paring: Yuta x Reader (fem? but no gender is mentioned)
au: rockstar, non-idol
category: smut (intended for 18+ ONLY)
warnings: masterbation, insertion, unprotected sex (stay safe!), cursing, Yuta's a cocky motherfucker, Yuta um... piercings 👀
summary: hooking up with your longtime friend and roommates' bf is wrong... right?
song inspo: Girls Girl- Zara Larsson
REQUESTS ARE OPEN
masterlist | info
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This was wrong. So wrong.
The last thing you needed to be doing was thinking about some other girl's man. Not just any girl, a friend you've literally known since childhood; not to mention, your roommate. This goes against every single moral you stand for and instinct in your bones. You just couldn't help it.
Maybe it was the way he looked at you, dark, hooded eyes. Like he was some kind of animal and you were his sweet little prey. It was dangerous and dizzying. It's the very thing you were thinking about as your hand reached between your thighs, panting out his name in the empty apartment.
"Yuta... Yuta..."
You thought about his hands, adorned in all those rings with chipped black polish on his nails. Imagining they were all over you body. Your hips, your thighs... clasped around your neck. And when he wore that thick eyeliner for a show! It was over for you.
Just like he did last week. She was the one that invited you, you stood next to her in the crowd, dancing to the music in the small underground club. The whole time you were practically drooling over him. He was shirtless, hair half tied up and tattoos on full display, dripping in sweat. And his piercings! Jewelry on both nipples and in his bellybutton. One time your friend had the audacity to tell you his dick was pierced and how good it felt.
You thought about it right now, your fingers a poor imitation but that didn't stop you from thinking about the way it would slide into your sopping wet cunt. The ridges of the rings that lined the underside of his dick creating a totally new sensation.
"God, Yuta! Yuta!"
The young rockstar thought he heard his name as soon as he entered the apartment that he let himself into. He found it odd considering he thought no one would be home, specifically choosing this time when no one was around. Curiousity was too strong and he decided to follow the sound of desperate panting to your door.
"Y/n?" He asked softly, tapping it with his knuckles as he once again, let himself in. Yuta has a bad habit of doing that but right now he wasn't too upset with himself.
He couldn't help but smirk at the sight. Eyes shut, brows furrowed, your pathetically tiny hand struggling to reach that precious spot he knew he could reach with ease-- both with his dick and his fingers. Suddenly he heard it again, but as a whisper,
"Yuta... Yuta."
Pride swelled from the pit of his stomach and he couldn't help but let out a cocky chuckle. Luckily for him, you didn't hear it which gave him the perfect opportunity... his heavy boots softly trudging on the carpet, chains clinking together lightly as he made his way over to the front of the bed, only his dark-lined eyes peeking over the top to give him the best view.
Once in place, he loudly cleared his throat, startling you upright with a squeal.
"Oh my god! Yuta!" Your heart was absolutely pounding in your chest.
Yuta smiled. It was a smile that should have scared you; it was devious enough, but instead it went right to you pussy, wide open and glistening... just for him. The devil himself stood up, leaning over you, and grabbed your wrist, "Thinking about me?"
What he did next you could have never predicted in a million years. He took the two fingers you had your your hole and brought them to his lips. You watched, completely speechless, not even attempting to answer his question. Silently watching the way his eyes closed and brows slanted together and he hummed around them.
"Mmm, so sweet."
You suddenly snapped out of it, "What the fuck, Yuta! You're dating one of my best friends!"
His face dropped, sarcasm lacing his features as he almost laughed at you, "Baby, you were the one moaning my name just now... in the apartment you share with your best friend."
"Oh my god, is she home?" You panicked, craning your neck to look out to the hall.
"No." He said lightly, watching as you relaxed. "I came when she wouldn't be here to get some of my stuff. We broke up last night." His tone was so playful, nonchalant like he didn't just end a 3 year relationship.
So... he was available?
What! No! He literally just broke up with one of your best friend. You had a code! An honors system!
We don't fuck boyfriends or exes.
On the other hand... she was kind of a bad friend. Selfish. Forgot your birthday when you gave her some incredible presents for her own. She never tidies up the living room or the kitchen. Didn't she call you a bitch last week? Leaves her laundry in the wash. Ignores your calls and texts...
Yuta could see the cogs turning in your mind. He'd seen the way she had treated you, hell, he experienced it himself. It was part of the reason why they broke up last night. She only wanted a hot boyfriend to show off, an up and coming rockstar that she could leach on to and ride the coattails of. fulfil some fantasy she had. He'd known it all along and it had run its course... especially the way he saw you, practically like a cat in heat at his last show. The way your mouth fell open in the front row, all he could think about is how pretty that mouth would look around his dick.
Seeing you like this was all he needed.
He crouched down again like a tiger in the grass, looking for the perfect moment to pounce. His eyes held something sinister behind them, thinking of all the ways he'd have you, flashing in his mind like snapshots. For now, something simple.
"You want me to help you out there, Baby? It seems like you were struggling." He teased you.
Your face twisted in offense, "I was not!"
"How come you haven't gotten off yet?" Blunt and quick.
"I was interrupted." You nearly spat back.
Yuta raised his hands and backs up, "oh, by all means. Don't let me interrupt. but..." He smirks again, an evil glint in his eyes, "If you wanna finish up before she gets home... you may need my help. 15 minutes, babe."
You groan. He was unfortunately right and you needed to get off and get him out quickly. An exasperated sigh left your lips, shoulders slumping as you lift your head just enough to look at him through your lashes.
"You think you can do that?"
"Oh, I know I can. You're all wet and spread for me and I've been hard since a heard my name. So just say the word, Baby." He flashed his best salesman smile.
"Fine."
"'Fine', What?" He spat, his cheery disposition switching in the blink of an eye.
"Fuck me, Yuta!" You yelled back, reaching up to grab him by his shirt.
"With pleasure." He gave you that devilish grin before standing up and undoing his belt and pants, just getting them down enough to pull out his cock.
What a sight it was to behold. Thick and veiny, metal glistening on the underside but he didn't even give you a moment to admire the view, not when time was so limited. Yuta set himself forward, teasing the entrance with his leaking tip before he stopped and looked up at you.
"You're positive you want this?" He checked one final time.
"100%."
"Good." His tone gave no indication that he was going to fully insert into you without any warning.
Yuta pushed himself in completely, letting you moan at the intrusion. He was thoroughly enjoying this. You propped up on your elbows watching, legs still spread completely and the way your head fell back as you moaned. He gave a lopsided smile and didn't waste any time and set a brutal pace.
"Oh, god, Yuta!"
"Not god, baby, but close." He grunted in tandem with his thrusts.
"No, too much! too fast!"
"Ha! We don't have time, sugar! Take it or leave it!"
Jesus, he was so cocky. It was infuriating. The man gave you no time to adjust to his size, the piercings... oh, those felt so good. Fuck, he looked good too. Hair messily half up again, thick liner, a zip-up half zipped with nothing underneath, chains... lots of chains that made a pretty noise with every thrust.
"Open your hoodie."
"What?" He barely glanced up, he was way too focused but his brow quirked in confusion.
"Open your fucking hoodie!" You demanded much louder this time.
Yuta let out a breathy chuckle, "Why, like the view, baby?" He tossed his head side to side teasingly before he adjusted, your hips lifting off the bed for him to used his hands to unzip while continuing to thrust in and out. "Better?"
"Much."
His tongue jammed into the back of his teeth and he leaned back down to support himself.
You were getting close. It was all a lot. His newly exposed torso, the chains and sounds of skin against skin, the soft, breathy grunts he was making, sweat making his blonde, spikey hair stick to his forehead and streaking his eyeliner. Not to mention the rhythm and spot he found deep inside you.
"Harder, I'm close."
"Yeah, I can tell," His voice pitched and gravely, "You're gripping me like a fucking vice, baby. I'm right behind you."
In one swift motion, he pulled you by your legs tilting you hips to a different angle and held you to pound into even harder. Oh, god, here it comes.
"Ah, Yuta!!" You cried out as a quick warning before you released over his cock.
Two more thrusts and he emptied himself into you before collapsing on top of you. He stayed there a moment before popping his head up, "Shit, I forgot a condom."
"I'm clean and on birth control." You panted out, coming down from your high.
"Good," He stood up, also out of breath, buttoning his pants back into place and reaching down to smack your bare ass lightly, "So, listen, your lease is up in month. You should move out so we can do this more often without that bitch around--sorry, your 'friend'." He put in air quotes.
"Well, see," You rolled your eyes.
"Yeah, we will. Ok, I gotta go. Get in the shower or something. Spray some air freshener. It smells like sex in here." He left the room and you heard rummaging around in the other room quickly before he stopped by your room on his way out, box of stuff in hand, "Tell her I took the switch."
"Can't wait." You deadpanned.
"See ya, Dollface." The front door shut behind him.
Yuta was right. You needed to get in the shower, spray the room to hide the evidence but you took just a minute longer to lay there, legs still parted, thinking about the whirlwind that just happened. If he was that good with... 7 minutes, you could only imagine what he could do with a night.
[ author’s note ! ] fun fact!! originally i was inspired by the song... mamushi by meg n yuki chiba LMAO just uh, the line "we are stars" .. i was like,, hell yee, singer power couple yuta n yn! but then yutas solo came out n i uh,,,, yeah, it took a turn. also im really happy w this one hehe <3
[ summary ! ] you decided to prioritize your career. a selfish gesture to do, yuta thought. but in the end... was it?
[ extras ! ] idol!yuta, idol!yn; angst-y/hurt2comfort kinda ? some medical stuff but dont quote me on the accuracy, any med nerds feel free to hmu if something is not right!
[ word count ! ] 1831
“we need to talk”
those words, oh those horrific words that yuta hoped would never come out of your mouth, struck him like a lighting.
you were serious, not a single hinge of a positive sign on your face.
your boyfriend stood still, frozen in time. astoundingly, his heart was racing like a mclaren on a highway. before the ringing in his ears got to his brain, he tried to gaslight himself into thinking it’s nothing serious. such simple words should not impact him that much. and yet…
“did something happen?” he asked, reaching his hand out. you were standing in the doorway, hesitating to come in.
“i just… i need you to listen to me” you started softly, fiddling with the strings of your hoodie. yuta knew you like the back of his own hand, he knew you’re nervous.
“i’m breaking up with you”
the whole world stopped, including his breath. eyes widening, lips parting and opening in a shocked motion.
“what?” he breathed out shakily, brows furrowed.
“it’s not you, yuta. it’s me. i… god, i’m such an asshole but you need to understand. you’re a singer too” you carefully picked your words, as if you practiced million times beforehand. “i need to focus on my career. and maybe it’s also… i have this feeling that i’m only shining because of your light. it’s eating me up alive”
“are you kidding me?” yuta blinked, mind resisting what you just said.
“i’m sorry, i know you’ll hate me. and there’s nothing wrong with you, i love and will love you. i just need to be alone” pearly tears balanced at the edge of your waterline, threatening to spill out, but you quickly wiped them. because of that you smeared a bit of your mascara. your voice was barely above a whisper from the beginning to the end. “you have the right to be furious, to be mad. i get it. so i’ll keep going. i just… i’m sorry, yuta. it’s about me, i need to be selfish this one time”
there was a hint of begging in your voice, this kind of sadness that one has when facing their biggest fear. but yuta was too blinded by a whole hurricane of emotions to notice.
it’s been a year since that night and yuta can still clearly recall this memory. despite having more positive memories with you, this one always plays in his head whenever he sees your face. you released two albums, with one debuting last week number one almost everywhere. the public knew you were dating, since the company put a statement about it. however, they did not say anything about your breakup.
so often people that haven’t seen him in a while would congratulate you through him. each time ending with a sour expression on yuta’s face.
he wanted to reach out but all his friends told him not to (“give it a rest” johnny nagged “clearly she doesn’t give a shit about you”).
but the more time passed by, the more sleepless nights spent in deep thought, yuta realized maybe there was another reason. maybe…
“don’t overthink it, that’s how life works. i’m sorry man, she clearly loved you. but you’re in this business too, you know how it is” jaehyun would pat his back with a soft smile.
maybe they were right, maybe it was his heart after all that never came to an agreement with your decision.
he even texted you a couple of times, always meeting with his messages only being seen.
“it’s time to let go, yuta. it’s been a year” taeyong’s advice is always the best, in the end.
“l/n y/n to end her career! the singer didn’t state a reason, only leaving a long apology letter behind for her fans!”
yuta’s heart halted, feeling as if a freezing icicle ripped through the muscle.
first of all, he was genuinely shocked.
second of all, he was worried. you left him to pursue your career and now you’re… leaving? was it all pointless?
as your ex boyfriend (god, that still sounded strange to him) and as an artist himself, he felt like something was not right. he truly wished the best for you and now… you’re quitting?
no one seemed to know what’s up – a massive flood of both hate and sad comments on the internet. twitter was filled with conspiracy theories (like, you flopped or you two broke up – which wasn’t wrong, necessarily. but it wasn’t also fully correct).
yuta knew he had to find out what’s going on. if you’re doing okay. not knowing whether meeting you will only make things worse or better, the only thing he was certain about was facing it.
the sound of doorbell caused you to stir awake from your nap. you rubbed your eyes and stood up, hoping it’s the takeout you ordered.
your living room was covered in darkness, blindfolds rolled all the way down. sure, you were tripping all the time but that way you didn’t have to fight with the mess you made.
you opened the door, leaning to grab the paper bag but instead, your head bumped into something.
you huffed, looking up. you clearly left a message on the order to leave it on the doorstep because…
yuta.
“y/n”
you gasped, ready to close the door. but his foot sliding between the doorframe prevented you from doing so.
you two stared at each other in silence, both analyzing the other’s appearance.
him, red hair stylishly falling on his forehead. he had his loose clothes on, a leather jacket thrown on a grey hoodie. he looked… well. healthy. as if your breakup never happened.
and you… greasy hair, pajamas that you’ve been wearing for the past – god knows how many – days, deep circles under your puffy eyes.
“is everything okay?” yuta had the courage to speak up first, genuine worry in his voice.
you could see he was fighting with emotions on the inside.
opening your mouth and closing it, you wanted to say it.
instead, tears pricked your eyes.
your ex was the first person to ask you that question ever since you dropped the announcement. ironic, isn’t it?
you started hyperventilating, wanting to scream it all out.
“hey, it’s okay. talk to me” he said gently and watched in terror how your face twisted with sadness, pearly tears rolling down your cheeks “hey, y/n…”
you jolted forward and hugged him, arms tightly wrapping around his waist. at first, he wasn’t sure.
code red was booming in his mind, knowing that there’s going to be no way back. but his heart knew he has to be there for you. he has to be the one to comfort you.
so he did, letting you cry everything out. gently holding you, swaying back and fourth. just like he always used to.
just when he felt you calming down, breathing becoming more stable, he leaned away with his hands still on your hips.
“we need to talk”
hah.
now that was ironic due to two reasons.
you nodded and stepped aside, allowing him to come in. yuta did.
he felt a stench of rotten food and dirty clothes. your place was soaking in darkness… not a natural one, it was still sunny outside. anxiety rushed over his body. things are certainly not right.
you sighed deeply and ran your fingers through your hair, thinking.
then, you lead him into your bedroom.
quickly putting the blindfolds up and then sweeping the piles of clothes off your bed, you had to squint your eyes. you had to adjust for the natural lighting.
you felt yuta’s burning gaze on you.
with a heavy heart, you pulled out your phone.
“i’m worried. i have my own challenges and struggles but i feel like you need saving more than me” he hummed softly, ebony eyes scanning you with a tender gaze.
he saw you swallow hardly, typing something. then, you turned your phone around with tears pooling in your eyes once again.
the note read: “i lost my voice permanently”
his heart dropped, breathing coming to a halt.
“what?” his head is spinning, panic settling in. that’s a horror for a singer.
you nodded and added something else.
“i got aphonia. i recently had laryngitis, it disappeared and then appeared again. and so on. until one day it didn’t go away. but my doctor warned me beforehand that this may happen”
yuta closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to reject it. he heard of those illnesses, of course he did. his vocal coach mentioned them but also said that they are very rare, often affecting only 0.4% of the people between ages of 14 and 35.
but he didn’t think… out of all people… it would be you.
he opened his eyes, wanting to say something… anything. no words came out, his throat feeling as if someone held it with an iron grip.
you switched to another note. he looked at the date and his eyes widened upon realizing.
the day before you broke up with him. you already knew, you had it prewritten.
“i thought this day would come and you know how much of an overthinker i am. maybe it’s good i lost my voice because i wouldn’t be able to say it out loud without my voice breaking.
yuta, i wanted to break up with you to save you from pain. i didn’t want you to see me struggle, to see me rot inside because im not able to do what is my passion.
i knew i’d lose my voice sooner or later and wanted to record one or two last albums before i wouldn’t be able to. i wanted to put all my heart in, i knew i had to focus. and spare you pain.
i’m sorry. i know i ended up hurting you nevertheless. it was inevitable
maybe you wou”
the last word was clearly stopped halfway, a thought escaping you.
just when he finished reading, he realized you’re crying again.
everything clicked suddenly, like a puzzle. why were you whispering when you broke up with him, that you did it so he wouldn’t see you suffer. so your decision was just a cover and it wasn’t selfish after all, no. it was the complete opposite.
“it’s alright, it’s alright” yuta said, stepping closer. he wrapped arms around you, pressing your head to his chest gently. the drum of his heart made you shake… you missed that sound “i’ll save you. we’ll go to different doctors. there has to be a cure–”
he wasn’t able to finish because you just shook your head with a loud sniff. “i’ll be here for you now”
you felt weak. like a burden.
“we’ve got this” yuta whispered, a bittersweet feeling in his heart. he hated seeing you in pain, especially such a big one. but now it was his turn to be selfless and help you, save you; love you.
Word Count: 419
Summary:"You’re being ridiculous."
"You say that now, but you’ll thank me when you’re feeling better,"
Pairing: Yuta X Reader
Taglist: @sh0dor1
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Yuta crossed his arms, eyes narrowing slightly as he stood his ground. "You need to rest," he stated firmly, his tone leaving no room for argument.
You sighed, rubbing your temples. "Yuta, I told you, I’m fine. It’s just a little headache. I don’t need to be wrapped in a blanket like I’m on my deathbed."
He scoffed, stepping closer and pressing the back of his hand against your forehead despite your half-hearted attempt to swat him away. "You’re warm."
"That’s because I have a functioning body temperature," you countered, exasperated.
"It’s because you’re overworking yourself," Yuta shot back, already reaching for the nearest blanket. "You never take care of yourself properly, so someone has to."
You huffed, watching as he draped the blanket over your shoulders with such determination that you couldn’t help but find it endearing. "You’re being ridiculous."
"You say that now, but you’ll thank me when you’re feeling better," he muttered, tucking the edges of the blanket around you like a stubborn parent fussing over their child.
A soft laugh escaped your lips before you could stop it. As frustrating as Yuta’s stubbornness could be, there was something undeniably sweet about how much he cared.
He caught the change in your expression and raised an eyebrow. "What?"
You shook your head, a fond smile tugging at your lips. "Nothing. You’re just—" You paused, searching for the right words. "Really cute when you get like this."
Yuta’s ears turned slightly pink, but he huffed and looked away. "Just shut up and let me take care of you."
You chuckled, leaning into his warmth despite yourself. "Fine, but only because you’re cute when you worry."
"I’m always cute," he muttered, wrapping his arms around you for good measure.
And as much as you wanted to argue, you couldn’t find it in yourself to disagree.
The silence that followed was warm, comfortable. Yuta's fingers absentmindedly traced patterns on your back as you nestled closer. "You should try and sleep," he murmured, voice softer now.
You sighed, allowing your eyes to close. "Only if you stay here with me."
"Where else would I go?" he scoffed, shifting slightly to make sure you were settled. "I’m keeping watch, in case you try to sneak away from your rest again."
You smiled, feeling the steady rhythm of his breathing lull you into relaxation. "Stubborn."
"Caring," he corrected.
You hummed, too content to argue further. With Yuta holding you close, warmth surrounding you, sleep came easier than expected.
𝗣𝗔𝗜𝗥𝗜𝗡𝗚! ⭒ bf!yuta x reader 𖦹 𝗚𝗘𝗡𝗥𝗘! ⭒ fluff 𖦹 𝗪𝗖! ⭒ 0.861k 𖦹 𝗪𝗔𝗥𝗡𝗜𝗡𝗚𝗦! ⭒ none! 𖦹 𝗡𝗢𝗧𝗘𝗦! ⭒ just a short drabble bc i rly enjoy writing these days <3
[ ☆ 4:37 p.m ] sunlight bleeds through the half-drawn curtains of yours and bf!yuta's shared apartment. the sky is clear, birds are singing and yuta even hums along to some tune playing in his head. you can hear the kids from the apartment below splashing away in the pool, squeals and giggles echoing against the walls. all of these features point to the perfect day to spend outdoors.
which is exactly what you wanted to be doing. deciding earlier in the day that you would go for a walk at around 4:30 p.m, when the time came around, yuta had already put his outside shoes on, water bottle in hand. you would have joined him had it not been for this terrible headache of yours.
you had spent the last half an hour on the couch trying to fight your headache while yuta napped in your bedroom. you had turned over in every position, flipped your cushion over a number of times, even tried blocking out all the sounds from outside with your eyes closed, but to no avail. you had taken a pill for it earlier, but this one was persistent, the dull thud throbbing away inside your head while you lay there trying to numb the pain.
"aww", yuta cooes, finally noticing that you hadn't moved from the couch. "what happened, angel?"
sensing your discomfort, he plops down on the couch in the space between the arm rest and your feet, placing a hand on your calf. "head hurts...", you mumble into the material of the couch, bring a hand up to pinch the bridge of your nose. yuta makes another sympathetic sound and begins asking you a couple standard questions, such as ‘did you take something for it?’ and ‘have you drank enough water today?’, replying ‘yes’ to all of them.
if this was a regular headache, the pill you took should’ve kicked in by now, but still you lay on the couch, feeling lethargic as ever. looking at the leaves blowing outside with the faint breeze through the window, you try to sit up out of slight guilt but end up feeling groggy and soon, yuta’s gentle but firm arms are helping you lie back down.
“i don’t think i have the energy to go for a walk, babe”, you mumble into the pillow, feeling flushed and sticky all of a sudden. he brings his hand up to your forehead to try and check your temperature, biting his lip in concentration. “i can’t tell if you’re burning up or if my hand is just warm…”, he mutters more to himself than you, but he soon starts talking his shoes off, so it’s pretty much decided that neither of you are leaving the house today. “i may be getting a cold.”
yuta excuses himself to the bedroom for a couple minutes and returns with a damp hand towel and a blanket, lifting your head up ever so gently to seat himself, like you’re made of porcelain. the action makes you giggle weakly but you push yourself up anyway, making space for your boyfriend who softly coaxes your head on to his lap.
his hand immediately finds itself smoothing out your hair, fingers carding through it while you hum appreciatively. this new position is ten times more comfortable than your previous one, head resting easy on yuta’s thighs while he delicately massages your scalp, applying the right amount of pressure. “thank you…”, your voice is a little muffled due to your cheek being squished against his leg, but he recognises the tiredness behind it and the way your eyes droop a little.
yuta adjusts himself so he can reach over to grab the blanket on the coffee table and rest his back against the sofa better, but your eyes are closed and the movement makes you think he’s trying to get up, eyes shooting open immediately. “shh…”, his hands fly back to your hair, leaning down to pepper your face with kisses– your nose, cheeks, eyelids and temple are all victims of the attack. “i’m not going anywhere, baby, relax…”
“mm, don’t want you to catch my cold, if i have one”, you argue feebly, but make no move to get up from his lap, to which yuta replies, “we can be sick together, it’s okay.” remembering the damp towel, yuta folds it one, two, three times before brushing the stray hairs off your forehead and placing it on the warming surface, instantly feeling a sense of relief from the cool material. he smiles softly when he hears you sigh contently, snuggling yourself into him even more when his fingers return to your scalp.
“i’m gonna fall asleep if you keep doing that”, you warn him slightly incoherently, but you know he understands you because he chuckles a little, dragging his knuckles across the expanse of your cheek endearingly. “that’s the idea, babe. i’ll carry you to bed later, don’t worry.”
and that’s how your afternoon goes, wrapped up in a warm blanket while the throbbing in your head minimises little by little, yuta’s soft hands playing with your hair absentmindedly as your eyes become droopier.
nakamoto yuta was your hero. as the lead singer of the rising punk band takes you along with him on his journey to stardom, you realize that you never knew heartbreak could taste so sweet.
PAIRING: nakamoto yuta x fem! reader
STARRING: lead singer! yuta, guitarist! doyoung, bassist! johnny, drummer! mark
GENRE: rockstar au, band au. angst, suggestive.
WC: 17k (17.630)
WARNINGS: age gap, mentions of alcohol, weed and hard drugs, yuta and his band actually played the warped tour (canon!) pls somebody tell me yall get the reference, cheating and breaking up
PLAYLIST: honey - l'arc en ciel ; i felt younger when we met - waterparks ; your power - billie eilish ; motion sickness - phoebe bridgers ; guys my age - hey violet ; praha/vídeň - calin ; drugs - cheridomingo
A/N: oh yall are gonna HAATE this one. thank you arden @zhongriot for brainstorming with me about this it was greatly appreciated <3 growing up is realizing doyoung was actually the only decent one and that jaechan was right. also the original title of this wip was honey so sweet bc of the honey cover just so yall know lol
I. honey, so sweet
The last few tones of a G chord resonate through the garage, the platinum blond’s raspy voice fading out into silence as you watch the band in front of you with stars in your eyes, breathless and with your ears ringing only slightly due to the noise that’s been happening for quite some time now. Feeling yourself clap and squeal at the little show you just finished watching, you’re brought up to your feet as you jump around enthusiastically, the sound of the thick sole of your boot against the ground waking you up only slightly from the weird state of euphoria you’ve been in until now.
You’ve known Yuta for quite some time now, but this was the first time he let you watch his band practice. Everything you’ve known about the music he plays was through the headphones sneakily passed to you when you had a night shift at the diner, or from the voice memos he’d send you very early on in the morning when you were supposed to be asleep, and everything you’ve known about his band members was through his words shared in the comfort of his car seats or the benches in the park. You’ve seen Mark once before, when he had late dinner with Yuta while you were working at the diner downtown, but your interaction didn’t go further than a polite greeting and a boyish grin sent your way from the charming drummer.
It’s only natural that everything about the late night feels ecstatic to you now. The tones of electric guitars and the rhythm of the drums making your heart beat faster than before, Yuta’s sharp, yet hearty vocals calling to you like sirens in the middle of the ocean. Tonight’s one of the few nights you don’t have night shift at the diner– since you usually take all Friday night ones; you get paid more for them and with your schedule at school, you can’t afford to work more night shifts throughout the week– and Yuta took that as an opportunity to invite you over to his garage to listen to his band play. The lead singer made eye contact with you throughout each song, and you felt yourself flush at the thought that the words coming out of his mouth might have been addressed to you, written about you, adrenaline soaring freely through your veins.
“That was amazing! Wow, like,” you throw your hands up, at a loss for words, “I literally couldn’t believe my ears.”
“You expected less of me, babe?” Yuta grins at you from his place at the microphone stand, taking a step back from the device to put away the guitar hanging around his neck. You watch his movements intensively, eyes scanning the outline of his biceps and the loose hems of his jet black shirt, the platinum white hair falling into his eyes. “I thought you already knew what we were made of when I let you listen to our songs back then.”
