the moon is full ☾

The dragonborn undoes the lacings of his leather outerwear using the sharpened tips of his claws, delicately catching them under and pulling. The motion is careful and patient, repeated until he can toss the garment into the room's only chair.

It’s not that you don’t want to share a room with him. In fact, you think you want this a little too much. You're absorbed with all of his movements as he primps a bit, adjusting the hem of his shirt so it sits properly, running a palm over his crest, sliding off his traveler's boots. If you're lucky, his shirt will be next and you can catch a peek of the toned spance of his stomach.

"My lady," His teeth flash in the fire light, pearls against the deep, dark opalescent hues of his scales, "You're staring."

"Ah, I'm sorry!" He’s one to talk; you’ve felt his gaze following you for weeks now. That's the only reason you're thinking about him and his body.

And, using that logic, he's the only reason you bought that bodice ripper last week, the one starring a pretty red dragonborn and his human lover--

"Is there something in my teeth?" Obi teases. That earns him a giggle, but, when you don't respond, he exhales through his nose and moves closer. "We're rooming together tonight, so if there's any tension between us, I'd rather-"

"I heard a rumor," you blurt out.

He goes pale. "About me? What did Thyrll tell you?"

"No, about dragonborns in general."

Relief relaxes his features.

"And you just want to know if it's true?" There's a click in his voice as he laughs, something strange and inhumane, "It's okay. You can ask. Let me guess- I eat poor little gnomes? I enchant humans with my-"

"Is it... inside of you?"

The dragonborn pauses at that, eyes wide. "Excuse me?"

"Your..." You cannot believe you're about to say this, "Cock."

"Oh."

You scramble up, hands over your face as you head towards the door. You aren't sure where you're going to go in a nightgown, but anywhere else has to be better than here.

"Oh, I'm sorry! That was so rude of me."

A wall of muscle suddenly blocks your way. Those dexterous hands that you were admiring moments ago are now touching your shoulders, rubbing up and down affectionately.

"It's alright, my lady, I'm just... surprised." He smells like petrichor, something strangely earthy and yet unnatural clinging to his scales, and laughs like summer rain, "I think it's natural to wonder about different races, I just didn't think..."

His sharp eyes are dilated a bit, the pupils closer to almonds than slits as they bounce up and down your body.

"I've had my own... curiosities about others as well," he admits, "So, who am I to judge?"

Your spine prickles at that. Who exactly was he curious about? One of the elves in your party? The barmaid downstairs? Or is it you that the thinks about at night, cock in fist?

The dragonborn misreads the upset look on your face. "I promise that I am not cross with you. How about I answer your questions and you'll answer mine? No judgments."

You settle a bit. "If you're sure."

He smiles a draconic smile, all teeth and the smallest flick of his tongue.

"Of course I'm sure. I'm not embarrassed because my species is a bit different than yours."

You watch him for a long moment. He’s kind. A scoundrel at times, but kind. It's etched into his face, always reflected in his wide, chartreuse eyes.

"So, it is different,” you say carefully.

"It is."

“Very different?”

“When my cock is hard?” He says it so easily. Always proper, it makes you squirm to hear him curse, “No. But when I’m not, it is, in fact inside.”

"It's just... flat down there?"

"Yes- give me your hand."

You weave your fingers in between his without a second thought, but he just shakes his head and pulls away. Then, he takes your still open palm in his and brings it to his torso. The muscle there is just as firmed as you imagined and it's hard not to linger in once spot to appreciate it, Slowly, Obi guides your hand down, running it over the linen of his pants. Underneath, you can feel how it's slightly ridged with larger scales than the rest of his body and, subsequently, larger gaps form in between. It's just skin-- well, it's just scales. You're touching nothing technically intimate, but your heart races anyway, caught in your throat.

"See?" His voice has the edge of a tremble and, when you look up, you realize just how close you two have become. Practically chest to chest, his snout is only inches from your face, close enough that you can see how each individual scale slightly shifts in color as the fire dances. He seems to have realized too; dragonborn expressions are hard to read, but you don't miss how deep his breathing has become.

"It's nothing like touching a human, is it?" he mumbles, hand squeezing yours ever so slightly, “Not intimate at all.”

"Well." You curl your fingers up, clumsily feeling through the fabric, "Maybe a bit.”

The fire crackles in the fireplace. He breathes again, on the brink of a sigh, and you think he’s just as caught up in this as you are.

"Just a bit?" Heat radiates from him. If he were human, it'd be alarming, but instead there's a comfort to it. You're still warm from the bath, and yet you chase that heat, slipping your hand from his just to bring it under the waistline of his pants.

"More than a bit."

He's hot underneath it all, almost uncomfortable to the touch as you explore the space blindly. His eyes haven't left yours, his lids getting heavy with every prod and poke of your fingers.

A vertical line of soft, exposed skin catches your ring finger and his body jumps reflexively as you accidentally dip inside of him. It’s strangely dry, yet much softer than the rest of his scaled body. Despite yourself, you explore it a bit more, pressing in the same way you’ll be playing with your own pussy tonight.

"A-ahh--" The dragonborn sucks in a deep breath and you can feel his abdomen crunch under your touch, "Be careful."

"Did I hurt you?" you ask as you pull away.

His chittering laugh returns. His hands rest on the small of your back, not pushing, but not entirely platonic either. When he talks, the air tastes like distant embers, just far enough away, yet not close enough, "You didn’t hurt me, don’t worry."

“Are you sure?” you press, “You made a weird noise.”

“Very sure,” He dips low enough to press his lips against the shell of your ear, "You’d do the same if I put my fingers inside of you."

This time, the heat is coming from inside you, twisting and pulling with want.

"With your claws?" You manage to joke through your suddenly dry throat, "I might cry."

"I could cut them," His voice is rolling and low as his hands explore, one traveling up your spine and the other dipping the smooth over your ass. When they both reach their zeniths, they switch directions. The silk of your dress catches against his skin, pulling it up and revealing the fat of your ass to the air. "Nice and short."

His nails dig gently into your skin, nothing more than a nip, a test.

"You’re so soft, all over. Your body just gives when I touch it,” There’s a distant tone to his voice as he speaks into the curve of your neck, “Too delicate for me, aren’t you?”

You hum in disagreement and his teeth prove you otherwise. It’s barely a graze, but the nip against your pulse point drags a whimper from deep within you. Your companion chuckles, then coos with pity as he does it again, much, much kinder this time.

“Oh, you’re knock kneed and sweet for me,” The already blossoming bruises are soothed by a warm, textured flash of wet. His tongue is rougher than a humans, longer too, and it leaves behind a string of spit that is more viscous than any human’s. “Like a fawn. My sweet fawn.”

The hand that once explored him is trapped in between your bodies, unable to move, but you can feel something against your stomach: something hard, something thick. Too much cock for your human body, but, fuck, you’re going to try.

“Bet you’re even softer down here.” A singular clawed drags over your bare ass, searching for underwear that isn't there and your body trembles with want, “Oh, look at that, shaking like a leaf. I bet you’d melt if I-”

A sharp knock at the door scrambles you two apart. A moment passes and the sound almost feels imaginary, but then it happens again. You smooth your still wet hair and try to gather yourself, heading to the door in a hurry. Somehow, the dragonborn is more flustered than you. His scales are physically ruffled and his usually stoney brow is creased. He can’t blush, but you swear you can see his face alight as you swing the door open.

There stands a familiar elvish figure, with dark straight hair and the prettiest of smiles.

“Kiri!” you exclaim. She’s a natural beauty, like most elves. All legs and sharp angles, she’s a good head taller than you, leaning over with almost a condescending grin. She’s so beautiful that you almost hate her for it.

“I am sorry to be a bother, rogue.” She speaks in Elvish and the dragonborn’s head tilts slightly side to side, like a dog who hears his name, as he tries to listen. “I came to thank you and the sorcerer.”

“Oh, yeah, no worries,” Your Elvish is unnatural on your human tongue, “We are fine here.”

“My lover thanks you too,” she winks and giggles. She’s over a hundred years older than you, and yet still head over heels like a schoolgirl. Elves might live for thousands of years, but they take hundreds to mature. “We will not be sleeping much tonight.”

You roll your eyes and pretend to gag, biting back a smile, but then Kiri grows serious.

“If he scares you, please let me know,” she continues.

“Obi?” you say, “He’s a sweetheart.”

“I’m sure he is, but those teeth! Like needles. Braver than me, sleeping next to a monster like that.”

You glance at your dragonborn and he looks away before you can meet his eye. A disappointment settles in your stomach. Monster is such an ugly word for a pretty man. Everything about him is charming and refined, from the way he speaks and the way he walks, to the way he shines his scales when he thinks no one is looking.

“That’s rude.” You’re quick to reply. Kiri grew up around only her own kind and their ideas-- she doesn’t always know what’s uncouth or offensive because of it, “Don’t say such awful things.”

“It seems like he’s already gotten hungry.” She jerks a chin to your shoulder. You reflexively reach to cover it, only to pull away when the spot feels wet. Blood speckles your fingers- not enough to warranty any worry, of course, just the slightest graze of the skin.

“That’s not--”

“I tease, I tease!” she continues, “I know it is just a scrape. Can you imagine? To lay with someone who is all claws, fire and untamed magics! I-”

The man in question stalks in between you two silently. With a towel in his arms and a chip on his shoulder, he stomps by with a snort of his nostrils.

“I’m going to bathe.” His Elvish is worse than yours, but it's enough to make Kiri’s face drop. The worst part is that he doesn’t sound angry-- you could deal with anger. Instead, he sounds heartbroken. “I don’t mean to be frightening.”

Nowadays things aren’t so hectic. Osamu’s got a good team of people around him to help Onigiri Miya run smoothly—a team who he trusts and values. It doesn’t all fall onto his shoulders in the same way that it used to: he doesn’t have to be there for every open and every close, his bills are paid, he’s not fighting to lure people in off the street just in the hope that he can scrape by for another week.

