dress in the bathroom because it felt strange to do it in front of a husband who barely looked at you since the ceremony.
That night, you slept on opposite sides of the same bed, with a pillow placed between the two of you like a line neither of you was meant to cross.
By the time you woke up the next morning, Jungkook was already gone.
At the very least, Jungkook had the decency to leave a note on the counter with his flight time. Much later in the marriage, you would realize it was the first of countless mornings that started the same way:
waking up to find out that Jungkook already left.
♡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━♡
first year of marriage
Jungkook moved into the guest room during the very first day you started living together. That first night, you lay awake in the enormous bed you were apparently meant to have all to yourself, listening to the faint sounds of Jungkook moving around the apartment.
Then during the first year of your marriage, you found yourself keeping track of everything Jungkook never did.
You stupidly believed that if you counted the nights he came home, the meals you shared, and the times he looked at you like he cared about you, then you might be able to prove that things were getting better. And when they did not, the numbers became proof that you had not imagined how lonely the marriage made you feel.
You hated that you cared enough to count it all and you hated yourself even more for still waiting for Jungkook to change.
Pathetic did not feel like a strong enough word for measuring your marriage by how little your husband gave you, only to find yourself disappointed each time the answer was almost nothing.
You counted the nights he came home before midnight: 11 out of 365 days.
You counted the meals you ate at the same table: 4, and two of those were during the week his grandmother visited. To Jungkook, keeping up appearances to his family mattered more than whatever existed between the two of you.
You counted the number of times he asked how your day was: 0.
Well, what did you really expect?
This was an arranged marriage, and Jungkook chose you because he knew you would be easy to please without ever having to worry that you might leave the marriage. At some point, you realized maybe Jungkook had always known how you felt about him. Perhaps that was why he had chosen you as his wife in the first place.
Yet what some stupid part of you wanted was to know undoubtedly that he cared for you, even just a little.
Whenever you were out with friends and thought of him, you would bring something home and leave it on the counter with a note telling him it was his to eat or drink.
By morning, the food was always still sitting there on the counter, clearly untouched.
Jungkook never ate any of the food you brought home for him, not once that entire year. So eventually, you stopped being surprised and then, sometime near the end of the first year, you stopped bringing anything home at all.
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Family holidays were the worst because Jungkook never bothered to show up. So you had to act and lie to everyone around you that the marriage was fine and Jungkook is just one busy businessman.
“He’s on a business trip,” you told your mother at Chuseok, “the company’s expanding into three new markets this quarter. He barely has time to sleep.”
“He’s swamped with work,” you told Suji at your father’s memorial dinner. That was the one day you truly wanted him there. Just once, you wanted your fake husband to stand beside you at your father’s grave, so you didn't have to lie when you were already drowning in grief and sadness. “Jungkook sends his condolences,” you added.
He did not.
You made it up, the way you always did. He did not come because he did not want to, because you were not worth giving up even a single hour of his life for. You could not say any of that to the people who loved you, not yet and maybe not ever.
Besides, you had no one to blame but yourself.
No one had forced you to say yes. Your mother would have been fine if she had to keep paying the debt, even if it took the rest of her life, and you could have helped her without marrying Jungkook. There were always other choices you could have picked, harder ones perhaps, but they always existed.
Yet you chose this route.
You walked into the marriage willingly because some foolish part of you wanted an answer to the question you’ve always had since you were ten: what would happen if Jungkook chose you to be his partner?
Well, now, the adult version of you know.
♡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━♡
What you didn't know that first year was that Jungkook noticed all the empty containers more than he let on, he noticed all the food you brought home for him to consume.
Jungkook would come home late most nights, and sometimes later than he actually needed to, because coming home early meant having to sit in the same room as you, and Jungkook never knew what to say to you.
He would see the food you left for him on the counter with a small note on top of it. And every time he saw it, something in his chest felt weird. Jungkook told himself what he felt had to be guilt, there was no other reason for him to care about you.
A few times, Jungkook found himself standing in the kitchen in the middle of the night, holding the food you brought home and he would just stare at it for a while before putting it back exactly where you left it. Because he didn’t want you to know he had even looked or noticed the effort you put in for him.
To Jungkook, the whole point of this marriage was revenge.
You ruined his life, so he was ruining yours.
♡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━♡
second year of marrtiage
By the second year of your arranged marriage, you were used to the coldness between you and Jungkook. You stopped hoping for him to change his ways, you stopped waiting for him at dinner and setting out a second plate.
You started going to Suji's for girls’ nights and coming home late on purpose, just to see if Jungkook would notice and he never did. Thankfully, it didn't hurt you as much as it would have in the first year. Most nights, he was either still out or locked inside his study. Sometimes the light under the door was the only sign that he was even home.
The apartment stayed exactly the same whether you were there or not.
At New Year, your aunt cornered you before dinner, “Where’s your husband? We’ve only met him twice in two years, and one of those times was at your wedding.”
“He’s closing a deal in Singapore,” you answered easily as lying about Jungkook was almost natural by now, “it’s a big one, so he had to be there.”
What she did not know was that you cried in your car before coming upstairs. You gave yourself exactly ten minutes to cry, sitting in the dark parking lot with the engine off and your forehead pressed against the steering wheel. Once ten minutes were over, you went upstairs to greet your family and smiled as if nothing was wrong.
It was also during the second year that you flew to Jeju for the wedding of one of Jungkook’s business partners.
You assumed you would sit together since it was still a public appearance. It felt stupid now, standing at the gate of priority passengers with your boarding pass in hand, but you didn’t think to check your tickets until Jungkook told you.
“I’m flying first class,” he said, “you’re in economy.”
“Oh,” you forced a small laugh, trying to sound as if it didn’t bother you, “I thought you would’ve booked us seats next to each other.”
“Economy seat should be fine for you. It’s only three hours.”
You spent the flight in a middle seat between two strangers, leaning past the person beside you whenever you wanted to look out the window.
Years ago, you believed being noticed by Jungkook would feel like winning something.
Now you were his wife, and he couldn’t even be bothered to sit beside you.
When the plane landed, he was not waiting for you, just as you expected. You had to book a taxi to the hotel alone and texted him to say you have arrived. And his only reply was the number of the room you had to share together since most of his colleagues and friends are staying in the same hotel.
When you let yourself into the room, he was on a call, feet up on the balcony railing as he sat on the balcony couch. It was thankfully an ensuite room with 2 separate beds, so you didn’t have to share a bed with him. Your only interaction with Jungkook then was when he lifted his finger in front of his mouth to tell you to be silent as he was talking on the phone.
At the wedding reception, you sat at a table full of his friends, who happened to be the group he used to hang out with at school, and you smiled throughout a dinner where no one asked you a single question about yourself, because to them you were simply "Jungkook's wife.”
You weren’t paying much attention to the conversation until one of the women at the table turned to you, “Is that even a real Van Cleef?” she asked, nodding at your bracelet, “it doesn’t look like it.”
“It isn’t,” you said, “it was handmade by a small business.”
“Huh,” she looked at it again, her mouth twisting slightly in disgust.
Another woman leaned closer, “Don’t you think you should make more of an effort with Jungkook’s friends? You never come to any of our gatherings. We barely know anything about you besides the fact that you’re Suji’s younger sister.”
Jungkook has never invited you to any of those gatherings, but you couldn’t tell them that, it would only give them something else to laugh about, “I’ve been busy,” you said.
“Jungkook is much busier than you,” one of the men cut in.
The first woman looked at you again, “You should be more careful about how you dress too, wearing cheap jewellery makes your husband look bad.”
It was not as if Jungkook has ever given you money to buy anything, not that you would have taken it even if he had.
“I see,” you muttered.
You stared at her bracelet before standing up from your seat, “Well, at least mine was made responsibly by someone who was paid fairly,” you said, “can you say the same about yours? Or do you just not care about the children who had to mine the diamond and stones as long as your jewellery came in an expensive box?”
Then you picked up your bag and walked away before any of them could answer.
Later, near the bar, you overheard your husband's name.
"Jungkook, honestly, I always thought you would end up with the sister. Suji, right? The one who's married to Taehyung now? She would've made more sense since you had always fancied Suji too. I mean, no offense, your wife seemed sweet, I guess, but.."
"She doesn't really fit in with us, does she?" someone else said, finishing the sentence the other couldn’t.
You turned away before you could hear Jungkook’s response, already heading back towards a table where you felt just as out of place, then his voice stopped you mid-step.
“Yeah,” Jungkook answered, sounding almost bored, “I guess Suji would’ve made more sense for me.”
That was the day you found out Jungkook fancied your sister.
You waited until you were in the hotel bathroom to cry. You locked the door, sat on the closed toilet lid, and pressed both hands over your mouth because Jungkook was somewhere on the other side of the wall and you could not let him hear you.
It should not have hurt as much as it did, you knew he did not love you. Jungkook made that clear from the first night of your marriage.
But knowing he did not want you was different from finding out he liked your own sister.
Suddenly, everything made sense to you.
The way Taehyung and Suji looked at each other when you announced the marriage to them and the way they never congratulated you. They knew, everyone knew except you.
And the worst part was remembering that you told them you have always loved Jungkook, and that he secretly liked you too.