“Well,” you sheepishly hum, “it’s different to hear it live.”
The singer snickers, shrugging to himself. “Told you to prepare yourself.”
“I don’t think I could even if I tried,” you compliment the man, eyes watching the rest of the band as they put their respective instruments away. And again, you don’t know these men that well– you’re not as familiar with them as you are with their frontman, since you haven’t spent much time around them just yet– but there’s something joyful in the bassist, Johnny’s smile when he meets your eye before he puts away his guitar into its dark blue case.
Their band– Neo zone– consists of four members. Yuta, your friend, plays the guitar and sings. He’s the frontman of the group and also the person that founded the band; at least that’s what he told you. He met Johnny at college– both of them majoring in Finance before they decided to drop out in their sophomore year– and soon after, he recruited his friend to be the bassist for his band. The two of them met Doyoung, their lead guitarist, at a concert of an underground band some years ago through a mutual friend Taeyong, and they all hit it off so well that when the thought of a band first came to light, Yuta wasted no time in chatting up the charming male for the position. And lastly, their drummer Mark– he was the youngest of them all, the most quiet one, and from what Yuta told you, he met the man through his younger brother. The two of them were friends at college, so Mark spent a lot of time over at Yuta’s house, and he knew that the male could play the drums– so after a casual conversation over a beer one evening, here they were.
“I’m heading home,” says the drummer, waving at the rest of the group, “I have a thing I’m supposed to attend with Jaehyun today.”
“Aight,” Yuta hums, nodding, “good job today, Markie. See you next week!”
The male disappears out of the rusty garage in no time, and with him follows the tall one– Johnny– saying he has a morning shift at the store he works at tomorrow, excusing himself out of the after-practice hangout. That leaves only you, Yuta and Doyoung in the room, and while you’d like to get to know his friends and bandmates better, you’d be more satisfied if either all of them stayed behind, or if the only one who stayed was anyone but the lead guitarist.
See, you don’t know Kim Doyoung that well. All you know about him is that he’s a year younger than Yuta and that he’s painfully good at what he does. You also know that he has a sharp jawline and even sharper eyes, which he gladly lands on you whenever he hears you talk, and that motion makes you self-conscious and insecure on most instances. He also has a sharp tongue, which you learned not that long after being first introduced to him this afternoon, and while you don’t know what you did to get on the man’s nerves so much, you figured it’s for the best to interact with him as least as humanly possible if you wanted to spare your feelings and not get yourself hurt.
“Today was good, but try getting over the last song on your own again,” Doyoung offers to his friend, watching him with cold eyes. Yuta makes his way around the room and takes a seat next to you on the dusty, maroon sofa, his legs spreading wide making your eyes drift towards his lean figure. You watch the exchange silently, picking at the skin of your cuticles anxiously, hoping for it to be over quickly.
“The Departure?” Yuta assures himself.
Doyoung nods as he hides his guitar into his case as well, handling the instrument with utmost care. “You went a little off-beat in the last part.”
“Got it, chief,” Yuta jokes, saluting the man, a lazy grin overtaking his features. “Wanna grab a beer and stay over for a bit?” he asks, the question making your insides heaten up with anticipation, stinging a bit of an anxious fear.
It’s almost as if the guitarist feels that you’re afraid of his presence– it’s not like he scares you, to be exact, you’re just slightly intimidated by the serpent-like male– as he meets your eye before he turns towards the frontman. “Nah,” he shrugs, “I’m good. Maybe next time,” he adds, taking the guitar case off the ground and heading towards the door.
“Whatever floats your boat.”
“Try not to fuck the kid on the couch, right? We sit there sometimes,” Doyoung snickers before he’s off, his raven bangs bouncing up and down when he skips out of the old-smelling garage. The remark stings you a bit, the harsh words, although you hate to admit it, feel like salt thrown into a fresh wound, having you chew on the inside of your cheek as you listen to the door close behind the male, leaving you alone with Yuta.
The male next to you clears his throat, easing the tension in your muscles when you look up at him and see him smiling softly at you, a twinkle in his eye. “What?” he asks you, sensing that you’re feeling a little down.
“It’s- it’s nothing,” you nod to yourself, not really wanting to be as vulnerable in front of your friend. You treasure Yuta more than anyone else, since you always somehow feel like your souls are connected on a level you haven’t felt with no one your whole life, but sometimes, you feel a bit shameful to admit to your worries in front of him. To the male, the world is his sea, his place that he swims through with passion and enthusiasm. He doesn’t seem like the type of person to worry about what your friends would think of him, no matter how bad it could be. He doesn’t seem like the type of person that would understand you if you worded your anxious feelings out loud, the type of person who’d reassure you without making you feel foolish.
Still, somehow, he sees right through you. “Don’t worry about Doyoung. He’s got a stick up his butt on most days, it’s nothing to have with you,” he says, offering you the gentlest of smiles, poking your cheek a little when he sees you pout.
You heave out a sigh, but offer the man a loop-sided smile– the kind you fake, but hope the receiving side is satisfied– watching him as he scoots closer to you and puts an arm around your shoulder. The scent of his cologne hits your nose and you feel yourself easing into him, the gesture somehow protective and affectionate in your eyes, but the proximity still makes your heart thump fast against your ribcage. Taking a shaky breath through your nose, you find yourself staring intensely at his face.
“So you’re saying you enjoyed hearing us play?” he asks you, tone of voice kitten-like, yearning for praise. He sounds coy, confident, but still searches for hearing you say it out loud. Sometimes you think he enjoys listening to you talk about him. It makes him feel good when you flutter your eyelashes at the male in the middle of the diner and tell him you love the way he sings, it makes his ego grow when you gasp at all the right parts and compliment the lyrics in the chorus. And you don’t think it’s a bad thing– you think you’d do the same if you were in his shoes.
Hushed voice, you nod eagerly, grinning. “Yeah,” you agree. “I also enjoyed seeing you play,” you muse, watching as the satisfied look on Yuta’s face grows and his excited eyes gleam with more intensity.
“Did you?” he teases, head ducking closer to you, the proximity making your breathing catch in your throat. You bet he knows about the effect he has on you by now– you bet he realizes that each time he talks to you with that tone, the flirty hint of it in his voice, you feel weak in your knees, ready to fold for him. You bet he is aware of the fact that you watch him all the time, eyes glued to his confident figure, amazed at the way he moves around the garage with his guitar, tinted with a hint of jealousy when the girls that go eat at the diner at the same time he visits you on your night shifts ogle him and he sends some a shameless wink. You’re almost sure he knows about the dreams you have of him at night, about the fact that you fantasize about him writing songs for you and singing them on stage, letting the world know that your feelings might be reciprocated.
The idea makes you cave in on yourself. “Yeah,” you breathe out, feeling heat rising to the tips of your ears.
“That’s good,” he hums, “wanna hear a little secret?” he asks, eyeing you with a glimmer in his eye. You hum in response, eager to be let in on the confidential information. “I wrote the last song about you,” he whispers. “Maybe I’ll release it one day.”
The sentence startles you, the comment makes all sorts of warm gold sprawl around your stomach, the tips of your ears burning and the nerve endings on your fingers tingling from excitement. “Really?” you gasp. You never imagined having a song written about you. You never imagined someone caring enough– never imagined having someone sing to you, about you. Sure, you fantasized about it happening, almost a little foolishly and childishly, but you never once dared to think of the fantasy as true.
Yuta laughs at your composure. You bet you look small in his eyes. “What? Are you shy about it, pretty girl?”
“No,” you peep, averting your gaze from him and aimlessly searching through your surroundings, watching the unmoving garage. Your eyes glue to the white wall in front of you, ignoring the fact that Yuta’s face is only an inch away from yours, your hands now clammy as you rest them in your lap.
“It seems that you are,” he grins, “you don’t have to be, though,” he notes, a finger hooking around the bottom of your chin, a gentle hold making you turn your face towards him, eyes locking in a dangerous blink.
Gaping, not breaking eye contact– too afraid to break the spark– you wait for what’s about to come, welcoming it with open arms. The air around you gets thicker and the silence becomes overbearing, you find yourself counting each white strand that falls into his eyes, when the male leans in to you, the sudden shift making your eyes flutter close on themselves.
It happens, the moment you’ve been dreaming about; the moment you’ve wanted to experience ever since you first met the male, all real and only yours to live over and over in your memories– Yuta kisses you, gently at first, lips playing with yours in a way that makes the soft sense of nervousness flutter like butterfly wings in your stomach. Your shy hands grip the front of his shirt when he deepens the kiss, makes it more firm and urgent, teeth clashing against each other in the messy cacophony of your souls, a sound of a heavy breath flying into your ear as the male grips your jaw and angles your face the way he wants it to, testing the waters with a bit of tongue.
You invite him in, parting your lips and letting him explore, letting him win the battle for dominance– not that you even wanted to be the one in charge in the first place– and although you feel a little overwhelmed, a bit too lost in the moment, you find yourself moving from your place and straddling his lap, the hands that were once cradling your face falling off and gripping your hips, keeping you right where you are.
When you feel your lungs being knocked out of all oxygen, you pull away from the male, eyes locking with his swollen lips, and you feel a bit satisfied with yourself– having him like this, eyes blown-out and staring at you like you were the only thing in the whole entire universe that mattered right in this moment. There’s something about the wrinkles on his shirt from how you’ve been gripping on it, about his flushed cheeks, that makes you feel proud of yourself. You did this to him, you smile, you are the reason why he looks like this.
Pressing your forehead against his, eyes still staring into his deep, dark orbs, the singer breaks out into a boyish grin, shaking his head in disbelief, wanting to bring himself back to the present moment. “So I’ll take it as my pretty girl will come watch me play more often, right?” he hums.
A fluttery feeling erupts in your chest, warmth spreading all the way to the tips of your fingertips. “Your pretty girl?” you ask.
Yuta nods, snickering to himself. “My pretty girl,” he mumbles, and before you get a chance for a rebuttal, he pulls away an inch, cradling his neck up to press a peck to the middle of your forehead.
The adrenaline, the smell of his cologne, the excitement seeping right through you and to the space all around– you never knew Yuta would taste this good. You never knew he could taste this sweet.
II. the rush of adrenaline, I'm not scared to jump in
The smell of burned oil and grease fills your nose as you make your way through the kitchen, figure skipping through the whole diner in irregular intervals during yet another one of your Friday night shifts. Taking the plate filled with chicken nuggets, potatoes and ranch dressing, you offer a quick smile to your coworker Jaechan as you walk out of the back, ready to serve the food to one of your regulars.
As you finally get out of the heated and humid place, back to the main dining area that has air conditioning on, your eyes catch with a certain someone waiting for you at the pult, a grin settling onto his features when you light up at noticing his presence.
“I’ll be right with you,” you say to him as you pass his body and walk over to one of the tables in the corner of the room, smiling at your customer when you give him the plate. Your steps are lighter and more enthusiastic when you get back to Yuta sitting at one of the tall stools, his face still adorned with a soft smile. The male watches you as you work, and you feel warmth envelope your insides.
“Weren’t you supposed to have practice tonight?” you ask him, settling behind the pult. There aren’t many people in the diner right now, and the work during the night is slow– you kind of despise the fact that you’re open 24/7, but that’s what you get for working at a diner– so there’s no issue in you chatting away with your friends that come visit when you have the time. You always make sure to do your job well and put the customers first, so your boss never really complained.
“It’s over already,” he says, “we got over the songs quite quickly,” he notes, seeing you nod and smile at his response.
“That’s good,” you say, “I’m glad. Do you want something? Fries? Coke? On the house, obviously,” you grin, making the man eagerly nod to your question, eyes lit up in joy.
“Just a glass of coke is fine,” he says.
You turn away from him for a mere second, taking one of the clean glasses to your hand and then walking a few steps to the right where the coolers are, taking out a glass bottle of Coca-Cola. Offering the drink back to your boyfriend, you watch him as he pours the black liquid into the tall glass, the two of you enveloped in a comfortable silence. The diner doesn’t play music after 10 PM, and somehow, you’re glad. It gets kind of annoying to listen to the same few songs on loop the whole night– because the speaker system is old and doesn’t have an AUX input, you have to listen to the same 3 CDs over and over again the whole year– and so whenever Yuta comes to visit you during your night shifts, the silence only adds to your sense of intimacy and comfort with the man.
“Was Doyoung less snappy today?” you ask, watching the male grin and shake his head at your question.
“A bit,” he admits, “not too much, though. Don’t know what’s gotten into him lately, but he’s been a real bitch.”
You hum at his response, eyes tracing his features. “Maybe he’s stressed about something,” you propose, and you don’t really put much meaning into your own words– you don’t know the man enough to know how he reacts under pressure, nor do you really care– but the man in front of you only squints his eyes in thought, shrugging.
“Could be it,” he agrees, “I mean, there’s a lot happening with the band right now, so it would be only natural,” he says, making you furrow your brows at him in question. You weren’t aware of anything big happening– maybe the news were recent, you didn’t know, but judging by the fact that you’re pretty updated on things concerning the band, you wouldn’t be surprised if they were.
“What do you mean?” you ask, folding your hands at your chest and leaning on the counter, your face now closer to Yuta’s– god, you’ll never get used to just how beautiful this man is in your poor eyes.
The singer grins to himself, acting innocent. “Just… some stuff,” he says.
“What is it?” you ask again, this time with a coat of persistence in your voice. You don’t want to say it out loud, but you’re getting kind of worried– Yuta doesn’t usually hide things from you. Hell, you’d even go as far as saying that you are the first person he comes to when something happens, no matter if it’s good or bad, and with the suspicious way he’s acting right now, your mind can’t help but wander.
“Nothing,” he peeps, taking a sip out of his glass, making you sigh and roll your eyes at the male. You point your finger to the middle of his forehead, poking him– his head lulls backwards a little, making you heave out a soft giggle– before you squint at him in annoyance.
“Come on,” you huff, “you’re not gonna tell me?” you pout, mastering your best attempt at puppy eyes– something inside of you tells you that no matter how stubborn Yuta is, he’s kind of weak for you when you look at him like that– and the man only snickers at you as he shakes his head in disbelief.
“I will,” he admits, smiling at you. The gesture has you soften a bit, your muscles losing their previous tension, because come on– if he’s smiling at you like that, there’s no way the news could be bad– but before you get a chance to pry him about it, the ring above the door makes a sound and your eyes trace the figures of two girls, both a bit older than you, smiling at someone in particular.
And that someone isn’t you– of course, why would anyone smile at their server, am I right? – that someone is Nakamoto Yuta, the man sitting in front of you, and you’re already familiar enough with the two girls to know what’s about to happen next.
See, you are aware that Yuta is attractive. Hell, you blushed under his gaze when you met him in this diner for the very first time, his hair back then raven black, falling into his eyes. You’re painfully aware of the fact that you’re not the only one who finds him beautiful, but there’s something about the very obvious gazes and giggles the girls who frequent the diner send to him that has your stomach turn, making you see red and feel very obvious green, and no matter what you do or try to tell to yourself, you can’t battle the feeling out of your veins.
The scenario is one you’ve seen before– the girls giggle out as they arrive, sharing a knowing look, before they pass the pult you two are standing behind, sending very obvious looks to Yuta as they reach for the table in the corner. They greet him with their soft, honey voices, they say “Hi Yuta!”, because he’s known around the town– everybody knows the name of the rising band’s lead singer, everybody wants to take a glimpse of him, shoot him a flirtatious smile, because once he makes it big, you can tell yourself you knew him, he knew you, he looked at you and said hi back. Yuta looks at them and grins, sends them a wink, greets them with his raspy voice that says “Hi ladies,”, and it makes your stomach growl, it makes your gaze harden, but most importantly, you feel acid on your tongue when the man in front of you sends them his usual wink.
Clearing your throat as all goes exactly how you remember and expect it to go, you watch as Yuta looks back at you with an innocent smile, not really minding that he told you you were his pretty girl just last week, not really caring that now, his actions have very different consequences. Back when you were uselessly pining over him, you knew your jealousy was foolish– you didn’t really have a reason to feel possessive over the man, because he was very clearly single. Now, things have changed, though, and you kind of expected his behavior to alter around the girls– the girls that are a few years older than you, a few inches taller than you, a bit more mature and a bit more pretty.
“Something’s wrong?” he asks you, face coy and feline-like. You glare at him, knowing he’s aware of what you’re implying, but still, he does nothing to apologize as he only giggles at you and leans in, pecking your lips.
“Everything’s peachy,” you mumble, shaking your head as you take the menus from the counter, ready to serve the customers.
As you’re about to exit the pult and pass your boyfriend, he grabs your wrist and spins you so you face him, making you watch as he downs the last remains of the Coke in his drink, offering you another smile. “I’m gonna get something at the gas station real quick,” he muses, “I’ll wait for you in my car after you get off?”
Sighing, still acting a bit annoyed at his behavior– but knowing, sensing that you already forgave him the moment he spared you a single glance– you nod. The male pulls you closer to him, sending another kiss, this time firmer, to your lips, and if he wasn’t in control of the situation, you know you’d get too lost in the moment, too distracted to do your job– but before you know it, he leans away and stands up from the tall chair, pats your bottom and walks over to the front door.
Watching as he disappears behind the glass, laughing to yourself when he waves at you and blows you a kiss, you shake your head as you walk over to the table with the two girls sitting at it, their mood not as bright as it was before, and with a victorious smirk, you realize, with a hint of joy in your heart, that they’ve been watching the exchange.
The singer waits for you in the parking lot, his figure leaning on the 2007 Volkswagen golf he sometimes drives you home in, and although it’s already 4:45 AM (your shift ends at 4:30, but you have to count up the register and change before you go), you find yourself walking over to him with a pep in your step. The platinum white falls into his eyes as he grins at you, reaching his arms out once you’re close enough, pulling you into a hug.
You and Yuta never really hugged much. You can’t say you dislike the change.
“How was the rest of the shift?” he mumbles into your hair, holding you close to his chest. His arms feel almost possessive, making you feel secure, and something about the whiff you get of his cologne makes your head spin a little when he lets go, watching you as you walk over to the passenger’s side and get into his car.
“It was okay,” you admit, shrugging, “not busy.”
“That’s good to hear,” he nods, getting in as well and fastening his seatbelt, putting the car into reverse and slowly driving out of the parking lot. The radio is turned off at this hour– a thing that rarely happens in Yuta’s car, because he always has to have music playing in the background of his life– and the silence envelopes you in an intimate, comforting atmosphere.
Hence, why you ask the crucial question that’s been bugging you the whole night. “What did you want to talk about earlier?” you mumble, the tone of your voice light and coated with tiredness. You’ve been up the whole day, since you have classes in the mornings, but now that you know there’s something Yuta’s been keeping away from you, you know you wouldn’t be able to fall asleep even if you tried, overthinking making your mind too busy to lull you into the dreamland.
“Are you up for a drive? I’ll tell you and then drop you off at dorms,” he asks, eyes locking with yours for a split second before he focuses back on the road.
Humming, you agree with his idea. You give him some time while he takes the turn that goes out of the city and towards the ring road, tracing his actions with your hazy, half-asleep eyes. The car takes a steady speed, one that’s neither alarming nor too slow, and Yuta’s palm easily takes a hold of your thigh, the steering wheel now being operated with only one of his arms. The affectionate action makes you feel heat in the tips of your ears and on the highest parts of your cheekbones, gaze shifting away from the male next to you towards the empty road. Everything about the things you’ve been dreaming about– the subtle touches, the glances, the pet names– makes you shy away from the man. It’s not that you don’t enjoy it, you would be a liar if you said you didn’t, but still– the novelty of it all still surprises you, keeps you on your feet.
“So,” he starts, clearing his throat a bit before proceeding, “you know how I told you we now practice more often than we used to?” he asks, eyes peering at you with expectation, waiting for you to answer. You offer him a tired hum, too sleepy to really master up anything else, and when it reaches his ears, he takes it as his lead to continue.
“Well, it was for a reason… at our last gig, there were some scouting people, or whatever you call it… and I didn’t tell you before, because it wasn’t certain and I also don’t really know how these things go– y’know, that’s Doyoung’s thing, sorta– and I also didn’t wanna sound silly if things didn’t work out,” he explains, deep voice resonating through the low hum of the engine, keeping you awake, “but things did work out and we got signed to a label.”
Yuta gives you a minute to process the information. He doesn’t say anything for a bit, only waiting for you to reply back to him– to react, in any way, really– and when he doesn’t get any words out of you, he looks at you with a look so fragilely expecting that you almost want to coo at the male and hold him in your arms, tell him you’re just as excited as he is, because it’s the truth, and you are; you just can’t really find the right words to express so right now.
“Wow,” you heave out, half-lidded, something warm and proud bundling up in the depths of your chest, “that’s- that’s awesome,” you mumble, watching as the male next to you visibly relaxes at your response.
“Yeah,” he nods, suddenly more energetic than before, and you chuckle at the realization of just how important your opinion was for him– even though it shouldn’t be, really. It’s always been his dream, and what you think of the matter shouldn’t be any of his concern. “So they heard us play and listened to our songs and stuff, and they said we can record an album somewhere towards the end of the year, but they said we gotta promote ourselves a bit first, so…” he freezes a little, chewing on the bottom of his lip.
Suddenly, he seems nervous again. It’s a strange sight– you don’t often see Nakamoto Yuta so worried about the opinion of other people. You don’t often have the privilege to see the singer so open and so vulnerable, so easy to break. It only happens with stuff important to him, you think– the band is always his priority, and you’re more than happy that he’s finally getting the recognition he deserves and strives for. Hand slowly reaching for the one that’s resting on your thigh, you interlock your fingers with him and squeeze his palm in a reassuring manner, as if to tell him that he doesn’t have to be afraid, that you’re his biggest supporter, that you’re always here for all the news– good or bad.
“So…?” you prob him.
“So,” he clears his throat, smiling at you when he gets reassured, “we’re going to tour this one festival. It’s only for a couple of weeks, and it’s around the country, so we don’t have to fly out and all, but… I’ll be out of the city for a while, is what I’m saying.”
The confession makes your stomach churn in fear. Suddenly, you’re painfully aware of Yuta’s worry about talking to you about the topic. Somehow, you understand him completely. Ever since you met Yuta, you haven’t gone more than three days without seeing each other. You two are like puzzle pieces that fit together perfectly, always searching for the other pair when it’s not in its place by your side. Your relationship is very fresh, very new, and although you know your bond is stronger than the distance, you can’t help but feel a bit of worry in the tips of your fingertips, in the pit of your stomach. And also, there’s this silly feeling– small, but yet so overbearing– that comes with the image of not being close to Yuta for weeks, of not being able to see him every day and find the light in his eyes to get you through the week. There’s this silly feeling of missing him, of yearning for him to be there with you every minute and every second of the day, and hell, sometimes you miss him even when he’s away for a day, and you don’t know what you’ll do if it’s gonna be weeks, a big, nasty thought that’s both unreal and too realistic prickling your brain– how will you even survive when he’s not by your side? Without Yuta, you’re nothing. No one.
Still, you’re not about to ruin this for him. You’re not about to act sad, or act disappointed, because you’re not, at the end of the day. At the end of it all, you’re aware that this has always been his dream. You are happy for him– you’re ecstatic. And that’s exactly how you’re gonna react.
“That’s awesome, Yuta,” you muse, and you’re glad the tone of your voice stays genuine, “that’s big news. I’m so happy for you,” you say, seeing as the male next to you breaks out into a boyish grin, excitement spreading into every inch of his body, fingers tugging at yours to bring your interlocked hands into his lap.
“It’s gonna be over soon and then I’m right back by your side,” he hums, and you shake your head at him.
“I’ll wait however long it takes,” you disagree with his statement, “don’t you worry. I’m gonna cheer for you every night.”
The road in front of you signals a turn back into the city, Yuta’s car naturally and smoothly driving back towards the center of life. You subtly hear your partner talk excitedly about all his dreams and all the visions he has of the festival tour– how he’s going to have the time of his life, how the boys will make it big, how he can’t wait to show everyone what they’re made of– and although you’re happy and content, the buzzing excitement of his voice does nothing to keep you awake in the late hour. You feel a peck pressed to the back of your hand, your sleep-filled eyes meeting with his, when he shakes his head at you in disbelief.
“We’re almost at yours now,” he hums, “I’ll wake you up in front of the building.”
Smiling, you nod. Somehow, you drift off with thoughts of full crowds cheering for Yuta, with thoughts wishing for him to make it just as big as he’s always dreamt of. You battle your own worries away, telling them you’re silly for thinking that things will change between the two of you when he’s away, writing them off to be your own unreasonable anxieties.
Things won’t change, you repeat to yourself, and if so, only for the better.
III. a little bit of California with a little bit of London sky
Life has stilled into a pleasant, comfortable routine for the two of you. You admired just how easily Yuta fit into your daily schedule, just how easily he managed to get used to the cycle of your days, and the knowledge makes you that much sadder to let him go. You go to class from Monday to Friday, snatching mostly the morning ones this semester, which is a thing you’ve grown to be appreciative of, since it means you have time off in the afternoon for your shifts and hanging out with Yuta. On Friday evenings, you take the night shift and have your boyfriend drive you back to dorms when you’re off, and on Sundays, you and Yuta go out to eat in your favorite sushi restaurant downtown as he talks to you about the events of the whole week. He talks your ear off with his excitement, sometimes not even giving you a chance to speak yourself– which he apologizes for on most days, and you’re not mad at him, because truly, you understand– telling you about how practice is going and how their new manager, a thing they haven’t had before, is keeping everything in check for when the festival tour happens.
You went to listen to them practice one more time. You don’t really dare to go close to the garage anymore, since Doyoung has not grown warmer to your presence, but you still enjoyed yourself as you realized that their mutual passion only made them perform better.
And with days going by slowly like this, you almost don’t notice when it’s time for Yuta to leave, and suddenly, you’re standing in the crowd of the first show of their first festival tour– the thing that’s supposedly going to make their career take off– as they play songs you know like the back of your hand by now for thousands of people around you in your hometown. Something about the first stop of the tour being your hometown made you feel a bit unsettled– isn’t it always the other way around? Aren’t you supposed to reunite with your lover while he plays his last show back home? But then you realize that it’s a festival, and not their own tour– they aren’t as big to have one themselves yet– and you’re understanding of the logistics. They can’t all play the last show in their hometown.
You brought your roommate Aeri along with you to the show, both of your outfits matching in shades of black and red as you make your way towards the front row, making sure you have good enough of a view to see your boyfriend on the stage. There’s a nervous pep in your step when you wait for the band to arrive, the knowledge that your roommate has never seen Yuta before; you wonder if this is how he felt when he was introducing you to his bandmates all those weeks before, and if so, why he didn’t tell you about it.
Murmurs of the people in the crowd fill your ears, and you watch them with a horrifying realization that you don’t seem like you belong here– so out of the general aesthetic of the crowd, making you feel not cool enough, not punk enough, not good enough to be by the side of someone like Yuta– but before you get a chance to really vocalize your thoughts, there’s a sound of a drum coming from the front of the stage that makes you turn your head forward, watching as Mark grins at the crowd with something you’d call a nervous, yet excited smile, starting off their gig with an up-beat song.
“They’re kinda good!” you hear Aeri scream into your ear, and something about the compliment makes you relax. This is a good thing, you think– she doesn’t hate it, which means she probably won’t hate the members of the band themselves either.