Now when he closes early on Sunday, it’s more for the sake of his staff than anything else. Occasionally Osamu will take the night off, too; he’ll go home and catch up on housework, run an errand or two, or even grab dinner—usually with you, though evidently not so much lately. But most Sundays he stays behind after his last employee heads out for the night; locking up behind them, switching off the sign in the window to tell the world the shop is closed, and then holing himself up in his office to do some admin. He’ll grab a plate of whatever’s leftover from the day’s service and a cold can of beer from the fridge, put on a rerun of Atsumu’s game from the night before, and get to work shuffling through the paperwork that he’s left to pile up over the past seven days.

Osamu hates paperwork.

It’s not that it’s particularly challenging work—the really hard stuff is left to his bookkeeper after all. It’s just tedious, a mindless task in many ways, and he always finds his thoughts drifting as he sorts through invoices and inventory registers: catching himself being inattentive halfway through a spreadsheet, and having to force himself to go back to the beginning just to make sure he hasn’t missed anything in his carelessness. 

You used to help him with this kind of work, or at least keep him company while he got through it—sitting on the lumpy couch crammed into one corner of his little office and pretending like you weren’t asleep each time Osamu caught you with your eyes closed. More often than not, he’d throw his jacket over you to keep you warm while you napped and then rush through the last of his work so that he could wake you up and get you home. But just having you there on those late nights was enough for him; your presence was the thing that helped.

Coffee is his only saving grace, these days.

Samu shuffles out to the front of the shop on one such Sunday evening, taking off his baseball cap and ruffling the hair underneath tiredly. He’d finally gotten a trim, and he’s glad that things feel a bit more normal again as he rakes his fingers through it—his mother had been right when she remarked that it was getting too long the week before. He tosses his hat down on the front counter of Onigiri Miya, rounding the end to grab a sachet of instant coffee from behind the bar where he keeps his emergency stash.

The overhead lights in the shop are off, but there’s enough brightness filtering out from the still-lit kitchen that he doesn’t need to struggle to see as he prepares himself some hot water to add to the mug in front of him. He tips the granulated contents of his instant coffee sachet into the bottom after ripping it open with his teeth, tapping the empty plastic packaging against the edge of the cup to make sure it all comes out. The kettle behind him hums quietly as it heats to boiling, and Osamu sighs, leaning back against the counter with his arms crossed over his chest.

He stares out at the restaurant—his restaurant, as hard as he still finds it to believe some days—his gaze sweeping over the tables with their corresponding chairs resting atop them. One of the staff had mopped the floors at the end of the night, which left them still slightly wet and glistening. There’s light filtering in through the front windows from the streetlights and the other shops that line the Osaka street outside, and their glow catches in the water that hasn’t yet dried from the tile.

Osamu’s eyes suddenly snap up to the glass that lines the front of the restaurant.

There’s a silhouetted figure—so familiar he could trace it even with his eyes closed, from memory alone—standing on the other side of the door.

Osamu blinks, thinking that the paperwork must have finally gotten the best of him, or maybe that the beer he’d had earlier is inexplicably hitting him too hard. But no matter how many times he squeezes his eyes shut, the familiar shape stays where it is on the other side of the glass each time he opens them again.

His heartbeat thumps, loud and wet, in his ears.

Like the shot of a gun, the man stumbles gracelessly into action: loping around the end of the bar and slipping slightly on the wet tile as he heads towards the door. He fiddles with the lock as he struggles to unlatch it, accidentally trying to force it the wrong way in his haste before eventually getting it right. When he finally throws open the door, a gust of cool night air flooding into the restaurant along with it, he takes in a deep, gasping breath.

“Hey.”

His voice is shaky when he greets you—mostly air and very little shape to the word.

You stare at him from a few paces away, your arms crossed firmly over your chest and a frown tugging down the corners of your mouth. Osamu thinks you look pretty when you’re mad. He always has. But it’s worse now because he knows all too well that he shouldn’t—because he knows you’re mad at him. 

You seem to have something to say, he can tell as much from the almost spiteful glint in your eyes, but you stay tightlipped as you simply stare at him.

“D’ya… wanna come in?” Osamu asks, still holding the door open. He nods his head back into the shop. “Still got some stuff prepped, I could make ya—“

“You’re a jerk.”

Osamu blinks, taken aback.

“Yeah,” he agrees plainly after a moment, thinking it’s only fair of you to say given then circumstances. 

His concurrence only seems to upset you more.

“Like, you’re a real asshole, y’know that?” You’re nearly spitting you’re so angry, your features twisted up in contempt. Your arms uncross and drop down to your sides, and Osamu watches as your hands ball into fists. He’s the one who taught you how to throw a punch, years and years ago now, and he’s wondering if he’s about to experience a practical demonstration of his teaching abilities firsthand.

“I don’t necessarily disagree.” He nods, agreeing with you once more, though this time his response is slower, more hesitant—not because he doesn’t mean it, but because he’s not sure that it’s what you want to hear.

“Ugh!” Your following exclamation is loud, and palpably frustrated, all but confirming his suspicions. “You…!”

Your tone is climbing with every passing second, and Osamu looks furtively up and down the road around the two of you. It’s late in the evening but there are still a few people out, and he sees heads turning in your direction at the commotion.

“Hey,” he says, his own voice dropping in volume but still pleading all the same. “My name’s on the door and we’re gettin’ some weird looks. I wanna hear everythin’ you have to say, but could you please just say it to me inside?”

You look at him blankly, your lips puckering into a petulant, unhappy pout. You seem like you want to say no, to keep causing a scene, and for a second Osamu really thinks you’re about to round in on him again. Instead you trudge forward, stomping past him over the threshold of Onigiri Miya.

Osamu hesitates for a moment after you pass, half in shock and half in relief, and then he lets the door swing closed and locks it behind him for good measure—he’s not sure he wants any unsuspecting people coming in search of onigiri and stumbling upon a brawl.

It’s dim in the restaurant when he turns to face you, but he can still see your fury burning in the dark.

Neither of you say anything.

“You can keep goin’ if you want,” Osamu is eventually the first to speak, and he means what he says. This is the least of the punishment he deserves, after all. And hearing you yell at him is markedly better than the silence.

“Martyrdom doesn’t suit you at all,” you mutter sullenly.

Osamu sighs, scrubbing his hand over his face. “I just wantcha to say whatcha came here to say.”

You begin to pace as you work through your thoughts, slowly walking back and forth in front of the counter, picking at your cuticles. You’d put a fair amount of distance between the two of you, and he’s sure it was intentional. Osamu keeps himself confined to the entryway near the door, while you walk a path back and forth along the length of the service counter. His eyes follow every step you take, like a captivated child watching fish at the aquarium.

“I had a terrible dream last night,—” you finally force the words out, your feet stilling against the shiny tile as your pacing comes to a sudden halt.

Osamu decides to just do the right thing and shut the hell up for once, giving you the floor.

“—I was going to buy 30 kilos of rice from Kita-san’s farm—”

That’s a lot of rice, Osamu wants to note, but his lips part to let the words through and then he decides better of it.

“—and I was there, at the farm, and then Kita-san started telling me that you got married and had a baby. A baby, Samu! Kita-san standing there telling me all these terrible things with that big bag of rice in my hands, and I couldn’t even get mad at him because he’s Kita! So I just had to listen to him go on and on and on about the venue and the flowers and the baby name that you picked out. And the more he’d tell me the worse it was, and the bag of rice just kept getting heavier.” Your teeth bite down so hard into your lip as you suck in a breath that Osamu's amazed he doesn’t see blood. “I was hearing all of these things—terrible things—and all I could think was that I should have been there to see all of that for myself. I shouldn’t have been hearing about it from someone else. And I realized that you were living a whole life apart from me, a life that I didn’t know about or get to be a part of, and it just kept getting worse and worse and I woke up and I felt like I was going to scream.”

You’re out of breath by the time you finish your rambling thought, your chest heaving and your eyes wild and your mouth faintly wet. You look to him, and Osamu doesn’t see that same indignation in your eyes anymore, only hurt. He watches as the expression hardens again, whets itself like a blade—sharpened not in anger, but rather in resolve. In resignation.

“That day. I looked for you first.”

Osamu feels lost now. Are you still talking about that dream?

You understand without him saying it, and explain yourself further. “In high school. The day that I kissed Suna.”

Osamu’s stomach drops, all of the blood rushing to his head so quickly that the shop begins to spin a little around him. He can hear his pulse in his ears. He can feel it in his throat. He can’t help the twist of jealousy in the pit of his stomach, writhing and ugly though it may be, at the mere mention of his friend’s name. He doesn’t have the right to feel the way he feels, but it happens all the same.

“I looked for you,” you keep going, like you’ve broken a seal and have to let it all out. Osamu doesn’t dare try to stop you. He couldn’t even if he wanted to. He watches on like it’s a conversation that’s happening not with him but rather to him. “You were eating lunch with Tsumu in your classroom. I realized he would have had a fit if he knew that I was asking you and not him. I thought about asking him but…”

Osamu can’t feel his fingers from how tightly his hands are balled into fists at his side. His lungs burn in his chest—the breath he’s holding having long since lost the oxygen his body needs, though he can’t seem to draw in another.

“If it wasn’t you, I didn’t care who it was. So I asked Suna.”

The young man processes your words slowly. Incompletely. Like only every third word seems to register.

“Ya wanted me to be yer first kiss?” It’s not the question he ought to ask you but it’s the one his brain chooses to spit out.

Your reply is frustrated, but with an unmistakably melancholic rasp running through it. “Yeah. I did.”

Somewhere distantly, Osamu recognizes a sharp, stinging pain. An ache as part of him realizes that it could have been him. All along. All this time. Him. But the pain is muted, because part of him—most of him—still doesn’t quite understand.

“I think that was the first time I realized it.” 

Osamu watches your face, maps the achingly familiar lines and dips and curves of your features as he tries to read meaning in the space between your words. But he still finds nothing.

“I liked you, Samu. More than I should have. Differently than I liked Tsumu, or Suna, or any other guy.” You laugh, but it’s a hollow, watery sound. “I realized it and it was awful.”