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A few weeks later, back home, you went to dinner at one of Jungkook’s business partner’s houses. You wore the nicest outfit you owned, but you knew the second you walked in that it still was not enough for them.
One of the wives looked you up and down before smiling, “Cute,” she said.
And you knew it was not a compliment.
“No ring upgrade yet?” another woman asked during dessert, nodding at the plain band on your finger, “Jungkook usually doesn’t do anything halfway. I guess he’s saving the good jewellery for later.”
“She likes simple things,” Jungkook said without looking at you and then he continued, “Suji always said less is more too.”
You quickly excused yourself and went to the bathroom before your face gave you away. When you came back, they were talking about Suji, about how smart and impressive she was.
“You know,” one of his friends said to you as he refilled his glass, “we always thought Jungkook would end up with your sister. You seem sweet, but Suji and Jungkook would’ve made much more sense together.”
“None taken,” you said. This was a conversation you have heard before, so you didn’t really care much of it, at least that was what you thought.
You looked at Jungkook across the table and waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. Jungkook could have told them to stop. He could have done anything that made you feel like you were not just the wrong sister sitting in Suji’s place. But instead, he looked away and didn’t even bother to correct them.
You didn’t speak during the entire drive home, Jungkook didn’t ask what was wrong or maybe he didn’t even notice how your silence was different, or maybe every silence with you sounded the same to him.
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The next morning, you tried to talk to him about it, because some stubborn, hopeful part of you still believed that if you just explained it clearly enough, he would understand how you felt.
"You compared me to my sister in front of your friends," you said, over coffee he was drinking standing up, already half way out the door.
"It wasn't a big deal," he said, checking his watch, “it was a joke."
"It didn't feel like a joke."
"I don't have time for this right now," he said, "can we talk about it tonight?"
You knew, even as you nodded, that tonight would turn into tomorrow, and tomorrow would become some vague promise of “later”. By then, you already knew what later meant with Jungkook, it meant never.
♡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━♡
What you did not know was that Jungkook kept thinking about what he said in Jeju.
“Suji would’ve made more sense.”
The words came back to him at random times; in the shower, in the elevator, during meetings when he was supposed to be listening, and he kept telling himself it was true. Suji was always the one he wanted and everyone knew that.
Still, he could not understand why saying it had made him feel so bad.
Jungkook should not have felt guilty. You were the reason he lost Suji in the first place. You were the reason she had chosen Taehyung and left him behind.
So if anyone deserved to feel guilty, it was you.
Later that year, on a night you were out, he opened the cabinet and took out two plates without thinking. He stared at them for a few seconds before putting one back.
You stopped setting a place for him months ago, but he watched you do it so many times during the first year that the habit had somehow stayed with him. He stood there longer than he needed to, wondering why he reached for two plates when he knew you were not coming home.
For years, Suji had been the person Jungkook believed he wanted. His friends still mentioned her like she was some great love he lost, and he let himself believe that was true because it gave him a reason to stay angry.
But whenever Jungkook tried to remember her, his mind kept going somewhere else. He remembered sitting at your family’s kitchen table, helping you finish a puzzle because no one else wanted to. Jungkook remembered finding you behind the curtain during hide-and-seek, and he remembered how easily you used to laugh around him.
Jungkook has not heard your laugh in a long time and that bothered him more than he wanted to admit.
One night, while you were out celebrating a friend’s birthday, he sat alone in the living room with a drink in his hand. He remembered you mentioning the party, though he couldn’t remember whether you told him directly or if he saw the birthday card on the counter.
Jungkook looked around the apartment and thought that you were probably happier when he was not there.
And Jungkook did not like that thought. He did not like knowing that you could leave the apartment and become a completely different person around everyone else; someone happier.
He poured his drink into the sink and went to bed early.
Jungkook told himself what he was feeling towards you was guilt that would pass if he ignored it long enough.
It did not.
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third year of marriage
By the third year of marriage, you stopped hoping at all.
Whatever hope you carried into the marriage was nowhere to be found. You could not remember the exact moment it happened, you only knew that one day, you stopped expecting anything from Jungkook.
The two of you have been living separate lives under the same roof.
You paid for half of everything, the groceries, bills, and all the other small expenses neither of you ever discussed.
You have also gotten even better at lying during family gatherings; “he’s travelling,” “he’s busy,” or “the company is going through an important season.” You said the same excuses so often that the lies came out without any effort nowadays, even Suji stopped asking you questions about Jungkook.
“You know you don’t have to keep covering for him,” Suji said quietly at your mother’s birthday after you finished explaining Jungkook’s empty chair for the hundredth time, “we’re not going to think less of you if you tell us the truth.”
“I know,” you said.
You just didn’t have the energy to say it out loud. Once you told them, they would worry, they would ask what you planned to do, they would want you to leave him, and then you would have to explain why you even stayed for so long.
Some nights, you sat alone in the apartment and thought about how long it has been. Three whole years; you have spent three years living with someone who barely knew you.
You counted everything during the first year, but eventually, you stopped doing so. The amount of things Jungkook has done for you has become too embarrassing. There was no point keeping track of shared meals when there were barely any to count.
You feel like a different person now, sometimes, you almost feel sorry for yourself.
You waited so long for your knight to choose you, never knowing that when he finally did, it would be the very thing that broke you apart.
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Sometime during the third year of the marriage, Jungkook finally began to understand something he spent most of his life getting wrong.
It has never really been Suji.
For years, he has been so sure she was the one he wanted. Suji was beautiful, confident, and always at the centre of everything. Everyone liked her, so wanting her had always made sense to Jungkook, especially when everyone around him seemed to expect it.
But when Jungkook thought back to the years he spent at your family's house as a kid, the memories that stayed with him were never really about Suji.
It was you sitting beside him at the kitchen table, asking for help with a puzzle even though you were too shy to look directly at him. It was you hiding behind the curtain during hide-and-seek and him trying not to laugh when he found you. It was the way you used to save him a seat at lunch, the way you followed him around when you were younger, the way your face lit up whenever he paid attention to you, as if he'd done something far kinder than he actually did.
Somehow, Jungkook took all of those memories and put Suji's name all over them instead. Maybe it was because Suji was his age, and she fit so easily into the rest of his life. You have only ever been Suji's little sister, or at least that was what he always told himself. And the truth came to him slowly, then all at once.
It would have been easier if Jungkook could have kept blaming you.
Jungkook was sixteen when he finally found the courage to tell Suji how he felt, he was certain she felt the same way, only for her to turn him down. Suji told him she liked Taehyung, not him. Then she told him that even if she felt differently, she could never be with him. She told him that she couldn't bear the thought of you finding out that the boy you adored since you were ten had fallen for your own sister instead.
That was the day Jungkook decided you were the reason he lost Suji. He never could decide who he was angrier at; you for telling her first or Suji for choosing you over him.
And Jungkook found it easier to be angry at you.
He told himself for years that marrying you was a way of taking back what he lost, except somewhere in the second year of your marriage, the plan stopped feeling like justice and started feeling like something he will regret his whole life.
Because somewhere in that same year, without meaning to, Jungkook started noticing you.
He noticed that he memorised the sound of your keys in the door. He noticed he wasn't surprised your mug was blue, because he remembered you telling him back when you were still a kid that blue was your favourite colour.
Jungkook started noticing the shows you watched in the living room that he could hear from his room, the nights you came home late and laughed quietly on the phone before disappearing into your bedroom, and the way the apartment felt different when you were gone.
He noticed you took your coffee black in the mornings but liked your tea with milk at night. Jungkook noticed the light under your door usually went out around midnight, and on the nights it didn't, he found himself lying awake wondering what was keeping you up.
Jungkook noticed how you would go still for a second before answering your mother's calls, then soften your voice the moment you picked up. He noticed you still bit the inside of your cheek when you were concentrating, exactly the way you did at ten years old.
He spent years insisting he had no interest in getting to know you, and somewhere along the way, he memorised you completely.
He even started coming home earlier on the nights he knew you would be there; early enough that he could hear you moving around in the kitchen, or catch a glimpse of you before you went to bed.
Jungkook remembered that night in Jeju more clearly than he wanted to. He watched you leave the table after his friends made fun of your bracelet, and for a second, he almost went after you. Yet he did nothing instead and later at the bar, he told someone that Suji would have made more sense for him. It was just easy to say because he has been telling himself the same thing for years.
It was easier to believe he lost Suji than to admit he was ruining whatever chance he had with you.
The night he finally realised it, he tried to think about Suji, tried to search for whatever he spent years insisting was still there and there was nothing. Whatever he felt for Suji disappeared a long time ago. Jungkook only kept holding onto it because it felt familiar, because blaming you was easier than admitting he was the one in the wrong.
He knew more about you than he ever bothered to learn about Suji, and that was when he finally understood that all along, the person he has been thinking about was you.
Somewhere in the middle of an arranged marriage he agreed to as a revenge, Jungkook had fallen for the person he was punishing, and he only realised it after you had already stopped caring whether he came home.
The only question left was whether Jungkook had realised he witnessed your devotion too late.
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You didn’t come home that night, instead you called your sister for an emergency meeting at your mom’s place, "Come by mom’s house tonight," you pleaded, "please."
Suji and Taehyung were already there when you arrived.