Once Yuta walks on the stage with his guitar slung over his neck, playing the chords you’d be able to name by memory– having your boyfriend repeat them to himself for a few good minutes once when you came over to his house and he was practicing the song by himself– and even though you wouldn’t be able to play it, you’re sure you’d recognize this song even if you were woken up in the middle of the night, slightly sleepy and still out of it. The crowd cheers, and you find yourself smiling in a sense of euphoria.
Jumping around with the rest of the population, you get lost in the music. Their set plays out for a good hour and a half, combining cover songs and their own originals, the sun setting with the sound of their eclectic guitars. There’s always something about concerts that makes you lost in time, not really register the way it flows by and leaves you unknowing in the spiral. You didn’t even realize it– you don’t think you even fully registered the experience of seeing Yuta play live on a stage for the first time– and it’s over and you’re catching your breath, feeling your ears ring from the noise that’s been there for the last hour or so and now isn’t, everything around you muffled and a little bit hazy.
“Let’s go, we gotta catch them in the back,” you hurriedly mumble into Aeri’s ear, the girl following you with excited steps as you drag her around the crowded space. Yuta told you he is leaving as soon as the festival ends so their van can drive over to the next city as soon as possible, and since they were the second to last to go on, you feel a threatening bubble growing in your chest.
There’s a group of girls waving at the band leaving off stage, and you pray that you can somehow catch Yuta before he has to walk over to their van.
You catch a glimpse of the platinum white bangs when you jump around and try to see them, and as your eyes meet, the singer breaks out into a smile before he turns towards the rest of the band, waving at them and telling them that they can go and that he’ll find his way back in a bit. The gesture warms your heart, a sense of relief settling onto your shoulders.
“You were amazing!” you holler as you get towards the metal gate that keeps the artists away from the crowd, your body getting into contact with the cold material as you throw your hands around your boyfriend’s neck, grasping him harder than ever before. His arms reach around your waist, squeezing out all of the air in your lungs, as a laugh bubbles out of his chest and makes you feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside.
“I was singing the songs for you, babygirl,” he hums into your ear, heat rising to your cheeks at the sentiment. When you pull away visibly flustered, Yuta laughs at your face, making you swat his arm in an act of playfulness. “You must be Aeri!” the man notices your roommate tagging along, smiling at her with his welcoming, warm smile.
The girl nods at him, greeting him almost a little too politely. “Yeah! I heard a lot about you, so I’m glad Y/N wasn’t lying, y’know,” she giggles, and you roll your eyes.
“See, I would never lie to you,” you snicker, and as you put your arm on the metal gate to steady yourself, you feel warmth cover it as Yuta’s own palm envelopes it in a sweet gesture that still surprises you whenever it so effortlessly happens, but also puts you at ease all in one minute.
“I liked the drummer,” Aeri muses, making Yuta laugh at her.
“I’ll let him know,” he salutes, and with that, he turns back to you with wide eyes, a thousand glimmering stars behind them making you admire just how beautiful and full of life the man in front of you suddenly looks. It tugs at your heartstrings– it’s only the first show and it’s already gone so well, he was born for this, you think, and even though it’s difficult, you suddenly feel like letting him go will be so much easier after the sight, because you’ll be doing it with the knowledge that it’s the best possible thing for him, something you would never be able to give to him if he was stuck with you back home.
“It went exactly how we wanted it to go, it was- it was so great,” he sighs, the crowd behind you suddenly disappearing and grouping around the front of the stage again, signaling that the next band is about to play and finish off tonight’s stop, “thank you for coming.”
“I wouldn’t miss it, you know,” you shrug, gazing into his eyes. There’s a lot of noise around you– the sound of the people talking and cheering behind your back, the beat of the drums, the shuffling of feet– yet, you feel like in this moment, everything else tuned out, everything around you disappeared for a second and left only you and Yuta in the big place, eyes and hearts for each other.
“I’m gonna–”
“Don’t say it,” you hush him, chewing on the inside of your cheek in nerves. You don’t want to hear it– you don’t want to hear him say it, because then, it would make it feel more real, more raw. You wanted to name the sensation when it comes to you, not have it in your brain before you even get a chance to get it, but Yuta shakes his head at you and sighs.
“I have to say it.”
“No, you don’t,” you giggle, amidst a little sadly.
“I do,” he nods, “because it’s true. And you deserve to hear it face to face, not over the phone,” he says, and you heave out a sigh at his words.
“Fine,” you grant him permission. Get it over with.
He shakes his head at you in disbelief, his hair bouncing in the motion. It makes you want to reach over and brush back the damp locks, put the wet strands into their place, but you don’t– and why you stop yourself is a question you don’t get to ask. “I’m gonna miss you,” he completes, and you nod.
Tears prickle at the edges of your eyes, and you promised yourself you’re not going to cry when Yuta goes– something about it feeling childish, too overly dramatic for a fact that he’s gonna be away only for a couple of weeks– and that’s exactly why you didn’t want him to say it, why you didn’t want to hear the words before he’s miles away and talking to you through the phone, because crying seems foolish in this moment. It seems stupid, dumb, dramatic, because tonight’s a good night– one that should be celebrated– and you feel like you’re ruining it.
“I’m gonna miss you more,” you muse, choking through the tears, battling away the heat in the corners of your eyes and begging that no tears actually fall down your cheeks– you could handle tearing up, but crying was a bit too much– but when the man softly scoffs at your state and brings you towards his chest, you feel them escape and fall freely, wetting his sweaty shirt more as you hold him closer, trying to hide into his body.
Who knows? Maybe if you hug him hard enough, you’ll be able to fit into his skin so he could bring you with him. Maybe you won’t have to be apart.
“Don’t cry, you dummy,” he sighs as you push yourself away from him, trying to laugh through the pain that’s hitting you in your gut right now, praying hard you can ease the situation, “I’ll be back in no time,” he says, wiping at your cheeks with the pads of his thumbs– one of the only fingers that aren’t calloused with the force he plays on the guitar– the action so tender you swallow in on yourself.
His voice is as soft as it can get over the loud music, and you nod at him, trapping your bottom lip between your teeth so you can stop it from trembling. “Come here,” he hums, tugging you into him once more, but before you get a chance to hide your face into his chest, the male leans towards you and kisses you on your lips, a firm, sweet contact with the chapped surface.
When you pull away, he goes in for another, a starved man wanting more, and you try to remember the imprint of his lips on yours so you don’t miss it on lonely nights, so you can remind yourself of it whenever he’s away.
There’s an arm on his shoulder when you pull away from him, a tall figure tugging him backwards, and before you have a chance to register what’s happening, you recognise Doyoung telling your boyfriend that it’s time to go, we gotta get on the road soon, and you’re left aimless and lost in the crowd, the hollowing feeling in your stomach only deepening once Yuta nods at his bandmate and turns to you again, smiling.
“Take care of yourself, okay?” you tell him, hating the fact that you can barely see him over the tears, but not really caring enough to try to stop them now.
“I will,” he reassures you, hand coming up to your hair to pet it, a soft laugh escaping his throat. “I gotta go now, baby.”
“Okay,” you nod.
“Okay,” he repeats, taking a few steps back from you. You watch him, his figure skipping away from you, when he turns and hollers over the loud set. “Love you!”
You don’t get a chance to react before he disappears out of your sight. You don't even get a chance to say it back after hearing it from him for the first time, and something about the fact brings countless worries to your chest. Still, you chant to yourself– nothing’s gonna change. And if so, only for the better.
IV. no matter where you go, somebody follows
Navigating through the foreign city with the hood pulled over your head, the plastic bag full of take-out hanging loosely from your hold, you squint at the buildings around you and sigh in relief with the recognition of your surroundings– you didn’t get lost, despite your biggest concerns, and you’re at the parking lot behind the venue, multiple buses parked right in front of you. Jogging through the space, your sneakers hitting the pavement in a sound you find satisfactory and calming to your nerves, you reach one of the older buses parked in the corner of the parking lot, the windows dark and the vehicle painted in a chipping, rusty white color. Still, it’s a tour bus– an upgrade from what Yuta and his band departed in from your hometown just three weeks ago– and you feel a sense of pride swell inside of your chest at the sight.
Yuta’s band has been growing successfully and steadily– just like his new manager thought would happen. Their songs are catchy, their fanbase is growing in amount, their exposure is getting bigger on social media and some of their songs even play on the radio. Sure, you wouldn’t call them radio hits– it’s not like your parents or your professors would recognize the band or know the lyrics if you showed them the tune– but it’s still something, and even that something feels tremendously big in your eyes.
The decision of skipping school for a few days and coming up to visit Yuta on his tour was spontaneous. It came to you after you missed him particularly much one night, going to sleep without his call– he apologized a day later, telling you he’d been too busy to talk– and after you counted up the money you saved up from working at the diner, you realized you can afford going on a little getaway to meet up with your lover. Yuta was delighted to hear about your plan and even got you a free ticket to the festival, and after watching him and his band play, you decided to get McDonald’s as a form of a late night snack.
You expected your boyfriend to follow you, but he didn’t. It was okay, though– he was probably tired. Traveling both gives and takes a lot from you, and while Yuta was given a thousand opportunities over the past few days, his energy has been slowly receding. You understand– as his girlfriend, it’s your job to.
Knocking on the door of the bus– and hearing the ruckus coming from the inside, making you gaze at the darkened windows in suspicion– you get inside after the driver opens the door for you and nods at you in acknowledgement. The tour bus is kind of old, again– Yuta isn’t at a point in his career yet where he could afford the latest gadgets– but although the lights aren’t neon and the space isn’t big and modern, it still serves its purpose. It has a functioning bathroom in the front, with a surprisingly working lock on the door, and it also has a kitchen area that’s big enough to host a couple of people behind the efficiently placed table. The bus has a corridor with bunk beds on the sides and a small bedroom in the very back of it all, which is used by their manager Sangyeon.
Usually, the bus stinks a bit. You don’t really know what it is, but you can’t really get the bad smell out no matter how hard you try. Now, though, the bus stinks even worse– and although the smell is a tad bit different than the one you’re used to (even though you’ve only been here for 2 days, with the next day being the morning of your departure back home, to your ordinary life), you can’t quite put your finger on the cause.
You walk over to the kitchen area, the plastic bag full of food still loosely placed in your grasp, and the noise gets even louder now, the laughter and the loud music over the speakers mixing together in a way that has your head pounding similarly than to what you experience when you stand front-row during the festivals, and when you put your head through the entry to the small area, the sight in front of you has you gasping. There’s a bit more people in the tour bus than you’d expect– you mentally count the heads, realizing there are four unfamiliar faces in the small crowd– and that’s what initially makes you shy away and want to hide. See, your experience with Yuta’s band mates wasn’t the brightest– that’s why meeting another potential friend group of your boyfriend has you shrinking away in worry.
“You’re back already?” Mark asks you, your presence noticed by the man first. You nod at him, offering him a tight-lipped smile as you hold up the plastic bag in the air, showing him its contents. He smiles at you, but doesn’t pay you much attention after, instead focusing back on the commotion in front of him.
Disappointment washes over you when you realize your presence hasn’t been acknowledged by your boyfriend– mainly because everyone else at least offered you a nonchalant nod of a head, Doyoung included– and that’s when you sigh to yourself and move closer to the small table, ready to put the food in the middle and try to join the conversation. You’re taken by surprise when you realize it’s harder to find an empty space on the crowded surface, bottles of beer, shot glasses and a bottle of tequila settled all around, a potato chip bag thrown in the corner, almost falling off. An ashtray in the middle of it all, almost full to the brim, something white and messy lined up on the other side of the table, folded arms falling to the surface with a loud thud that have you snap your head around and watch Yuta as he settles his chin on them and closes his eyes and then slowly opens them in a hazy blink, pupils almost as big as his whole iris.
This has you stopping in your tracks, this has you slightly wake up in a cold sweat, making you too aware and alert of the situation.
Your eyes scan the surroundings again. The four men at the table seem a bit older than your boyfriend, and you’re sure you saw them on stage a few hours ago, playing their own set. The bottles of alcohol are almost empty, the ashtray filled with cigarettes, your gaze finding the source of the weird, sweet, yet earthy smell when you see a bag of dried weeds loosely thrown behind a beer bottle, rolling papers settled on the side. Finding the platinum blonde head again, the line of white substance close to Yuta’s elbow, chills run down your spine when the male looks at you with big eyes, his smile slightly out of it, yet amazingly satisfied.
Suddenly, you’re terrified. You’re scared and afraid, and you wonder how things could have gotten so out of hand in the time you were gone. Surely your trip to McDonald’s didn’t take more than a few minutes, or did it?
“What’s all this?” you ask Yuta, your voice hush, yet loud enough to be heard over the music.
“What?” he asks, voice coated in a blissful sweetness that has your hair stand up, goosebumps rising all over your body. Frustrated, you run your hand through your hair, seeing that your interaction doesn’t have many viewers comforting you only the slightest.
“What’s all this, Yuta?” you ask, pointing everywhere around the place, but mainly to the substances found on the small, dark-wooden table.
“We’re just having fun, baby,” he says lazily, grinning at you from under his eyelashes. Were the circumstances given to you different, you’d admire his features– his flushed cheeks and his strangely starry-glazed eyes, the satisfied and comfortable smirk playing with his flush lips. But now, you feel shaken-up; a strange kind of terror you’ve never experienced before, and frankly speaking, one you wouldn’t imagine experiencing even in your worst nightmares.
“This is fun to you?” you ask, scoffing. “Is- what happened here?” you keep dumbly asking, not finding any more coherent thoughts in your brain that could be expressed by words. Somehow, the whole situation is painted right in front of you, yet, you don’t think you have it in you to describe it or admit it to your brain.
“Why are you freaking out?” he asks, reaching out one of his hands to you to hold your hand, but you shake it off with a different sense of vigor.
Why are you freaking out? Is he out of his mind? Does he not understand the consequences of his actions; the full implications of everything that’s going on right in this moment? Are you overreacting? You find it hard to think that’s the case.
You scoff at him, not really believing you’re in this situation right now. Something in you feels a bit shameful to be acting like this, now that you’ve been called out on it. You’re in a battle of opinions– one side telling you to drop it and let him live his life, because he’s an adult and he knows what he’s doing, the other one shouting at you that this is not okay and you need some space to breathe and get away for a second. Yuta said he was having fun, but to you, none of this was even close to funny.
“You’re unbelievable,” you say, moving away from him and sending him a gaze you hope signifies the turmoil of emotions on your insides right now, your hands shaking as you cross your arms on your chest. You’re not met with the desired reaction, though. Somehow, Yuta makes the matters even worse as he scoffs at you, shaking his head and pointing it towards the group as he mutters something under his breath.
“And you’re being unreasonable.”
The argument makes your blood cold, your eyes widen. You’re being unreasonable? In your eyes, you’re being ignored. You’re being put on the very end of the ranking of his priorities, and you’d understand it if the first one was held up by his career, his dreams– you’re not willing to battle for that place with alcohol and drugs, though. You’re simply not.
Storming out of the area, suddenly feeling like there’s no air in your lungs, no oxygen in the whole planet Earth, you run through the small and crowded place, making eye contact with no one as you run out without a plan. You bump into a slender figure as you plan on escaping the vehicle, right in the place where the stairs down are located, crossing your paths– one going in and the other one out. The person smells of cigarette smoke and when you look up to find a raven-haired boy staring at you with a glare, the plan of leaving sounds even more urgent in your head.
“Where are you running off to?” Doyoung asks, voice laced with indifference.
“I don’t want to talk right now,” you snap at him, trying to push through the small corridor past him so you can get out and get some air.
“Saw something you didn’t like?” he mocks, laughing at you.
“Doyoung-”
“Those places aren’t for college kids like you, Y/N,” he snarls, huffing out air as you push against his chest to get him out of the way, “this is how this world works. Get out before it gets you too, kid.”
V. you're the only one I'll miss when I'm gone
The coldness of the liquid spilling down your throat makes you cool down noticeably, your fingers working on the lace around your waist to loosen up the apron you’ve been wearing for the last couple of hours. You sit on one of the tall bar stools, facing the diner with your back, as you scroll through your phone and look through all your social media. You’re working another one of your night shifts, the diner surprisingly empty as you allow yourself some time to just sit around and do nothing– it’s not like you have anything else to do or any customers to serve in the first place.
Checking your messages– and finding none, much to your dismay– you move over to other apps, opening up Instagram with a swift tap of your finger, eyes tracing the posts appearing on your phone screen. There are some from your favorite music artists and some from your friends from high school, and you’d usually find an Instagram story from your boyfriend’s band right at the very beginning of the little reel on the top as well, but ever since they got signed to a label, their page is hands of their manager Sangyeon, so the account is no longer as active and as unserious as it was when Yuta was the one behind the posts.
Scrolling down a little, your eyes zero in on a post of the mentioned account– a carousel of professionally-looking pictures of the band on the stage, taken from multiple angles and in perfect quality, colors most likely edited and lightning adjusted so they look as nice as they can. You were in the crowd just a week ago, and although you only left your visit recently, you already miss seeing Yuta in real life, playing and talking to you, existing by your side.
You haven’t heard from him much since the day you left. Still shaken up from the sight in front of you that one night, the band’s manager let you sleep in the only bedroom of the tour bus before you took off to the station in the early morning, having Yuta groggily press a kiss to your forehead as a goodbye, telling you to stay safe as you travel, before he went back to sleep. The events of your last night with him went unnoticed and unmentioned and you’re not exactly sure if it’s for the best– you two barely call nowadays, since your schedules don’t align, and it’s kind of hard to talk about it over a text, especially when the conversations are short and dry, like they’ve been for the last few days.
Zooming in on the picture, fingers pinching the screen to take a closer look on Yuta’s face, you chew on the inside of your cheek, letting your thoughts run a thousand miles an hour. What did you do wrong? Or was he just busy?
That must be it. He’s in a band. A touring, rising band. He must be busy.
“What are you staring at?” you hear a male voice coming from your right, making you jump in your seat. Eyes landing on Jaechan, your coworker from the kitchen, you watch as he throws a damp kitchen towel to the counter and takes a seat on the chair next to you with a sigh. You shrug. The male takes a peek over your shoulder, craning up his neck to get a closer look, a hum escaping his throat at the sight. “Is that your boyfriend? I heard he’s in a band.”
You find yourself humming in agreement at his question. Jaechan nods at you in acknowledgement, resting his head into his palms, eyes zeroing on your stoic face. “Did something happen between the two of you? You don’t sound too happy talking about him right now.”
Sighing, you put the phone down, the screen still on and displaying the professional picture their photographer took, showing Yuta with his platinum blonde hair damp and all over the place, the singer in the middle of a song gripping his microphone tightly, veins protruding due to the notes he’s singing on his sweat-covered neck. Once again, you find yourself shrugging. “I don’t know. He’s just… not really talking to me?”
“Did you two have a fight?”
“No,” you shake your head, “not really. It’s not like he’s not talking talking to me, it’s just that he’s not doing it as often as he used to before,” you explain, chewing on your bottom lip as you tear your eyes off the picture and glue them to your companion instead, seeing as the older male hums, pressing his lips into a tight line.
“He must be busy,” you say, not really knowing who you’re saying this for. Is it to prove to Jaechan that your relationship is completely fine, that there’s nothing shifting in the dynamic you had with Yuta, or is it to reassure yourself, try to manifest the thought into life? You’re not quite sure at this point.
“Well, he texted you a lot more often before,” he points out, “how busy can a singer really be, you know what I mean?”
“There must be something that’s taking up so much of his time,” you sigh, the male in front of you scoffing and rolling his eyes at your naivety.
Jaechan argues with you, and something about his sentence makes your mood even gloomier, your composure shake further. “I mean, what does a singer even do? He plays a gig in the evening and then he’s lazing off the whole day, it’s not like he’s recording an album or something, do you feel me?”
To this, you shrug. What does Jaechan even know about this? He’s never dated anyone in a band before. He’s never been in one either, so he can’t know how this life works. Maybe he’s just jealous that your significant other is famous and his is not (because it’s non-existent, just for the record), and that’s what’s making him say all these things.
“What do you know?” you scoff.
Jaechan looks at you with a softer look in his eyes now, the black bangs falling into his forehead serving as a sort of a curtain when he smiles sadly at his next words. “Enough to see when a guy gets bored, Y/N. If he had time before, he just can’t be assed now. I’d hate to see your heart break over him,” he says, each word like a sharp knife to your heart, a stinging pain erupting into each crevice of your body. Your mouth opens to reply to him, to argue that he is clueless, he is snide, he is acting like a know-it-all, when the bell above the entrance rings and a small group of teenagers enters the diner.
Before you get a chance to stand up from your place to re-tie your apron and serve them, Jaechan, who doesn’t usually serve– since cooking is his job around here– beats you to it and pats your shoulder as he goes. “I’ll get it.”
You’re left sitting at the bar, eyes bearing into the screen of your phone, gazing at Yuta on the other side of the country, almost begging him with your eyes to text, to call, to do something, before the screen darkens and your phone eventually locks, the time running out already.
VI. and he holds me like a woman
Prepared for another night of staring at the ceiling, not even the sound of Aeri’s snoring present to lull you to sleep with its monotonicity, since the girl went out and stayed over at her (as she calls him) sneaky link’s place, you settle into your bed sheets and pull your blanket close to your neck. Unlocking your phone and scrolling through social media, planning to do so until your eyes are droopy enough that you don’t have much time to overthink in the late hours of the night, waiting for sleep to take you, your finger moves through all the different apps, begging for your brain to stay occupied. You have to treat yourself like you’d treat a little child while trying to get them to sleep– except you don’t watch Cocomelon, instead you settle on the latest episode of your favorite podcast– and it starts working eventually, until you’re woken up with a knock to your door, cursing at the person behind the wall for disturbing your routine, because now, you’ll have to do it all over again.
Sighing, you stand up from your bed, lazily walking over to the door of your room– sometimes, you despise the fact that your dorm layout looks like the corridor of a hospital wing, with rooms all over the hall and a common kitchen and a bathroom at the very end, since the living space for you and your roommate Aeri is a 5x6 square meters with little to no storage room– but this time, you thank the god for this fact, since it means that nothing is too far out of reach and nothing can get lost in the small space. You think of whoever might be behind the door– is it Aeri? You doubt it’s Aeri. She usually doesn’t back out of a hook up, and even if she did, she’d text you about it before– she has her own set of keys as well, so she wouldn’t just knock.
Is it your dorm mate? Yeji from three rooms down the corridor sometimes comes over and asks you if she can use your frying pan– since the ones in the common kitchen suck and are hardly ever clean– so maybe it’s her. However, you’re not quite sure why she’d want to cook something so late in the evening.
Shrugging, deciding that you’re not gonna dwell on the thought much longer and instead look for yourself, you unlock the door (you learned to do that every night after Ningning, the freshman that lives across the corridor from you, once stumbled into your room at 3 in the morning, drunk out of her mind, because she confused her left and right) and crack it open, shock overtaking you as you recognize the figure casually standing on the other side of the wall.
“What are you doing here?” you gasp, the man with platinum blonde hair snickering at your parted lips and big eyes.
“Visiting,” he shrugs, “I missed you.”
Taking a few seconds to process the situation, you stay standing in your place, a metaphorical loading bar appearing in the middle of your forehead. Yuta shakes his head at you in disbelief, taking a step closer towards you. “Aren’t you gonna invite me in?”
“I- I am, but-” you stutter, taking a step away from the doorway, watching as your boyfriend walks in as if he owned this place, “who let you in? We can’t have visitors after 10 PM,” you mumble, suddenly aware of the fact that you could get in trouble.
You close the door after yourself and lock it– old habits die hard– as you watch the male giggle at your shaken composure. “The doorkeeper recognized me,” he announces, “I just had to say I have a girlfriend I haven’t seen in a while living here and he let me right in,” he shrugs.
Humming, you play with your fingers as you walk over to your bed. “So you’re like, famous famous now, huh?”
“Not that famous,” he sighs, “but quite a few people know me now.”
“So I’m dating a rockstar,” you joke, taking a seat on the uncomfortable mattress, watching as the male follows you and invites himself into the sheets.
“Something like that.”
A smile overtakes your features at that, and your room breaks into silence. Something about the quiet makes your skin scatter with goosebumps, the discomfort of his stare making you almost hate the fact that he’s here now, after not talking to you properly for a couple of weeks, but at the same time, you know you don’t really hate it. You love it, actually– the fact that he came to surprise you in the middle of the night, the fact that he’s here, the fact that he thought of you, spared you the time of his day. You love it and you love him and the fact that he came back to you. He came back for you. Only you. That sounds like a prize, doesn’t it?
Still, you feel a bit of a distance in between the two of you, and you can’t believe the fact that he feels further despite being closer in space. Maybe it’s because you can’t blame his lack of words for him being busy now– he’s right in front of you, paying you his full attention.
“How long are you staying?” you ask, picking at the skin of your cuticles.
Yuta averts his gaze from you, looking almost shameful at his reply. “I have to leave tomorrow afternoon,” he whispers, “I left suddenly, but we gotta get back on the road.”
You hum at that, not offering him a vocal reply– you don’t have any words to say to him anyway. What is there to say about a fact you can’t change? You only have to accept it.
“We only have a couple more stops to go. It will take another three weeks or so, and I’m back with you,” he says, this time locking his eyes with you in a sincere gaze, “I promise.”
The sentence has you gazing at your hands, clasped in your lap, nodding. Holding eye contact with him is suddenly hard when you feel just how far away he is from you, in another world, in other circles– and you can’t help but not see yourself fitting those, you can’t help but hate the fact that you’re so far away from everything that completes him as a person now. Maybe you’re a burden now– maybe you’re a nuisance, a baggage he has to carry even though he doesn’t have to, but keeps holding on to just because of a promise.
You remember how you chanted to yourself– believed– that nothing’s gonna change, and if so, only for the better. But you’re not so sure it came true, looking at everything now. And you do admit, you feel a little silly. Both for making the promise to yourself, and both for feeling so defeated when your world is shifting. Because things did change, and you should’ve expected it, and for Yuta, they did change for the better. He’s chasing his dream and everything’s coming out well for him. You should be happy.
You should be happy that he’s texting you less, talking to you less, having less time for you. Because that’s proof of him succeeding, after all. You just wish you could’ve been there to witness it with him.
“It must be so hard for you,” Yuta suddenly hums, leaning closer to you and wiping your cheeks. You haven’t even realized you were crying– you failed to keep your emotions in control– but instead of pushing him away and not showing him just how much the distance hurts you, you only hold him closer, crying into his chest.
His hands caress your hair, smoothing down the strands and providing you comfort, your body folding into his hold. He lays you both on the bed and tugs the blanket over you, strong arms shielding you from the pain. “Are you- are you having fun at least?” you ask, hiccuping through the sobs.
“I am,” he hums, and something about the sentence comforts you, making you fail to address everything you’ve witnessed when you came to visit him and just how much it made you worry, “wish you were there with me, but I know it’s hard. We just gotta hold on and get through this, and it will only get easier as we go, alright?”
You hum, fists bunching up the fabric of his thin black shirt. “Promise me to hold on for me, pretty girl? It’s gonna be okay. I swear.”
Another silent sob accompanied by an eager nod, hands letting go of his shirt and instead sneaking around his waist, nose burying into his chest intaking his scent. “I promise. It’s hard, but the thought of you having fun and chasing your dream comforts me.”
“That’s my sweet girl,” he hums, smoothing down your hair, “now stop crying. There’s nothing to be sad about.”