You’re waiting for him to say something, but Osamu is at a loss for words. No, that’s not quite it either. It’s not that he has nothing to say, but that he has everything he wants to say to you. To ask you. But he doesn’t know where to start, or how to sort through them, or even how to will his lips, teeth, and tongue to shape any of them.

“You… Y’know ya don’t have to say this,” his voice is tight, like a rope drawn to secure a knot not unlike the one in his throat, when he finally manages to speak. “Ya don’t have to pretend or convince yourself that you… felt the same as me. I care about ya too much to ever ask that.”

You laugh—a single, sharp, distinctly mirthless ha!—as you throw your hands up in exasperation. “There you go again not letting me have any say, Samu!” You punctuate your exclamation with a frustrated little sound. “Stop deciding things all on your own and just listen to me.”

That shuts him up again.

“I thought I was over it,”—you begin to pace once more, your steps slow and measured—“I really did. I told myself it would never happen and moved on because I never ever wanted to fuck things up between us. Between any of us.

“You told me that you’ve loved me your whole life, but you don’t know if or when something changed. I do. I had a singular moment that I could point to where I realized that if I did or said the wrong thing after that, I could fuck up something that meant more to me than anything else in the world. Even if you felt the same way I did, there’s no guarantee that something like that would work out. But if we tried and it didn’t work, we wouldn’t be able to just go back to how things were. So I told myself that no matter what I wouldn’t. No matter how hard it was or how awful it felt. I could get over it if it meant I never had to lose you. And it was fine. For years it was fine. We were fine. Everything was fine. And then I lost you anyway.”

You suddenly stop pacing and crouch down, your arms winding themselves around your knees as if to comfort yourself. 

“That night, when you…” You swallow, and risk a glance up at him. “I don’t think I’m over it.”

Osamu feels like he might die. Maybe he did already. Maybe this is his life passing before his eyes, because it’s always been you anyway.

“But it’s scary, Samu,” your voice is so small, so vulnerable, when you speak to him again. You’re trembling as you hold yourself. “Aren’t you scared?”

Osamu is suddenly reminded of that fall day in the woods, so many years ago now. Reminded of two kids who didn’t know what they were doing. Who didn’t know anything. But who knew each other.

Slowly, Osamu crouches too—his joints cracking in protestation as he drops his body down to your level. Your eyes never leave his.

“Yeah,” he says, after a moment. Soft but sure. “‘Course I am.”

You let out a soggy, incredulous laugh, but it somehow doesn’t feel out of place. He watches as you reach up and scrub at your eyes.

“I love you,” Osamu says, because it’s true. Because there’s no other words he can possibly think to say in this situation. Because it’s the only thing that he has in his mind.

You look over at him, sniffling a little, wiping at your running nose with the back of your hand in a way that Osamu absolutely should not find as endearing as he does. “How can you just say it like that? Like it’s so easy?”

Osamu wants to laugh too, like you did earlier, but he worries that the sound might come off as almost hysterical thanks to the misplaced hope he can feel simmering in the pit of his stomach. “Sayin’ it’s the hard part, that’s why it took me so long. But I’ve spent forever lovin’ ya. S’always been the easiest bit.”

You choke back a sob, your head hanging defeatedly as your body slackens. You’re a ghost of the angry little thing that was outside of his door only a few minutes earlier, but more yourself now than Osamu has seen you in weeks.

“What about you?” he poses the question so quietly he might worry you didn’t hear him if not for how silent the dark shop is around you both.

“What do you mean?” You know what he means. He knows you know what he means. You’re stalling, trying to buy yourself time that’s run out now.

“Do you love me?” he asks, praying to anyone who’s listening that he’s been a good enough man up until this point to deserve the answer that he wants to hear more than anything else in the world.

“Of course I do,” you say evasively, refusing to meet his gaze. But it’s not the same. It’s not enough.

“But are you in love with me?” Osamu finally dares to ask.

There’s a stretch of the most painful, profound silence that either of you have ever experienced. It goes on for an eternity, though the clock hands in the corner say differently.

You still refuse to look at him, your gaze fixed instead to a point on the wall on the other side of the restaurant. Osamu watches how the light from the windows catches in the tears that cling to your bottom lashes.

“Yeah, I am,” you say, barely a whisper. You speak the confession like it’s the most terrifying thing imaginable. Like it's wretched.

And it is maybe, but Osamu’s never felt happier to hear anything in all his life—he feels a rush of something so visceral and elated flowing through him, he thinks he might pass out.

“Can I touch ya?” he asks hesitantly, his voice thick and unlike its normal tone. He hardly recognizes it as his own.

You peek over at him for the first time, and Osamu revels in the feeling of having your eyes on him. Delights in watching you watch him and knowing that behind the gaze is the same feeling as the one he holds inside of himself. You consider it for a moment, and he doesn’t dare rush you, but eventually—mercifully—you nod. 

Osamu inches forward slowly and wraps you in his arms. Your body relaxes into his hold instantly, and he pulls you into his lap on the tiled floor. He holds you so tightly that he’s scared he might break you, but he still can’t find it in himself to be more delicate. You cling to him anyway.

It’s the first time he’s touched you in months, but every inch of you is still known to him. Still familiar in every way that matters. You smell the same. You feel the same. You’re soft and warm just like always. Osamu buries his face into the crook of your neck, and your fingers eventually lift to play with the hair at his nape. He holds you, and holds you, and holds you more—sating a thirst that’s been building for longer than the time the two of you have been apart.

And you let him.

You hold him too, in the same way.

“If I kiss ya, you gonna cry again?” Osamu asks you quietly after a while, his lips brushing against your throat as he murmurs the words.

You snort, your fingers twisting into the material of his t-shirt at his shoulders. Osamu peels himself away from you and looks up, and finds that your faces are so close. Too close, in any other circumstance.

His palm lifts, cupping your cheek in his hand, running his thumb against the smooth skin underneath.

“Shut up, Samu,” you say, a little smile twisting up the corner of your mouth.

It almost surprised you how neatly the totality of your life’s possessions fits into boxes.

The entirety of your childhood bedroom, admittedly forgoing your rather impressive collection of stuffed animals, fits more or less into 12 boxes - along with a couple of suitcases that you use to transport your clothes, and your backpack stuffed to the brim with notebooks, your laptop, and a lonely pair of socks you forgot to put in with the rest of your apparel.

The heaviest boxes are those containing your plentiful collection of books: a mix of well-loved and re-read novels, and the textbooks you accumulated in your first year of university. The lightest box is the one you’d packed last, stuffing odds and ends into that you’d forgotten to put into other boxes - including a last minute addition of your favourite stuffed teddy bear from childhood, named Oscar, who you couldn’t bear to leave behind (no pun intended.)

All in all, it only takes the movers you hired around 45 minutes to unpack the contents of the small box truck and lug it up to your new apartment: a quaint two-bedroom on the third floor of a building not too far from your university’s campus. You thank them when they leave, offering them each a cold bottle of sports drink you’d made a point of setting aside in the fridge before they arrived - they accept both the beverages and your words of thanks gratefully.

After only an hour, the move that you’ve been anticipating for the better part of the summer is finally over.

You’re then left with the challenge of unpacking.

The apartment is already mostly furnished by your new roommate, Sasha, who has been living there for a year already. When her previous roommate moved out at the end of the school year prior, she’d made a post on your university’s Facebook group advertising a room for rent. Though you didn’t know her particularly well, you were coming off a year of living with a terrible roommate in a cramped dorm room with abysmal campus food, and jumped at the prospect of better living conditions.

You met for coffee one afternoon before the semester ended late in the spring, toured the apartment quickly, and had already made plans to move in at the end of the summer by the time you’d made it back to your residence.

Sasha seemed nice enough: outgoing, relaxed, and with a serious appetite judging by how quickly she scarfed down not one but two pieces of cake in the cafe where you met up just down the road from the apartment. You’d only exchanged a few texts in the weeks leading up to your move-in, to coordinate getting a set of keys and various other logistical details, but she seemed nice - leagues better than your last roommate - and you were looking forward to getting to know her better.

The move went as smoothly as it possibly could; the boxes were packed ahead of time; the movers were highly rated, punctual, and professional; and everything was neatly labelled so that when it came time to start unpacking it would be easy to do. You're a notorious planner, so you’d accounted for every possible misstep and planned contingencies in the case they occurred.

One thing you hadn’t planned for, however, was the heat.

It made sense that the one singular thing that you had absolutely no control over would be the thing to go wrong; the weekend you planned your move, your university town was being hit with the worst heat wave it had seen in thirty years.

And of course, your A/C is broken.

“The landlord said he’ll send someone over to look at it on Monday,” Sasha says, sweeping a hand across her perspiring brow as she stands near the front door.

The movers had just left, your furniture and boxes all piled high in your new bedroom, and Sasha was just about to head to work for the day - having informed you on first meeting that she works part-time through the summer at a bakery a few blocks away with her boyfriend, Niccolo.

It’s only Friday, which means you’ll have to suffer through another excruciating four days of heat before you have any hope of reprieve.

“How nice of him to come fix it after the worst of the heatwave has passed,” you grumble to yourself, pulling the material of your t-shirt away from the sticky skin of your abdomen.

Sasha laughs a little at your bitter response. “The bakery has A/C - you should come by later if you need to cool off!” she says with a smile, which you endeavour to reciprocate in spite of your disgruntlement. With a final wave of her hand she ducks out the door, leaving you to the heat and your boxes.

You pad across the apartment, back into your bedroom, tugging your shirt off as you go.

It’s simply too hot for clothes.

You survey the boxes around the room warily, and with a long world-weary sigh you set to work unpacking.

Twelve boxes had been easy enough to move, but were a hell of a lot harder to unpack when the air felt as thick as concrete.

You make good progress throughout the day, and when four of the twelve boxes have been completely unpacked you take a much needed break to chug the last sports drink in the fridge and sit on your new balcony to cool off.

You’d stripped down to the absolute barest amount of clothes human-decency allowed while you worked: a simple pair of athletic shorts and a sports bra. But it still feels like too much fabric given the oppressive heat hanging in the air.