You sat down at the kitchen table where you grew up doing homework, "I need to tell you guys something," you said.
So you told them about how he treated you, you told them the reason behind the empty chair at every holiday, and every single thing that happened during your marriage.
The moment you stopped talking, your mother went to her knees in the middle of the kitchen. You have never, in twenty-six years, seen your mother on her knees for anything, not even at your father's funeral where she stood so straight and so still you worried she had forgotten how to bend her knees
"I did this to you," your mother cried out, and she was frantic in a way you have never once witnessed, her hands were shaking as she reached for yours, "I owe them the money, not you. I sold you to fix my own mistake and I have watched you smile through three years of a marriage that's been eating you alive and I told myself it was fine because you never once complained, because you're so good at never complaining, and I am so sorry, I am so sorry, please forgive me."
You dropped to your knees and held her, and you cried the way you haven’t let yourself cry in years. You cried until your throat was hurting, until Suji came around the table and wrapped her arms around both of you, until Taehyung stood a few feet away with his jaw tight and his hands curled into fists.
"It's okay," you said, when you could speak again,"I'll always help you, Mom. I mean that, I’ll help you pay that debt. But this time, I want a divorce."
Suji was already standing next to you, and the look on her face was one you'd never seen there before, "I am going to kill him," she said, “I’m sorry, ____. I never.. I should have known. I should have asked you harder. I should have protected you."
"Don't," you said, “please. I don't want any of you doing anything. I don't want him in my life anymore, and I don't want to spend one more minute of my energy on him. I just want it to be over. I want to be done."
They didn't like it.
You could see in all of their faces that it was hurting them not to do anything in your stead. But they loved you enough to hear you out.
For the first time in three years you slept in your childhood bedroom, and that night, you slept better than you have in a long, long time.
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At first, Jungkook didn’t think much of it when you weren’t home. You went out sometimes. Three years of marriage taught him your routine; Tuesdays with your girlfriends; the occasional weekend at your mother’s.
Jungkook came home the first night to an empty apartment, ordered food, and ate it standing at the kitchen counter. Your disappearance didn’t seem unusual enough for him to question it.
By the second day, the apartment felt different and he couldn’t immediately work out why. The coffee maker hadn’t been used, there was no bitter smell in the kitchen when he walked in that morning and the mug you always used for tea was still sitting where he left it two days ago.
Jungkook looked at it for longer than he should have, then he checked the entryway for your shoes and they weren’t there. An hour later, Jungkook checked again, and still you weren’t back home.
By the third day, he texted you.
Jungkook: You okay?
No message came back. He stared at the screen until it dimmed in his hand again, and when Jungkook unlocked it, there was still nothing.
By the fourth day, the uneasiness became too loud for him to ignore. It followed him into the shower, the car, and the office. Jungkook sat through meetings without taking in a word. Jungkook asked his assistant to repeat what they just said three times, and afterwards Jungkook still couldn’t remember what they were even discussing.
Jungkook called you once in the afternoon, then again on the drive home, but both calls went to voicemail.
Jungkook wasn’t used to this.
Jungkook is used to handling problems, hell, he has built companies and sat across from men twice his age and made them agree to terms they had sworn they would never accept. Jungkook knew how to remain calm when everyone else in the room was losing their mind.
But that night, at two in the morning, Jungkook lay awake thinking about one unanswered text, thinking about where you were, if you were eating well, if you were sleeping soundly, if you will ever come back home to him.
When did he become like this?
By the fifth day, Jungkook drove past your mother’s street twice.
The first time, he told himself he had taken the wrong turn. The second time, he slowed down near your house and looked for a light in the windows. Jungkook wanted proof that you were there, that you were somewhere and you didn’t simply disappear beyond his reach.
Jungkook hated how badly he needed you. He opened your contact on his phone again and again but never pressed call, his thumb only hovered over your name until the screen went dark again.
The past three years of marriage have been made up of small things he never should have done. The meals you prepared that he barely touched, the questions he answered without looking at you, the evenings when you sat beside him and eventually stopped trying to start a conversation.
You tried to make a life with him, yet Jungkook treated every attempt as an inconvenience.
For years, he told himself that he was the victim, that Suji was the person he should have been married to. But when Jungkook forced himself to remember exactly why he liked Suji, he felt nothing.
What Jungkook remembered was always you and everything the two of you had done together. He remembered a girl half his size sitting across from him, looking up at him like he was her world. He remembered playing hide-and-seek with you and he remembered pretending not to see you.
Jungkook always said Suji was the person he was the happiest with, but all the memories that felt warm to him, belonged to you.
Admitting the truth would have meant admitting that Jungkook spent years hurting the wrong person. And tonight, Jungkook sat alone in the living room and finally clearly admitted the one he always wanted was you.
Jungkook didn’t want a divorce and he did not want you to leave him.
When he imagined the apartment being empty of your things, Jungkook’s chest started hurting. When he imagined another man hearing you laugh, learning what food you liked, being invited to your mother’s house, he felt something pressing against his chest that it was hard for him to breathe.
Jungkook wanted you to remain his wife and the thought made him feel ashamed of all the things he had done to you the past three years.
“My wife,” Jungkook said to his empty apartment.
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Jungkook tried to call Suji, but she didn’t answer. So, the next morning, he called Taehyung and to his surprise, Taehyung answered on the second ring.
“Stay away from my family,” was all Taehyung said when he picked up.
“I knew you had feelings for my wife,” Taehyung continued, “I have known for years, I knew since we were children, Jungkook. I didn’t say anything because I thought you would get over it. I thought it was some pathetic thing from when we were younger that would eventually die out.”
“Taehyung,” Jungkook tried to cut him off, but Taehyung wouldn’t let him.
“No. You don’t get to say shit. It’s been years,” Taehyung said, “and while you were busy feeling sorry for yourself, you destroyed her sister. Three years, Jungkook. She carried your marriage alone for three years and still smiled through every family dinner because she didn’t want anyone worrying about her. We recently found out it was an arranged marriage, fine, you didn’t have to love her, but you could have treated her decently.”
“You knew she didn’t deserve it,” Taehyung continued, “that’s the part I can’t understand. You knew exactly who she was, and you still treated her like she was responsible for everything you hated about your life.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t,” Taehyung let out a short and bitter laugh, “But I hope you do now. I hope you finally understand what you’ve done, and I hope you feel every second of it.”
Then the call ended.
Jungkook spent years blaming you for a decision neither of you had made. Every humiliation, disappointment, and every bit of grief he carried since he was seventeen, he somehow found a way to make it yours.
It was easier than looking at you, who stayed beside him and asked for so little, and realising he had still given you even less than that.
Now you were gone and there was no one left for him to blame but himself.
Jungkook was not the man he always imagined himself to be. He was pathetic, petty, cowardly, and far smaller than the woman he spent three years treating like nobody.
Jungkook has been nothing but a pathetic, petty and frightened boy wearing a man’s face.
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The next day, Jungkook went to your mother's house.
She opened the door and just looked at Jungkook with disappointment across her face. It was the same look she gave him when he didn’t kiss you at the altar.
"I'm not here to see her," Jungkook quickly said, before your mom could close the door, "I know she doesn't want to see me yet. I'm here because I need to say something to you, and I need you to hear me out."
She didn’t say anything, yet she opened the door wide enough to let him in. Unlike the other guests who have visited her home, your mother did not offer Jungkook tea. There was no need to treat him like an acquaintance, soon Jungkook will be her ex son-in-law and someone whom she’ll never ever meet in her life again.
She sat him at the same kitchen table where you cried just a few nights before.
"I owe your family a lot of money," she said, folding her hands in front of her, "I understand that. I understand this was an arranged marriage none of you asked for or wanted, and that you were as much a pawn in it as my daughter was.”
She drew in a small breath before continuing, “What I do not understand, Jungkook, is how you could treat another human being, my daughter, the kindest person I have ever raised and the one who never once in her life made anyone feel small… How could you have treated her the way you have done the past three years? I am in as much pain watching what this did to her as she is living it, maybe even more, because I was the one who put her in this situation with you in the first place. So tell me, why should I forgive you? Why should I let you anywhere near her again? What exactly do you intend to do?"
Jungkook has never been shaken by anything in his life, not until tonight, sitting in front of your mother.
"I don't have a clear answer," he said, "I wish I did. I spent years being angry at _____ for something that was never even her fault, something I won't even go into right now, because it's mine to explain to her first. And then I spent three more years married to her and still treating her like she was the one who wronged me. I'm not asking you to forgive me."
Jungkook looked at her, and he looked so broken your mother couldn’t help pitying him, "I'm asking for the chance to keep showing up until it means something to her. I'll beg for her forgiveness, I'll keep coming back even when she tells me not to, even when she has every right to slam the door in my face. But we'll talk, we'll argue, we'll probably fight, more than once, because I don't think she's going to make this easy for me, and she shouldn't and I wouldn’t want her to. I just know I can't bring myself to just let this end without actually trying for the first time in this whole marriage. I want to be someone worth her time. Without knowing it, I realised that the small things she has done throughout our marriage was never small at all. She loved me despite the ugly things I have done. I was just too busy being furious at my past to notice I was standing next to the person I actually wanted."
Your mother stared at him for a long moment, long enough that Jungkook thought she might ask him to leave without another word.