Nodding, you try your best to relax. He’s right– you were being unreasonable. Silly, even. Everything’s okay and everything will turn out just fine, you just gotta hold on for a few more weeks. Once Yuta’s back, your relationship will go back to normal and things will get better.
Leaning your head back, you press a kiss to his lips. He holds you to his chest, deepening the contact of his mouth with yours, wiping the last tears off your cheeks and placing pecks all over your face. When his lips find their way back to yours, his kisses are deeper, more firm, experience making him smoothly slip his tongue into your mouth to battle with yours, passion dripping off the muscle and tasting just like honey.
He makes your heart race, just like he did when he first kissed you in his garage, and when his lips smoothly travel down your neck, placing bites and kitten licks to smooth the area after, you let him work his magic. You relax under his touches, you let him unravel you from your clothes, big hands testing flesh, calloused fingers pressing into all the right places. It feels amazing. It feels rewarding– and even though you’ve never done this before, you’re glad he’s your first. It’s good to look back at your first time when it’s done with someone you love– someone that’s admired, older, but still so fond of you. You feel beautiful with his hushed compliments, whispered promises. It’s like you’re running on a high, and you’re not sure if and when you’re ever gonna get back down.
You ache a little when you wake up for your morning class the day after. Throwing on his shirt you find on the floor, taking a seat next to him on the bed and brushing back his disheveled hair, his arm finds yours and tugs you back towards him.
“Stay,” he hums.
“I can’t,” you reply, “I have class in a few,” you explain, pressing a tender kiss to his cheek.
He sighs, dissatisfied, but lets you go. When he chants a goodbye at you as you close your door after with the knowledge that he won’t be there when you come home in the evening, you chew on the inside of your cheek with the crushing feeling of living in a different world than he does. And it shouldn’t matter to you– because he loves you and showed you so last night– but still, it keeps annoyingly eating you up from the insides.
He’s in a rising punk band, and you… you have to get to class.
VII. he used to sing me sweet melodies
The news hit you on a Thursday afternoon, on your way to dorms after your last class of the day. You feel exhausted, both mentally and physically, and so you decide to take the bus– the journey isn’t long, but you don’t feel like walking, and so you slung your pained body onto one of the free seats after pressing your travel card against the terminal to pay for the ride.
Fingers searching through your tote bag, a small sense of victory filling your veins when you finally find your phone in the mess of things, you grip the device and unlock it, deciding to search through social media to pass time and let yourself dissociate.
A flood of uninteresting posts flashes through your vision as you absent-mindedly scroll through your feed, unfunny memes making you roll your eyes at the absurdity of the jokes, political discourse just making you sigh. After a while, posts from Neo zone update pages that you selfishly and amidst a little foolishly followed quite some time ago start appearing one-by-one on your Twitter feed, the face of your boyfriend smiling at you from fan-taken pictures from the last few stops of their festival tour. It’s been three weeks since you last saw Yuta, and even though you’re glad he’s enjoying his life to the fullest, you can’t help but admit to yourself that you oh so desire to have him back home as soon as possible.
One post in particular makes you stop in your tracks, furrowing your eyebrows as your eyes scan over the headline of an article with your boyfriend’s face clearly staring down at you through the screen. It’s not often that Yuta or his band get interviewed– or at least, it wasn’t the standard before, but you heard from him that he did get an interview from one of the local newspapers right after he got signed to an agency– but it seems that after getting interest from the punk scene during the festival, everybody wants to know more about the lead singer and his friends; press included. The existence of the interview itself isn’t what makes you so startled, though– it’s the headline of the article, each word like a sharp knife to your heart, making you more and more confused.
“No, I’m not dating anyone right now.” Neo Zone’s frontman reveals in our latest article, the title reads, your shaky fingers pressing down on the picture to have the text pop up, making you brace yourself for the impact. You know that the press loves to twist words and put statements into people’s mouths, but you don’t really know how those exact words could come out meaning something completely different– your very much taken boyfriend told everyone he is very much single. Do you not deserve to be talked about, after everything? Is he ashamed of you?
Sighing, taking a peek out of the window to see if you’re at your stop yet– you’re not, and you think you have just the right amount of time to read the whole article before you have to get off. And so you do that– eyes quickly skimming through the words, Yuta’s answers transcribed so perfectly you can almost hear his voice saying the words in your head, the essence of him everywhere, making your chest tighten on itself.
The Seoul-based punk band Neo Zone is picking up everyone’s attention as they take over the Warped tour festivals with their ecstatic performances and amazing stage presence. Their sound is like no one else’s, making their fanbase rise quickly, the fastly growing popularity making a lot of questions rise in the heads of the public– one question in particular mostly in the female side of the spectrum.
We met with the frontman, 28-year old Yuta Nakamoto, to ask him a few questions about the band’s slow, but steady journey towards stardom, and also a bit about his personal life. Stay with us to get all the answers to questions you’ve been wondering about!
Eyes only briefly reading over the questions that ask about their journey– since you do know how they got where they are now, being there to witness it all; from band practices on Fridays, Yuta’s worried words at midnight over your night shifts, the songwriting sessions they had with Doyoung, where Yuta would send you pictures of his lyrics, asking for advice from his one and only muse, to them getting signed and going from playing local gigs at bars filled with cigarette smoke to venues filled with thousands of fans, all in the course of a few months. There’s only one thing you’re searching for in this article– although you’d read it all anyways, taking your time to patiently skim over each sentence, cheering Yuta on silently, there’s a thing in particular that makes you so jumpy to get to the bottom of the headline.
Finally, you get to it. You can only imagine the voice of the woman who did this interview with Yuta to be annoying, her eyes sneaky and coy as she asked him the question– but you soon catch yourself and sigh at your antics, at disbelief with what you managed to turn yourself into just for attention of a man that deemed you worthy.
“I’m sure a lot of girls are wondering the same thing, Yuta– especially after seeing you play on stage. I mean, you have an amazing stage presence, one that can’t help but attract people. The public– me included– wants to know: are you dating anyone right now?”
The singer laughs at the question, shrugging to himself. The words don’t take long to come out of his mouth. “No, not at all. With how things have been going for us, it’s been really hard to find some time to date, but I’m sure that if anyone shoots me a wink from the audience, I can change my mind quickly.”
The words make you scoff. You rest your head against the seat, your tongue poking the side of your cheek, when you notice that you’re at your stop– resulting in you scrambling for your things and practically throwing yourself out of the bus so the doors wouldn’t close on you and drive you away from the bus stop you need to get off on. Yuta’s response keeps repeating in your brain– ‘it’s been really hard to find some time to date’ – at least he’s not lying about that, you think.
And yes, maybe you should’ve understood his motives. Maybe he wanted to protect you from the hate, maybe he simply wanted to give you your privacy, but still– something in you breaks at being denied, at being hidden, and that burning, green feeling has you dialing Yuta’s number, waiting for the singer to reply.
It takes him a few seconds to pick up the call– you expected it, since it’s an usual occurrence now, with your texts going unanswered and calls mostly ignored, if taken, then either after a lot of ringing, or being returned to you after a few minutes when you get through to the voicemail. Still, you’re relieved when you hear his voice on the other side of the line, a little low and groggy, but still familiar.
“Hello, my love,” he says, and the pet name makes you equal parts warm and furious. So now you’re his love? What about the time he did the interview?
“Hi,” you breathe, walking down the sidewalk to your dorm building.
“Why are you calling?” he asks. Do you need a reason to? He seems to be asking this a lot lately, but now that you actually have a reason is when the question hurts you the least.
You hum into the phone, finding the right words to say. Something inside of your gut is screaming at you, telling you just how silly and childish you’re going to sound– at just how demanding and clingy you’re going to look. But still, you can’t help but let the words slip past your mouth. “I was just wondering… about the stuff you said in the interview,” you say.
The male is silent for a little, not really responding to your worries. When he seems to gather that you’re not going to explain– and you don’t have to, since you’re aware that he knows what you mean by your subtle prompt– he talks to you with lightness in his tone, something akin to playful teasing in the reply that has you feeling stupid, so stupid for calling him.
“About that? Y/N… you know you don’t have to worry about the two of us,” he says, laughing, “it’s just… I couldn’t just tell them I’m dating. My manager said I couldn’t, since it may damage the band’s image. I have to stay desirable to keep up the interest.”
You’re silent. So he did it for the band. Not your privacy, not your safety.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “I’ll make it up to you when I get back, okay?”
You find it in yourself to hum at his explanation– no matter how unsatisfactory it was, no matter how it made you feel even worse about the situation than before you called. It’s okay, though– you know that his band always comes first. You can’t tarnish his dreams like that. If a secret is what you have to be, then you’re more than okay with that, if it means Yuta gets to shine like the star he’s always been in your heart.
“Is that all you wanted to talk about?” he asks. “I have to go now, if you don’t have anything else.”
“That’s- that’s all, yeah,” you mumble, sighing as you walk over to the dorms, opening the door with your student ID and slipping inside.
“Okay,” he hums, “I’ll talk to you later. Bye.”
No I love you, no how was your day, no I miss you. No I’ll see you soon, no I can’t wait to see your face, no I can’t wait to hear your voice. It’s okay, though– he must be tired.
VIII. broke, but gave all money to an airline
The next time you allow yourself to travel to see Yuta (despite all your responsibilities at college, with finals coming up and assignments piling up, making you bring your laptop to work with you and type away to finish up all your essays in between customers, having Jaechan read over the passages when your sleep deprivation gets the best of you and you can’t even recognise if you’re using the correct grammar and punctuation anymore), is on the last show of his festival tour. Something inside of you is telling you that you should go watch your boyfriend’s last gig for the time being, to congratulate him and show him just how much you support him, despite your busy schedule (that he is unaware of. You don’t want him to worry).
And on top of that, it’s his birthday– the surprise visit to the show is only an addition to the gift you bought him, though. The personalized lyric journal and a box of his favorite chocolates seems too silly of a gift for somebody like Yuta Nakamoto, but it’s all you can afford, all you can give him. Still, you hope the sincerity and love is able to be felt through the action; you hope he realizes just how much you love him and just how much you missed him all those months.
The journey to the last state was long. You didn’t get enough sleep, you felt jittery and anxious, everything in your bones was screaming at you and cursing you for allowing yourself to make such a trip so early after the old one. Traveling is exhausting, you realize– both mentally and physically– when you have to walk distances and flash all your savings down the drain just to get bus tickets, when you have to rack your brain over to not get lost and take the right directions, make the right turns and walk the right distances. You guess you could understand Yuta a little bit better now– you’re not the one traveling somewhere else every night, and still, you feel insanely tired.
You didn’t tell Yuta about your visit. All you texted him the night before was that you wish him good luck on stage today and that you’re proud of him– sentences that get a short-cut response, an uninterested tone. You guess he just got bummed out that you didn’t stay up and wish him happy birthday the first thing at midnight– a thing he did for you when you weren’t even dating yet, the action warming you up so much back then– but even though it broke your heart, you couldn’t blow your own cover. You wanted to wish him happy birthday in person, to his face.
There is a buzz in the tips of your fingertips when you arrive at the festival. You’ve watched countless of clips online, experienced the concert first-hand multiple times before– you’re sure you could recite the setlist and the exact order of the acts playing if you were woken up in the middle of the night, drenched in cold sweat– but still, you can’t wait to see Yuta perform. You can’t wait to watch the joyful look on his face, the dreamy eyes gazing over the crowd, the raspy voice calling to you like a siren in a love song you were told was about you in the middle of the night, holding him in your dorm bed.
You didn’t stand in the front rows this time. For some reason, you don’t want the singer to know you’re here. You want to watch the show unnoticed, unannounced, enjoying it like every other fan would– except, you’re expecting to meet him after, the way so many girls dream of every night, but never get to experience.
And in a perfect reality, the show ends and you run backstage. The security acknowledges you as his girlfriend and lets you in, smiles at you and pats you on your lower back– go get him, he’s all yours– as you excitedly grin and get ready to finally close the distance between you. In your perfect dreams, that don’t become reality, you’re meeting Yuta and holding him close, chanting whispers at the universe and telling them see? We made it, no matter how many obstacles you threw our way. We made it despite the distance.
Maybe somebody should’ve told you you were a naive dreamer before you came here to embarrass yourself. Nobody did, though– and so here you are.
“Unfortunately, fans aren’t allowed backstage,” the security says, and you understand him– your relationship is secret, not public, so really, he couldn’t have known you were not just a fan, but his girlfriend (despite still thinking that you are Yuta’s biggest fan, always. Nobody could ever support him the way you do).
“I’m not a fan, sir,” you grin, “I’m his girlfriend. I know anyone could say that, but if you just get someone from the back and tell them my name, they will tell you that I’m his partner, trust me,” you explain, a desperate inkling in your voice.
“I don’t have time for that, kid,” the man says. And it’s fair. He’s just doing his job.
“Please, I went here to surprise– there he goes!” you point towards your boyfriend walking off the stage, his head snapping towards you at the sound of your voice, still recognisable even through the flood of screams around. The man locks eyes with you and you wave at him, a fond smile overtaking your tired face, the flame inside you that’s currently giving you third degree burns of anxiety finally starts to get more subtle when recognition flashes through Yuta’s face, but again– you were naive. Naive to think he would appreciate your visit, naive to think he’d like the surprise, naive to think nothing would change between the two of you, naive to think he wouldn’t get tired and find someone new.
A naive kid.
That’s what you are.
Nakamoto Yuta runs off stage, envelopes an excited girl around her shoulders when she runs after him from backstage. Her hair is longer than yours, her face more mature, her smile similar to the ones you saw all the time at the diner whenever Yuta was around, a flirting spark somewhere in between her pearly white teeth. She kisses his jaw and he grins at her, not bothering to look around. The crowd around you gets silent, but your brain tells you it’s foolish to think everyone suddenly stopped talking– it was just your senses slowly shutting out, your vision getting blurry.
So this was the problem all along, you think.
“Anything else? If you’re done being delusional, you can get lost,” the security spits at you, and you chuckle to yourself.
Delusional. That hits the nail on the head.
Nodding, you chew on the inside of your cheek as you stumble backwards, running off through the crowd as you try your best not to get your legs tied and fall over. Your vision is hazy and you refuse to look up, too embarrassed, humiliated by the events of the day to show your face to anyone, resulting in you bumping into someone, your figure limply falling to the ground. Sobs make your shoulders shake, all motivation to stand up and move leaving your body when somebody crouches down next to you, a considerate female voice reaching your ears.
“Everything okay, hun? I’m so sorry, I should’ve watched my step,” she says, a hand patting your back, the smell of her perfume filling your nostrils. “Why are you crying? Are you hurt?”
Shaking your head, you refuse to speak. The female considerately sneaks her arms around you, pulling you to her chest. “What is it? You can tell it to a stranger, I won’t spill.”
“Yuta-” you choke out. Embarrassment is finally the least of your concerns.
“What? What about him?”
“I loved him and he– he threw it all away,” you finish, now completely breaking.
The girl rocks you back and forth, hand running up and down your back to get you to relax. It’s strange, since you haven’t even seen her face, haven’t even asked her name– for all you know, she could think you’re just a crazy fangirl, crying for no reason. But the universe has its way of looking out after you tonight– the soul next to you holding you tight, fingers running through your hair. “It’s alright, babygirl. Cry it out,” she says, “he doesn’t deserve you… I know, I’ve been there. That’s a lesson you have to learn, though– you never date a band guy.
He’s always gonna break your heart.”
EPILOGUE - try not to abuse your power
Yuta Nakamoto was your hero.
He was your everything. He was someone you admired, someone you longed for, someone whose attention you craved for ever since the day you met him for the first time. It’s not every day you get to hang out with a guy that’s in a band, and it’s also not every day that the said guy shows you any type of interest or gives you any type of attention– and in your foolish heart, you took all of that and ran with it, chasing down the adrenaline and calling it love.
You guess it’s never a good idea to date your hero. See, people tend to idolize the ones they admire. People tend to put their heroes on the pedestal and do everything for them, putting them as their priority and disregarding their own needs and interests just to be worthy in the eyes of the other. You were too young to differentiate between healthy love and toxic obsession. You were too young to realize the relationship you had with Yuta wasn’t built on healthy grounds.
Yuta was your hero, yet, he managed to ruin you in a little not over a year. You bet it wasn’t even that hard.
Yuta was sweet. He tasted of honey and adrenaline, of chasing your dreams and running through empty streets with sparkles in your eyes. Yuta was someone older than you, more mature, promising you security and safety that he failed to give you despite your delusional beliefs of having your haven in him. You were young; thinking that guys your age don’t know how to treat you, won’t ever know how to treat you right– being with someone like Yuta was only right in your eyes. You were his fragile piece of pottery, the thing he was supposed to handle with care, and yet, you found yourself shattering at his touches. You should’ve expected it– his fingers were always too calloused to know how to touch anything gently anyway.
And yes, you do feel guilty. You do feel like it’s your fault that you let someone do this to you. You should’ve known better– you shouldn’t have been so childish, so naive. But really, you didn’t know any better. No one ever told you it was wrong. No one warned you. No one told you how it’s supposed to look.
No one told you that you weren’t supposed to spend all your money on plane and bus tickets just to see him for a couple of days. No one told you you weren’t supposed to support him unconditionally, ignore all the bad signs and pay no mind to the way his treatment made you feel worthless. No one told you you weren’t supposed to believe his sweet words, put trust into his empty promises.
It makes you sick, in a way. He knows your freckles, he knows your skin. He knows you like the back of his hand. Maybe, just maybe, you’d still fold under his touch if he dared to get close to you again. You don’t know if you’re strong enough to resist.
And maybe you do know better now, you do hate him for what he did, but you still miss him like a little kid. It’s like you were put on a drug that made you hate everyone and make him the only one you miss when you’re gone.
You do miss him. You do sometimes look at his social media. You do read the headlines of magazines when his face is on the front page. You do think of him whenever you wipe the counters during your night shifts, gazing at the spot he used to sit in whenever he came to keep you company, almost as if you could wish him back into existence. It’s a weird battle. The strangest type of inner conflict.
Driving down the road, back to your dorm in the car you saved up for, the radio humming lowly to keep you company in the silence, you recognize the first few tones of a G chord, the song sending chills down your spine. You listen for a few seconds, waiting for his voice to start– the raspiness, the strongness of his vocals still making you feel some type of way– before you chuckle to yourself.
You guess he did end up releasing the song, after all.
You sigh. It feels like ages have gone by since you heard the song for the first time. It feels like you aged a thousand since you last saw his face.
It’s still strange to hear him on the radio. He made it big, you think.
After all, you still wish him well. Somehow, you still think he deserves the glory.
After the mirror (Doyoung) declares her the fairest of them all, the princess (Y/N) is lured out of her brother’s (Taeyong) protection by the huntsman (Yuta). She is found by the dwarves (Johnny, Winwin, Mark, Haechan), who show her what it is like to be valued for something more than her beauty. She is poisoned by a poisoned apple and falls into a deathlike sleep. The huntsman is blamed for the princess’s victimhood. The video closes on shocked reactions as the wishing well prince (Jaehyun) approaches her with true love’s first kiss.
i. You like him, don’t you?
Your POV
By age seventeen, you had not yet outgrown your childhood habit of staring after Sehun whenever your paths crossed under the same sun or moon. By age seventeen, you didn’t have the sense to hide your bleeding-heart admiration even though a.) somebody was always watching and b.) Haechan was always eager to run his big mouth.
“Noona, you’re staring,” Haechan accused, driving his elbow into your ribs. He started off loud—so loud that, at his voice, Sehun, Chanyeol, and Baekhyun turned around on their way to practice.
While you rushed to face the wall and lowered your head, Haechan hissed, “What will Jaemin think about you staring at senior idols?”
From his place in the doorway of the dance practice room, Yuta laughed. His arms were crossed tight over his chest. Clearly, he thought he looked cool. The worst part: he was right. You looked away because there was almost nothing worse than thinking and liking that Yuta looked like he walked off the page of some dark, gritty, gothic graphic novel.
You saw little point in dignifying Haechan with a response. He liked to put his nose into everything, especially the little matter of Jaemin’s not-so-secret crush on you. You were used to it. Still, you couldn’t help but glare at him. He yelped like you burned him.
Then, probably remembering your history of responding to his torments with physical force, Haechan bolted back into the practice room without another word. Yuta made just enough room for Haechan to pass.
Yuta’s eyes met yours for only a moment before you looked up, up, and away at the ceiling. Even that millisecond of eye contact emboldened him to speak to you. “You shouldn’t worry so much, Y/N. It’s cute that you have an unattainable crush! It makes you more human.”
You hoped Yuta couldn’t see that your ears were burning. You hoped to distract him by rolling your eyes. You said, "I didn't realize my humanity was in question.” Except you kind of did. Even in those pre-debut days, the word ‘idol’ felt like a magnifying glass or a stumbling block or something.
You tried to walk back into the practice room, but Yuta wouldn’t let you pass. He stretched an arm to block the doorway, so you cut your eyes at him.
You and Yuta never got along, you would admit if you were being honest. He was precisely the type of guy who made it hard to be the only girl in NCT. He liked to press your buttons just to see how many of your expressions he could unlock. He liked to push the envelope not because he actually wanted to be close to you but because he wanted to see you slip in defending your self-imposed self-defending dating ban. His casting as the Huntsman in our Snow White debut concept only encouraged him to pester me more.
“Move,” you demanded, forcing your face into a passionless expression—neither smile nor frown, neither laugh nor scowl. Sometimes, you thought that your interactions would end sooner if you just gave Yuta whatever reaction he wanted. Always, you thought nothing would make you more miserable than giving Yuta whatever he wanted.
Prying for something more explosive, Yuta said, “Some call you a princess—but that’s the agency branding. Others call you Super Junior’s kid—but that’s just figurative. Others call you Manager Kim’s daughter—and that’s literal. But when you stare after Sehun—”
Yuta’s jagged smile made your stomach twist and turn. Or maybe it was the sound of Sehun’s name that made you feel that way. Anyway, whether Yuta’s smile or Sehun’s name was the culprit—the floor slipped out from under you. And you couldn’t be seen falling, so you planted your feet shoulder width apart.
“You’re just a cute girl with a crush,” Yuta determined, looking you up and down.
You think he knew his words burned into you like a spotlight burns into the only person on stage. It was hard to like somebody who could burn you like that for his own sick pleasure. Maybe it was impossible.
“I wasn’t staring at anybody,” you argued far too fiercely to be taken seriously. You slipped into the room by ducking under Yuta’s arm.
You should have run to hide behind Taeyong. He was the only person who could stop Yuta in his tracks. Maybe you weren't really made to hide, though. So, you lingered by the door. You turned on your heel to tell Yuta, “And I don’t have a crush on anybody!”
Most of the guys were used to these shouting matches between you and Yuta. Nobody, not even Taeyong, looked up. Well, except Mark. Mark looked up.
Mark was born to be a pacifist, you think. But you dragged him into conflict without really meaning to. That’s not to say he was a fighter or anything. It’s just—Mark wasn’t above making a fool of himself to get Yuta off you back. You shook your head on your walk to Mark’s side.
“Make sure Jaemin doesn’t hear you say that!” Yuta fired at you. “It might break his kid heart.”
You opened your mouth to argue that Jaemin was only a year and a half your junior. In Yuta’s hands, though, any defense of Jaemin would have been proof that you weren’t only pining after Sehun; you were head over heels for Jaemin, too! Plus, that motor mouth Haechan was sitting in the corner with his phone in hand. You knew for a fact that Haechan sent Jaemin a tally of how many times his name came up in 127 schedules.
It was embarrassing enough for everybody to catch wind of your undying childhood love for Sehun, but you could survive that embarrassment. You survived it this long. You had loved Sehun long enough for it to be a mere fact of life. And, like Yuta said, Sehun was unattainable: too old, too mature, too serious about defending his own self-imposed dating ban.
Jaemin was a different story altogether. He wasn’t somebody tangled up in your girlhood ideas of what it meant to be handsome and loveable. He was just a boy. Neither too old or too young, a little immature, and utterly uninterested in hiding his attachment to you from anybody. So, between the two of them, Jaemin was infinitely more dangerous because he wouldn’t brush you off if you stood too close. You thought Jaemin would probably follow you to the ends of the earth or off a cliff or into the sun. That kind of devotion should be avoided by anybody, like you, striving to maintain a dating ban. That kind of devotion should be avoided by anybody, like you, wired to return love in kind.
So, you kept your mouth shut through the rest of the break and dance practice. You didn’t need anybody getting the wrong idea about who you were and what you were there for. You were a trainee, and you were there to debut. No matter what it looked like to be the only girl in a room full of boys, you weren’t there to fall in love. You weren’t there to become like the idol who never debuted, the agency’s favorite trainee-turned-cautionary tale when she left the agency to become a mother.
While you studied your movements in the mirror, you recognized that there must have been a progression in these sorts of things. A crush is not the same as being in love, and being in love isn’t the same as being pregnant. And, really, motherhood must have been a more fulfilling vocation. Even though the agency spun the idol who never debuted as a tragic victim, you liked to imagine she was happy with her choices. Still, you didn’t want to be her. You couldn’t want to be her.
You almost wish you had fallen hook, line, and sinker for the agency’s framing that there could be no greater betrayal to your team, fans, and self than to choose being in love over being an idol. It’s not that you wanted to believe it. You just had to. And it was easier to pretend you were halfway there if you just kept your stupid mouth shut.
Ten, Lucas, Mark, and you gathered around the fire pit in your back yard after your mom made dinner. Ten and Lucas sat together on a checkered blanket on one side of the fire; you and Mark sat together on the other side. Ten and Lucas crowded the fire like it was an old friend. You and Mark kept a more respectful distance because you only knew of one flame that could burn without consuming.
In pre-debut days, Ten, Lucas, and Mark were the only guys you would hang out with outside of practice and agency-mandated agency-supervised activities to ‘promote group cohesion.’ To put it simply, Ten, Lucas, and Mark were your friends. You think they would have been your friends in every version of the universe—even ones where you aren’t striving to become idols.
Even though Ten was nearly three years your senior, he never made you balance on your tiptoes to match his seniority. He never looked down on you, either. He liked to flirt—yes—but not in a way that made your skin crawl or burn. He liked to have people wrapped around his finger. You rarely wanted to be seen for your attachments to the NCT boys in those early days, but Ten was an exception from the start. You liked being wrapped around his finger, honestly. You thought you looked prettier that way. And the best part: you never had to worry that Ten might try to take too much from you. He could flirt, you could tease, you could play. While there was true love beneath your games, there were no binding expectations.
You met Lucas when you were about sixteen. Some might say that you’re dating—or you were—but that’s not true. From the moment you met, you and Lucas were like siblings. About as often as people assumed you two were dating, people assumed you were twins. It was kind of weird that both misunderstandings could exist at the same time. Anyway, you preferred it when people thought you were twins, so you leaned into that. It helped that you kind of looked alike. You both had eyes that were a little too big for your faces. You both had smiles that were way too big for your faces. Lucas was probably the only person alive who could almost make you like your goofy smile.
Sometimes, you wondered if your mom might actually like Lucas as a son more than she liked you as a daughter. You wouldn’t have blamed her. There was no point in saying something like that to Lucas. He wouldn’t have judged you or anything. He had this developed theory that love was non-competitive, non-jealous, non-exclusive. He didn’t know how to account for things like favoritism, even though he was often somebody’s favorite.