You watch the people passing by in the streets below from your seat on your apartment’s balcony, scraping your bare toes across the concrete beneath your feet - even in the covered shade the ground is still hot to the touch.

As you sit out in the practically non-existent afternoon breeze, you find your attention particularly focused on the people entering and exiting the little convenience store on the corner across the street. You watch as people duck into the sliding doors of the store, emerging minutes later with plastic bags dangling from their hands. Some people emerge with popsicles, others with cold drinks - most seeming to turn to the convenience store to help them survive the veritable hellscape that wasn’t set to pass for at least another few days.

You make a note to run over to the shop yourself and grab some more drinks before the day is over, knowing you’ve completely depleted your stock.

You don’t linger long outside, realizing that thanks to the stagnant air there’s little difference in temperature between your bedroom and your balcony, heading back inside to return to the task of unpacking.

The fifth box you begin unloading is full of books - you take your time slotting your collection of titles neatly into the bookshelf you’ve set up beside your desk, organizing them alphabetically by author’s last name.

You’re halfway through authors whose names begin with the letter N when your phone starts ringing. You look around your new bedroom from your place on the floor - sitting cross legged among short stacks of books still waiting to be shelved - spotting your cellphone on the other side of the room on the edge of your bedside table.

You nearly trip over a pile of books (authors with last names beginning with R) in your haste to retrieve the device.

“Hello?” you ask, a little winded, when you finally manage to answer the call.

“Hey!” Sasha’s voice greets you from the other end of the phone. Her tone is chipper but subdued, and you distantly wonder if she’s making the call in secret while she’s still on-the-job. “My friend Connie left his phone charger at the apartment the other day, do you mind if he swings by to grab it?”

“Of course, I’m just unpacking. He can come by whenever!” You nod your head, though you realize a moment later she can’t see you.

“Okay!” Sasha chirps happily. “Oh! He has his own key, also - I probably should have told you that before you moved in.”

You pause, unsure of how you feel about some stranger having a key to your apartment, but if Sasha has already entrusted it to him you suppose you don’t have much ground to complain.

“Okay cool, that’s fine. I’ll just be in my room.”

You hear someone call Sasha’s name irritatedly in the background of her side of the call and she squeaks out a parting before the line clicks dead - you laugh lightly as you look down at the Call Ended screen on your phone.

Since you’re already up, you take it as an opportunity to pad out to the kitchen and get yourself a glass of water. As you let the tap fill up the glass in your hand, you note again that you really need to run to the convenience store to get more drinks. You take a long gulp of your disappointingly tepid water as you shuffle over to the living room.

You set your glass of water onto a coaster and flop down onto the couch - turning your head to watch a bead of condensation roll down the side of your glass and pool on the coffee table below.

Everything feels heavy as you lay reclined on the surprisingly comfy sofa: the air, your limbs, your eyelids.

Your eyes flutter closed for a moment, and before you know it you’ve fallen asleep.

When they open again, there’s a stranger’s concerned face hovering over you.

“Ah!”

“AHHH!”

The stranger echoes your own shout of surprise as you roll off the couch onto the floor, your hip colliding painfully with the blunt edge of the coffee table.

You scramble up to your feet and find yourself face-to-face with a guy around your age with his hair cropped close to his head in a buzz cut.

His tongue is purple as he yells: “I’m sorry! I thought you died!”

“I was sleeping!” you yell back, “who the hell are you?”

“I’m Connie! Sasha told me she’d tell you I was coming over, I’m so sorry!” he apologizes profusely once more, his hand raised in what you can only assume is a stance intended to make him look as unintimidating as possible.

You blink, remembering your phone call with Sasha earlier in the day. Your mind is hazy from the heat and the sleep and the fright you’d just experienced, but you recall it after a moment.

“Oh, right. She did tell me you were coming over. Sorry, I must have dozed off,” you say, relaxing slightly and feeling the tension in your shoulders dissipate.

Connie mirrors this deflation, head drooping a little in relief. He shoots you an easy smile. “It’s hot as hell in here, I don’t blame you. Sasha wasn’t kidding when she said your air-con was busted!”

At the mention of the heat, it seems that you suddenly both become aware of how underdressed you are - you both look away, your arms crossing over your barely-covered chest.

You only look back at him when you hear slurping sounds from across from you.

“Is that a slushie?” you ask curiously, noticing the drink in his hands that you must have missed in all the excitement.

“Uh, yeah. I just got it from the convenience store across the street,” Connie says, holding it up a little for you to see.

“Huh, nice.” You can’t remember the last time you had a slushie - it had to be a good couple of years - maybe even since you were a kid.

“Well, it was nice to meet ya! Sorry again for the scare!” Connie waves from the door, the charger that he’d come to retrieve clutched in his hand that wasn’t holding his drink.

You laugh a little, pushing your hair back from your face. “No worries.”

After your unexpected visitor leaves, you go back to unpacking - but you can’t seem to tear your thoughts away from the slushie Connie had been sipping. After a while of lusting after an icy beverage of your own, you push yourself up from your seat on the floor - resolved to do something about it.

You take a brief, delightfully cold, shower and then throw on a flimsy sundress and a pair of sneakers.

You head out with your new set of keys in hand.

The A/C in the convenience store is so strong that you shudder when the sliding doors shut behind you, the perspiration on your skin cooling quickly under the burst of unexpectedly (but very welcome) cold air.

You head right to the fridges along one side of the store, grabbing a few more bottles of brightly coloured sports drink and some green tea, and then you continue towards the slushie machines lining the walls on the opposite side of the store.

There are four flavours for you to choose from: grape, cherry, blue raspberry and orange. You fill the largest size cup available with blue raspberry, watching as the icy blue slush pools in the waiting cup below the dispenser.

One the drink has been filled and you've popped on a domed plastic lid, you tote your purchases over to the checkout counter, and get in line behind an old man who seems to be arguing with the shop attendant over lottery tickets. You try to ignore it, but can’t quite tune it out as you wait only a few paces behind the scene.

The drinks in your arms are cold as you hug them to your chest, and you wish you’d grabbed a basket as you squirm against the chill seeping through the thin cotton of your dress. You should have put a bra on before leaving your apartment - but the very notion of putting one on fresh out of the shower had sounded so torturous you simply couldn't bring yourself to do it.

Eventually the cranky customer ahead of you in line shuffles out the door - tickets in his hand and muttering under his breath about the injustice of lottery odds.

“Sorry about that,” the young man behind the counter sighs when you finally step up.

“I’m sorry you had to deal with that,” you laugh lightly, dropping your purchases onto the surface in front of you but keeping your slushie in hand.

He begins scanning your items, tawny eyes flickering up to you as you take a sip of your drink.

“It’s pretty gross out there today, huh?” he asks, making polite small talk.

“Absolutely disgusting,” you agree, chewing on the end of your straw as you glance out through the windows lining the front of the shop. “I just moved into an apartment across the street and our air-con is broken.”

“Brutal,” he winces sympathetically.

You sigh with a nod. “It is, so I’m grateful for an excuse to hang out in the cold - even if it means seeing you get bullied by a pensioner.”

“Well, Mr. Tompkins comes in every afternoon around this time if you’re hoping to catch a repeat viewing,” the young man quips, and you laugh lightly.

Your eyes scan the front of his blue vest where his name tag is pinned. Jean.

“I might take you up on that,” you say, eyes flickering back up to his, “at least until Monday when the A/C is fixed.”

He smiles, reading you off your order total. Your brow furrows in confusion.

“I think you forgot this,” you say holding the slushie up, the total too low to have included it.

He shakes his head, smirking a little. “Don’t worry about it - consider it a house warming gift.”

“My house is already pretty warm,” you reply dryly, handing him over some cash.

“Fine, consider it a gesture of goodwill to help prevent you from getting heat stroke.” Jean drops the cash into the drawer of the register before handing you your purchases in a plastic bag.

“What a good samaritan,” you snort, before softening appreciatively. “Thank you. You might have just earned yourself a return customer.”

He grins, a brow quirked curiously. “So, see you tomorrow around the same time?”

“If I don’t die of heat exhaustion,” you muse, holding up a finger in warning, “and I’m paying for my slushie tomorrow.”

“If you say so.”

///

You don’t pay for your slushie the next day.

Or the day after that.

You do however get a rather spectacular viewing of an argument between Mr. Tompkins and Jean over the price of a carton of milk while you sipped an orange slushie - Mr. Tompkins having some choice words about the effects of price inflation - and then another about how Mr. Tompkins swore there was usually a senior discount at the convenience store, and Jean assured him that there never had been and never would be one.

You fall into this routine: you show up, pour yourself a large slushie from the self serve dispensers lining the far wall of the store, stand behind Mr. Tompkins as he argues with Jean for anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes, and then you step up to bicker about whether or not you should pay for your beverage. Jean always wins.

It’s pretty dead in the store that Sunday, just an old lady browsing the aisles, so you don’t feel bad about staying and chatting for a while after you pay for your bag of pretzels and two bottles of tea - and once again lose the argument about paying for your sweet, frosty drink.

“Does Mr. Tompkins really come in and pick a fight with you every day?” you ask, leaning against the counter as you sip on your slushie. You had chosen cherry that day.

“Hasn’t missed a day that I can remember since I started working here Freshman year,” Jean nods, eyes flickering over your face as you swirl the straw through your drink.

“Oh, are you in uni?” you ask curiously, looking up and catching his eyes on you.

“Yeah, going into senior year,” he nods, looking away. His cheeks go a little pink.

It’s cute.

“You?”

“Yeah, going into second year,” you reply. There’s only one university in your town so it isn’t hard to guess that you go to the same one. “What are you taking?”

“Business,” he replies, scratching absentmindedly at his ear.

“Capitalism is a plague,” you sniff indignantly.

“Capitalism gave you that slushie,” Jean reminds you pointedly, a smirk tugging the corner of his lip upwards.

“You didn’t charge me for it, so technically this is a radical act of anti-capitalist rebellion,” you reply.