Her marriage to your father hadn’t always been easy. There were years of arguments over parenting, finance, and many more. There were years where she wondered if she married too young.
But when he died, something in her broke apart and it never quite put itself back together.
She remembered how you used to climb into their bed on Sunday mornings, how your father would let you win at cards, how you cried at his funeral so quietly like you were trying not to take up too much space even in your own grief.
you see, your mother knew about your crush on Jungkook. She watched you for sixteen years, she saw the way your face changed whenever Jungkook's name came up at the dinner table, and pretended not to notice the way you used to volunteer to answer the door whenever Suji’s group of friends came around, just in case it was Jungkook. She knew, long before you ever confessed to it, that you had loved him since you were a child.
And when she told you about the arranged marriage, some small, guilty part of her had let herself believe that maybe this could help. Maybe if she was going to ruin your life with her mistake, it could at least be with the one person you had always wanted to have a relationship with.
She was wrong.
She watched that hope change into something else these past three years, watching you get smaller in ways you thought she hadn't noticed, watching you repeating lies about a man who could not even be bothered to accompany you for your own father’s death anniversaries.
She was, is, a bad mother for that.
But she also knew you. She knew that if she asked you right now, whether some part of you still wanted to know if he was willing to try, you wouldn’t say no.
"Sit up straight," she finally said, and Jungkook blinked at her, caught off guard.
"I'm sorry?"
"You heard me," your mother’s voice was firm and steady, "If you're going to sit in my kitchen and tell me you intend to fight for my daughter, you're not going to do it slouched over like a boy waiting to be punished. Fighting for her means showing up like you mean it, every time, starting now."
Jungkook immediately straightened his posture.
"I'm not telling you this because I forgive you," she continued, "I will not forgive you for a long time, and that will be my right to decide, just as it will be hers."
She took a deep breath, before continuing, "But I have spent three years watching my daughter lie to the people who love her because she didn't want anyone to know how badly you have hurt her. If you're serious, then you do not need to convince me. You show her, you keep showing it to her, and you need to accept that she may never let you back in, and you don't get to be angry about it, not after all the years you've taken from her already."
"She was ten years old the first time she talked to me about you," she said quietly, "I used to think it was sweet. I didn't know I was watching the beginning of something that would be a long time pain for her. So if she gives you a second chance, you do not waste whatever time she gives you, Jungkook. She has given enough of it away for free, do you understand me?"
"I understand," he said.
♡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━♡
You came home from a work trip three days later and found Jungkook sitting at your family home’s dining table, his laptop open and a stack of papers beside him like it was any other weekday.
He was sitting there as if it wasn’t your first time seeing him since you walked out of the home you shared with him.
"What the fuck are you doing here?” you sneered.
Your keys were clenched in your hand, and your entire body went rigid at the sight of him sitting in a chair at your family home.
"I'm here to date you," he said, slowly looking up at you.
You stared at him in disbelief, "You are here to what?"
“Date you,” Jungkook said as he closed his laptop, “I want to date you properly this time.”
For a second, all you could do was look at him.
"I know what I did,” Jungkook continued, “I know what three years of this marriage to me did to you. I'm not asking you to forget it. I just.. I want the chance to earn what I should’ve earned before we ever got married.”
You let out a dry and humourless laugh, before asking, “What the fuck?!”
You dropped your keys onto the counter, and they hit harder than you intended it to be, “You think you can just show up here and ask to start over?”
“No matter what you do, my heart is not going to change, Jungkook. I'm not a child anymore. I know better than to give you a second chance, hell, I gave you a hundred chances over the last three years and you didn't take a single one.”
“You are beneath me now,” you said quietly, “do you understand that?”
“Then give me one last chance,” Jungkook said, almost pleading.
“Let me court you,” he continued, “let me date you the way I should have the past three years.”
You didn’t answer.
You just walked past him and went to get changed.
You were meeting your friends that night, and had no intention of spending another minute in that kitchen listening to Jungkook act like he could fix three years with a few words.
He stayed where he was while you moved around the house, but you could feel his eyes on you. It shouldn’t have felt unfamiliar, he was your husband. Still, you couldn’t remember the last time he actually noticed you.
but you hated that your body enjoyed the feeling of being noticed by him, hated that some part of you still wanted to be seen by him.
"Can I come?" he asked, from the living room, he sounded quieter than you have ever heard him speak, “I would love to get to know your friends.”
You scoffed out loud in response and left without answering him.
When the door shut behind you, something in your body felt at ease because for the first time in years, your life felt like it belonged entirely to you again.
Characters/Pairings: soft dark Bucky Barnes x curvy Millennial female!Reader
Word Count: 7.8k
Summary: Your super soldier next door neighbor puts some of his old skills to good use. (Unspecified post-Endgame Bucky)
Notes: This is my week WEEK SIX submission for @buckybarnesevents' Hot Bucky Summer - "please, I need help" and sex pollen.
↠ Main Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest
As the Winter Soldier, they made him master many skills, including branches of chemistry specifically so he could create compounds necessary and advantageous to fulfilling and expediting his missions. He was so good he even helped develop some of the compounds used by Hydra and in The Red Room.
It had been years since he’d applied the long dormant skill.
But it had also been a year since you moved in next door, and he was tired of waiting.
You were so sweet, so good, and he would treat you so well if you were his.
And you were so deserving.
You ought to have someone dote on you, take care of you. You were fiercely independent, fully capable, but you shouldn’t need to be.
He was more than willing to take care of you. He always insisted it was no trouble to hold a door open for you, to help carry your groceries, to pick up your mail when you were out of town, to help you put together the table you ordered online when it was delivered. Not only was it no trouble, he liked doing those things for you.
He wanted to do more.
He heard you late at night with your vibrator.
He could give you so much better.
How many times had the super’s wife said to him what a sweet couple the two of you would make?
What was the harm with hurrying you along into something he was so sure you wanted with a little sex pollen?
Before he’d been The Winter Soldier, the efficient and essentially untraceable assassin for decades, he’d been a damn good soldier as Bucky Barnes. He was still an asset now whether he was consulting or going into the field. Constantly valued for his keen mind.
Why shouldn’t he use his expertise and strategy now?
It was just traces at first. You hardly noticed.
There’d be the odd moment when you hesitated in a sentence, blinking, eyes glossy as you lost your train of thought. That little fluster was delicious, but not enough. He watched you closely, reading the microexpressions that drifted across your features: confusion, a tiny flicker of heat, embarrassment you squashed down. You’d shake your head briskly, recenter yourself, and apologize with a laugh he could tell was forced.
And he always smiled warmly at you, but inside, it was with the energy of a satisfied smirk.
It was working.
He made minute adjustments. Ratcheted the levels up and down, spiked your mail with just enough to make you breathe deeper when you opened it. He traded in your regular coffee beans for a new bag from the “cool indie shop on the corner,” slipped the powder into the grounds. It was a delicate balance: he never wanted you to feel sick, just hungry. Desirous. Needy.
Once, he heard you through the wall, weeping with frustration. He’d never heard that in your voice before, and it made him burn with satisfaction and anticipation.
But he was always successful in his missions because of his expertise, his ability to gage proper timing.
He struck early, before the city could shake off its Saturday morning haze. Heat already radiated from the bricks, the kind of July swelter that made people yearn for lemonade and picnics and pools. He moved in darkness as much out of habit as necessity, crossing the handful of feet between your fire escape and his with the ease of a man who’d spent too many years navigating roofs and ledges and the soft places between shadows.
The mixture was clear, almost invisible, but he applied it in a glistening line along the edges of your window frames, working methodically. His hands did not shake.
He returned to his own apartment and pulled up the port he’d developed to control your HVAC system, and shut it down just before he knew you were typically up and stirring around on a Saturday morning.
And then he waited.
By 8:37 a.m. your apartment was growing warmer than usual, and you woke with a slick hairline, a sheen of sweat over your skin. He watched you from the camera he installed as you slipped out of bed and down the hall. You pawed at the digital thermostat first, muttering under your breath, but only the error message blinked back at you: HVAC ERROR. CALL MAINTENANCE. You let out a laugh, brittle and bitter, and trudged to the windows, pushing up the panes to at least get the fresh air. You left every window open, desperate for a through breeze.
You braced your palms against the sill and he could see the relief already blooming in your posture as the pane slid open. The breeze was gentle but constant, carrying with it the faintest hint of the compound’s sharp, metallic sweetness. It was immediate, the way it worked instantaneously: you inhaled, unaware, then blinked rapidly. Your jaw slackened for a fraction of a second, mouth parted in an unintentional invitation. Your hands lingered on the window frame, before you pulled them back and wiped one over your brow, while the other went to your chest, and no wonder since he assumed that you’d be feeling an uptick in your heart rate.
And now, he would wait.
He watched you pad into your little kitchen, tugging at the hem of your sleep shirt. You filled the kettle, set it on, and stood at the counter, hands fluttering as if you’d forgotten what to do with them. You took a breath—he could see the shudder of your shoulders—then craned your neck, face tilted to the open window, and inhaled again, a long, greedy drag.