That was the most charming thing about Lucas. He loved openly, boldly, plainly. Nothing was ever complicated with him. He couldn’t or wouldn’t be restrained by rumors spread by your peers or reprimands from our managers, including Mom. He couldn’t or wouldn’t be confined by the conditions of fame. You think he knew that somebody was always watching—at least, you tried to tell him—but he didn’t seem to care.
Lucas just was, unapologetically, and you guess that’s how he walked right into your heart without tripping any alarms. Lucas was a lot like Jaemin. You realized that even back then. But the thing is, Lucas proudly bore the title of brother. He practically wore it over his heart like a name tag. Jaemin could never bear that title, though. He would have hated it, and it wouldn't have fit him anyway.
And Mark—what words are there for Mark? He was the only boy who ever loved you more after you asked him to let go of his crush on you. If you broke his heart, he never let the shards cut you. He never let that weight sit near you, let alone crush you. You liked to be around him because he was the same good guy on stage and off stage. Sometimes, you didn’t want him to outgrow his crush on you half as much as you wanted to grow into a girl who could crush on him. Maybe one of the great tragedies of your life is that your heart wouldn’t or couldn’t beat for Mark even though there was nobody you could’ve trusted more to hold it—to light and guard, to rule and guide.
Mark caught you staring. He couldn’t know that you were willing yourself to just love him in that heart-fluttering time-stopping sort of way, but you imagined he could. You thought you might melt or explode or catch on fire if he guessed how much you wanted to love him. So, you stuck your tongue out at him before squishing a scorched marshmallow between chocolate and graham crackers. He snorted when you pressed the sticky melted mess of a s’more into his open hand.
“You two are so cute!” Ten gushed through a full mouth. He wiped the chocolate-stained corners of his feline smile. “I ship it!”
While you clicked my tongue, Mark laughed. On your behalf, he insisted, “It’s not like that, man.”
You hoped you weren't imagining the ease in Mark’s voice. You hoped it didn’t hurt him to tell that truth.
Eager for a distraction from your nagging conscience, you tossed a raw marshmallow at Lucas, nailing him right between the eyebrows.
“Score!” You and Ten cheered at the same time, throwing your hands up. Mark laughed immediately. Lucas’s laugh was delayed.
You told Lucas, “You’re unusually quiet tonight.” That wasn’t supposed to be an invitation for him to share whatever was weighing on him. It was actually a demand to lighten up until Ten and Mark left.
Sometimes, Lucas was like a mind reader. Other times, he was the most oblivious person on the planet. Right then, as the bonfire flames climbed high into the night, he was oblivious.
“Man, I had the weirdest day,” Lucas huffed. The marshmallow you threw at him landed on the blanket. He picked it up and packed it into his left cheek. He locked eyes with you to report, “Sehun dragged me into a supply closet during dance practice break. He kept asking me about you—us—so I told him that you’re the coolest girl I know. He thinks we’re together, I guess, and I don’t think I convinced him that we’re not.”
Your face burned and crumbled at Sehun’s name. There was no escaping him. At practice, in your backyard, in the agency’s hallway, in the darkened corners of your mind, in the sunshine of your heart, Sehun’s shadow lingered. You thought you loved finding his traces everywhere. You did. But if Sehun was dragging your friends into storage closets—well, how could you romanticize that?
Picking at a scab on my knee, you blurted, “Why would he do that?” You didn’t want the boys’ theories. Instead, you were turning the story over in your mind, searching for any angle, any light that wouldn’t cast Sehun as anything like a villain.
“Because he has a thing for you,” Lucas replied without a moment’s hesitation.
That was Lucas’s answer for everything—no kidding. In his view, nearly every guy had a thing for you. Even when they were quiet, they had a thing for you. Even when they were annoying, they had a thing for you. You hated it when Lucas tried to make you see your world through his lens. Lucas knew that
And still Lucas insisted, “That’s why he thinks he needs to know if I do too.”
You snapped, “That’s not funny!” Under force, your s’more splattered all over your hand and your opened knee scab. Ouch. Sticky. Warm. Far from ideal. Par for the course. Blockhead Lucas.
Ten cackled before letting out a low whistle. “Ooooh, Y/N!” He wiggled his eyebrows. That eyebrow movement usually precipitated some aggravating physical contact, like tickling or something. But he stayed planted beside Lucas. “An older guy has a thing for you!”
Exhaling through your nose, you turned away from Ten and Lucas. With Ten, everything could become a joke. With Lucas, everything came back to love. Maybe your stomach was too full of s'mores. Suddenly, you didn’t have much of an appetite for jokes or love.
You didn’t mean to meet Mark’s eyes. Quietly, he suggested, “Sehun has always looked out for you.”
You smiled at Mark because that was the most flattering light anybody could shine on a senior idol like Sehun cornering a trainee like Lucas. Maybe Sehun was looking out for you, the kid who loved him at first sight, the gap-toothed girl who had to be taught that there is such a thing as too foolishly forward, too hopelessly devoted. Of course Mark would voice the only possibility that let you hold onto the daydream of Sehun a little longer.
Honestly, your hands kind of hurt from holding on so tightly to a daydream that could never come true. Every rational part of you screamed that it was past time to grow up. But the thing is, even though you tried to paint yourself as someone governed by logic, you really weren't. You dealt in dreams in the sunlight and the moonlight. And if growing up meant there would be no place for Sehun in your favorite fantasies, then you didn’t want to grow up yet or maybe ever.
Mind-reader Lucas reactivated. He advised, “Maybe you shouldn’t rush to outgrow your love for him when he’s finally growing into loving you.” He might have sounded wise if he hadn’t exposed your top secret love for Sehun right in front of Ten and Mark!
Before you could mouth your shaky ignorance defense or, better yet, throw another marshmallow at Lucas’s giant blockhead, Ten pounced. He practically leaped over the fire pit to grill you. His hands wrapped around the ends of your braids as he demanded, “How long have you been into Sehun?”
If you made any sudden movements, Ten would pull your hair. So, you had to sit perfectly still. If you looked away, Ten might drop your braids to touch your face. So, you had to look into his eyes. You don’t know what possibly possessed you to admit the truth: “Since I was, like, nine.”
Ten released your hair and dug his fingers into your shoulders, bare under your black tank top. He shook you wildly. “Sehun! Y/N is in love with Sehun! None of us NCT scrubs stand a chance!”
Maybe Ten’s rough-housing knocked some sense into you. While your brain rattled around your skull, you argued, “I’m not in love with anybody!” You nearly bit through your tongue.
Nobody believed you. Not even Mark! He joined Ten and Lucas in laughing at you. You couldn’t really blame them, but you tried to anyway. As the night dragged on, you lost more of your appetite for jokes. And love. And jokes about love. And—most especially—jokes about you in love. But you don’t think anybody else noticed.
Yuta didn’t know any other way to get Lei’s attention. That’s why he teased her so much. At least that’s what Mark thinks. Mark also thinks he would’ve died on the spot if you ever glared at him like you glared at Yuta. Yuta probably didn’t believe you could see him without glaring. And Mark thinks sometimes Yuta didn’t want anything as much as he wanted you to see him.
So, yeah. Maybe Mark can just say it. Yuta liked you. Most of the guys did. But some remembered to treat you like a person, you know. Not just a pretty girl. Not just a live wire.
Yuta liked you more than most of the guys did, so it was kinda hard to watch him corner you into hating his guts. Mark doubts Yuta realized that you were taking so many of his dumb jokes to heart. Yuta didn’t have to see that for it to be true, though.
While everybody was stretching before dance practice, Yuta nudged your foot with his. Mark doesn’t think Yua noticed that he scuffed your shoe. But you noticed. You glared down at the new white streak on your black sneakers. You opened your mouth, probably to ask what his problem was.
Yuta spoke instead. He liked to talk over you. “So, you really fell in love at nine? Sehun’s angry eyebrows have been your thing that long? I guess that pre-dates your dating ban, huh?”
Yuta’s words were supposed to be like building jokes. Instead, they were more like a flurry of bullets. Or maybe they were like sharpening arrows. Anyway, the point is, Mark noticed Yuta was drawing blood without really meaning to.
Mark half expected you to tackle Yuta like you tackled Haechan that one time. But Mark guessed even in anger, you knew that tackling Yuta would be very different from tackling Haechan. Where Haechan would see it as aggression, Yuta would see it as progression toward whatever passionate relationship he wanted with you.
Instead of taking your rage out on Yuta, you spun on Mark with fire in your eyes. You whipped around so fast that the hair in your ponytail hit you in the face. It kind of got caught in your lip gloss, but you brushed it away fast.
You must’ve known that Mark didn’t tell anybody about that night by the fire pit in her backyard. No matter how obvious your thing for Sehun might’ve been to everyone with eyes, Mark planned to treat it like your invisible secret. You were only rounding on Mark because the likelier leakers—Ten and Lucas—weren’t there to get their just desserts.
Raising his hands in panic, Mark defended himself. His voice was all pitchy and crackling. “It wasn’t me, dude! I swear!”
Johnny stepped between the two of you. He was so freaking tall. You both shrunk back. Johnny told you, “It’s not a big deal. Honestly, Y/N, it’s always been pretty obvious that Sehun is special to you. Don’t sweat it.” Johnny was trying to keep the peace, but he only made everything worse.
While you went stiff and your eyes fell on the floor, you balled your fists. The muscles that tensed along your arms were small but unmistakable. You could probably pack a punch if you really wanted to, but Mark didn’t think that was your style. Well, he guessed it kind of was your style when you were straightening Haechan out. But—look, the thing is, you were pretty and strong from a glance, but Mark still thinks most people get stuck on the pretty part. You can’t really blame them.
Everybody started laughing about your undeniable crush on Sehun. Well, everyone except Mark and Taeyong. Yuta and Haechan competed to be the loudest. Yuta wanted to be the center of your attention. Haechan was greedier. He wanted to be the center of everyone’s attention.
Taeyong cut through the noise without trying hard. “Enough!”
Everybody shut up and turned to face him. Well, everyone except you. You turned your body toward Taeyong, but you kept staring at the floor. You lifted her fists to cross your arms tight over your black t-shirt. You liked to wear all black. Mark guessed you probably thought it made you blend in. Mark guessed you probably knew trying to blend in was a waste of time, but maybe you had to try anyway.
Taeyong continued, tapping his foot, “I never want to hear another word teasing Y/N for her feelings about anyone.” He raised his eyebrows threateningly. “Heard?”
Everybody responded instantly, “Heard.”
Well, everyone except Haechan. He was too unusually quiet. So, Mark elbowed him. He muttered, “Heard.”
And everybody got through practice without any more drama because Yuta and Haechan were too scared to pick on you with Taeyong watching.
You still don’t really know why Jaehyun so often sat with you until your mom was ready to go home. He had done that since you met, when he was sixteen and you were fourteen. Even though he was a little older, you got along easily at the start. Maybe that was because you could speak freely in English. Or maybe that was because you were both labeled old souls by everyone who knew you.
You hate to make it sound like being in 127 was some great suffering. It was a blessing, really, even when you couldn’t keep your head above water. The truth about being their girl was a mixed bag, though, if you're being honest. Maybe the biggest casualty of being at the center of 127’s reverse harem concept wasn’t only the toll it took on your self-esteem and self-perception. Maybe the biggest casualty was the loss of your friendship with Jaehyun. For a time, you think you forgot how to speak to him.
The agency declared that you were the princess, and Jaehyun was the prince. The problem wasn’t that Jaehyun didn’t deserve to be a prince. You think that’s who he was before the agency confirmed it. Any and everybody could see that the problem was you. You didn’t know how to be a princess. More to the point, you didn’t know how to be a princess worthy of Jaehyun’s kiss like your concept demanded.
You tried to play your part well for the cameras and the stage lights, but you could never believe you were doing the part justice. You could never shake the feeling that you were wearing a costume. The costume was either too big or too small, and it was always itchy. And that bothered you because you remembered what it was like when you didn’t feel that way around Jaehyun.
Before you were anybody’s princess, you were Jaehyun’s friend. So, maybe you were reaching for that old familiar title, that more comfortable crown when you finally broke the silence at that table by the vending machine.
You tugged your earbuds out and asked, “Do you think I’m too much?”
From his side of the table, Jaehyun only blinked when he looked up from his book.
You over-explained anyway. You added, feeling that your tongue was in the way, “With anybody? About anything?”
Jaehyun shook his head.
So, you didn’t get to tell him that you felt like you were born with a neon sign over your head that flashed your every thought and feeling for any and everybody to see. You didn’t get to tell him that the sign doesn’t even have the decency to post your secrets in hard-to-read script or a legitimizing type-writer font. Instead, the stupid sign pokes fun with Comic Sans.
Jaehyun gave you a very kind smile. It was the kind of smile that showed his dimples without bragging about them. It was the kind of smile that made your mouth dry. Then, he said, “No, Y/N. I think you’re fine just the way you are.”
Jaehyun looked like the kind of gentleman who would like old music, so you liked to imagine he did. You daydreamed that he was quoting Billy Joel to you. Despite your period of silence, you wanted to believe that English didn’t have to be your only secret language. So, to prove to him that you were also fluent in the oldies, to prove to yourself that it could be yesterday once more, you quoted Billy Joel back to him.
“I need to know that you will always be the same old someone that I knew.” You had to speak up so your voice wouldn’t be drowned out by the vending machine’s humming.
You didn’t have to wonder if Jaehyun caught the reference. Almost as soon as the words left your mouth, he laughed. So often in those days, laughter made you feel naked and exposed. Jaehyun’s laughter was different, though, probably because it was so gentle. He saw you, so in a sense, you were exposed. But you didn’t feel naked, and that’s what counts. Jaehyun had a way—entirely his own—of making you feel clothed in his dignity.
“Billy didn’t want clever conversation,” Jaehyun said softly, holding his place in his book, “but I don’t mind yours.”
Our conversation ended as quickly as it started. Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, your mom was ready to go home. You didn’t let her wait long. Still, the whole way home, your conversation with Jaehyun left you breathless in the best or worst sort of way.
You weren’t really supposed to skate in the weeks leading up to debut. Apparently, the risk of injury was too great. Still, you dug your board out of the closet and walked a few blocks away so your Mom wouldn’t catch you skating and/or thinking about Jaehyun.
You had to feel the wind in your hair while you thought about how he let you press pause and play in your friendship. Maybe you thought the air would cool you down. Maybe you thought the air would remind you that somebody was always watching, and they watched you with Jaehyun most closely because you were princess and prince in their story.
You almost wanted to scuff your elbows or knees because that would have distracted you from your memories of Sehun. It was at that very table by the vending machine that you first met and loved him. Even though you and Sehun had not yet fallen out or apart, maybe you saw it looming on the horizon. Or maybe you were just being a crybaby because you two hadn’t fallen into place or closer together. Definitely, you were being a bitter brat because no matter how poetically Lucas waxed about growing into each other, you couldn’t believe that you and Sehun ever would. You couldn’t believe that you and Sehun ever could. And you thought that scuffed up elbows or knees would feel a lot better than a breaking heart.
While you gained speed, you nearly convinced yourself that any love found by that vending machine was doomed from the start. Really, you just wanted another reason to ignore your rather obvious, boring, predictable thing for Jaehyun, and none of your usual tricks were working. You could think of only one antidote for an unwanted dream: a more dreaded nightmare. It was almost too easy to see Jaehyun as a reflection of Sehun’s shadow.
Jaehyun and Y/N—putting your names together like that made your legs feel weak. You decided not to try that again. Still, you replayed that Billy Joel song for the millionth time. And you prayed that he would stay a storybook prince forever. And you prayed that you wouldn’t stay a wayward princess for always.
According to Doyoung, here’s the problem with you, especially in the days around 127’s debut: you lived locked in your head. You were too tangled up in your own poetic license to see or believe objective truths.
A List of Objective Truths
You were a standout dancer.
You were a stable singer.
You were entirely too open to criticism.
As soon as everybody piled into the van after your first stage performance as a unit, Doyoung caught you reading fan reactions. It was obvious that your thumb was hovering over negative comments. It’s not that there’s no place for constructive criticism. Doyoung’s point has always been that one should not become a sponge for negative feedback. Too often, Doyoung thinks, that’s what you allowed yourself to become in the name of ‘humility.’ He hated to see it.
Rolling his eyes, Doyoung unfastened his seatbelt and leaned across the seat dividing him from you. Coming between you and Mark, Doyoung snatched the phone out of your frozen, trembling little hands. Even when you gave Doyoug that sweet doe-eyed look that melted everyone’s hearts, he remained firm.
“Stop,” Doyoung demanded. You winced. Doyoung continued, waving your phone, “Don’t let this distract you. We need your head in the game.”
You didn’t argue. Even after Doyoung returned your phone, you didn’t return to the fan discourse. Instead, as Doyoung sat back in his seat beside Johnny, he watched you retreat to a more uplifting conversation with Mark.
If you wanna post more vampire yuta..well…I would absolutely most certainly not be complaining 👀 💦
(this is a formal request, pretty pls say yes)
i was planning on it🤭 i hope this lives up to your standards! <3
maybe two? - Yuta Nakamoto ft. Zhong Chenle
INCLUDES: dom vampire!yuta x fem!human reader ft. switch!chenle, swearing, smut, spitting, poly relationship, cuckolding(?), degrading, oral (f receiving), daddy kink, mention of blood, squirting, just A LOT of things tbh
wc: 1k
a/n: not proofread, ALSO I AM SO SORRY FOR HOW LONG IT TOOK FOR ME TO REPLY TO THIS ASK
one night wasn't enough for him, he needed you constantly with all the strings attached.
but you were spoken for shortly after he last saw you.
"be a good girl for me and let him use you, yeah?" yuta's voice was low as his hands held your legs open for the male in front of you.
"open your mouth for me." yuta whispered and held your face towards his own, his thumb caressing your bottom lip.
immediately obeying, you open your mouth for yuta, him bringing his face closer to yours, only for him to spit into your open mouth.
yuta raised an expectant eyebrow at you and watched as you swallowed. "that's my good little slut" yuta praised with a smirk, his fangs glistening as he runs his tongue over his teeth.
"you think you can do that, doll? let him use you? like the dirty whore you are? hmm?" yuta hummed and bit at the crook of your neck softly, licking at the blood that had bubbled from the small wound.
chenle stared at you with his head tilted as he awaited for you to answer yuta. "y-yes." you groaned as yuta ran the tip of his nose along your jawline, eyes piercing into the brown-haired male before him.
"yes what, baby?" yuta gripped at your thighs tighter, making you hiss in a breath, knowing his strength he was bound to leave a mark.
"yes, daddy." you could feel your face redden at the pet name that yuta loved all too much.
yuta nodded his head towards chenle who almost instantly dropped to his knees in front of your glistening core.
yuta smirks and sinks his teeth into his bottom lip as he watches chenle's eager body moving so fast for a taste of you.
he looked up at you and watched as yuta pulled your hair away from your neck and face. yuta's eyes bore into chenle's as he watched the younger males movements.
"go on, use her like the slut she is." yuta urged. nothing else needed to be said to the younger brown-haired male, as he quickly pushed both his middle and ring fingers on his left hand into your entrance.
a gasp left your lips as the brown-haired male, curled his fingers in just the right way. "oh fuck!" you hiss and grip yuta's arm tightly.
chenle looks up at you with his bottom lip between his teeth, and eyes dark with lust, he had yearned for you since he had last seen you.
"put that mouth of yours to work pretty boy" yuta spoke lowly, his hand moving from your left thigh to rub his hardened length that was restricted in his black jeans.
moans leave your mouth endlessly as chenle's mouth latches onto your clit, his tongue quick to tease you in the way he knew you liked.
"fuck! chenle!" you huff and arch your back, falling helplessly back onto yuta. yuta wraps his free arm around your waist, his teeth sinking into your neck again drinking from you, giving you more pleasure than chenle was already giving you.
within a few minutes you reached your high, screaming chenle's name.
the brown-haired male stands up from between your legs, his mouth glistening with your release, a dazed look in his eyes.
yuta pulls the younger towards himself and smashes their lips together. yuta let's go of you, letting chenle climb onto the bed and on top of yuta.
you hear yuta chuckle at this. "you're ours now, baby boy." yuta flipped chenle onto his back and straddled his waist.
the younger male watched yuta, with his chest heaving up and down. yuta quickly pulled his black shirt over his head and ripped open chenle's black button-up.
yuta's hands were quick to run over the younger's abs. "you wanna taste her again?" yuta asked lowly, his pointer fingers hooking the hem of chenle's dark blue jeans.
chenle nods eagerly, looking at you while licking his lips. you smirk towards the brown-haired male before turning to yuta.
"fuck that pretty face of his, baby." yuta raises a pierced eyebrow and watches you hover over chenle's face while gripping the bed frame in front of you.
yuta was quick to move away from both you and chenle to the chair conveniently placed towards the end of the bed.
you moan quietly as chenle grips your waist in his hands and lowers your hips onto his face.
chenle groaned, sending vibrations from your core and up your spine, as he gripped his length through his dark blue jeans.
yuta rested his left arm on the chair arm and watched as you continued to rock your hips against chenle's face.
with your left hand gripping onto the bed head and the other gripping chenle's hair, you feel the brown-haired male below you whimper into you as his own hand stroked his cock, the way he liked all too much.
by the time you felt the coil in your stomach, yuta and chenle had both came into their own hands.
just before the coil snapped, you moved away from chenle's face and used your right hand to vigorously rub your clit.
chenle's eyes lit up, he situated himself onto his elbows and opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue.
yuta watched on with curious dark eyes, he hadn't seen you react like this to his own touch.
in almost an instant you squirt all over chenle's face.
coming down from your high almost instantly sent you to sleep. if it wasn't for yuta ushering you and the youngest male into the bath as he showered by himself.
he would never admit it, but he loved watching you with another man that wasn't him.
a few days later, you and yuta had both welcomed chenle into your relationship.
summary: you've been anxiously waiting the reunion with Ten and Yuta. But first, you have to break them out of their imprisonment in Hell. And, who knows, maybe while you're there, you'll learn some new stuff about yourself, too
length: 19,907 words
tags: supernatural, demons, happy stuff, stressful and nervous stuff, scared and angry stuff
<-previous || next–>
You wish you could say the first day of planning went splendidly and you were ready to go marching into Hell the next day.
That wasn’t the case.
Each day, your planning meetings end with nothing truly decided. Each night, you dream again of Hell, of the Queen of the Night, of the torture that Yuta and Ten are enduring. Each morning you wake feeling more stressed than you had been the day before, more afraid of what is happening to them, and how different you might find them – they’ve been imprisoned in two separate prisons, possibly tortured, who knows what sort of effect that’s had on them since you last saw them.
You cover lots of things in the meetings that should reassure you of the success of this mission, but they don’t necessarily reassure you of anything.
Jeno and Jaemin tell you about the layout of Hell, of secret entrances and passages and exits while they also regale you with amusing stories of their time at Hell’s boarding school. Johnny tells each of you how shadows work – not the obvious way, but the magical way that lets him twine them around his fingers and send them away to do his bidding. There are skills lessons – Ira instructing you more in the ways of the Watchers, Jaemin and Jeno giving you more information about demons that they’d learned in their demonic boarding school, combat lessons from Jaehyun the werewolf (which Haechan seems only too eager to go head-to-head with some of your new companions). Ira and the sirens discuss various plans to leave the island and to return, revealing the secrets you’ve been wondering about since Renjun brought you here.
You keep your distance from the sirens, still a little wary of them after the dream you had a week ago in which they’d drowned you. It doesn’t help that all three of them have a mildly terrifying aura anyway, and it only gets worse every time that you see Seulgi watching all of you like you’re her prey during Jaehyun’s combat lessons. But you know that the sirens are actually rather sweet. Sunmi is kind and truly nurturing with her sisters. Seulgi actually is quite adorable and soft-hearted when it comes down to it — one day after Johnny’s shadow-talks, you see Seulgi playing with his shadow tendrils like they’re kittens while Johnny watches on with amusement.
Minnie, though, shows such affection for Renjun. She acts cute and flirty and clingy, constantly trying to steal his attention away from Haechan who, in turn, tries to steal Renjun’s attention back.
You try hard not to find the dynamic between the elf, the vampire, and the siren very amusing and familiar.
Finally on the morning of the seventh day, you wake in the darkness of your bedroom to find that Mark’s side of the bed is empty.
It’s late. Or early. The sky outside the window of your bedroom is still a deep, dark shade of blue with stars just barely visible, tiny pinpricks of silver light in the sky. You can see the ink of the sea in the distance, whitecap waves reflecting moonlight.
The night is truly silent tonight. Your view out the window could be nothing more than just a pretty picture in the frame for all the sound you catch – no wind blowing, you can’t hear the waves rushing against the shoreline. No one whispers in the halls or other rooms of Ira’s house. The only sound is the thundering of your own heart in your ears and the dull sizzling sound of your handprints you’ve burnt into the sheets where you’ve been clutching them.
A nightmare is what woke you.
It’s similar to the one you had a week ago, centered on Hell. Every part of it was confusing and disappointing as each element of your plot to rescue Ten and Yuta fell through completely. You woke when the dream couldn’t possibly have gotten any worse.
You saw them burning.
Everyone.
Everyone burned. Yuta and Ten, although that should have been impossible. Mark and WinWin, Ira, the sirens, the others that Ira has drawn here to his island to help you with this mission.
They were all burning in your dream. The dream was so vivid that you could smell burning hair and flesh; you could see the terror in their eyes; you could hear their cries and screams. You had heard the vile laughter of the Queen of the Night, cackling with wicked delight while they burned and she made you watch.
Now, as you lie here in the waking aftermath of your nightmare, you try to focus on your surroundings to ground you in the present.
Behind you, WinWin is unmoving, an arm pitched above his head, the sheets twisted around his hips, one exposed leg visible and covered in white scars like lightning bolts originating from the silvery bite mark left behind by the Fell Beasts. Tonight he’s unbothered, deep in dreams so he doesn’t budge even as you leave the bed, as you quietly dress yourself.
Soft snores sound from the bedrooms you pass. There’s no sign of anyone being awake, no sounds of the unsleeping vampires being aware of you moving through the house. You creep down the spiral stairs, taking careful steps to keep quiet as you make your way out through the front door.
Dawn is just beginning to touch the perfect blue darkness of night. Peach colored sunrise swirls through the navy clouds and the steel gray of the choppy sea. Deep shadows remain over much of the island, and you stick to them, remembering Johnny’s advice of bending shadows to help hide you, which you apply skillfully as you leave the eaves of the house towards the cliff’s edge.
As you walk forward, you glance backwards, attempting to look up at the lighthouse tower’s peak, trying to see if maybe Mark is up there. You know he’s got a tendency to climb up the tower so he can sit there and stare at the stars. If he’s up there right now, you can’t distinguish him from the dark. And if he is up there, he must not notice you because he doesn’t descend to join you or stop you either way.
You don’t want him to join you.
The nightmares that have been plaguing you all week have been bad enough, but the one you just awoke from truly has put you in a state of panic. No one else can come with you, you saw the argument for that in your dream. Everyone here on the island has been helpful in these planning stages, but if they come with you, they’re just weaknesses for you, they’ll hold you back and make you much more noticeable than if you just go by yourself.
You know how to get off the island now, and you have a plan for exactly how you’re going to get into Hell, how you’re going to locate Ten and Yuta, and how you’re going to escape. You’ve even got a Plan B tucked away in the back of your mind in case your original plan goes awry.