“The slushie cost 2.99 - it’s not like you assassinated Jeff Bezos.”

You stick your red-stained tongue out at him.

He laughs.

“So what are you taking?” Jean asks, tilting his head to the side.

“Dietetics,” you say, smiling.

“You consume a lot of sugary drinks for someone studying nutrition,” Jean snorts.

“And you sure give away a lot of those sugary drinks for someone studying a free market based on the exchange of goods and services for profit,” you bite back.

“I only give them away to you,” he says with a light chuckle.

You blink, processing the admission. You seem to realize at the same time exactly what he’s said and the both of you look away, suddenly unable to meet the other’s gaze

“I can’t believe classes start up again in two weeks,” Jean complains, swiftly changing the subject as he raises his arms over his head in a stretch. Your eyes catch on the way that the white t-shirt under his convenience store vest rides up, revealing a patch of skin at the bottom of his abdomen. You tear your eyes away once more, taking a long sip of your icy drink to douse the heat you feel kindling in the pit of your stomach.

The little old lady who’d been browsing leisurely around the store chooses that moment to shuffle up to the counter.

“Hi Jeannie,” she coos as she begins slowly unloading her purchases onto the counter from the basket in her hands.

“Hi Mrs. Jones, how are you doing today?” Jean asks, smiling warmly at her over the counter.

“Oh, same as always,” the elderly woman croons with a chuckle. “Roger sent me out to pick up some bits and bobs - I think he was just trying to get me outta the house again.”

“I’m sure Mr. Jones wouldn’t do that - not to as sweet of a wife as you,” Jean chirps, exuding a sort of effortless charm as he interacts with the woman - clearly a regular customer.

You smile as you watch the exchange, stepping back towards the exit. You pause, waiting for him to glance up at you. When his eyes flicker up to meet yours, you raise your hand and wave, which he reciprocates while ringing Mrs. Jones’ purchases through. She’s still prattling on as you slip through the sliding door back into the heat outside.

Jean does seem like the type old ladies would fawn over.

You’re still smiling as you make your way back into your apartment, hardly even noticing the sweltering heat anymore as you shuffle through the door.

You leave your convenience store bag on the kitchen counter and cross the room towards the balcony to crack open the door and let a bit of breeze in - not that there’s much reprieve in doing so, the air outside is just as hot as the air in your home.

You pause in the doorway, peering across the street towards the convenience store as your thoughts flitter back to the boy behind the counter.

At that exact moment, the doors to the store slide open and Mrs. Jones dawdles out with a plastic bag in her hand. You watch as she gets a few paces away before the door slides open again, Jean darting out after her with another bag in his grip, his blue vest flapping behind him .

They exchange a few words, Jean handing the plastic shopping bag to her which she takes gratefully - clearly she’d forgotten it in the store and he’d rushed out to return it to her. You watch as the elderly woman reaches up to pat Jean’s cheeks appreciatively, he has to dip down so she can reach him.

You catch yourself smiling to yourself as the two part ways, ducking back into your apartment out of sight.

You swear the red slushie tastes even sweeter after that.

///

Jean isn’t working the next day when you go into the convenience store, and you can’t help but feel a little disappointed. Mr. Tompkins is there though - and he spars with the man behind the counter about how sales tax is a scam for a good nine minutes before the clerk shoos him out of the store.

You pay $2.99 for your slushie. You got grape that day.

Connie is at your apartment when you return home, sprawled across the sofa like he lives there - which you’re beginning to think he might as well.

“Hey, new roomie! Good to see you’re still kickin’!”

“Barely,” you laugh as Sasha shuffles out from the kitchen. “Still no A/C?” you ask turning to her, misery heavy in your tone. Your maintenance man had been working on the cooling unit for the better part of the afternoon before you went for your daily visit to the convenience store, but now he was nowhere to be seen and your home was still unbearably warm.

“The guy said they have to order a part but that it should be here by Wednesday,” she says, equally downtrodden, and both of you share a sort of commiserating look.

You’re in this hell together, after all.

“You guys have plans for the night?” you ask, dropping your tote bag on one of the stools at the island in the kitchen, unpacking your drinks onto the counter.

“We’re going to see a movie with some friends! Wanna come?” Sasha asks.

“What movie?” you inquire, yanking on the handle to the fridge and luxuriating in the cool air that spills from inside.

“The new zombie one! 'Redemption of the Undead - Part Five’!” Connie says excitedly, popping up over the back of the sofa to grin wildly at you.

You wince - you’ve always been a bit of a baby when it comes to scary movies.

“I’m not much of a horror gal - real life is scary enough,” you say, shaking your head a little.

“Awwww come on! You can meet the rest of the gang!” Sasha says, “plus you can get in on our bet to see how long it takes before Ymir and Historia start sucking face!”

“Who?” you ask, confused as you don’t recognize the names.

“Our two friends! They’re… y’know…” Connie flips his wrist.

“Ah,” you say, nodding in understanding. “Well, as fun as that sounds, I’m still pretty wiped from the move. I’ll probably just stay home and get a good night’s sleep.”

Connie and Sasha nod, not pushing the offer, and you shuffle off towards your room as the two of them fall back into conversation.

You pause in your doorway, grape slushie in hand, debating whether or not to ask Sasha and Connie if they know anything about Convenience Store Jean, before thinking better of it.

Yeah, you may all go to the same school, but you hadn’t met either of them before you moved in, so it stands to reason that they probably don’t know him either. You shake your head a little to yourself, slipping into your room for another quiet night, languishing in the heat.

///

As the start of classes draws ever nearer, your friends from school start to come back to town.

A few days after moving into your own apartment, you spend the day with your friend Hitch - who you’d become fast friends with the year prior after suffering through an introductory level biology class together - helping her move into her own (thankfully air-conditioned) apartment.

The two of you are standing in Hitch’s new kitchen, unpacking a very Hitch-appropriate set of pink dishes into her empty cupboards, while you listen to her recount her various summer sexploits in painstaking detail.

She’d just finished telling a particularly spicy story about a lifeguard who worked at a beach near her family home, who had been all too happy to give her a bit of mouth to mouth, when you put the last pink bowl onto it’s new shelf and close the cabinet door.

You turn to her, an eyebrow raised. “So, what about Marlowe?”

You watch as Hitch freezes, a mug dotted with a pastel flower design in her hand, unwilling to meet your gaze. She immediately gets cagey at the mention of the boy, spluttering out something evasive and non-committal. The two of them had been partnered up the year prior for a group project in one of their classes, and had remained friends even in spite of their drastic differences in personality. You strongly suspect there are some unspoken feelings between the two of them that neither of them have yet had the courage to act on.

You smile a little to yourself but don’t press it when she clearly side-steps the subject.

“So, what about you? Any juicy boy news?” Hitch asks, nudging a drawer closed with her hip after half-assedly dumping her silverware into it. You bite back a comment about her terrible system of organization, mulling instead over her words.

“Not really,” you trail off, nibbling on the edge of your lip as you fiddle with a spatula in your hands.

Hitch catches the ambivalence in your words right away. Like a hunter stalking its prey, she pounces on the moment of exposed vulnerability without any hesitation.

She sidles up alongside you, leaning close to your face, her bright eyes sharp and prying.

“Doesn’t sound like it,” she purrs, pressing the tip of her pointer finger to the crease that had formed in your brow, her nose practically touching yours.

“Okay, okay!” you bat her hand off your face, sliding away from her to put a bit of space between your bodies. “There’s this guy… who works at the convenience store across from my new place.”

“The convenience store?” she asks flatly, clearly unimpressed with the decidedly unsexy profession.

“Yeah, he’s really… nice.”

“Nice?” she parrots back monotonously.

“Yeah he always chats with me.” You continue to chew on the edge of your lip as you think about Jean and the strange relationship the two of you have cultivated over the past week or so.

“Honey, I hate to break it to you but that’s called customer service,” Hitch says, her tone gentle as though softening a blow.

You roll your eyes and throw a nearby roll of paper towel at her. It hits her head dully and bounces off, making her squeal. You can only laugh in response.

“Is he hot?” Hitch finally asks, having grappled a second roll of paper towels out of your hand after she saw you reaching for another.

“Extremely,” you sigh, though you sound a little miserable as you say it. It’s undeniably true, and has caused you more than a little bit of agony over the past few days.

“Well, then all hope is not yet lost.”

The two of you continue unpacking for the better part of the afternoon, though you do take a break to order some food through a delivery app. You sit together on her kitchen floor eating and gossiping about your friends and classmates that you’d been keeping up with over the summer as the afternoon sun sinks lower on the horizon outside her windows.

You get a text from Sasha late in the afternoon when the sun has almost completely disappeared from view in the sky, asking if you want to join her and her friends at a frat party that night. She knows you’re hanging out with Hitch, and tells you to invite your friend along too if she wants to come.

You’re not really a fan of frat parties, having very quickly come to that conclusion in your freshman year, but you know that it’s probably not going to be too crazy seeing as not everyone is back on campus yet. You mull it over for a moment after receiving the invitation, before eventually extending the offer to Hitch.

“What frat is it?” Hitch asks curiously as she unpacks a box of blu-rays on her living room floor.

“Uh, Alpha Omicron Tau?” you reply uncertainly, scrolling back in your conversation with Sasha just to confirm.

“Annie’s boyfriend’s best friend is in AOT - you know, Eren?”

Annie was Hitch’s roommate freshman year, and though the two of them had been an absolute nightmare to deal with for the first few months of living together, they ended up unlikely friends. You eventually formed a friendship with Annie as well, by proxy thanks to Hitch, and you had also met her boyfriend Armin - whose smiley personality and gentle demeanour is as shockingly different to Annie’s as you could have possibly imagined.

“Oh, the one who looks like he hates the world?” You have a vague recollection of a surly guy you’d met through Armin the year prior. He was a little unpleasant to be around, but his quiet dark-haired girlfriend seemed to be cool.

“That’s the one,” Hitch snorts.