Inside a minute, you began to fidget. Your thighs pressed together, then parted, then pressed again, the rhythm building. Your head tipped forward, eyes closing as you gripped the countertop, knuckles going white. A slick little shiver wound through you. The kettle whistled, shrill and out of place, and you startled so hard the mug tumbled from your hands, landing on the floor with a muted thunk.
Bucky chuckled.
This was going to be fun.
You were not, generally, this unbalanced. You could ride out a wave of sexual frustration for weeks, even months, and never let it show in your polite smile or the hand you’d lend to old Mrs. Lopez on 5B with her packages. You had learned to live with your little obsession with your neighbor Bucky Barnes in the same way you’d learned to ignore the drip in your bathroom sink: a low-level, constant irritant, a fixture of your life that you could, with sufficient self-control, simply tune out.
It was only a quarter past nine in the morning and you were already panting like you’d just climbed six flights in July, not merely rolled out of bed. Something was wrong with your body. Not sick—more like your skin had outgrown you overnight, every inch of you thrumming with an ache that had nothing to do with exercise and everything to do with need.
Because as bad as the heat was, you’d woken up at 3:21am, rolled onto your stomach and pressed your thighs together and rocked your hips, humping your mattress to no avail. It was as unfulfilling as the dream you’d woken up from, a dream featuring your neighbor Bucky Barnes pinning you in place, fucking you so well, so close you could taste the climax, only to have jolted awake, desperate and empty.
Now with no AC, it just figures that the universe would align for the worst day of your sexual frustration to peak when your AC went out.
You had lived through enough New York City summers to know the heat would try to kill you, but you’d never expected it to go for the slow, erotic smother instead.
Great. Now your brain was writing romance copy.
You took a cold shower, or as cold as the pipes allowed, and stepped out feeling more feverish and frustrated than ever. After that you stood in front of the open fridge for several minutes, eating string cheese in small, desperate bites, willing the chill to transfer from your tongue to your bloodstream. It didn't work. Cold air kissed your shins momentarily, but it was already evaporating.
Your phone, sticky with sweat, offered no solutions. The building super had already responded to oyour texts, but with the city-wide sweltering temperatures, he said it was going to be difficult to get someone to come look before Monday. You scrolled through social media, found only posts about the heat, people frying eggs on their windowsills, and, for some reason, an uptick in thirst traps. You slammed it facedown on the kitchen table, stood there, and considered your options.
Maybe you would have to resort to leaning on your own personal thirst trap and endure the torture.
Look but not touch.
As always.
You jogged your memory for Bucky’s likely status. His AC always worked, a source of neighborly gloating he pretended to feel sorry about. You’d seen him on the fire escape last night, watering an improbable pot of basil, so he hadn’t left for one of his mysterious, week-long trips.
You counted on him to be up, and you counted on him to be kind and neighborly. How many times had he said to let him know if you needed anything?
You slipped your feet into flip-flops and padded across the hall, the chill of the corridor almost pornographically relieving. Ignoring the urge to just lie down in the communal patch of coolness, you knocked. Not politely, but as un-desperately as you could manage.
His door opened before the second knock. He wore an old t-shirt and gym shorts in the way of a man who didn’t expect guests but was always ready for them. He grinned, broad and easy, and you wanted to slap it off his face or maybe—maybe—sink your teeth into the soft underside of his jaw, alternate violence and adoration. If it weren’t for the white socks on his feet, he would have been wholly unapproachable. He blinked at you, a little surprised, before his expression softened in recognition.
His blue eyes slid from your face down the length of you—bare-legged, sweat-sheened, half-dressed. If he noticed how untethered you looked, he didn’t say a word.
He just leaned against the doorframe, forearm braced above his head, a little smirk twitching at the edge of his mouth. “Hey, neighbor,” he said, voice just hoarse enough to sound like he, too, had just woken up. “You okay?”
You opened your mouth, then closed it. No, you were not okay. “Yeah, no, my AC’s dead. Reuben says maybe Monday.”
“Damn. That’s rough.” He stepped back, opening the door wider. “Come on in, you can cool off in here. It’s like an igloo compared to the hallway.”
You tried to say “thanks” but it came out thin and breathy. You hesitated in the threshold, pulse hammering in your ears, palms sticky. You were acutely aware of every inch of your skin and the patches where your tank top clung and stuck to your warm skin. You kept your arms tight at your sides and followed him in, trying not to look too hard at the wide set of his shoulders and the deliciously lived-in swoop of his hair.
His apartment was frigid. A gasp left you, startled, as the coolness curled around your ankles and up your shins, relief so sharp it tasted almost like salt. You braced a hand on the wall, felt your knees threatening to buckle for a whole, embarrassing second.
Bucky closed the door behind you and put a hand in his pocket, rocking his weight once up and back on the balls of his feet. As you adjusted to the temperature, your brain came back online, time stretching out but your thoughts not clearing so much as multiplying, all scrambling around the same basic theme: need.
Every little physical sensation felt magnified and weirdly erotic—Bucky’s clean-laundry scent, the chill bristling your nipples, your own rapid breathing, every sound echoing in his silent apartment.
Bucky peered at you with gentle concern, vaguely amused, like he could hold both those things in his expression at once. “You want some coffee?” he offered, casual, normal.
“Only if it’s iced,” you answered, following him into the kitchen.
You perched at his breakfast bar, gripping the edge, trying to appear unbothered. Up close, the scent of his skin and aftershave filled the air, a dizzying magnetism that was entirely unfair. You shifted, restless, gnawing the inside of your cheek.
Bucky moved with measured, assured movements behind the counter, opening a cupboard for glasses, filling them from a pitcher of cold brew. You couldn’t help but follow the flex of his forearm, the way his veins pressed up beneath the thin skin, the way his hands dwarfed the glass when he reached to set it in front of you.
His close proximity, the press of cold air from the vent above, the frisson of want that kept pooling in your belly and lower—god, was there anything left of you but need, at this point? It was getting hard to think, and you had to grip the glass hard to keep your hand from trembling. The iced coffee gave you the jitters. Or maybe it was just him, and the way he looked at you—just for a second, a slip out from behind his affable neighbor mask. It made your skin flare with fresh heat, the want sharper now for the momentary suggestion that maybe he knew exactly how ruined you felt by him.
He didn’t sit, just stood at the other counter a few feet away, tilting back his own glass.
He watched you over the rim, unhurried, eyes steady and watchful, and you thought, briefly, incoherently, that if you didn’t put something else in your mouth besides ice, you were going to say something reckless and humiliating. The coffee wasn’t helping at all. The caffeine sharpened your need, made it into a nervous, electrified ache, made you more aware of the incessant want.
“How’s your week going?” he asked, mild as ever. His voice was a low vibration, something pleasant you wanted to crawl inside.
You tried to recall anything that had happened since Monday, but it all seemed distant, unrelated to the desperate present. “Um. Work’s a lot,” you said, then, quickly, “How about you?”
He waited a beat, as if debating whether to give the default “fine” or to try for something more interesting. “You know. The usual. Little consulting, some paperwork, surveillance for an old friend. Watered the plants.”
There was a small silence. When you spoke, your voice was tight. “Your place is always freezing.”
He shrugged, a smile tugging the edge of his mouth. “Just lucky for once, I guess.” He was looking at you—really looking, with that steady, disarming focus of his, like he was cataloguing everything from the way you shivered to the fact that you couldn’t seem to unclench your legs. “You can hang out as long as you want. I’ve got snacks, TV, whatever you need.”
You needed something, and it was not TV.
But you had worked so hard to manage this—all your strange, out-of-joint attraction to Bucky, your embarrassing daydreams about what it would be like, the impossible softness that sometimes came over his face when he listened to you talk. You knew it was only the pheromones, the chemical trick of proximity that had you feeling so desperately out of control.
God.
He was just being the nice neighbor and friend he always was, and here you were actively fighting some itchyearndesperateneed to fuck him.
Maybe it wasn’t the heat or the coffee. Maybe it was just you, and the unsolvable, hungry problem of wanting him.
You finished your glass with a gulp that left your throat sore. The chill bloomed through your veins, hitting the heat in your core and swirling the want into a sharper, thinner line that tethered you, drove you. You wiped condensation from your lip and found Bucky staring at your mouth. You caught him, or he let himself get caught, because he didn’t look away—he watched, and then, slow and unapologetic, he smiled.
You could feel the edges of yourself getting fuzzy, your boundaries dissolving in the cold and the ache. His name was a bell in your head, a reflex: Bucky Bucky Bucky. You wondered what it’d be like to say it while he was inside you. Or after. Or never.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked, but he came closer, leaned over the counter, invading your space as if he knew you weren’t, as if he needed to be sure.
Instead you cleared your throat. “Yeah. Sorry. I think I’m just a little, uh, loopy from the heat.”
His gaze flicked purposefully down your throat, over the pulse jumping there, then back up to your face. “Don’t apologize,” he said, softer than before, which made it worse. “It’s not your fault. Heat’s a killer.”
You tried to laugh it off, but the sound that came out was so thin it hurt. “Is it weird if I jus sit here for a little?”
“You sure you’re okay? No fever?” he asked, his eyes on the exposed column of your throat as you swallowed.
You shook your head and then realized that wasn’t entirely true. “I don’t know. Kind of feels like it.”