The beach looks nearly the same as it had the day that you arrived. Foamy white waves crash against the shore, rushing through the pebbles as you near the water’s edge.
Since your arrival to Ira’s island, you’d wondered several times how the portal magic worked for the island. Ira and Renjun had made it clear that it was only possible to enter the island via portal, and that made sense. Up until a few days ago when one rescue strategy had been discussed, you hadn’t known how to leave the island. At what point did the sea become a portal back to the rest of the world?
Ira had led all of the group out onto the porch outside the front door. With his arm outstretched, he pointed out at the sea visible beyond the cliff’s edge. “See the water, where it turns from a shallow turquoise to a darker blue? Do you see the circle of turquoise out a little further? It’s straight out from the inlet where you all came in.”
The sea faded from turquoise closer to the shore to a deeper blue as the sea floor dropped off, but then there was in fact a pocket of lighter color out in the deep.
“This portal works a bit different from other portals. To exit the secure space I’ve placed this island in, you have to have a specific mental picture of your destination, you have to focus on it and push through.”
“Push through? It’s in the middle of the water. How will we know when we’ve reached the portal to push through and to focus?” Jeno had turned to your father in confusion.
Mark, standing beside you in the shadow of the house’s doorway, grimaced. “Trust me, you’ll know. Coming through is easy enough, but when we left to find you guys, I thought like you. It was in the middle of the water, so how would we know? But it’s like hitting an invisible wall. You have to focus on holding your destination in mind while you also push through what feels like a solid wall of water.”
Ira nods. “I didn’t make it easy to come and go.”
And now, in the present moment as you stand on the shore and face the morning gray of the sea, you hope you’ll be able to find the portal. From down here at the water level, you can’t see a difference in the water like you’d been able to from up above. It’s impossible to tell how far out you’re going to have to swim.
You stare out at the water.
If you don’t go now, you’re going to lose your nerve.
Images of your dream last night flash through your mind.
Ten screaming as hungry flames consumed him. Yuta’s body stretched out on the floor as veins of poisoned fire wrapped around his throat, crawling over his cheeks and mouth.
It had all seemed so real, so terrifying. You can’t take another night of not knowing that they’re safe, of not having them in your arms again.
The seawater is cool where it touches your bare ankle.
Ira had said the portal is just a straight swim out from the shore. You can do this.
You take a few steps more out into the water, shivering as the cool water rises up your body, as the waves splash it even higher.
You pull in a deep, full breath and with one last glimpse back at the cliffs behind you – halfway hoping to see a familiar face, halfway checking to make sure that there isn’t anyone watching. There isn’t anyone. You face the horizon again, and you dive beneath the surface.
Below the water, the world is dark and still. You’re still close to the shore, in only a few feet of water, but as you begin swimming forward, the bottom falls away beneath you. Darkness grows around you when you reach the open water of the sea. There’s a different feeling to the water, a hollowness and a pull of gravity as the forever black maw opens beneath you.
High above you, the sunrise bursts in prismatic colors over the surface. Your lungs begin to ache and your heart longs for you to rise to the surface again, to feel the heat of the sunrise on your face and a fresh breath of air filling your lungs, but instead you keep swimming forward into the endless, deep dark.
The pressure grows stronger in your chest, in your head, in your throat, and you feel like you’re being squeezed to death and frozen as the sea around you becomes entirely black. Momentarily, the thought crosses your mind that you’ve slipped right through the portal without being aware, that you’ve been somehow sucked into that Abyss that Yuta and Ten once told you about – the place where soulless supernaturals go when they die.
And then, you feel it.
A wall of pressure.
You pull an image of your destination into your mind, focusing on it with every part of you that’s not worrying about being able to breathe, and you push forward.
You feel as if you’re making absolutely no progress no matter how hard you push against it, and for a moment you’re right back trapped in that mirror at the House of the Watchers – again, you can’t breathe, you’re trapped against a barrier with everything you want on the other side. You push and you push, trying to keep a river a million miles away held in your mind, pushing, pushing, feeling your lungs seizing in your chest and dots of blackness and sparks of impossible light spark across your vision.
The world breaks around you, shattering and transforming into a world of bright sound and heat and so much air.
Each breath sears your lungs, your chest burning in an entirely unpleasant manner, but you can’t help gasping for more and more air. Your hair drips into your eyes, making them sting. There’s so much noise, and after the suffocation of the deep sea, all of this everything is very disorienting.
It takes a moment or two of treading water before you realize that your escape from the island actually worked.
River water stains your skin with tiny granules of silt, a twig has tangled itself in your hair as well as a slimy piece of plant life that has twisted through your fingers. You shake it off, pluck the twig from your hair, and you look back up to the banks of the river you’re in, at the high city buildings reaching up into the orange haze of the sky.
You’ve come back to Hell City.
Something silvery flickers by you in the water, and it takes a moment too long for you to realize what it is. Another pale streak rushes by you, and this time you recognize it for what it is. A memory rises to the surface of your mind.
In your early days here, as Ten and Yuta showed you around the city, they’d brought you here to the riverwalk along this river that marks the border of Hell City. Right now, you’re a bit upriver from that spot where the river splits in two, but you still remember clearly leaning against the railing with Yuta beside you, his arm wound around your waist to keep you from tipping into the dangerous water.
It’s the memory of that day that has inspired your rescue plan.
“What do you see when you look at the water?” Yuta had asked you that day. And that morning, just as right now, you’d seen a whitish silver ribbon twisting through the water. With his hands on you, keeping you safely planted on solid ground, Yuta had explained to you, “Those are spirits of the damned. This river leads straight to Hell. Proper Hell, not just this city. Water is a transmitter, or conductor, carrying the spirits down where they belong. A little way down the way, the river vanishes underground, and it never resurfaces.”
It’s funny, thinking back on that now. You’ve definitely learned that water works as a pathway – it’s taken you to Purgatory and to Ira’s little special corner of the universe, and it’s brought you back here.
And if your plan works, this river is going to take you straight to Hell.
This is something that has come up in your week of planning. Jaemin’s voice echoes from the back of your mind. “Once you’re in that river, it’s a certainty as to where you’re going. Because the river is a one-way ticket to Hell. Spirit Express, no stops, no clear return.”
In the present moment, you can already feel the current of the river sucking at you, pulling you downstream. A cold wave slaps into the side of your head, and you swear you hear a voice whispering a death song in your ear, and you keep your mouth closed tightly, trying to keep your face above water, even as the current pulls you along, threatening to drag you under even as you fight to stay afloat.
And then you see it just up ahead. The river forks.
One branch of the river continues on through the regular, mortal, unmagical world towards the ocean. The other branch grows darker and darker until eventually it delves underground, passing briefly through Hell City’s underground, and then surging even deeper below to the realm of the demons; this branch of the river is the one that has you in its gravity.
And suddenly it really has a grip on you. You’re being propelled forward in the water, carried along faster than you had been just a moment before, racing towards the place where the river disappears underground.
The moment is obvious when the power of the great river of the damned finally overpowers the simple current of the natural river. One moment, you’re still able to fight to keep your head above water, and the next you can feel the force of the water pulling you downward.
You keep getting pulled under, managing one final gasp for breath in the instant before it’s impossible, sucking in a little of the river water despite all of your previous attempts. It tastes like poison as it trickles over your tongue, and the moment you resurface, you cough and gag, trying to expel the toxic water. Repeat.
Occasionally, you feel something else in the water, hitting against you, bumping and slithering and slimy. Mostly it feels incorporeal, as if you’re just feeling passing souls. Until you feel the tug at your ankles, the gravity pushing you down further from the surface.
You wish you had something to hold onto, some easier way to get to Hell than this, but Jaemin and Jeno had assured you that this was going to be the easiest way for all of you to get there, and even though you’re going this alone now, you don’t know any other way to get to Hell.
You’re being sucked downward, and you flail around, trying to claw your way back to the surface for one last breath, one last glimpse of the sunlight –
Free-fall.
You’re in free-fall, no longer controlled by the river’s current but by gravity.
Lights flicker to life – far away and below you, growing rapidly bigger and closer.
You recognize where you are, but you’ve never seen it from this perspective.
You’re tumbling in the waterfall you’ve seen before, racing through Hell City’s underground, and within seconds you’ll be crashing into the next layer of the underworld. Streams of silvery light surround you, and if you could really force your eyes to focus on anything, you feel certain that you might be able to make out features of faces or limbs. These are souls, after all.
The air is full of voices – whispers of the souls, your own screams.
You feel the impact as your body crashes into the pool of water at the base of Hell City’s underground waterfall. It doesn’t hurt necessarily, but you can feel the water passing like a heavy wave beating against you when you stand unprepared in the surf. And then everything is dark and cool again. The air is filled with the rushing sound of water and passing air and all the whispers of the souls around you. And you’re spinning.
It takes a moment to really realize that, but soon you come to understand that you’re spiraling downwards in tighter and tighter curls, moving faster and faster, you and all of these souls are funneled to a point.
You’re spinning in the darkness, and then suddenly you’re not.
In a great cold splash and a burst of warm light, you’re standing dripping wet on a stone floor.
“What the fuck?” You hiss, blinking and looking around.
Directly in front of you is the broad back of a very tall, large man. He doesn't turn to look at you, only shuffling forward a step.
A cold wave of water rushes over your feet as a considerable splash sounds from behind you.
You glance over your shoulder and find an elderly woman standing there with round glasses sliding toward the tip of her nose, her hair curling loose down to her shoulders. She doesn’t seem to take too much notice of you. Momentarily, there’s another big splash, a second wave assaulting your feet as a spout of water shoots down from the distant blackness of the ceiling, the jet of water deposits another soul in what appears to be a line growing behind you.
You twist around to the front, leaning around the broad man in front of you to get a look at what you’re in line for.
“What the fuck?” You repeat, looking at the line that stretches into the impenetrable distance. It winds forward, twisting around rocky structures that jut up from the floor. A deep reddish-orange glow semi-illuminates this vast space, but the end of the line in either direction – as the spout of water continues to deposit an endless string of souls behind you in line – is swallowed by the same darkness that resides above your head.
But do you really have to wait in line?
None of the others around you pay any attention to you or anyone else. They all wear bored, resigned expressions, content to shuffle forward step by step as the line slowly shifts forward with some unknown signal.
It is eerily silent. Your brain can’t comprehend the absolute lack of sound when you can see so many people. You should be able to hear breathing or some slight shifting, fabric brushing together, feet moving on the floor, an exasperated sigh or grumbling under the breath. You even half expect to hear a distant echo, water droplets trickling down from somewhere or even dripping from clothes, but as the Hell Delivery System waterfall moves ever farther down the line, you can’t even hear its roar of delivery anymore.
And you’re soaking wet. Uncomfortably so.
You know that you could easily call your demon fire and make quick work of drying yourself off, but some instinctive feeling in your belly is telling you not to do that. It might just draw attention to you.
Not that there seems to be anyone overseeing this line, enforcing behavior. If you just stand here waiting in line for some unknown end, you’ll just be wasting time. There probably isn’t anyone who will even notice if you cut the line a little.
You’ve moved only a dozen paces since your arrival.
You take a step out of line, pause, waiting for something to happen.
After a few beats, nothing has happened.
You begin to move, passing up the column of this endless queue. No one moves or spares you a glance, speaks or breathes or anything. So you walk, and you walk and walk and walk, searching for the front of the line.
Is this Hell? Just this, waiting in line forever? Moving forward inch by inch for all of eternity. Because you’ve been walking for at least half an hour, and the front of the line doesn’t seem anywhere in sight. Although, the scenery has slightly changed. There seem to be more outcroppings of rock here, and there are large torches mounted to the walls, providing a stronger orange light than the previous ambient red-orange glow.
Another fifteen minutes pass by in unchanging silence. You look behind you to see the line vanishing back into dim light some distance back, twisting out of sight around a big boulder. Ahead of you looks pretty much the same.
But then you hear something.
It sounds like footsteps, so you freeze. Sharp clicking footsteps pass over the stone floor. Heavy breathing and the acrid scent of brimstone.
A demon.
You don’t dare to move even a little bit. Wherever this demon is, it must be ahead of you, around the next curve of the line, but you’re sure even a slight move would draw its attention to exactly where you are as it prowls along the line.
Sure enough, around the curve ahead, you see a puff of black smoke, a shadow painted on the wall of a beast. It’s coming towards you.
You clench your hands into fists, and you feel your nails bite against your palms hard enough to break skin.
The demon’s shadow on the wall twitches, head tilting curiously to the side, and you glance down to see a trickle of your blood as it drips from your hand.
A sharp whistle cuts through the never-ending space, echoing off the rock walls and the invisible ceiling. The demon twists around, a growl rumbling from it. A second whistle, and the beast sets off in the opposite direction. You hear a grinding sound of stone against stone, a third whistle and another growl from the demon.
You take a step forward, conscious of the coarse sand that dusts the stone floor, aware that even a slightly wrong move could cause sound. If only there was some way to silence your footsteps so you could sneak forward, hopefully catching a glimpse around the next curve of the line, maybe to see what is happening ahead. Have you finally found the front of the line?
You take a tentative step forward, and there’s a soft crunch of a pebble beneath your foot.
Your heart leaps in your throat, but then you remember.
During the weeks of Ira’s lack of availability and assistance with this plan, you’d dug into any and all of the books he had in his home. There were boring books about gardening and maintenance, cookbooks, and even self-help books, but there had also been histories of the Watchers, but these were ancient texts that you felt must be from the early days of the Watchers because they were just histories, they held information pertaining to the instruction of young Watchers.
Those texts you had devoured, pouring over them for long hours until Mark or WinWin had dragged you away, providing you with ample distraction.
But you had learned some things from those texts about the powers of the Watchers, the abilities that you possess. You’d practiced a few things, but you are fully aware that you’re a long way from being adept at the skills.
Although, one of the magical skills you’d read about, and that you’d once attempted semi-successfully, had been the power to become undetectable – invisible and silent – for up to an hour. You’d used that experiment to sneak up on WinWin and scare him, for which you’d had to apologize and make it up to him when you returned to detectability about ten minutes later.
But isn’t that what you need right now? To be undetectable?
Luckily, the process had been rather simple, and you’d made certain to memorize it before even attempting it that first time.
The powers of the Watchers were magic like you’d not quite seen it before. Sure, some of it involved fancy words and waving your hands around, but there was a simplicity to it all that almost seems deceptive, like you feel like it should be much more difficult than it is, and by finding it easy, you must be doing it wrong. But that’s not the case at all. Maybe it seems that way because you’re so new to this power that you were actually born with; it’s a part of you, so natural that it just flows without having to work too hard at it.
Either way, the effort to become undetectable right now is simple.
The sandy soil underfoot is actually much more fine than you’d believed. It’s a soft, reddish-brown powder that clings to your fingertips as you crouch and gather a handful. Disturbingly, it reminds you of dried blood.
You spit into the small pile of soil in your hand, mixing it into a paste that you try not to think too much about as you dip your paste-coated fingers and paint them around your face.
It’s more difficult without a mirror to know if you’re getting the runes correct, but you hope that you don’t fuck it up too much.
You can tell it’s taking effect, and you begin to hurry before you lose the ability of physical touch. This spell truly makes you undetectable – invisible, silent, and intangible.
Just as you put the finishing touches on yourself, you see your fingertips fading away.
You lift your hand to your face, and you can feel your breath on your fingertips, and you think that maybe there’s the barest imprint on the air in front of you, but you can’t actually see anything there. Beneath you – where your feet should be – there’s no sign of your footprints, not even when you take a step forward.
As you walk around the curve, you don’t find the front of the line. You’re certainly closer to the front, but now the line straightens out instead of curving, moving forward into the far distance where you can see looming high in the shadows, the faintly lit arch of a massive doorway. But right here beside the line, just on this side of that curve in the rocks, is a hidden doorway. You can still see a glowing outline of it as you reach it, but your intangible fingers can’t find any purchase to pry the door open.
Again, this is where you’re grateful to be part Watcher. There’s a magical phrase for this, and a moment later the hidden doorway is grinding open again, revealing a narrow hallway roughly carved through the rock, winding away and downward. To a certain degree, it reminds you of the passages Yuta and Ten had led you through to take you from the surface of Hell City down into its underground, although these tunnels of Hell are much better illuminated.
Once you’re through the entrance, you close the door again with a simple wave of your hand.
The rocky ridges in the walls of the tunnel are a warmer reddish brown than where the evenly spaced torches along the walls illuminate. You get a vague impression that you’re staring down a great beast’s throat, looking at the insides of its ribcage. As you pass silently down the tunnel – footsteps leaving no mark in the sandy floor nor even a scuff or sound of your footfalls – you grow even more aware of how you’re sinking further and further into Hell.
The flickering light of the torches on the ribbed walls of the tunnel truly gives the sense of being slowly swallowed by a beast, and you’re terrified and exhilarated to learn what awaits you.
And then you see it.
A small archway up ahead, open and unguarded.
Slipping through the archway into Hell Proper is easy, but what you find immediately on the other side is less so.
The hidden tunnel didn’t just bypass the rest of Hell’s eternal waiting line to the Great Gates. You managed to bypass a lot of the structure of Hell, and the tunnel has spat you out into the one place that you’ve feared and yet dreamed about for too long now.
You’re in the throne room of the Queen of the Night.
You’re in the very belly of the beast.
And you’re not alone.
You melt into the shadows at the edge of the throne room, pressing your back to the wall, your shoulders blend into an enormous woven tapestry as you make an attempt to conceal yourself even more against its pattern. There are too many people – or demons, you suppose – for you to feel safe even with your Watcher spell making you undetectable. Your heart pounds as you look around, observing the space.
The ceiling vanishes above you into darkness just as it had in Hell’s lobby, but here there’s at least a hint of architecture. Something sort of Gothic, sort of Art Nouveau which adds an odd bit of whimsy to the otherwise imposing aura. Columns span the length of the room, leading your eye toward the apse – a semicircular space at the far end of the room, the ceiling ribbed and vaulted. The back curved wall of the apse is more window than wall, and it reminds you of something you might have seen in a Church before, although it’s much more dark and whimsical than the structured beauty of a Church’s stained glass window. It has an organic feel to it, like the wall is covered in vines that have grown around irregularly shaped black windows.
You try not to imagine those windows as eyes, but it’s difficult to do. You feel as if you’re being observed.
Seated there above it all, doing nothing to help the feeling of being watched, is the Queen’s throne. The high seat is housed in the apse, and you’ve seen it before.
Her throne is exactly as you’d pictured it in your dreams. Massive. An unscalable monolith, carved of black stone that reflects torchlight from the walls, thin trails of liquid darkness seep from unknown pores in the throne, and although you can’t see the base of the throne at the moment due to the throng of of demons in the way, you know that black liquid is dripping down into the black pool the throne rises from. You’d dreamed it exactly like this.
And also like your dreams, seated atop the throne is the Queen herself, veiled in shadow.
All you can see of her are her hands, which are clawed and deformed. Her twisted long fingers are pale as bone until they taper at the tips into black points which she taps against the arms of her throne. Her voice is a rasp, reminiscent of dry leaves rattling against each other, like bare branches snapping in a strong breeze, and an underlying tone of train wheels screeching on the track. Whatever language she’s speaking in, you can’t understand it, although the demons around you certainly seem to.
They cheer at whatever it is that she’s rasping in her unholy voice.
A demon rises up above the crowd on stilt-like legs, pronouncing something that you still can’t understand. A few others respond, and the Queen laughs – her voice echoes sharply around the room, bounced back at you by all the hard stone.
And then you hear the rattle of chains. An eerie clinking.
You need to get closer.
Even sticking to the edges of the throne room, skirting the gathered court, you narrowly avoid detection. There are guards stationed along the walls, as well as court members whose presences overflow even beyond their physical forms – similar to Johnny back on Ira’s island, with his shadows that reach beyond himself.
At one point, you swear one of the demons turns its head to look in your direction, but it can’t see through your Watcher magic, so it turns back to face the Queen.
You keep moving until you reach the front of the crowd, until you can see the black pool beneath the throne. Heavy chains in the dark water, just like your dreams. But unlike your dreams, the chains aren’t looped around the limbs of your boyfriends. Now the chains lie limp in the water, empty.
You’re not sure if you feel relief or some other unnamed combination of fear and horror and frustration.
If they’re not here, like they had been in your dream, then where are they?
Are they hiding on the other side of the throne? Perhaps they’re just not visible from your vantage point here, and if you could just squeeze through the crowd….
It’s easier said than done.
More than once, one of the demons bumps into you, which shouldn’t be possible unless your undetectability is wearing off. Luckily, those that bump into you seem to think they’ve just bumped into another demon in the crowd with them, and they brush it off, but each time it happens you curl in a little tighter on yourself, pushing onward.
And then someone steps directly into your path, and you pull up short.
Another demon stands slightly behind the first, reaching up to adjust the collar of the first demon’s jacket, to brush nonexistent lint from the demon’s shoulders.
“Stop,” the demon hisses.
The second demon drops his hands from the other’s shoulders, murmuring a quiet, “Yes, my Prince.”
A Prince of Hell.
Ten and Yuta had once briefly mentioned the Princes to you in passing. The five Princes of Hell mostly kept to themselves, although both of your boyfriends had met them a few times.
The Prince standing before you is very handsome. Dark reddish brown hair curls around his ears. His eyes glow a deep red as he turns to look over his shoulder at what must surely be a servant.
Suddenly, another demon shoulders his way forward through the crowd. He’s taller than the first Prince, his hair a smooth ebony encircled by a crown of obsidian.
“Kun,” he says, “We missed you.”
Prince Kun — the first Prince — turns to his brother. “Mother had me handling some business.” He faces the Queen, listening intently as she continues speaking her demonic tongue. “Hendery, don’t you ever wonder why she tries to keep us separate from our people? It’s only times like these she allows us among them, and even then she wants us to be kept apart. To be just simply out on display.”
Hendery’s head turns slightly, and you follow his gaze to a small dais off to the side. Three other Princes sit there on thrones carved of dark stone, looking bored.
“You know why,” Hendery answers. “It’s to keep us safe.”
When Kun looks at his younger brother, his eyes seem to flare a shade brighter. “If we’re never among our people, how can they ever hope to know us? How are we to ever understand them? And if they don’t know us and we don’t know them, what hope do any of us ever have of ruling them?”
His jaw clenches, hands curling into fists at his sides. Hendery only gives his brother a look of mild confusion.
“Sometimes, Hendery, I think that Mother never plans to pass the throne on.” Kun’s voice has lowered to the point that you need to strain to hear it, meant only for his brother’s ears. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll have to steal it from her so I can fulfill my destiny as King.”
“Don’t say that.” There’s now a tick in Hendery’s jaw.
“I’ve made it clear how I feel in the past about Mother’s rule, the changes and improvements I will make when I’m King. Don’t act like this is anything new.” Kun turns to face his brother, and you spot other demons in the crowd casting sideways glances at their two Princes.
A third Prince, this one with silver hair and a light and bright expression, appears and throws his arms around the shoulders of his brothers. “Come, brothers. Let’s go sit. Mom says there’s a feast after her speech.”
Unwilling to continue their argument in front of their younger brother, both Kun and Hendery drop it. They carve a path through the crowd on the way back to the dais. You take the opportunity created in their wake, and you make your way clear through the crowd, following them although you don’t plan to reach their thrones with them.
Instead, once you reach the edge of the Queen of the Night's audience, you turn your attention again to the pool at the base of her throne and the chains rusting in the liquid.
On this side of the throne room, you can see that the pool of water trails away toward the sides of the room, trickling through a grated section at the back of the apse. There are more chains scattered throughout the water, all of them empty. Well, mostly empty. You try not to look too closely as you catch a pearly gleam of bones tangled in one of the lengths of chain.
There’s a narrow strip of raised stone along the edge of the room just below where some of the chains are bolted into the walls. The dark water swirls, a light current keeping it moving on the way toward those grates in the back.
High above you on the throne, the Queen’s voice still echoes out over her people. As you’re still invisible and unable to understand what the Queen of the Night is saying, you decide to take the opportunity to explore the apse.
The narrow pathway is just wide enough for you to fit without touching the water. Every few feet as you shuffle along it, you glance backwards.
All of the demons are still gazing upwards at their Queen. The dais of Princes are the only ones who aren’t devoting all of their attention to her. Kun is sitting on his throne, his left ankle resting on his knee as he disinterestedly picks at his nails. The dark-haired Hendery keeps casting glances at his elder brother. The young silver-haired prince is distractedly stroking the backs of the phantom shadow cats that twine around his ankles and stand on his shoulders and rest on the arms of his throne; as you watch, one stretches up to place its paws on his chest and rub its shadowy head beneath his chin.
There are two other Princes sitting there, both of them with their heads bowed together in quiet conversation, although they appear to be joking around, judging by the barely suppressed laughter. One of them looks as if he’s part-bat – large membranous wings are tucked behind him. His wings are dark and angular, although the webbing is thin and paler in color. He’s very handsome, despite the bat wings and the vicious blood red color of his eyes. His hair is a deep, dark brown color, parted precisely down the middle, and two sections of his bangs fall down to perfectly frame his face.
The last Prince is round-faced, pale, and very relaxed. He’s handsome as well, although at this point you’re half-certain that being extremely handsome is a demonic condition. His jaw is so strong, his eyes gleam with mirth as he whispers with his brother. He exudes a sense of casualness, a very go-with-the-flow vibe that immediately puts you at ease even as you’re sneaking around behind his mother’s throne.
Perhaps it puts you a little too at ease.
Upon your next step, your foot slips.
Your toes dip into the water, and to your surprise, a few shallow ripples spread out over the surface of the dark liquid.
You dart a glance toward the high throne, toward the crowd, and to the Princes.
Prince Kun has turned to look in your direction, his eyebrows furrowed together as he scans the shadows where you hide. You hope that your spell of undetectability, which is clearly beginning to wear off, stands up beneath the Prince’s scrutiny. His eyes narrow, focusing on the back section of the apse, but after another moment, he blinks and returns to his nails.
Moving forward, you go more carefully.
You’re not sure exactly what you expect to find back here. Maybe it’s something about those dark eye-like windows staring down at you, but you feel drawn into the shadows at the back of the apse, to the place where you can hear the dark water trickling and tink tink tinking down through the grate.
When you reach the end of the stone edging, you’re right there upon the grating.
There’s an odd swoop in your belly as you take the first step onto the drain. Maybe it’s because it’s not a solid surface, and you halfway expect the thin bars to give way beneath your weight. But they hold and you take another step and another, making your way to the very back of the apse.
There’s a doorway.
The door is recessed, half hidden in the shadows between intricate carvings, a leering gargoyle with wings like the Prince back on the dais.
Of course, the strange pull you’re feeling is guiding you towards that doorway.
You take a step towards the doorway, and as you do, the gargoyle moves.
A flutter of its wings. A shake of its head.
It turns away from you, its ears tilting like dog ears do when they’re listening for something. You hold your breath, pleading with the universe to let your undetectability hold for just a little longer. You walk lightly, quietly, without breathing, and you slip right by the gargoyle, into the recessed doorway.
A yawning mouth opens before you.
Almost literally.
The doorway has stalactites hanging from the top like jagged teeth. A cool draft plays with your hair as it breathes by you from the dark maw beyond the doorway. The air is damp, carrying with it the smell of mildew and sulfur.
The knot in your belly tightens, rising in your throat as you whisper another helpful spell Ira’s books had taught you. Nightvision.