Hitch eventually agrees to the party - deciding that the two of you deserve an evening to let loose after all of the hard work you’d put in that day. You don’t point out that you spent the majority of the afternoon laying on her floor watching TikToks together, and that the better part of her belongings are still in boxes.

The two of you spend the rest of the evening getting ready - you borrow some clothes from Hitch to avoid making a trip back to your apartment - and you split a few bottles of wine between the two of you before taking an Uber to the party.

It’s busier than you would have thought as the two of you approach the house on Greek Row - the street just off campus where all of the frat and sorority houses were situated. The music pulses loudly into the hot summer night, and there are plenty of people lingering outside the entrance to the house as you make your way in.

“Let’s find Sasha so I can introduce you!” you say, raising your voice a little to be heard over the music, tugging Hitch along behind you through the crowd.

After a bit of searching, you find Sasha, her boyfriend Niccolo, and Connie all seated around a red cup covered coffee table with two other girls.

“Hey new roomie!” Connie cheers at your arrival - still having yet to drop the nickname. You notice he's wearing a shirt with the frat's insignia on it - clearly Sasha's connection to the party in the first place. “Glad you made it!”

You smile, tugging Hitch up alongside you.

“This is my friend Hitch!” you say, making their introduction. Everyone greets her warmly.

“These are our friends Ymir and Historia!” Sasha says, pointing out the two other girls who were joining them - a dark haired girl with sharp eyes and freckles dotting across her cheeks, and a petite blonde perched atop her lap with her arms circled protectively around her thin waist.

“Nice to meet you guys!” the blonde, who you’re pretty sure is Historia, says to you both warmly.

You catch Connie flicking his wrist in your direction from behind them, in what was probably the most pitiful attempt at covertness you’d ever witnessed. You suppress the urge to roll your eyes at him and instead smile at them, returning the girl’s sentiment.

From the corner of your eye you see two other figures approach the group and Connie breaks into a grin.

“And here are a couple of my brothers!”

You turn and have to keep your jaw from falling open in shock.

“I see the resemblance,” Hitch teases, earning a bit of a laugh from everyone gathered.

Two other boys had approached the group both also sporting frat shirts - one with short dark hair and freckles on his cheeks, smiling warmly at the two of you.

And the other is Jean.

The two of you blink at each other for a moment like some sort of standoff, totally unaware of the conversation continuing around you. After a moment you both smile, laughing a little.

What are the odds?

As the group is chatting, you and Jean find yourselves standing off a little to the side next to one another. He crosses his arms over his chest, fiddling with the red cup in his hand.

“Hi,” he says quietly, keeping his voice low as to not be overheard by the rest of your friends. He smiles down at you from behind the brim of his cup, glancing at you from the corner of his eye.

“Hi,” you repeat his own word in reply, feeling the telltale warmth of a blush sting your cheeks. Your eyes flicker over to him, trailing to the t-shirt that covers his broad chest. “Weird seeing you without the vest.”

“Weird seeing you without a stained tongue,” he quips back dryly.

You stick your aforementioned tongue out in response, which earns you a laugh from him.

“So you’re Sasha’s new roommate, huh?” Jean asks, absentmindedly ruffling the hair at the nape of his neck. “Small world.”

You hum in agreement.

Sasha says something, evidently recounting the harrowing tale of your broken A/C unit to the group at large, pulling you back into the conversation to share in the woeful retelling.

You like Sasha’s friends. They’re nice, and funny. Connie, having evidently had quite a bit to drink that evening, is even more boisterous than usual and his relationship with the other members of his frat is fun to watch.

You gather more information about the boys of AOT as the evening progresses: a big blonde guy named Reiner is the frat chapter president, and you catch sight of him with his righthand man Bertolt - vice president, and very possibly the tallest guy you’ve ever seen in your life - on and off over the course of the party. You also find out that Connie, Marco, Jean, and Eren (who you haven’t yet seen but are sure is also in attendance) all pledged together first year. They’re a rather mismatched group, but you can’t help but notice that they all seem to complement each other well.

Reiner and Bertolt approach your group later in the evening, giving you and Hitch the chance to be properly introduced, however briefly. Marco is quickly called away to help Bertolt with some drunk guy stuck on the roof again - to which you had, rather incredulously, muttered ‘again?' only to find out that it was a semi-regular occurrence at the frat house’s infamous parties. You choose not to pry into it any more than that.

As Marco, Reiner and Bertolt begin to shuffle away, Reiner looks back over his shoulder towards Jean.

“Make sure to show our guests where the drinks are!” he calls to the boy beside you, who nods dutifully.

As Jean offers to lead you and Hitch through the party to where the drinks are found, Connie pops up and opts to tag along as well - and as you cross the crowded house, he and Hitch fall eagerly into a conversation about third-wheeling because Connie didn’t want to be stuck alone with the two duos of Niccolo and Sasha, and Ymir and Historia.

The four of you step into the busy kitchen and make your way to a counter covered in bottles of practically every type of liquor imaginable, all while Connie and Hitch are still loudly complaining about the indignity of being forced to spend time with people in love.

Connie had just made some comment about how annoying it is listening to people talk about how much they like someone when Hitch nods eagerly in agreement, a finger reaching out to point at you accusatorially.

“Tell me about it! She’s got a big crush on some guy who works at a convenience store, and I had to listen to her talk about it alllll afternoon!”

Your eyes widen immediately at the comment. First of all, because she’d been the one to pry the conversation out of you in the first place, and secondly because that “some guy” happened to be standing only a few feet away. You find yourself grateful that Connie seems to be too drunk to put the pieces together, and Jean doesn’t seem to have heard the comment at all.

“Hitch!” you hiss at your friend through your teeth, reaching out and clutching her arm tightly - willing her to sense the ‘shut the actual fuck up’ vibes you were sending in her direction.

“Yeah, yeah I know: he’s cute or whatever!” Hitch says dismissively, shaking her arm out of your grasp. You don’t dare to cast another glance towards Jean, who you know must have been close enough to hear that comment.

Connie snorts, jutting his thumb out towards Jean. “Yeah well he’s obsessed with some hot girl who keeps coming to his work to buy slushies!”

Both you and Jean freeze.

A few things happen then in rapid succession: Hitch sees Annie across the party and runs off to greet her; Connie gets distracted by people doing keg stands and forces his way over to participate - yelling something about how he doesn’t want anyone to beat his record; and finally, Jean’s large hand circles your wrist easily - tugging you towards the doorway.

He guides you along behind him through the halls of the crowded frat house, pausing every so often to glance back and make sure you’re okay, make sure you’re still there, make sure you’re still real - you aren’t really sure. Eventually the more crowded space of the main living area turns into a labyrinthine series of dimly lit and sparsely occupied halls, and soon you find yourself being pulled into a room with the door shut behind you.

Your pulse is pounding distantly in your mind as you survey the room, like the music playing somewhere far away in the house, only the dull thrum of bass meeting you so far from its source. You’re in a bedroom, you realize that much quickly - with two beds pushed on either side of the room, one made and one unmade. There are various trinkets you’d expect to see in a bedroom - textbooks, pictures and posters on the wall. There’s a shirt crumpled in a heap on the floor and a backpack hanging from one of the chairs pushed under one of the twin desks set side by side along one wall. You know Jean shares a room with Marco, and it’s not hard to gather that this is where you presently found yourself.

“Did your friend mean it?” Jean asks after a moment of you looking around curiously. You peer over to see him standing almost comically far from you on the other side of the room.

“Mean what?” you ask him uncertainly, tilting your head slightly.

He shoots you an exasperated look, as though frustrated he has to spell it out for you.

“You know, that you… think I’m cute or whatever.” He suddenly seems exceedingly bashful - all of that confidence he’d had when he dragged you along behind him to his bedroom seeming to have abandoned him when he needed it most.

“Dunno,” you murmur, toeing idly at the dingy beige carpet underfoot, “when Connie was talking about the hot girl with the slushies… was that me?”

Jean sucks in a sharp little breath of air, looking away as he purses his lips thoughtfully.

“I mean, you were technically hot. We’re in a heat wave and your air-cond-“

You shoot him an unamused look, and he cuts himself off before he makes it any worse for himself.

Jean sighs.

“And what if he was? Talking about you, I mean.” He seems to muster up a bit of courage, holding you in his stare. “What if I told him about you? What then?”

He takes a hesitant step towards you, and then another - slowly gaining confidence until he has you practically pinned against the door.

A moment passes as you acclimate to the weight of his words and to the staticky hum in your ears at his sudden nearness. You’re not even sure if you’re capable of stringing together any coherent sequence of words, but you force something out anyway.

“Well, I guess I’d have no choice but to admit that you’re the cute convenience store guy.”

Jean breaks into a crooked grin above you.

Something flutters in the pit of your stomach at the sight - a flicker like a flame, only this time you don’t have a slushie in your hand to douse the kindling hazard.

“I mean, it’s not like I was talking about Mr. Tompkins,” you mutter, your lips pursing into a little pout.

“I sure hope not, because that would make this pretty awkward,” Jean sighs and before you have a chance to ask him what he means, he's dipping down to crash his mouth to yours.

You’re taken aback for a moment, hands flying to grasp the tops of his arms. You aren’t sure if you’re going to push him away or pull him closer, but one gentle brush of his fingers against your jaw makes up your mind for you as you melt into him instinctively. He cups your cheeks in his large hands, tilting your face up to meet his as your lips part against his own.

You know this is probably not a good idea. You know that you have a house full of your friends just a floor away, likely wondering where the two of you have disappeared to. But even knowing that, you kiss Jean like you have all the time in the world; moving at your own pace, savouring it like the weight of your hasty decision couldn’t rapidly creep up on you at any moment. You lean into it, you reach for it blindly, clinging to him like he’s the only thought you’ve ever had.

The way his lips mould to your own, alternating between parting and suckling; licking and biting; giving and yielding. You allow yourself to get lost in that, until the voice of reason in the back of your mind has be drowned out by the thrum of your own pulse.

You’ve had your fair share to drink that night, but you know that the way your head swims, the heat that pumps steadily in your veins and paints your skin in a flush that you can feel crawling up your neck, that’s all Jean’s doing.