“Want me to check?” His question was so innocent you almost missed the note beneath it, the glimmer of amusement in his gaze. “Had to pick up some medical skills in the field. Got really good at feeling foreheads.”
Some combination of mortification and anticipation made you pulse all over. But you wanted the excuse—needed the contact.
“Sure,” you managed, low and hoarse as you scooted your stool a few inches closer to the counter.
He reached across the bar, his cool metal fingers a sharp relief, thumb feathering just under your jaw, palm broad and hot against your cheek. You wanted to press into it like a cat, you wanted to be ruined by it.
He drew in a breath, slow, deliberate, as if he were inhaling more than just your scent. His thumb brushed the hair back from your forehead, and his skin was so much colder than yours—you tingled where he touched you, the contrast as intoxicating as his closeness. “You’re burning up,” he said, with a gravity that made it sound like it was your fault and also exactly what he wanted.
You must have made some noise, some keening thing, because he chuckled, low in his chest. “You okay?” he said again, but this time, not moving back, not letting go.
It wasn’t the move of a guy checking for fever in a platonic way, not really—the way he cradled your chin, thumb brushing over your face, was too familiar, too practiced. His callouses rasped against your skin, a roughness you liked maybe too much.
He started to draw his hand back, and your own moved lightning fast to catch his wrist and bring his touch back to your face. “I…”
“Yes?” he asked, infuriatingly patient.
“Please, I need help,” you whimpered.
The words hung between you, unbearable. He held there, giving you every opportunity to pull away. You stayed, rooted, nails warm on the metal of his wrist, breath short and staccato.
He ducked his head just a fraction, eyes still on you, as if waiting for more. “What kind of help?” he asked.
You couldn’t say it. Not outright. Your grip on him was enough, maybe. You hoped. You hoped not. It trembled out of you: “I don’t know. I just—” You let go, finally, as if releasing his wrist would break the spell. Instead the ache in your palms was replaced instantly by the ache everywhere else.
“You can ask me anything,” he said, as if the answer was simple. You felt the tenderness in the way his hand returned to cup your cheek with unexpected gentleness, thumb stroking along the apple of your cheek, cooling it, coaxing you to keep going.
You shuddered, half in mortification and half in surrender. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” you managed, voice high and thin. “It’s not just the heat, I swear, I just—” You pressed your thighs together, pulse jackhammering. “I can’t even think.”
His smile softened, the smugness replaced by something darker, intent. “Hey,” he said, voice lower now, “it’s okay. You trust me, right?”
You nodded, feeling the flush climb to your ears. “Of course I do.” Because you did, more than you’d ever admit. If you didn’t, you’d never be here, letting him touch you, letting your body confess the truth your voice couldn’t find.
“Tell me what you want,” he said, so steady, so direct it made you dizzy.
You tried to answer, but it caught in your throat, a wordless plea. Maybe the problem wasn’t just the heat. Maybe the problem was that your body had been braced for so long against this tidal pull; now it was finally time to give in.
You pressed your thighs together, yet again, and his eyes dropped to the movement immediately.
Then he leaned in, crowding your space, his presence as immediate as the frozen air and the thump of blood behind your ribs. You held your breath, and when he spoke, the words ghosted over your cheek.
“Let me help,” he said. It wasn’t a request.
You nodded, and it was like the cord inside you snapped. He moved so fast, so fluid, that you barely registered being turned—his hands a gentle but unbreakable grip as he rotated you on the barstool, so your knees faced him directly. His palms, one human and one metal, slid up your thighs, thumbs stroking the inside seam, and he sunk to his knees in front of you, the nearness of his face a gravitational force.
The world funneled down to the place where his hands pressed, and you realized he was holding you apart. Not obscenely, not yet, but enough that you were completely open to him, the thin cotton of your shorts doing nothing to hide the flush, the damp.
You made a soft, startled sound—the kind of sound that would have mortified you any other day, but now just seemed like a necessary release valve. The edge of the counter pressed into your back, bracing you, and there was nowhere to look but at him.
He glanced up at you, eyelashes impossibly dark, the blue of his eyes cool and unhurried as the rest of him. “Is this what you need?” he asked softly, one thumb circling closer, not quite touching you where he must have known you needed it most.
“I—” You gripped the counter as your own breath left you high and bright. “Yeah,” you whispered, then stronger. “Yeah. Please.”
Something old and hungry flickered in his eyes; for a second, it was like witnessing a mask falling away, exposing the pure, adoring greed underneath. He nodded, almost formal, and then both his hands bracketed your hips, holding you steady on the stool.
He started at your knee, a glancing scrape of blunt nails and calloused knuckles that sent shivers up your thigh. He traced the seam of your shorts slowly, as if there was all the time in the world, as if he wasn’t about to devour you.
His eyes didn’t leave yours, even as his mouth hovered over the thin cotton barrier. He ghosted a breath across the damp spot he found, and you lost all chance of composure. There was no longer any you, only some open, yearning thing perched on a stool, barely holding itself together. He thumbed the edge of your shorts aside just enough to press against you directly, the heat of his mouth and the shock of his cool fingers alternating in a way that broke your sanity into a thousand flickering, animal senses.
You grabbed at his hair without even meaning to, the urge so primitive it felt like a survival reflex. He hummed appreciatively at the contact, as if you’d pleased him, as if you were doing him a favor by yanking his mouth closer to your cunt. The sound vibrated through you, under your skin, rattling your bones. You tipped your hips, your nerves on fire, and his tongue licked a slow, deep stripe from your inner thigh up, not touching your clit, not yet, just lavishing the tender skin in a way that felt almost teasingly reverent.
You made a strangled noise, one part protest and one part plea, and Bucky’s hands tightened ever so slightly, anchoring you. He mouthed softly at you through the cotton, kissing and tasting like he had planned this moment, fantasized about it, orchestrated it down to seconds.
“God, Bucky, please—” you heard yourself say, shame gone, language stripped down to pure imperative.
He obliged, finally, dragging the fabric aside with both thumbs and kissing you directly, a cool blast of breath ghosting over your slick heat before his tongue pressed flat and broad against your clit. The relief was so acute you almost sobbed, hands convulsing where they tangled in his hair. You heard the low, satisfied growl in his throat as he set in, slow at first, until your hips bucking.
He didn’t tease, not in the sense of withholding; he controlled the pace only so you wouldn’t go off too soon, so you wouldn’t lose yourself before he had you in exactly the state he wanted. He gripped your thighs, thumbs stroking up and down, pinning you gently but completely, and sucked softly at your clit, laved it, flicked it until you heard yourself choking on a sob. Your hands curled into his hair, desperate for more, for anything, and he let you grind against his mouth, so attentive that he’d match every desperate movement with the exact pressure you needed.
It was embarrassing how quickly you came, shameful and glorious at once. You still had enough self-awareness to gasp his name in something like apology. “Bucky, Bucky, ah—fuck, so close.”
He growled, mouth pressed to you, and angled his tongue just-so, and the orgasm hit with staggering force, a white-out that blitzed your vision and stole any words from you. He didn’t stop. He held you through it and past it, swallowing down the shudders and the desperate sounds you made, like he’d known exactly how this would unfold. When you came down it was only because he let you, retreating from your cunt with a last, obscene kiss to your inner thigh.
He stayed on his knees as you caught your breath, looking up at you through the mess of his hair with a carefulness that could almost have passed for concern, were it not for the dark, starved edge to his gaze.
“It’s not enough, is it?” he asked, voice warm and hoarse, a dangerous temptation.
You shook your head before you realized what you were doing. The need was still there, louder if anything, a metabolic demand your body had never known before. The aftershocks of your orgasm didn’t blunt it; they just made you more sensitive, skin electric, greedy for any touch. The taste of his name was still burning on your tongue.
“I don’t—” You tried to get your breath, but every inhale was a plea, an invitation. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.” It sounded like a lie as soon as you said it. You did know, and so did he; the only thing you didn’t know was how far either of you would let it go.
Bucky’s hands slid up your thighs, palms broad and possessive suddenly, not the gentle friend but a man answering a hunger of his own.
He rose in a single uncoiling, smooth and predatory, and you found yourself wanting to press back, to get some space, but you didn’t want space—what you wanted was to be pressed under him, to feel the full weight of him locking you down, holding you together.
He didn’t say another word, just bent and swept you up. His hands were careful, but the grip was decisive, one arm braced under your ass, the other curling around your upper back so your body instinctively folded against his chest. You clung to his shoulders, dizzy from the abrupt motion, but he was already hauling you past his kitchen, navigating the hall with a single-minded purpose. In the living room he set you on your feet behind the couch, spun you so you faced the window, city sun slicing in through the blinds and painting stripes over the room.
He nudged you forward until your hips bumped the cushion, then planted his hands on your waist, pressing you down in a gentle but unmistakable command. You braced your palms on the back of the couch, arms locking to hold yourself upright, the cool leather shivery against your bare thighs. His breath ghosted over your shoulder as he leaned in, mouth at your ear.
“You’re desperate for me to ruin you, aren’t you, pretty girl?”
His tone was so wicked, so knowing, that you felt your knees threaten to buckle. Before you could respond, Bucky’s hands slid down, splayed wide over your hips, and then he used a foot to nudge your legs apart.