Although the path had been pitch black a moment before, the way before you suddenly blooms in color. The night vision provided by the spell isn’t quite like what you thought counted as night vision in your old life. It’s not all green and black, like you’d seen in movies and on TV. Everything is just… glowy. Like there is an ambient faint light source providing just enough light that you can see the cracks in the stones on the floor and the walls. You can see where a few feet ahead of you the path becomes stairs diving down into the unknown.
You take those stairs carefully, trying not to slip on the damp, slick stone where it’s been worn smooth by use over the eons.
Down and down and down deeper you wind, until at last you reach the bottom, only to find a barred door padlocked shut. You’re surprised that you can see a little bit better through the barred window of the door, and as you peer into the dark, you think the increased visibility is due to a faint light source from high above; you can hear a soft trickle, and you realize that the light and the water sound is likely coming from the drain grate high overhead.
You can see little else than some rough rocks – large boulder-like monoliths that glisten wetly. You think for a moment that you hear the rattle of a chain, but then there’s nothing. No movement, no sound. What if you’ve come all the way down here, and this is just the chamber where the Queen of the Night keeps some horrid, monstrous pet?
But still, there’s a weight in your belly, a magnetic pull that swoops as you step right up to the bars of the door, as you curl your hands around the bar and press your face between the gap, trying to get a better look around even as the rusty texture of the bars scrapes against your cheeks.
High above you, there’s a distant roar. It takes a moment for you to realize it’s the clamor of the crowd gathered before the Queen. They’re cheering about something. Thunder rumbles overhead, and you swear a few pebbles dislodge from the faraway ceiling, shaken loose by the drumbeats of footsteps in celebration as the demons continue their rallying.
Again, you hear movement. A chain’s rattle. The quiet echo of a single footstep followed by a quiet incomprehensible murmur.
Your heart thuds a beat harder.
You reach for the padlock, and without waiting, without thinking about if this is a terrible idea that you’ll come to regret, you reach below your surface for the fire that’s always there.
Demon fire bursts to life in your hand, glowing white-hot and then flaring blue at the core of your hand, wrapped around the padlock until the metal softens and then melts, dripping to the floor like small drops of starlight.
The cell door groans slightly as your luminous hand pushes at it, melting the metal even as it swings open on rusty hinges.
In the light given off by your skin, you can see what you hadn’t been able to before.
At first you think it is a statue, as still as it is with its face upturned to the light and sound above. Then, you realize it’s another gargoyle.
Ram’s horns curl from the sides of his head, clawed feet and fingers of abnormal length. He stands nude with his back to you, and where you would imagine wings would jut from his shoulders, there are instead cracked lines in the shape of wings stretching from the nape of his neck down to his tailbone. At his feet another gargoyle kneels, also nude with wings etched into his back, a tail curls over his thigh, shaggy hair reaches almost to his shoulders, and two sharp horns rise from the top of his head, curving slightly forward.
It’s only when the one standing turns his head that you gasp.
The eyes are sunken in shadow. The face is gaunt and pale.
But you would recognize those eyes anywhere.
“Yuta,” you choke out, tears rising to your eyes as you stumble forward.
The kneeling one lifts his head at the sound of your voice, his eyes striking against your soul.
“Ten?” You collapse on your knees in front of them both.
Now that you’re closer you can see the manacles on their ankles, the chains stretching back towards the wall. You reach for Ten’s face first, your palms gentle as you touch his sharp, unfamiliar bone structure. “What happened to you?”
Ten turns his head, unable to meet your gaze.
“Are you really here?” Yuta rasps, his voice dry and rattling in his chest. “How are you here? Did she find you?”
You tug on Ten’s chin, turning his face back towards yours. He meets your eyes once briefly before looking at the floor again – they’re the yellow cat eyes that he used to flash at you on occasion. You stroke his cheek tenderly; he might not look how he did the last time you saw him, but that doesn’t change anything.
“No, she didn’t find me,” You answer Yuta, “Renjun got us out of the House of the Watchers; he got us safely to my father,” you tell them.
Ten lifts his head, his eyes bright. “He did?”
Your heart warms in your chest when he looks into your eyes. “Yes. And the first thing I made my father promise was that we would come rescue you. Now here I am, and I’m getting you out of here, bringing you to safety under my father’s protection.” You rise to your feet again.
Yuta shifts towards you, and when you reach for him, he stops you with his fingers light on your wrist. “My love, you can’t.”
You jerk your hand away from his hold. “What do you mean ‘I can’t?’ What can’t I do?”
With a clanking sound, Ten stands as well.
“You can’t break us out of here,” Ten explains softly. “We’re bound here by the Queen’s law. And if she finds you here, she’s going to destroy you.” Now he lays his hand on your cheek, just as gentle as you’d been with him.
“Fuck that. I can save you both. I didn’t come all of this way, sneaking out of my father’s place, finding my way to Hell’s entrance, and sneaking in here all alone just to find you and not save you. Why would I give up so easily?” You take a half step back, looking between your boyfriends. You haven’t even properly had the time to rejoice in finding them, and they’re trying to drown your mood with this dark pessimism?
Yuta shakes his head. “For the moment, we’re going to ignore that you just said you’re here alone, which is insane. You don't understand. You can’t break us out. We’re chained in here. We’ve never seen a key, and these chains are impervious to everything we’ve tried, which isn’t too much honestly because all that’s down here is rocks. We can’t even really use magic because demon magic doesn’t work well within the walls of this chamber; trust me, we’ve tried.
“For weeks, each of us has tried time and again to get a message out to you, to contact you in some way or see you through a veil. We tried to build a binding connection between ourselves and you so maybe we could pass a message along, show you how to find us. A few weeks ago, Ten thought he was almost successful at opening a tiny window, but all we saw was starlit darkness and a tall light blazing in the distance.”
You remember that night on the island when you and WinWin and Renjun sat on the porch. You thought you’d seen something in the distance. A blip of something. A light, maybe. Could that have been them?
“Trying to reach you has taken all of what natural energy remained; it’s why we look like this. Our true forms.” Yuta holds his arms out so you can see all of him bared in the light from above. “How can you still want us when we look like this?”
You scoff. “Seriously? You think I’m so shallow that I care what you look like right now? I love you both. I have fought my way through Hell and high water – literally – to get here. And I’m not going to pretend, but I’m honestly a little distracted and turned on by the sight of Ten’s dick right now. So yeah, I still want you now.” You cast a small glance between Ten’s legs where there’s an actual goddamned forked penis. “Which I was right about your dick, Ten, and you lied, I’d just like to point out.”
For the first time in too long, you see a ghost of Ten’s smile. Before you first had sex, he’d told you that he definitely didn’t have a forked penis or a tail or horns; but now you’re seeing the real him, and it turns out he’s actually got all three.
“And as for the chains, I’m sure I can find a way to break them.” You take a step back, looking down at the chains and manacles keeping them prisoner down here. “I just need to think.”
Overhead, the sound of the Queen and the crowd pours down through the grate.
“What’s going on up there, anyway?” You ask, crouching to get a closer look at the manacle on Yuta’s ankle.
Silence is the only answer you receive until you look up.
Both of your boyfriends look down at you. You ask, “What?”
Ten looks at Yuta. “Just tell her.”
Yuta sighs. “A trial. The Queen and the Princes and all of the court are up there, right? She only does that for a big trial.” He pauses, lifting a hand up to touch one of his ram’s horns. “Specifically, this is our trial. Although, it’s as much a trial as the one the Watcher’s were going to give us. Our Queen seeks the death penalty for our disobedience and disloyalty; and who among her court and sons are going to tell her no?”
Immediately, the red-haired Prince Kun appears in your mind. But that’s unimportant right now. What is important is breaking these chains. Once you break them, you’ll nearly be done with the rescue.
You grab Yuta’s chain in both hands, and you pull, putting all of your strength and reaching down into that well of power within you to summon your fire.
Nothing.
“Told you,” Ten says, “Demon powers don’t work in here. If they did, we’d have prettied ourselves up for you, and burned our way out of here forever ago.”
Yuta clucks softly. “We appreciate it, my love, but the trial sounds pretty decided up there. You should leave while you can.”
Both of them flinch at the loud, jarring sound of the chain smacking against the floor as you throw it down and stand up. You’re not anywhere near tall enough to come nose-to-nose with Yuta when he’s in his pure demon form, but you do your best.
“I’m not leaving you. You’re both absolute idiots if you think I’m going anywhere without you now.” You spin around, turning your back to the both of them as you think. You close your eyes, trying to picture everything that you’ve read and learned and plotted back on Ira’s island. Surely someone in all the planning had come up with something about how to actually break them out. Surely not all of your plans had relied on magic?
You should’ve brought a crowbar. Would a crowbar help, though? Surely there are tools that would help in this situation that you could’ve toted through your journey to Hell? You should’ve brought a blowtorch or something.
Ten actually laughs when you say that aloud.
You glare at him.
“What? I’m just imagining you busting in here with a whole blowtorch, the welder mask, a fuel cylinder, and an oxygen cylinder strapped to your back.” Ten laughs again.
“I wouldn’t need all of that if I’d thought ahead. I could’ve just manifested something that works like it’s got all of that, but it could be small and portable, able to just fit in my hand.” You frown. You’ve created original things before; objects that you’d imagined up and wanted in your apartment in Hell City. You could create whatever you wanted there, in the House of the Watchers, on Ira’s island – shit, you’d even created your own miniature solar system.
Oh.
You’d created your own stars and moons and planets before.
That hadn’t been just basic manifestation, Ira had assured you when you brought it up one day. That was the Watcher magic that made that possible. Being a Watcher meant that you had the power of creation. It was completely separate from your demon magic.
You drop to your knees again at the feet of your boyfriends. When you cup your hands together and close your eyes, Ten makes a noise of confusion.
“What are you doing? We told you already that–” He starts, but you cut him off with a quick shh.
Yuta and Ten watch as you dip into your well of power again, and this time you dig deeper, searching for the warm glow of your Watcher powers, focusing on bringing it all together into your hands. You can feel the moment it begins to work, when you feel heat pooling in your palms, when the buzzing in your mind becomes the quiet whispering of thermal energy eating the air, radiant light glowing through your eyelids.
“Maybe you should both look away,” you advise, and you can almost feel the power on your tongue and lips. You can feel the shift of power as the miniature white star takes form in your hands, as you have to keep your mind focused to control it. The star hisses in the damp air, sending up spirals of steam as you move carefully, bringing it closer to Ten’s chain.
When the star meets the chain, it’s a similar effect to your fiery hand encircling the padlock to the cell. Gobs of molten metal drip to the floor as the star liquefies the chain.
Ten gasps when the strain disappears from his ankle.
Without another moment wasted, you move to Yuta’s bond, melting through his chain just as quickly. As soon as what remains of Yuta’s tether hits the floor, you sink back on your heels, let your hands fall apart, and you focus on dissipating the star safely, cooling it until it sinks, just a perfectly round black pebble resting in the center of your palm.
Again, there is cheering from far above you, and then the cry of the Queen’s voice in one final declaration.
Ten and Yuta look at each other.
“What?” You ask, rising to your feet once again. You slip the dead star into your pocket. “What’s happening up there?”
Ten swallows hard. Yuta shakes his head.
“It’s over.” Yuta looks at you. “The trial, I mean. She just cried out ‘Death to the disloyal.’”
Your heart does something very strange – it stops beating or beats harder or just simply jerks in your chest – whatever it is, you gasp, clutching at your chest. This can’t happen. You won’t let it. You didn’t come all this way, do all of these things, create a whole fucking white dwarf star to cut your boyfriends free only to have them give up because some fucking Queen up there decided that they should die.
No.
You won’t let them.
“You’re not dying today,” you command them. “I refuse to let that happen. We’re leaving. Fuck the Queen. There’s got to be some way out of here that won’t take us back up into the throne room.”
After a moment of uncertainty, Ten looks at you and Yuta. “Well, there is one thing I think we could try.”
Yuta nods. “Then let’s go.”
You try not to look too closely as your boyfriends begin moving. Since you’ve never seen them in their true demon forms before, you’ve never seen them moving, and it’s mildly disturbing honestly. Yuta has backwards knees like an animal, so each step he takes, his knees bend the opposite way that you’re used to seeing. Ten just seems to float a couple inches off the ground. With the horns and the tail and the deep scars down their backs, it feels entirely new to look at them, and you’re beyond grateful when Ten takes the first step through the doorway of their prison and immediately the version of him that you’re used to snaps into place.
As soon as Yuta follows Ten out, he resumes his usual appearance as well. But you don’t have time to stand there and admire them. Each of them pulls together some semblance of clothing that seems to knit itself from the damp shadows around the edges of the room, covering up their nudity.
“Come on,” Ten whispers, and he glances up the long staircase that leads up to the throne room.
Darkness puddles in the space under the staircase, and to your surprise, that’s where Ten leads you and Yuta. “I used to explore the palace when I was skipping out on guard duty,” Ten explains in a whisper, “I found plenty of the secret passages and trapdoors and all sorts of secret things. And there’s one that comes out right back here.”
In the dim light, you watch Ten feel along the stone wall until finally his fingers catch in the gap between one stone and the next. There’s a faint click, and then with a grinding sound, a door slides inward to reveal a dark passage within.
Ten steps in first, then you, and Yuta takes up the end. Once the door swings closed behind you, the tunnel is plunged into darkness.
You bring a tiny white star to life again in your hands, and for a brief moment you see Ten and Yuta’s faces. You don’t have time to admire them, to actually rejoice in the reunion with your soulmates. You can feel it in the air, in the stones, in the tense set of Ten’s shoulders as he turns and walks away: you’re short on time.
“Go on, my love.” Yuta’s hand is light against your lower back. “Keep up.”
The tunnel is long and dark, cool and damp. It branches off a few times, it narrows and the ceiling drops to the point that all three of you must crawl on your hands and knees to pass through to a section with a little more height. But Ten seems to know where he’s going, and with the help of your little light and Yuta’s warm hand occasionally reminding you of his presence behind you, you steadily make your way forward.
“Where are we going?” You ask after several long minutes.
“There are three exits from Hell,” Ten explains in a whisper. “The first is the entrance, although it’s a little more difficult to leave that way since we’d be going against the flow of souls. The second is the way the Queen brought Yuta and I in; she’s in possession of a mirror that acts as a portal, and that’s how she usually dispatched us on important missions as it’s the most private method of exit.”
He pauses then at a fork in the path.
“And the last one?” You ask, stepping up beside him.
There’s a draft coming from the pathway to the left, but there’s almost a pull trying to guide you down the one on the right. You can see a faint light rightwards, perhaps a little sound of music that makes you want to dance.
“What’s that way?” You take a step ahead, face turned towards the music and the light
Ten and Yuta each grasp one of your wrists.
“No,” Yuta rasps, “Not that way.”
Again, you feel the draft on your left cheek. The air has a breath of something sweet, something that reminds you of autumn.
“This way.” Ten takes the lead again, and neither of them releases their hold on your wrists. “This way is the third exit option. It’s the one we’re taking.”
The path toward the light had curved deeper down into Hell, but you realize that the autumn path is leading slightly upward, the incline causing a slight burn in your calves and your breathing comes out harder than you expected as the path grows steeper and steeper until eventually you’re basically facing a wall.
Far above you, you see a light. But in between that light and the three of you down here at the bottom of this wall are about a hundred rungs of a ladder carved into the stone.
Ten starts climbing, and you have no choice but to follow. You’ve made it up about maybe twenty rungs before your arms start burning, unused to working like this. You wish that you were able to give yourself fully functioning wings so you could fly the rest of the way out of here, but instead you double-down your focus, breathe, and keep climbing.
You barely even notice when Ten disappears from a few rungs above you. It’s only when you reach for the next rung of the ladder and find your hand placed into Ten’s instead, that you realize you’ve reached the top. He hauls you up to your feet on solid ground, and you grip onto his arm as you look around.
You’ve emerged from what is basically a crack in the wall. There’s a crumbling bit of pathway directly in front of you that extends to your left where it eventually joins with a well-kept path.
The realm opens up in front of you in a cavernous space. Curved bridges arc over canyons you can see down into. Fires of all colors illuminate the paths and bridges and buildings. It’s still rocky, still everything has the cast of the red-brown dirt that made up the tunnels and the entryway, but it’s so much more open than you were expecting it to be.
Behind you, Yuta clambers up through the crack, joining you and Ten.
“That’s where we’re going,” Ten says, pointing ahead.
From here, you can’t really tell what it is that he’s pointing at other than a bridge that leads to a floating platform of stone that branches off into four more bridges.
Off in the distance, you hear a loud, angry cry.
Yuta’s face pales. “That’s her. She must have realized we’ve gone.”
“We don’t have long, then.” Ten grabs your hand.
You run. The three of you fly along the path, scree kicked over the edge to tumble down into the abyss below. You reach the first bridge, and you try your best to not look over the side; you don’t really want to see how far the canyon goes down, nor do you want to see what might exist at the bottom of it. Luckily, with Ten’s hand still firm around yours, you don’t have the time to worry either about what would happen if you slipped. Ten runs quickly and smoothly, and you have no choice but to keep up with him, Yuta sticking behind you like your shadow.
You fly over the platform, taking another bridge that shoots you off in another direction, and now you can better see that there are many bridges and deep crevasses all over the place. A wary peek shows you that Hell continues beneath you in many layers – bridges connect islands of stone suspended in the canyons, and you can see the true fires of Hell burning deep below. There are stairs and ramps that lead down below, and you realize you’re just at the top of Hell.
There are buildings here on occasion. You pass a bridge and find yourself jogging down a street with buildings on either side and lampposts giving off a flickering red light. You pass by what could be a park perhaps with grotesque statues and benches and what you’re almost positive is a sand volleyball court.
Each time you think that you must finally be approaching the spot Ten said would be the exit, he keeps going. Yuta keeps up a steady pace behind you.
“Aren’t we almost there? How big is Hell, anyway?” You gasp when Ten suddenly jerks your arm, dragging you along another new bridge. Surely you must be getting close because you can see another great wall of stone looming out of the darkness before you, much like the one you’d climbed out of what feels like forever ago.
“Almost there,” Yuta says from behind you. “And it’s damn near infinite, but that’s when you go downwards.”
Again, you try not to look too hard at what extends beneath you. Instead you focus on what’s ahead.
This bridge leads to a grove of sorts. Trees made of shiny black stone cling to the edges of this stone island, their roots dangling over the edge, dipping out through the seemingly solid stone they grow from. It must be solid enough to hold the whole weight of this grove of obsidian trees. Their leaves shimmer and shiver in a nonexistent breeze, changing between moonsilver and steel, like blades. You scan the branches as the three of you jog along a cleared path, half-expecting to find nothing, but also hoping to see some little creatures in the branches — birds or squirrels, insects or bats even.
A fork in the path through the dark trees presents you the choice between a small bridge over a crack through which the level of Hell beneath you is visible before it curves out across the open space to another area of Hell, or you can choose a path that winds deeper into the forest.
Ten, of course, drags you towards the left branch, deeper into the trees.
You do hear something above you in the branches. It snaps a branch in one tree before landing in another. But even when you look up, you can’t tell what it is. You can only see the silvery leaves fluttering down towards you, although they vanish in a puff of smoke before they reach you.
And Yuta swears viciously behind you. Ten forces you to run faster.
And then you hear voices.
Sibilant whispers through the trees. A cackle of laughter.
Up ahead there is a glimmer through the trees, as of a handheld light swinging. The volume of the voices increases, still just incomprehensible whispers.
Ten breaks from the path, branches tear along your arm, tugging at your clothes and your hair. One twig burns across your cheek. The light continues swinging through the trees, and you find yourself rushing forward to meet it.
And then there you are.
Ten comes to a complete stop. You crash into his back, and he reaches back to steady you. Yuta steps around you, moving so he’s shoulder-to-shoulder with Ten, both of them acting as a barrier between you and what lies ahead.
At first you think it is just a small, empty clearing.
But then you see the truth.
A black pool of liquid sits restlessly in the center of the clearing, the surface of it is choppy and bubbling, a gray mist hovers above the surface. A hook beside the pool holds one lantern, casting light down on the pool’s surface, but another light is held by a demon that stands among his peers at the edge of the pool.
They all turn to look at the three of you.
“Ah,” drawls Prince Kun, drawing himself up straight. “There you are.”
His gaze passes casually over your boyfriends before settling on you. He lingers, cocking his head slightly to the side, the look of an intelligent predator glowing in his eyes. At his sides, his brothers shift on their feet, sizing up Ten and Yuta and, to a lesser extent, you.
“Move out of the way, Kun,” Yuta hisses. “We just want to be free, not to hurt you or your brothers.”
“Well, Mother just wants to put you to death.” One of the younger Princes steps forward. “So who are we to stop her from that? We’re just here to stall you until she can arrive.”
“Chenle!” Prince Hendery hisses at the young Prince, jabbing him with his elbow.
Prince Kun glances at his younger brothers, then back at you. “Forgive my brother. He doesn’t truly understand what we’re doing here.”
Yuta curls his hands into fists at his sides. “And what’s that?”
Kun grins, cocky and sly. “We are definitely stalling for Mother to arrive. But not for the reasons he thinks.”
In that moment, you recall Kun’s hushed words in the throne room exchanged between him and Hendery. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll have to steal it from her so I can fulfill my destiny as King,” Kun had said. And here he stands now, posted between you and your freedom, poised with three escapees who will do anything to escape from the Queen’s clutches.
You lean forward, squeezing between Yuta and Ten. “You’re plotting to involve us in something, aren’t you? You’re the Prince who longs to be King, but as long as your mother sits the throne, that’s not possible. And she doesn’t show any signs of abdicating anytime soon, so you’re thinking a little coup…. A convenient ‘accidental’ death by two death-sentenced fugitives in an escape attempt would do well to insure your placement upon the throne without the eternal wait. Hmm?”
Yuta turns to look at you, Ten squeezes your wrist. But you don’t look away from Prince Kun’s vibrant eyes, suddenly alive with hunger as he grins.
“You’re smart. I can see why Yuta and Ten like you so much.” He takes a step towards you. “We used to know each other well, your boyfriends and I. They were my personal guard, best of the best up until my mother decided they were too good to be left on my service, and she repurposed them for a more special mission.”
Again, Yuta and Ten move so they’re blocking you.
“Don’t worry,” Kun placates them, holding his hands up as he says, “Your girlfriend is right.”
Hendery frowns. Chenle takes a step back, casting quick looks at his other two remaining brothers.
The silver haired Prince who interrupted conversation earlier in the throne room interrupts again by stepping forward and placing his hand on Kun’s shoulder. “I’m with you,” he agrees. “You know I’m sick of her control. I want some freedom.”
Kun nods. “Thank you, YangYang.”
The final brother, the one who possesses wings like a bat, shakes his wings at that moment. It’s a dry leathery sound that draws every eye in the clearing to him. He looks first at Hendery and Chenle, then says, “Don’t act like you’ve never thought of it. We’ve all been under the thumb of tyranny for too long. Haven’t we longed for freedom too? To be able to take a short trip up to the mortal world just to see it? To feel the wind on our faces? Feel the light of the sun?”
“She’s our mother.” Chenle bristles.
The brothers turn upon each other then, bickering as they face each other.
Ten turns his head, his eye catching yours. “The pond,” he mutters out of the side of his mouth. “That is the last exit from here. We just have to get in, keep swimming, and we’ll come out where we’re supposed to.”
You understand that magic. Something you’ve come to understand here is that the lines of magic between Watchers and demons and even with Renjun’s elf magic is that they’re all drawn quite closely together, overlapping in many places.
“Make a run for it?” Yuta asks. “While they’re distracted?”
And then everything falls quiet. The Princes cease their arguments. The leaves grow still. Whatever small movements you’d heard in the trees earlier stop altogether. The air turns chill and so fragile that you feel as if a single sound could shatter everything.
She comes from across the clearing, which is one moment empty and then it’s not. She moves silently and smoothly, her long gown dirty at the hem as she passes barefoot over the obsidian soil and detritus of shiny leaves. Her hair hangs free and wild around her shoulders, only a thin gossamer veil hides her face. The air crackles faintly as she moves, the way it does before lightning strikes.
You stare as the Queen of the Night takes a seat, building herself a glittering black throne of shadow and stone as she lowers herself, trusting in her magic to catch her. .
“At last,” she says, her voice a sigh and a rasp, the creak of branches on a stormy night. Even though she wears the veil, which still muddles her features, you can tell she’s got her sights set on you as she continues, “At last we meet, face-to-face, my dear. I’ve waited years for this moment.”
“Mom,” YangYang begins, but the Queen flicks her fingers in his direction, and the young Prince falls silent.
“Your birth, dear child, was an abomination.” Her words are a hiss. “The fact of your creation is disgusting.”
You shrink into yourself at her words, but you can’t bring yourself to look away from her.
“The power held in your bones is enough to transform the world, has anyone told you that?” She leans forward on her throne. “Power enough to feed me for eons if I could just get a taste.”
Yuta firmly steps in front of you, which draws a horrifyingly shrill scale of laughter from the Queen.
“Oh, Yuta, do you think you could really stop me now? You’re weak, both of you,” she says with a lazy gesture towards Ten. “And her blood belongs to me, it calls to me, like to like.”
A chill climbs your spine. “I’m nothing like you.”
Again, the laughter.
“Darling,” the Queen tips her head back, her laughter climbing up into the branches of the obsidian trees. “Just because I don’t share the same toxic combination of blood as you, doesn’t mean we’re not still alike.”
The veil flutters away from her face, folded back over her wild hair by an invisible breeze, and she tilts her face forward again to look at you.
Your heart free falls through the bottom of your stomach, and you clutch at Yuta and Ten as your knees threaten to buckle.
The Queen of the Night wears your mother’s face.
A pleased smile grows on her face at your reaction. “We share blood, my dear. Since learning the truth of your heritage, haven’t you ever wondered why the Queen of demons would spare your mother for her traitorous dalliance with your father? I wouldn’t have done that for anyone, nor would I have offered forgiveness so easily to anyone but my own sister.”
As your shock clears, you see now that her face differs slightly from your mother, but the similarities are certainly there. Her mouth sits a little different, her lips wind a little tighter. She doesn’t have the small mole your mother had beneath her right eye, or the faint scar that cut through her eyebrow. Close but different. Sisters.
“You still did cause her death, though,” Ten interjects. “You may not have chosen to kill her right away, but you did call for her death, as well as the death of the Watcher.”
The Queen snarls, “I had my reasons, Ten. My sister was set to inherit the throne from our father. She had more power, so she should have been Queen of the Night, but she never wanted it.” The Queen laughs before saying, “She fell pregnant, began losing her powers once the holy seed of that Watcher took root, and she slunk away to the mortal world, glad that she no longer would be forced to the throne. But then she produced you.”
Her gaze is piercing, a blade of black ice straight to your heart.
“That is the great irony, of course,” she says to you, “Your mother never wanted power, but she gave life to someone more powerful than any demon, than any Watcher. I took the throne from the King before he could make a deal with my sister, and my first aim was to take your life before you could grow up and realize that you have a claim to my throne. But the Watchers sought you out as well because they were afraid and intrigued by the result of a union between our kinds. We fought a war over your cradle, and it was only because your mother possessed such power that we were thwarted time and again until finally we settled on a treatise for peace.