“Fuck, hold on to me,” Jean mutters, finally pulling his lips from yours.

Two strong hands slide down your hips to your thighs, hiking them (and you by extension) up around his waist. He holds you up with one hand, the other bracing himself against the wall beside the door. Your own arms reach up to loop around his neck, your chest pressing flat against his from your newfound elevation.

You hold a little tighter to him than you had been a moment prior - instinctively seeking his mouth again with your own, chasing the warmth and the wetness. He laughs a bit at your eagerness, kissing you again, though this one is slightly more chaste.

You sigh as he moves to trail his lips along the line of your jaw, sliding eventually down to your throat. He leans down to mouth against your collarbone and you crane your head back, arching your spine to give him better access to the sensitive skin at the base of your neck. He places a kiss there, and then another, and another - tracing a warm line back up again where he finishes the sequence with a gentle suck to your pulse point.

You keen at the feeling, a whiny unintelligible sound peeling from the back of your throat. Your hips shift forward as your wrap your legs a little tighter around his waist, unconsciously seeking friction. In response, you feel Jean drag his teeth against the skin of your neck, biting down lightly as a groan rips through his own chest.

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this,” Jean mutters the words directly into your stinging skin, fervid and reverent. The hand he’d been using to support himself against the wall trails gently over the skin of your shoulder, sliding his fingers under the thin straps of the slinky dress you’d borrowed from Hitch for the evening.

“How long?” you gasp out, breathy and exhilarated.

Jean pauses, peering up at you through his long lashes as he flicks his tongue over a bite he’d just left against your clavicle. His long, lithe fingers continue their journey downward, tracing lightly over the visible peak of your nipple beneath the material of your dress.

“Since the day you walked into the store in that little sundress, the air-con so strong these were peeking through,” he pinches lightly at the bud he’d been idly tracing, earning a squeak from you. “Fuck you were gorgeous.”

“I was?” you ask breathlessly, and he nods.

“You are.”

You seek his mouth again, pressing your lips together to stifle the moan that he coaxes out of your throat as he grinds his hips up against yours. He pulls you away from the wall, your arms winding tighter around his neck as both of his own hands press against the curve of your ass. He carries you over to the bed, laying you down with a surprising degree of gentleness.

You stare up at him as you lay flat against the cushy surface of his mattress, chest rising and falling rapidly as your eyes trace the lines of his handsome face. His own eyes trail down your body, settling at the tops of your thighs where your dress has ridden up, exposing a peek of the panties you wear beneath.

“Can I?” Jean asks quietly, hooking his thumbs under the hem of your dress as he peers down at you. You nod eagerly, helping him tug the garment up over your head before tossing it somewhere onto the floor behind him.

His own t-shirt soon follows, revealing the muscular planes of his chest from underneath and the sparse line of hair that trails from his navel down below the waistband of his jeans.

That’s as far as the two of you get before you’re eagerly reconnecting your mouths, having gone too long without the feeling of his lips on yours - though the newly exposed flesh of your bodies brings an added level of excitement as you feel his warm skin meet yours.

His hands find your thighs again, drawing them up around his waist as his fingers dig into the plush thickness of them. Your ankles cross behind his back as he grinds his hips down into yours, making you gasp against his lips. It feels entirely different than it had when he had you pinned against the wall - now, with the entirety of his weight on top of you, with only the thin material of your panties between his touch and your skin, it’s like something has ignited inside you.

You suddenly feel hotter than you had at any point in the past week, heatwave and broken A/C be damned.

But this is a nice kind of hot, building in the pit of your stomach like you’re burning from the inside out - a slow simmer that turns scorching and all-consuming with only a couple grazes of his hands along your skin.

“Want you so bad, it's been hell,” he murmurs into your mouth as his fingers slide up the inside of your thighs towards your core. His touch ghosts over the damp patch that has formed at the centre of your panties, the fabric clinging to the skin beneath it.

You whimper against his lips, and he pulls back a little, settling on his haunches so he can watch the movement of his own fingers between your legs. His eyes are dark and ravenous as he observes the way your thighs twitch with every careful graze of his fingertips along your slit.

“Watching your tongue turning all those different colours and wanting to taste it.”

His fingers press a little firmer against the fabric, tracing along your covered cunt until he finds the raised bud of your clit, rolling it under his thumb. Your hips shift into his touch, desperate for more contact, more pressure, more friction.

“Watching the way you bite your straw when you’re thinking.”

You teeth dig into your lip as Jean traces a firm figure eight with his thumb, tearing a moan from your throat.

“Please,” you whisper, breathy and pleading.

He’s quick to appease you, looping his fingers under the band of your panties and tugging them down your thighs, finally ridding you of the final layer of clothing between his touch and your skin.

“Perfect,” he sighs as he admires you bare beneath him, firm hands pinning your thighs back so he can appraise your dripping, aching core.

His fingers snake down between your legs once more, orbiting your clit a few times more before swiping down to coat his fingers in the slick that has been rapidly accumulating along your slit. A single finger traces around the dripping entrance to your cunt which has you clenching impatiently around nothing, whining at the insufficient contact. He chuckles at your eagerness, but it’s barely more than a breath of air huffed through his parted, kiss-slick lips.

Suddenly two long fingers slide in, crooking up inside you, and the sensation sends you reeling.

“Fuck,” you both hiss at the same time as you clench around his digits.

You want more.

More, more, more.

You feel gluttonous at your first proper feel of any part of him inside of you - and you’re suddenly unsure if you’ll ever be sated by your fill of him.

“Kiss me, please,” you keen, desperate and sweet, and Jean almost moans as he eagerly obliges, jerking forward and catching your lips in another searing kiss as his fingers curl inside of you again.

Your hips cant up with every snap of his wrist, chasing the fullness and the bright spots that spark behind your heavy eyelids every time his long digits brush against a particular spot inside of you that you could never hope to find on your own.

Jean slowly but methodically takes you apart with his fingers until you’re whimpering and babbling unintelligibly against his lips - a brush of his thumb against your momentarily neglected clit is all it takes for the flames that had been licking you to swallow you whole, a silent scream tearing from your throat as you cum.

Jean’s fingers don’t pause their careful ministrations, working you past your peak until you’re trembling and mewling for him to stop.

“S’too much, too much,” you whisper, voice weak and quivering, shaking your head from side to side as dampness collects along your lash line at the oversensitivity.

Jean kisses the corner of your mouth with a chuckle, withdrawing only at your insistence. He leans back, bringing his hand up to his mouth where he wraps his lips around his still glistening fingers.

You watch, enraptured, as his tongue eagerly laps around his knuckles to clean every last trace of you from his skin. The sight is sinful and lewd - and has that same fire that had only just subsided in the pit of your gut fanning alight once more.

The hand not presently between his lips travels to the button of his jeans, undoing it.

He pops his fingers from his mouth, staring at you intently.

“Is this okay?” he asks you carefully, hesitantly. “We don’t have to do any more if you don’t want to.”

“Want to,” you hardly even sound like yourself now as you rasp out your broken reply. “Want you.”

He groans, palming his clothed erection through his jeans.

He doesn’t even bother shucking his pants completely, too frantic and incensed by the earnest, needy way you replied to him, tugging his jeans and his underwear down to his thighs impatiently.

His cock bobs free and you take a moment to appreciate it. He’s long - though you’d surmised as much from the impressive bulge he’d been sporting since you were grinding on each other beside his door. His dick is slightly curved, the head pink and glistening with beading precum as he gives it a few cursory strokes once he draws it completely from his briefs.

He leans over you and quickly retrieves a condom from his bedside table, his scent and his warmth suddenly overtaking you as he reaches across your body. You watch intently as he rips into the foil package with his teeth, rolling the rubber deftly down his impressive length.

He catches your eyes watching him and smirks a little, dipping forward to kiss you again while grabbing a pillow from behind your head. He tucks it under your hips, a large, domineering hand on either side of your waist as he angles you just the way he wants you.

You feel the thick head of his cock run through your slick folds, nudging against your still-swollen clit and you keen a little - sensitive from the orgasm you’d only recently come down from.

But you want him.

He clearly feels the same desperation that you do, because suddenly, without much further preamble, he slides inside the welcoming walls of your cunt.

If you thought the depths his fingers could reach were impressive, it was nothing compared to this.

Jean’s forehead drops to your shoulder, cursing as you envelop him, clenching down instinctively against the sudden intrusion.

“Feel so good,” he moans, his words practically slurring in pleasure as his hips jerk forward shallowly - like he’s trying to hold back but can’t.

“Jean, g-god 'm so full,” you whimper as you try to shift your hips - you're not sure if you're trying to push yourself away from or further down his length, but his hands on your hips keep you pinned down in place either way.

“Hold on, baby, give me a minute,” he says, his voice very nearly cracking as he pleads with you, his grip on your waist tightens slightly. He sounds as wrecked as you do already.

He shifts after a quiet moment of panting breaths and racing pulses, rolling his hips against yours with more haste this time, and your fingers twist into the sheets underneath you at the sensation of him properly filling you up. He seems to gain confidence after the first few thrusts, building into a steady rhythm that has you choking on his name at the back of your throat.

Jean uses his grasp on your hips to pull you down to meet him as he ruts into you desperately. Your hands reach for his, wrapping tight around his wrists as he holds fast to you. Every fibre of your being feels like it’s on fire again, the heat that you’d thought had subsided reigniting with even more ferocity than the first time.

You can’t help but think you’d happily allow yourself to be incinerated away into nothingness beneath him if it felt as good as this.

His grip remains tight on the curve of your waist, but his roughness only serves to further fuel your pleasure, each harsh meeting of his hips against yours bringing you closer to the brink of release once again.

Your chest bounces with each thrust; Jean fucking you down into the mattress with such a fervour that you can hardly catch your breath. Your nails bite into the skin of his arms, desperately trying to ground yourself as pleasure singes through your veins, his name slipping from your lips quietly on every stroke.

He reaches his end before you see another - a carnal moan ripping from his chest as you feel his cock pulse inside of you. You suck in a sharp breath, the feeling of him finishing within you unexpectedly causing your walls to flutter, clamping down around him.