The movement was so natural, so certain, that you obeyed without thinking, planting your feet wider, arms braced. Your shorts were still tangled around one thigh and even that didn’t matter, there was nothing in the world but the way his hand slid between your legs and the sound you made when he did. He pressed the heel of his palm right to your cunt, pushing up against the fabric, feeling exactly how soaking, how frantic, you were for him.
Bucky made a low, appreciative noise, and you could feel the shape of his cock, hard and urgent, as he moved in closer behind you. He raked his thumb up your spine and you arched for him, made yourself an offering.
There was a trembling pause as his hands found the elastic, hooked under it, peeled the shorts and your underwear down in a single, devastating motion. He left them tangled around your knees, a shackle you could feel, and then he was there—close enough that you could feel the heat of him, the shape of him, hard and insistent, through his gym shorts.
You heard the rustle of his clothes behind you, the elastic snap of his waistband, the uneven jolt of his breath. You tried not to turn back, to break the spell, but his hand fisted gently in your hair, holding you forward, not cruelly but as if he worried you might float away from him. You felt the graze of his knuckles against the small of your back and then the soft, heavy head of his cock against your inner thigh, thick and achingly hot. You made another helpless sound, impossible to disguise as anything but want.
You half heard him whisper, “Good fucking girl,” and it was more grounding than anything—the way he said it, not for praise but as a pure statement of fact, as if you’d always belonged to this moment.
A heartbeat later you felt him line up, one broad hand bracing your hip, the other guiding himself between your legs. He slid in slow, first just crowning the tip, then a steady, unhurried advance until you pulsed around him, all the breath knocked out of you. He was big, God, he was fucking huge, and you felt every inch of him, slow and relentless, until your body gave up its resistance and let him in all the way.
You choked on a sob and he stilled, letting you adjust, the metal of his hand biting into your hip in an anchoring grip that kept you from collapsing. He pressed a kiss to the back of your neck, feather-light, before rolling his hips forward, testing. The drag was so exquisite, so sharp, that your eyes filled up and spilled over before you understood you were crying. It didn’t feel sad or even humiliating; it felt like relief, like every nerve in your body finally tuned to the right frequency.
“There you go,” Bucky murmured, and the silk in his voice slid down your spine. “Let me take care of you.”
You arched back into him, jaw gone slack, and he took the cue, holding onto your hip with steel precision as he drew out, then thrust in to the hilt. The both of you made sounds then—animal, necessary, a tangled braid of shameless arousal. You were seared open, body and brain in ruins for him, and Bucky’s every move felt designed to keep you right at the rawest possible edge without letting you tumble off. With each slow, grinding thrust, he’d flex his fingers into your skin, and you were glad for the force. Otherwise, you might have rocketed apart.
He fucked you like he had nowhere else to be for the rest of his life. Each pass in and out was deep, so deep you saw stars, and he bit down on every gasp and whimper you made like treasure, hoarding them, making sure there was nothing you could give that he wouldn’t take. When you shuddered, he braced you. When you tried to hide your face in your arms, he made you look out the window.
“Imagine how wrecked you look if someone could see you like this, how good you are, how pliant, how utterly fucked out and feral for me.”
You could only groan beneath him.
But that wasn’t good enough.
“Because you are, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” you managed to gasp.
“Fuck yeah, you are. Should film you next time so you can see.”
And that promised sentiment or threat or blessed assurance of a next time only barely registered in your head.
You felt the shape and girth of him everywhere, not just inside you but in your fingertips and jaw and even your toes, curled white-knuckled against the plush carpet. It felt like a breaking-open, a shudder that rattled the cage of rib and skull and emptied you in the best way. After the first spasm hit, it didn’t really stop; it just crested and broke, and then again, and again, as he drove you relentlessly through every aftershock.
Your throat was raw from the sounds you made, but you didn't care. Let the whole damn building know, let the heatwave carry it down to the street—anyone who heard would only know what you’d always suspected: that you were made, and remade, by the hands and cock of James Bucky Barnes.
He came with a groan that sounded like it had been torn up from the pit of him. You felt it, impossibly deep, an anchoring warmth at your core. He didn’t pull out right away, just pressed you down and into the couch, his breath ragged against your shoulder, sweat mixing with your own. The sun striped you both, pale and blurred, in the window’s glare. He cupped your waist, held you like he was scared you might disappear. The sound of your pulse was everywhere, in your mouth, your cunt, the tips of your fingers.
Eventually he eased out, then tossed you gently over the back of the couch and onto its cushions, hoisting himself immediatle after you, and settling between your thighs.
You wrapped your arms around his broad shoulders, he cupped your jaw in both his hands, and you met halfway in a kiss. Slow, charting, but eager to map, to pour into each other.
You should be spent, you knew that, and yet there was still a flickering need for even more, and ultimately you couldn’t keep from squirming your hips up beneath him like a bitch in heat.
Bucky growled but grinned against the crook of your neck. "Already? Thought I wore you out." He was half-teasing, half hopeful, and all of it made you ache more.
You panted, little strains of whimper leaking out as you shifted beneath his weight. "It's not—" You couldn't catch your breath. "It's not gone."
He drew back enough to see your face, the marvel and hunger written in every line of him. He was giddy on it now, drunk on you, the endlessness of your need. His thumb traced a path under your eye, along your jaw, a tenderness just as striking as the force when he'd bent you over the couch.
His hand was already sliding down, finding the tremor in your thigh where you'd hooked your heel into the small of his back. “C’mon, pretty girl, take what we know you need.”
He was still hard, not as superhumanly so as thirty seconds ago, but the evidence of his stamina pressed hot and thick against your thigh. The animal edge to his smile dared you to test him. So you did.
Your hand slid down between the bodies, still trembling, and guided his cock back home. Then you canted your head up, eyes wide, mouth open to him even before he took it. The kiss was deep and viscous as he slid his thick length back into you.
“You gonna let me fill up this tight cunt all day?”
Your head fell back, the surrender automatic. “Yes,” you managed, “please, Bucky—just—”
He didn’t give you time to finish the thought before he buried himself again, the shock of it so perfect you clenched hard around him, a plea and a welcome and a thank you all at once. You couldn’t believe there was anything left in you to give, but every stroke proved you wrong, dragged up a new, desperate need that was only satisfied by the relentless rhythm of his cock and his hands and the way his mouth fixed on you, starved.
He took you harder this time, body layered over yours on the couch, arms caging you in, fists in the cushions, the infected animal in your belly delighted to be conquered. The slap and drag, the obscene wet noise of your bodies meeting, should have been mortifying, but you couldn’t care less. All you could think about was the way he felt inside you, the fullness.
You fucked up into him like it could ever be enough, like you could reach the end of it, but all it did was ratchet higher the more you got. Illogical. Perverse. You wanted it so bad you felt like you might splinter from it.
He kept his eyes open, watching your every twitch and lost syllable, and when he spoke, it was a benediction and a dare all at once. “That’s it,” he cooed, “—take it, sweetheart, take every fucking drop.”
This man who you’d pegged as your polite, kind, helpful, funny neighbor, a gentle giant, a friend but not possibly interested in anything more… how could you have been any more wrong about him? It seemed his need was as insatiable as yours, as rough as yours.
He braced a hand on your ass and fucked into you so deep your vision actually blurred, and you had a moment of floating, refracted through heat and sensation, no thought in your head but the total occupation of Bucky’s cock and Bucky’s hands and Bucky’s words, which were now a white-noise loop of fuck, that’s so good and look at you and you greedy little thing.
You lost count of how many times you came, whether it was three or four or one long endless melt that crested and crashed and kept cresting again. Each time you clenched harder, he grunted, all approval and gratitude, like you were thriving on the mutual destruction. The only thing that finally stopped him was the way your body seized under him, shaking with exertion, whole frame slick with sweat and blown wide open—and even then, he only slowed to kiss the tears off your cheek before pumping in shallow, locking thrusts, filling you a second time.
He rolled and shifted so he was below and you were arranged on top of him, cock still inside you, and petted your head and back, pressing a kiss to your forehead.
But somehow your body still wasn’t done. The pitch of wasn’t as feverish, but you still ached for more, and you shifted, pressing your hands firmly onto his chest and pushing your hips back.
He growled and grinned up at you in approval, letting you take the pace, lazy hip rolls and shallow thrusts, like he was content to be used if only you’d keep him inside your cunt.
"That’s it, baby," Bucky murmured, hands cupping your hips in living brackets of steel and warmth, "workin’ it all out of your system, huh?" He let you ride him at your pace, let you grind and flex and arch your spine in a slow, deliberate torture, as if the last hour hadn’t emptied you. He watched the place where you were joined with worshipful fixation. Sometimes his hands drifted up your plump sides, moving over the sweat slicking over your ribs, sometimes they hovered beside your tits, thumbs circling the soft underside without quite squeezing. He wanted you to take, to use.
It was so much. The room, the man, the way your senses flattened and then sharpened around only the pressure and friction, the molten bracket of his thighs under yours. You could feel the outline and density of him in your gut, could feel the part of him inside you as an ache in your own bones.
Your hair stuck to your face, skin flushed and slick. You looked down at him, saw the blue of his eyes gone wild with something that wasn’t just lust but an infatuation so raw it jolted you harder than any thrust. You felt gorgeous and filthy and alive.