“You were to be raised in ignorance, never aware of your powers, ignorant of your heritage, of the entire supernatural world that you come from. So long as my sister could keep you unaware of this throne, and of the immensity of power you could have, we weren’t to touch a hair on your little head. My throne would be safe as long as you were blind to its existence, and the Watchers need not worry about your power if you didn’t realize you had it either.” She leers at you, such violence in your eyes that you can tell some part of the Queen – your mother’s own sister – longs to throw herself at you and attack.
To your surprise, it’s the youngest prince that speaks up now. “So what happened, Mother?”
She spares her son a minute glance. “I found a loophole, Chenle. I couldn’t have a living risk to my throne, despite the treaty. I knew the Watchers were surely looking for a way around it as well. Like I said, a half-demon half-Watcher is an abomination. Your mother was my sister, dear,” she addresses you again, “and I loved her dearly. But there was this tiny little loophole in our peace accord that meant you were only safe from us while you were under her protection. So, yes, I called for her death. And for good measure, the death of that Watcher as well.”
The Queen claps her hands, brushing her palms against each other as if ridding herself of dirt. “I sent a small troop of demons after her. They were to dispatch her and the mortal lover she took to help raise you, and once they were both gone, my demons were supposed to locate you as well, to bring you to me.” Her smile goes sharp as she says, “But they returned empty-handed, to my never-ending disappointment, and there was no sign of you. Somehow you were still protected by my sister even after her death. So, I set Yuta and Ten on your trail, and like the loyal bloodhounds they were, they eagerly went in search of you.”
The Princes – your cousins, apparently – all stand there, staring at their mother as she unleashes this story. You’re at least relieved to see that none of them look at her with any approval or admiration. Kun actually looks more angry and more determined than he did before.
“Raging cunt,” Yuta whispers under his breath.
The Queen looks at him, her mouth twisting in a tight smile. “I wanted them to bring me your heart. But strangely their loyalty wavered as soon as they met you, and they hid you in Hell City, knowing that I couldn’t go there myself. Of course, them hiding you from me only made me want you more. Originally, I planned to only consume your power, and send you back to the mortal world to live your sad, plain mortal life.”
You can’t imagine going back to your life before. You’ve tried that once already since having your eyes opened to this world, and you couldn’t do it. She would have to erase all of your memories of this — of Ten, Yuta, WinWin, and Mark; of the Watchers and demons; of everyone and everything that has transformed your life over the last several months.
You do not want that.
Not that you’d be willing to give her your power regardless. You’ve barely met her, but judging by the hate her own sons feel towards her, you doubt she would do any good with the powers she would steal from you.
“Now that they’ve betrayed me,” the Queen continues, “I have to show some punishment in return, do I not? No longer do I long just to punish Ten and Yuta with their own demise, nor to satisfy myself with your power and sending you merrily on your way. Now that you’ve conveniently dropped yourself into my lap, dear niece…” Her lips curl in a wicked grin, her sharp teeth shine in the light as she declares, “I’m going to eat your heart and make them watch.”
Suddenly, it doesn’t matter what Prince Kun was planning. You don’t give a damn if he was going to end his mother quickly or brutally unleash years of pent up rage on her.
All you know in that moment is that Yuta and Ten both lunge for the Queen. And you are filled with a white-hot rage that your physical body simply can’t contain – the inferno breaks through the barrier of your skin, and you can see yourself reflected in the black mirror of the Queen’s eyes.
In that moment you are more demon than anything else, just a raging inferno incarnate, hurtling at the Queen.
Her sons stand frozen, watching.
Yuta and Ten fall back, at your sides like two wings of shadow as you fly across the clearing, and the Watcher part of you pulls together your flames into the shape of a fiery blade, casting you in its golden light, painting you as a vision of a vengeful angel.
The Queen’s eyes widen, but her lips curl in an awed smile — full of terror and delight as you come soaring towards her — even at the very moment that you swing your blade, as it connects with her throat.
Her wicked head separates from the rest of her unholy body.
Her smile doesn’t falter even as her head falls from her shoulders, her tangled hair twisting over her face as her head rolls across the floor of the clearing.
One of the Princes cries out, another turns and you hear him vomiting into the grass.
You point the tip of your fiery blade at the corpse of your mother’s sister, the Queen of the Night. A twisted, dark part of you considers cutting open her chest, pulling out her heart, and eating it in front of her sons much like she had wanted to do to you. But you restrain yourself, satisfying the urge by simply touching the tip of the blade to her body and watching it engulf her in flames.
A hand falls on your shoulder as you watch the body burn.
“That’s enough, my love.” Yuta’s voice is gentle, placating, trying to get you to draw back into yourself because you’re still masquerading as a vengeful angel, wreathed in dancing flames.
Ten reaches for your hand that isn’t clutching the sword. “Come back to us, darling.”
You’re not sure whether you drop the sword or if it just simply vanishes from your grip, but your hand is empty as you lift it to Ten’s face. His eyes flutter shut as you brush the backs of your still-afire fingers against his cheek. His fingers trace up your burning skin from the bend of your elbow up to the softness of your inner wrist, and when his fingertips connect in a loop around your wrist, Ten opens his eyes as he turns his head and sighs over your skin.
His breath is a gentle wave, extinguishing your flames in a domino effect beginning with your fingertips and spreading everywhere until you stand as normal before them. A little smokier and charred than usual perhaps, but otherwise normal. Your clothes seem to have barely survived your personal inferno.
Beside you, Prince Kun clears his throat.
Ten drops his hold on your wrist, but he doesn’t let go of your other hand, nor does Yuta release your shoulder.
Kun’s brothers are gone from the clearing, save Prince YangYang who lingers at the mouth of the path, looking back at you and his eldest brother, although you can tell he’s determinedly not looking at what remains of his mother – her head and the smoking lump that used to be her body.
“Can I have a moment alone with the Prince… or King?” You ask your boyfriends. You’re looking at Kun, but he’s not looking at you.
Yuta squeezes your shoulder and takes a step back, but when Ten lingers, Yuta has to take him by the hand and pull him away to the other end of the clearing. YangYang disappears too, leaving just you and Kun and the dead Queen.
“Well, that’s done,” Kun sighs after a few moments. He lifts his gaze from the corpse, and to your surprise, he offers you his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, cousin. She never told us that’s what you were to us. Actually, I’m not entirely sure how much my younger brothers knew of her hunt for you.”
You look over at the path down which YangYang disappeared. “I know this is along the lines of what you wanted, Prince Kun. But what of your brothers? They may have agreed to having her off the throne, but was this too much?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know how they thought it was going to happen. But once she started threatening you, I could see where it was going. Honestly,” Kun says, nudging his mother’s disembodied head with the toe of his shiny shoe, “I don’t know what she thought would happen. As if you were just going to peacefully give yourself up and let your lovers watch you be eaten by her?” He scoffs and turns away from the smoking remains of the former Queen of the Night. “You should leave, cousin. Now, before the realm realizes what you’ve done. There’s deeply-rooted demon magic in this place, and if you don’t hurry, I can’t guarantee that you’ll make it out.”
Your first thought is his brothers – that they’ll turn on you and sic the demon army and all sorts of horrible beasts after you. But Kun quickly clarifies, “Whatever magic was used to build this place knows who is in charge, and if it senses that the Queen was murdered, it might do things to ensure that you don’t escape. It’ll close the exits, set the hellhounds after you. My brothers won’t get involved, don’t worry about that.”
A knot works its way up your throat, drawing tighter and tighter until you force out the question that’s been bothering you. “And what of you, Your Highness? Are you going to pursue justice for your mother after I leave? Am I going to continue being hunted by demonkind for the crimes I’ve committed here, for the power I possess that apparently gives me a claim to a throne that I swear I don’t want?”
Kun smiles and shakes his head. “Trust me, cousin, I don’t give a damn what you do with the rest of your life. Be free. Take Yuta and Ten with you, and be happy. As long as you don’t try to make a bid for my throne, you’re free to live your life in the mortal world or in Purgatory with the other Watchers; you can even visit or live in Hell, I don’t care.”
You know exactly where you want to be. You want to return to Ira’s island, safely with Ten and Yuta in tow. You want to be reunited with WinWin and Mark because although it’s only been a day since you left them behind, it feels like it’s been months. And it’s been even longer since you’ve had all four of your boys together, and you just know that it’s going to feel so good to have them together, all yours.
But now the Queen is out of the way, Kun is telling you that you’re free to go, and the pond that Ten says is the portal back to the surface world is right there.
You sigh.
You’ve almost got everything you want.
And then the surface of the pond begins to bubble and slosh over the sides. With a vast cloud of steam that erupts and fills the air with the smell of burnt rubber, the pond dries up entirely.
“Shit,” Kun swears, “That’ll be the deep magic I was telling you about. It’s trying to lock you in.”
Distantly, you hear baying – howling and barking that sends an uncontrollable shiver through your entire body.
“And that’ll be the hellhounds. As I recall, the alpha Cerberus wasn’t particularly fond of Yuta the last time they encountered each other.” Kun looks past your shoulder towards your boyfriends. “Run. I highly recommend going as fast as you can back to the palace. Ten should know the way to the mirror.”
You turn away, ready to heed Kun’s words as you can already tell the hellhounds are growing closer.
Kun catches your wrist before you can take two steps. “My last piece of parting advice, if the hellhounds catch up to you… don’t look back. Not even once you’re through the portal.”
You don’t ask why. You don’t linger for another moment as a loud snarl sounds from somewhere along the path across the clearing.
“Let’s go!” Yuta hisses, racing forward to grab your hand.
Ten leads the way, setting out full pelt. Yuta’s fingers stay laced with yours as you sprint back through the obsidian forest, across a bridge, down a crumbling set of stairs to the next level of Hell. The whole time, you can hear the growling of the hellhounds chasing after you, and whether it’s through your own supernatural strength or just pure luck, you manage to keep ahead of them.
Ten winds and wends you through Hell, up and down stairs and through tunnels. At one point he leads you and Yuta to leap over a chasm between two areas, a deep river of magma swirling at an incredible heat beneath you.
You wish you had the chance to actually look around and explore Hell because from what you can see of it, it truly looks like an interesting place. But any time you slow even slightly to admire the bizarre architecture and landscaping of this realm, you hear the scraping of claws against stone, the panting of the hounds, and Yuta’s grip drags on your hand to speed you along after Ten.
“When we reach the mirror,” Yuta tells you, his voice shaken with each labored breath, “You’re going first. Ten and I will be behind you to try to fend off the hounds if they follow. We’ll be right behind you.”
“No, I want you two in front of me where I can see you, so I know that we’re all making it out of here.” You try to argue, but that’s pretty hard to do when Yuta’s suddenly jerking you around a sharp corner, Ten’s footsteps slap against the stone ahead of you, and you can see the three of you are rapidly approaching a wall.
Ten skids to a stop, and you watch as he starts touching the wall, running his hands along it at eye-level, searching for a seam. Just as his fingers catch on something that you can’t see, as you hear a faint click and a panel in the wall pops inward slightly, you hear the clatter of tiny pebbles being kicked across the floor and claws scrambling to turn a sharp corner.
You don’t even realize you’ve begun to turn your head towards the sound until Yuta’s palms are warm on your cheeks, keeping your head from facing back. “No, you can’t look at them. That’s how the hounds trap souls that attempt escape. If you look at them, if they look back at you, they’ll capture your soul and you’ll be stuck. Don’t look at them. Follow Ten.”
“Come on!” Ten cries as he holds open the door he’s found, waving you and Yuta forward.
No sooner have you both crossed the threshold than the door slams shut behind you. A split second after that, there’s an immense bang as a heavy body throws itself against the door.
“They might not be able to open this door,” Ten says, “But it’s not going to stop them from finding us for long.”
“Where are we?” The space you’re in is almost entirely black, only a faint glow emanates from small crystals embedded in the walls.
Yuta answers, “The palace. This is a servant’s entrance to the royal baths.”
Ten snaps his fingers, and a ball of fire appears in his palm, illuminating his face. “I wish that we could take you to the baths, darling. They’re exquisite. Heated by the magma core, so it’s delightfully warm. There’s every scent of every kind of body care you could hope for. When we were in Prince Kun’s service, I admit I spent quite a bit of time in the baths.”
“Too much time enjoying the pleasures of the baths rather than working, if I recall,” Yuta laughs. “And as wonderful as a nice bath sounds right now, shouldn’t you be taking us to the Queen’s mirror? I assume you know some secret, faster way to get there?”
Ten grins. “Like I said earlier, I spent plenty of time exploring the secrets of the palace.” He looks at you, his dark eyes reflecting the light of his flame, the heat of his passion. “I know a shortcut that’ll get us there in no time. And the sooner we’re free and it’s just us, the better. I’ve missed you so much, darling. I fully plan to make up for lost time, and remind Mark and WinWin that we were your lovers first.”
His fingers brush your collarbone where your shirt has been burnt away, and you know there’s probably a hickey or the lasting imprint of Mark’s teeth there.
Yuta is smiling. “I’m excited to see them, too.”
“Then let’s go. The sooner, the better.”
Ten nods, turns, and begins walking off down the dark tunnel. Behind you, there’s another solid thud against the door, the baying howl of a frustrated hound, and then silence.
“There’s a main door to the palace not too far from here,” Yuta tells you, “So we’d better hurry before the hounds reach it. I fucking hope Ten knows the secret passages as well as he thinks he does.” He waits for you to take off at a jog before he follows at the same pace, chasing after Ten’s distant flame.
When you step out into an open chamber, you’re surprised by the stunningly humid air ripe with floral scent until you realize this is the royal baths. The baths have been dug into the floor, and their surfaces give off curls of steam that rise to caress the ceiling, lovingly wrap around you and welcome you in. Iridescent bubbles float from the surface of one bath that smells like cotton candy, and another bath you pass by shimmers like the water is made of molten gold.
Ten’s light is just a hazy orange glow ahead of you, and you nearly lose sight of him as the steam grows thicker around you and Yuta. Yuta has one hand touching your lower back as you wind carefully through the pools that make up the baths. At one point, in a narrow ledge between two pools, your foot does slip on the slick surface, and it’s only by Yuta quickly grabbing the back of your clothes that you manage to not take a dip in the unnaturally blue water.
You can feel the humidity threading through your hair, dampening it until it sticks against your face and neck. You’re sure you almost look as if you had actually fallen into the pool, but as you finally draw up next to Ten, you’re pleased to see that he looks the same, and Yuta does as well although he’s raked his fingers through his hair to push it back away from his face.
“Here,” Ten murmurs, “One of you hold this.”
You offer up your hands, and Ten pours his flame into your palms.
You’re reminded of the first day you made your own flame, sitting with Ten, his hands warm on yours, his flame passed from his fingertip to yours, the way it had felt like a fluttering heartbeat. Now you feel that way again, and you realize how familiar Ten’s fire feels, like a welcome kiss from your long lost lover.
You pull your hands towards your chest, longing to press his flame over your heart.
Ten crouches on the floor in the middle of the room.
Here, the floor is made up of a million tiny tiles all coming together to make a mosaic image of a figure upon a throne over the burning masses below. An interesting choice of artwork for a relaxing bath space, but whatever, everyone has their own taste in artwork.
Ten runs his fingers over the tiles, and you watch the colors shift, responding to his touch. Until he reaches the small tiled throne. It glows as his fingers pass over it, and then it transforms into a handle, raised from the floor just an inch or two.
“Yuta, help,” Ten grunts as he fits his fingers around the handle and attempts to haul open this secret passage’s door.
Yuta crouches beside him, and you watch in the wavering light of your handheld flame as they both work in tandem to lift open the hatch.
Ten jumps down, you follow, and Yuta brings up the rear again, dragging the door shut easily as he comes. You pass Ten’s flame back over to his hands so he can lead the way. The passage goes straight for a short distance before it becomes a set of stairs rising upwards.
You’re surprised you only stumble once or twice as the three of you climb the stairs at a run, though luckily it is only a few flights before Ten shoves against a wall, and it swings outwards.
You run out into a large, beautiful chamber. It’s full of rich reds and golds, marble tiles, a large fur rug that looks as though it comes from a massive beast or many pelts sewn together, heavy furniture and fine fabrics. You look around in awe, trying to catch your breath even as Ten drags you forward by the hand.
“It’s just over here.” He directs the words over his shoulder.
Various doors lead out of this room. A large set of double-doors probably lead back out into the rest of the palace, if you had to guess. A smaller set of doors have panes of glass set in them, through which you can make out the dim firelight of Hell, so you assume those doors lead out to a balcony. You’re sure one of the doorways leads to the late-Queen’s bedchamber, another possibly to some kind of an office, and then there’s the small door Ten leads you and Yuta to.
It’s rather nondescript, nearly blending into the wall itself.
You’re just a few short feet from it when you hear a sound coming from the other side of the large double-doors.
Raised voices, panic and heavy footsteps moving rapidly along a corridor outside. And then, amidst the clamor of the guards, the keening howl of hellhounds on the hunt.
“Fucking shit!” Yuta is right behind you, close enough that you feel the kiss of heat as he summons his flames. “Go, Ten. Get her through the mirror. If they make it through, I’ll hold them off.”
Your arm wrenches painfully as you twist around and plant your feet. Ten is still trying to drag you towards the door that leads to the mirror portal, but you won’t leave Yuta.
“No, you can’t stay here!” You argue. “Come with us. If we just run, they won’t catch us.”
Yuta’s fire is burning hot enough to distort the air between you with waves. “I’m not staying behind, I swear. Just until you’re through the portal, and I’ll be right behind you.”
No.
You’re this close.
You reach for him, reaching through the waves of intense heat, and you clasp your hand around his wrist. “Defend our position from inside the room, then. Not from out here.”
There’s a softness in Yuta’s eyes when he’s and your face. His flames dim slightly. “Alright, I guess that works too.”
Ten throws open the small door to the portal room, waving you in first.
The room on the other side is a small, dirt room. There’s nothing to it — dirt walls, dirt floor, dirt ceiling, a singular torch with its end planted in the ground illuminates the bare room; its light is only intensified by the only decoration: the large gilt mirror that stands tall enough and wide enough to be able to admit two tall men standing abreast of each other.
Yuta bumps against your back before sliding around you, and then Ten is there too, his hand at your waist as the door to the room clicks shut.
You can see your image reflected in the mirror — the unwavering image of all three of you standing side by side.
A knot forms in your throat, but now is not the time to cry. You can do that later when you’re all safe and free back in your father’s little bubble, when you’re reunited with Mark and WinWin as well.
On the other side of the door, you hear the loud bang of the double-doors being thrown open. Footsteps, the clacking of claws, the whines of the hounds.
Yuta turns, his flames rising in heat and brightness as he faces the last door between you and the hounds.
Ten wraps his arm around your waist dragging you along with him towards the mirror.
As you stand facing the mirror this time, knowing you’re about to travel through it, you hope it goes smoother than the last time. You lift a hand to the surface, and as your fingertips brush along the image, minuscule ripples expand across the mirror. This mirror feels so much more liquid, like actual cool water, no resistance.
“Go,” Ten urges, “Now. Think of our destination as you pass through, and that’s where this will lead. Go.”
A thud that shakes loose a few clumps of dirt from around the door. You can hear claws scraping against the door, you can see the shadowy movement as one hellhound attempts to dig under the door. The door holds, though it rattles in place.
“Go,” Ten repeats.
“I’ll hold them off,” Yuta growls, and his fire is still building. “But you have to get through.”
“I’m right here, right behind you,” Ten keeps his voice gentle, encouraging. “Just step through the portal, my darling.”
He’s holding one of your hands lightly in his own, and you use that hold of his to have him help you balance as you lift a foot to step through the frame.
Ira’s island, you think, imagining the sight of the lighthouse, of the island, the kitchen, the study, the living room, the cove with the sirens.
The mirror smoothly drinks you in, wrapping around you like stepping into blessedly cool air conditioning after standing in the disgustingly sticky heat of a humid summer day. A long passage extends before you, which is somewhat different from the mirror journey you experienced with Renjun, but it feels so blessedly cool on this side that you don’t hesitate to keep pulling yourself through the mirror. You pass through until all that remains on the other side is your fingertips pinched between Ten’s, but even then, Ten lets go, and the last of you sinks inside the mirror.
Ten stands just on the other side, staring at you through a faintly blue tint.
“Come on,” you say, “Hurry.”
The door into the chamber bursts open. Yuta sends up a wall of flame.
Ten whips around to aid Yuta. You step back towards them, ready to throw yourself through the mirror as well to help, but your palms crash against the inside of the mirror as if it were back to being solid glass, no longer the fluid surface that let you in.
You slam your hands against the glass. You yell, scream, cry, swear.
Both Yuta and Ten stand wreathed in flames, putting up walls of fire between the door and the mirror at their backs. They’re being pushed back, you realize. Soon they’ll be backed against the mirror.
You can see Yuta gritting his teeth together as he puts his all into maintaining the inferno he’s creating. His usual appearance is fading slightly, you can see his true demon features beginning to peek through. The same can be said for Ten.
You hit the glass one more time.
Ten twists his head around to look at you. His eyes are the piercing narrow-eyed slits of his cat-like eyes. “You need to go,” he calls to you.
“No, not without you.” You lean your forehead against the glass. “I can’t come back through. I can’t come to you. Come here, hurry!” You can see shadows, smoky figures moving in the walls of flame Yuta and Ten have thrown up. “Hurry!”
“Go!” Ten shouts, his voice raw, raging, echoing up the passage behind you. And then, a little more gently, “We’re right behind you, I promise. Just trust that we’re behind you, and don’t look back! Now, go!”
This time he says it with enough power in his voice that you stumble back from the force of it.
On the other side of the mirror, Ten turns back to face forward, to face his flames and the hellhounds.
You take another step backward up the passage even though everything in you is telling you not to leave, to run back at the mirror and do something to make it let you through it, even though your mind is saying that, your body won’t obey. Your body is listening to Ten as you turn and start running up the passage.
Your throat feels raw as you pant for breath, but you keep going, running up the sloping tunnel even as you feel as if your chest is going to cave in and your heart is going to burst. You can’t hear anything at all over the racing of your heart and the thunder of your breathing, so you can’t even hear if Ten and Yuta are behind you. Hell, you can’t even tell if the hounds are still pursuing you or not.
Kun’s warning and Ten’s last words ring in your ears.
Don’t look back.
You just have to trust.
Sobs tear from your throat with each jolt of your feet against the ground. You feel like you’ve been running for hours, days, weeks. You just want to peek backwards, to know if they’re behind you because if they’re not then all of this will have been in vain, and they’ll be re-imprisoned in Hell for the crime of the Queen’s death.
Don’t look back.
You’re almost certain you hear a footfall behind you, rock scattering under someone else’s foot. Was that a breath? Was it an echo of your own breathing, or was it the panting of a hellhound almost upon you?
Don’t look back.
An entire lifetime ago, you’d sat in a literature class that taught mythology. At the time, you’d felt a bizarre mixture of shame and interest – your highly religious upbringing made you feel that learning these stories was improper as they were based on false idols, but you were so intrigued by the pantheon of gods, their many stories and interactions with mortals that differed so greatly from the stories of the One God that you were familiar with.
Among those many myths you’d learned in that stuffy classroom, there was the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. The woman who died from a snakebite, and her lover who journeyed into the Underworld to bring her back.
The story comes back to you now.
Orpheus, who rescued Eurydice, who was allowed to bring her back to the mortal world on the sole condition that he didn’t look back at her until they were both in the mortal world. And now, more than ever, you understand that story. You have two lovers behind you, death nipping at your heels, and as you race out of Hell, you can’t look back – it’s a warning you’ve received now twice, and as much as you want to look back to be certain that Ten and Yuta are behind you, you know the mistake Orpheus made; in the last moments before success, Orpheus looked back.
Eurydice was lost forevermore.
It could have just been a tale, except that when poring over tomes and tales at Ira’s kitchen table during the useless planning of this rescue, one account had been that of Orpheus.
A miserable tale that you’d barely been able to stomach reading given your circumstances. How Orpheus, barred from telling her that he was forbidden to look back at her, marched before his wife out of the Underworld, both of them in cold silence. He heard no sign of her – not a footstep or a sniffle, not the sound of her voice or a whisper of her breath as they walked for an eternity – and he wondered if she was truly there, or were the words of the gods false and he was walking this endless path from Hades for no reason?
With mere footsteps left before he and his wife rejoined the mortal world, with hope burning bright in his heart as the light of the Sun warmed his bones, Orpheus couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. As he turned, he heard her anguished cry of his name, he saw the horror on Eurydice’s face, and Orpheus had no choice but to watch as she was reclaimed by shadow and drawn back down into the Underworld, screaming for him.
Don’t look back, Kun and Ten had both uttered the warning, Orpheus’ tale echoing the words at you again.
You run until your knees feel like liquid and your feet like stones, your chest burns with each breath, and surely if you didn’t have the power of your mother and father both in your veins, you’d have collapsed long ago. How far can this path from Hell possibly be?
Your toe catches a loose stone on the floor, and you stumble. Your palms burn as they scuff along the rough floor, your knees bruise and sting where the tatters of your clothes don’t cover them.
There’s no sound behind you. No hands reach forward to help you up and urge you on as you stay there for a moment – hands and knees on the dirty floor with your head bowed as your tears drip into the dirt, your ragged breath still loud in your ears.
Are you alone? Or is that deeply-rooted demon magic Kun mentioned holding Yuta and Ten under the same spell as Eurydice had been – unable to make a sound or touch you, unable to make their real presence known to you?
You find the strength to push to your feet again, to start forward again. Your mind races, and you can’t help thinking, I just want to go home, to be free of all of this. I just want to be happy with my boyfriends again, like we were in our apartment. All four of us. Why did everything have to go so wrong? Why did everything have to play out like this?
You run even as your bones ache and your mouth dries out. You feel hollow.
And then the ground evens out.
And you look up, and you can see watery daylight ahead of you.
You remember this: the sight of the world through the inside of the mirror. The watery distortion of everything when Renjun first led you through a mirror portal to escape the dungeon of the Watchers. You pray the exit runs smoother this time than the last – that you won’t feel like you’re drowning and suffocating and stuck within a glue trap as you had last time.
A fresh burst of energy rolls through you as you see it so close, close enough you can reach out and touch it.
Your fingertips pass through like reaching into water.
Your toe catches the inner lip of the mirror.
The world tilts and blurs, nausea rolls your stomach as you fly through the mirror and dash yourself against the floor on the right side of the mirror.
And you wait.
You don’t dare to turn to look into the mirror. You don’t know what you would be able to see. Does it look just like a regular mirror, reflecting only you and the room you’re in? Is it semi-transparent, so you’re able to see back into the passageway you’ve just escaped through?
But more terrifying than that – in some version of Orpheus and Eurydice, he reached the safety of the mortal world, and rejoicing in that, he turned to celebrate with his wife, only to find that she had yet to pass the border between the realm of Hades and the surface. Thus, he lost her because they were not both with their feet safely on the soil and in the sunlight.
You won’t make that mistake, even if it means you have to wait here forever with your cheek pressed against the wood of the floor, your clothes crumbling even more into charred bits after the rough friction of passing through the mirror and colliding with the world.
Tears still spill down your cheeks, and you squeeze your eyes shut because you’ve nothing to look at anyway.
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a/n: Thank you for reading! I'm so excited to see what y'all think about the rescue finally happening! It was a little bit different than originally planned, both in the opinion of the characters, and also different than I originally planned lol This chapter is the reason it took me so long to finally finish writing this story.
As usual, likes, comments in the tags, reblogs, messages about your thoughts, all of that is of the highest value to me! I love feedback, and I hope you can share this story with more people too 💗