You braced your palms on his chest, the sweat-slick warmth of him grounding you to the world, to the precise coordinates of this couch, this apartment, these four walls where everything inside you had been rewritten. You rolled your hips, slow at first, test-driving this new sense you’d grown this morning. Each drag, each grind made the both of you moan, made his jaw go slack with admiration and something wild behind it.
“You look so good like this,” he whispered, almost reverent. His hands continued to wander, kneading your waist, your ass, committing every detail like a man who’d been in a famine so long he didn’t trust that the feast would last.
You uncurled from his chest and sat up, knees braced against the outside of his thighs. The angle changed everything—it let you drop down with gravity on your side, and the sudden invasion made you gasp, then laugh a little at the reckless power of it.
“Didn’t know you had this in you, pretty girl,” he said, eyes bright with admiration and a little awe, as your bodies met again and again. You shuddered, every nerve ending tuned to the raggedly sweet friction. You braced one hand on the couch back for support, the other pressing his chest flat to the cushions so he couldn’t move, so you could wring every last drop out of him.
He let you, his hands only guiding, though you could feel they itched for more, alternately cupping your ass and tracing the slick line along your spine. He never looked away, and you couldn’t either, not really. Part of you was afraid if you stopped, you’d never start again, that all of being alive was compressed into this blinding, needy cycle, the slow slide up, the brief gasp at the crest, the smashed-together bodies and the static-burst of coming apart.
You both dissolved into it, rode out the rhythm together, a storm system of skin and sweat and salt air. You wanted to memorize every flicker in his face, the way his jaw tensed when you clenched around him, the soft snarl of delight when you scraped your nails up his stomach, the groan from somewhere ancient when you rocked down, hard, and took him to the hilt. Like this, you were animal and angel at once, an ache shaped just for him, every ounce of pain and pleasure remade as a message to Bucky that he could have you, all of you, if only he asked.
This time when you came, it was a slower surrender, a low-voltage tremble that climbed your spine and made you shake all over. You fell forward onto him, collapse and comfort in the same gesture, and Bucky wrapped his arms around you, rocked you gently even as you whimpered from the aftershocks. He kissed the top of your head, and it was tender but also bespoke a possessiveness that you felt curl happily inside you.
“That’s it,” he crooned, lips against your hairline, “breathe. You did so fuckin’ good.” His hands swept over your back, grounding you, stoking the heat that was already beginning to spark again in the depths of your belly. You wanted to fight it, or at least express some normal human embarrassment at the way you’d let yourself melt into a horny puddle in your neighbor’s arms, but the pleasure sparked with every breath and touch, making defiance impossible.
It was fortunate that this man was a super soldier and could give you what you needed.
You wondered how many times you would come before you burnt out completely, or if you’d just fuse into something new, a singularity of slick and want and Bucky’s name.
Bucky knew he could see you through all of it.
He looked forward to being the conduit you found your relief in since he was the architect of this sweet, filthy, exquisite destruction.
And he couldn’t imagine that this brain-altering type of experience wouldn’t yield him exactly what he’d been waiting so long for: you, surrendering to him completely, admitting there was more than neighborly friendship between you, content and eager to finally be his.
The chemicals would burn out of your system in a few more hours, and then he’d take such good care of you in your recovery. He’d keep the AC off in your apartment so he could coax you to accept his invitation to stay all weekend.
He was sure two days was all he needed to secure you forever.
small 300-word scribble that happened the next day
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I apologise if you've already answered this, but I tried searching your blog and I'm unsure if you haven't or if it's another example of Tumblr's amazing search system.
I was talking with a friend recently about how much of a culture clash the Monk Class is compared to the rest of Dungeons & Dragons and was wondering if there is a coherent reason for their original inclusion. I'm aware that they're largely influenced by Shaolin monks as depicted in Hong Kong cinema in the 70's/80's as compared to the Sword and Sorcery stuff most of the rest of D&D takes influence from.
Basically, my question ultimately boils down to, "Is the Monk Class there purely because of an original player wanting to rule of cool their way into playing something wildly out of genre, or is there a stronger link between Sword and Sorcery and Hong Kong cinema that could have organically resulted in the Monk Class joining the rest of the classes?"
A lot of the link between the two was simply a matter of time and place. The kung fu craze hit North America at just about exactly the same time as the sword and sorcery revival that gave us films like Clash of the Titans and Beastmaster and The Sword and the Sorcerer and Dragonslayer and Krull – not to mention the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan adaptation, which revived popular interest in first-wave sword and sorcery literature – so there was a lot of it going around. Analysis of early Dungeons & Dragons as a product of its media influences often overlooks that it was largely drawing on what was trendy in American popular media in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Even the tonally incongruous Lord of the Rings references weren't a deep cut; while the books were originally published in the 1950s, they'd experienced a strong resurgence in the 1970s, putting them firmly in the popular consciousness at the time that D&D was being developed. All this being the case, it's not surprising that early D&D was also substantially influenced by Hong Kong action cinema.
That said, the reason the monk character class in particular (i.e., as opposed to kung fu media influences more generally) is there is allegedly because one specific guy in one of the game's early playtest groups really, really wanted to play as Remo Williams from Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir's The Destroyer; several of the class's signature abilities are direct references to powers Williams exhibits in the course of the novels. Remarks from folks who worked at TSR at the time have pointed the finger at Brian Blume as the Remo Williams fan in question, though accounts are conflicted whether Blume was actually an uncredited contributor to Dave Arneson's Blackmoor (1975), in which the class makes its first proper appearance, or whether Blume's interest merely prompted its inclusion.
This is the case for the character archetypes in a lot tabletop RPGs of that era; instead of trying to work out what classes "ought" be be present, authors would simply start with the types of characters their playtesters actually wanted to play, often based on specific popular media characters, then work backwards to derive an IC rationale for why those were the setting's standard adventuring professions. Other examples from D&D in particular most obviously include the Ranger (based on Tolkien's Aragon, naturally), but also the Paladin (principally inspired by Holger Carlsen from Poul Anderson's 1961 isekai novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, also the source of D&D's goofy regenerating trolls), the Assassin, back when it was still a separate character class (probably mainly based on the Assassin Caste from John Norman's Gor), and even the Wizard to a large extent (less Gandalf than you'd think: a large portion of D&D's iconic wizard spell list is lifted directly from the 1963 Vincent Price film The Raven).
(I often think that modern indie RPGs could benefit from reviving this approach. Like, fuck textual consistency – just pick half a dozen of your favourite popular media characters without regard for the compatibility of the source material and work backwards to explain why these six random assholes are your game's playable archetypes!)
In all honesty, Supriya leaving the show checks out with the way they handled Samira’s character development or lack there of in Season 2. I mean, they essentially used Samira as a prop to showcase Robby spiraling out like she’s some fucking plot device/accessory, and you’re telling me we won’t get to see her next season? At all? The craziest thing is there’s so much praise about how Supriya/Samira is the beating heart of the show and we definitely got more of that in S1 than in S2, but now she’s just gone for “narrative purposes”? I call bullshit.
She had limited screentime this season, the writing for her character was subpar, and in all honesty this season in particular has really been lacking in keeping the “ensemble cast” feel from S1 when they’re so focused on Robby, Robby, Robby, and I’m sick of it. The writers in the room can’t decide on a cohesive message across the season, it’s bloated to account for so many things at once including new characters, and you can just tell they didn’t know what to do with Samira this season so their solution is to write her off. It’s so fucking lazy and sad. Y’all aged down Samira just to fit Supriya after her audition, and now you won’t even bother to give her a proper character arc? Y’all couldn’t even support or defend Supriya when she was dealing with racism from the press and they’ve said that. Man fuck y’all.
I seriously can’t wrap my head around how they give us such a great character in Samira Mohan just to write her off for “narrative purposes” which I’m honestly calling bullshit. She’s a part of the MAIN cast? I don’t fucking get it? And the craziest thing about this is they will introduce new characters in S3 that will attempt to fill in the gap Samira left and it’ll just miss the mark, the same way they missed the mark with Heather being written out. By S4 all of the white characters will remain lol. Could’ve written off literally ANYBODY else but it just had to be Samira right? Idgaf if it’s realistic, it fucking sucks and it’s bad writing, I don’t care.
I’m very happy that Ayesha’s character as Parker Ellis is getting promoted to season regular, but I have no faith in the writers’ ability to honor that given they already took out 2 characters who add so much to the story. They took out Heather, they’re now taking out Samira. Literally who’s next? I want to know.
I’m over it. I really am. This show had such a great start at the beginning and it’s just slowly going downhill. This makes me want to watch & engage with the show less and less. I’m not watching the Robby show, I’m just not. And this news dropping today when we still have 3 episodes left is so funny, couldn’t even wait until the season was done airing. Y’all got it fr. I’m wishing Supriya Ganesh the absolute best in her career, I really am it’s what they deserve. 🙏
I do hope whatever happens next, we as a society go back to 25/26 episodes per season when pacing was fleshed out and plot shared equal time with character development that isn't just implied so every main character in an ensemble cast has proper and fair screen time.
I miss when canceled shows with only 1 season still had enough info to see exactly what the writers were going for if they had more episodes without the need of articles and interviews to fill in the details of what should've been included in the show.