“Ah, fuck,” Jean hisses, pulling out from inside you as the feeling grows too much in the wake of his orgasm, smearing some of your own arousal down the skin of your thigh.

He makes quick work of pulling off and disposing of the condom in the trashcan beside his nightstand. Once he’s done so, he leans back on his haunches and brushes his hair back from his face, a few strands sticking to the sweat dampened skin of his forehead while he catches his breath.

You feel empty without him inside you now, the second orgasm that you’d felt building only moments prior ebbing away beyond your reach, but you can’t deny that you feel distinctly satisfied as he flops down beside you in his bed. Your chest heaves with every inhale as you try to calm yourself down - or at the very least get your heart rate to return to a pace that wouldn’t get you admitted to a cardiac intensive care unit.

Jean shifts slightly from his place beside you at the head of his bed, turning his chin down to look at you lying next to him. Just as his lips part to speak, there’s an unexpected knock at the door.

You jolt in surprise and instinctively reach for the sheet twisted under your bare legs, yanking it up to cover your chest. Jean shifts, sitting up in the bed and angling himself between you and the door to shield you behind his broad back - though it remains closed.

“Uhhh, Kirschtein?” a somewhat reluctant voice calls out from the other side of the door. "If you’re in there, the breaker flipped and there’s no power in the kitchen again. Bert’s still trying to get that dumbass from Sigma off the roof so you’re the only one tall enough to reach the box.”

Jean sighs deeply, a resigned sound. “Yeah, I’ll be down in a sec!” he calls back gruffly, thinly veiling the annoyance in his tone as he reaches for his t-shirt that had been unceremoniously discarded on the floor.

“Sorry for interrupting!” the voice calls sheepishly while Jean pushes his arms through the sleeves of his shirt. You almost snort at the sincere remorse in the boy’s words.

You watch as Jean hastily redresses, knowing you should do the same. Hitch is probably wondering where the hell you went, since you hadn’t gotten the chance to tell her about Jean.

Jean turns to you as he stands at the end of the bed, now fully dressed - stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

“Uh, the bathroom’s through there if you wanna clean up a bit,” he says, nodding towards a door on the other side of the room. “Sorry if it’s a mess, Connie’s room is on the other side and we share it, just make sure you lock both doors.”

You nod in understanding, rising from his bed on unsteady legs. You almost stumble a bit, though you catch yourself at the last moment, but Jean takes a step towards you anyway.

It’s a little bit awkward.

You don’t know what else you expected, sleeping with a guy at a party who you barely knew.

And who you’d now be forced to see on a semi-regular basis thanks to your mutual connections.

Yeah, you really hadn’t thought this one through.

Jean quietly excuses himself, slipping through his bedroom door which you lock again behind him. You gather your clothing from around the floor, perching on the edge of his bed to quickly tug them back on - resolved to find Hitch and get the hell out of there as fast as humanly possible.

This doesn’t prove to be a particularly difficult task: when you return to the party downstairs you quickly locate Hitch entirely too drunk for her own good - which is almost impressive considering you hadn’t even been gone that long.

You send a text to Sasha to let her know you’re leaving and that you’ll see her back at home the next day, and then maneuver Hitch out the nearest exit - eager to take your leave.

You soon find yourself walking down the road on greek row, Hitch’s cellphone in hand as you order an Uber to come and pick you up.

It’s Hitch’s cellphone and not your own for two important reasons: the first being that since she’s too drunk to make the walk back to her place, she can be the one to pay for the cab. The second being that you confiscated the device when she made an attempt to drunk dial Marlowe on your way out of the frat house - leaving the two of you to squabble over it as you make your way down the cracked pavement of the sidewalk.

“Hitch, it’s almost 2 in the morning - the poor guy is probably sleeping,” you say exasperatedly, trying uselessly to reason with her. You finalize the Uber request so it will pick you up on the corner down the road from the Alpha Omicron Tau house as Hitch makes another attempt to wrestle the phone from your hands.

“Annie would let me call him!” Hitch jeers back defensively as she trots along behind you, though her steps are staggered.

“Annie would leave your drunk ass on the curb,” you say flatly in response, pausing your stride to look at her pointedly, stuffing her phone safely into your purse.

Hitch pouts, knowing you’re right but still crossing her arms over her chest indignantly. Suddenly her eyes narrow - head tilting as a comedically blatant expression of realization dawns on her.

“You look like you had sex.”

You start walking again, unconcerned as to whether or not she’s following you.

“I did have sex,” you reply flippantly.

Hitch audibly guffaws, sputtering incomprehensibly for a moment before finally forcing out a coherent: “with WHO?”

“Jean,” you say simply, still walking down the sidewalk.

“What about convenience store guy?” Hitch protests in outcry, suddenly up in arms in defence of your otherwise unnamed crush. You finally pause your steps, sighing, and turn to her.

“He IS the convenience store guy, genius.”

Hitch’s bleary eyes go wide as she processes this information.

“That tall guy? From the party?” she asks, seeking clarification. “That’s him?"

“Uh huh,” you say with a nod, tone slow and movement exaggerated as though speaking to a child.

You watch her as she mulls this over, practically seeing the gears turn in her alcohol sodden brain.

Finally her lips purse, and she nods a little - as though in support of your decision.

“You really weren’t kidding when you said he’s cute, huh?”

///

You spend the night at Hitch’s apartment, having fallen asleep in her bed shortly after she locked herself in the bathroom with her cellphone to call Marlowe.

You wake up side by side, reaching over and ending the 6 hour long phone call that lights up the screen of her cellphone beside her on her pillow - with only soft snores coming from the other end of the line. You laugh lightly after you hit the red end call button, shaking your head at your friend’s obliviousness to her own feelings - and to those of the boy who had answered her call at three in the morning and stayed on the phone with her all night.

You spend the day helping Hitch nurse her hangover and doing a bit more of her unpacking - though not without making sure to remind her that you still have your own unpacking you could be doing at home every time she flops down onto her sofa to complain about her headache.

By the time you get home that evening, you shuffle in the door of your apartment and feel an immediate rush of cold air.

It seems that in the two days you’d been away, your A/C had been fixed.

You call out for Sasha, but quickly realize she’s not home - you wonder if she’s working or if she ended up spending the night at Niccolo’s and hadn’t made it home yet, and make a note to text and ask her.

You head into your bedroom, luxuriating in the deliciously cool atmosphere in your apartment, and flop on top of your bed, exhausted.

As you lay flat on your back staring up at your ceiling, you can’t help but find your thoughts drifting to the convenience store across the street.

Truthfully, a lot of your thoughts that day had been dedicated to the subject - or rather the boy in the blue vest who worked behind the counter.

A quick glance at the clock on your bedside table tells you that Jean’s shift has probably already ended for the day.

You gnaw on the corner of your lip as you mull this realization over.

Even if it hadn’t, would you go?

You’ve had almost a full 24 hours to process just how awful your decision making skills had been the night before, and have come to a few conclusions:

1 - Hooking up with your new roommate’s friend was unlikely to end well, and was asking for a mess.

2 - Hooking up with a guy who was supplying you with free slushies was borderline prostitution.

3 - In spite of points 1 and 2, you thoroughly enjoyed yourself the night before, and you have absolutely no idea what you were supposed to do about it or what it meant.

These three points continue to loop through your mind on repeat.

You’d been making daily trips to the convenience store since you’d moved in, and you know that after a day or two of not showing up that Jean would be likely to put the pieces together himself.

You know you need to come up with some sort of plan to address the anxiety you feel knotting in the pit of your stomach, but instead you choose to ignore it for a little while longer - resolving to deal with it the next day.

By the time the next day rolls around - which feels all too soon considering you're no closer to coming up with a plan - you pace around your room for a bit as you once again contemplate whether or not to go across the street.

It’s right around the same time that you’d usually show up, and you know Mr. Tompkins is probably already there giving Jean hell.

You should go.

You know you should go.

But you don’t.

Instead you opt to unpack a box of your school papers, setting up your desk. It takes you longer than you expected (certainly not because you were intentionally drawing it out) and by the time you finish, the sky is dark and Sasha has arrived home from work. The two of you decide to watch a movie in the living room, and you force the thought of Jean to the back of your mind again.

But you know you can't keep doing this forever.

It takes you three full days after the party before you finally muster the resolve to drag yourself to the shop across the street.

You stand outside the door to the store for a while, equivocating on whether or not you have the courage to step through it. You’re sure people think you’re up to something weird, hovering around outside the door to the convenience store like a teenager trying to find someone to buy them cigarettes, so you take out your phone and scroll through your email’s junk inbox for a while to make it look like you aren’t just loitering.

You scroll past your fifth email from some Nigerian prince who wants to sell you weight-loss tea when you finally decide against going in for a multitude of reasons - it’s a stupid idea, you’re not ready to face him, you have no idea what you’re even going to say - and so you step back towards the crosswalk to head home, head hanging in defeat.

You pause as the light above you turns green to cross the road, staring at it for a moment but not moving. You know your time to walk is running out, the person on the other side of the road having already made it halfway across the intersection in the time that you’ve been hesitating, and before you can think any better of it you’re spinning on your heel and stomping towards the convenience store again, stepping through the door.

But he’s not there.

The air-conditioning is as cold as you remember it being, only it somehow feels a little bit more frigid and unwelcoming now as your eyes sweep the store. The kindly looking woman behind the counter greets you warmly, though eying you a little warily as you stay firmly planted in the entry-way. You mumble something about forgetting your wallet and duck back out through the door into the heat of the summer evening.

In spite of leaving the convenience store empty handed, you’re carrying something heavy in your chest.

You head back across the street to your apartment, slumping through the door lethargically.

Of the 12 boxes you’d moved in with, you only have one left to unpack - some photos and decorations you’d brought along with you to make your new place feel a bit more like home. You unpack it slowly, taking time to arrange the photos and trinkets in just the right places.

Even in spite of the painstaking care you devote to the task, you soon find the final box emptied.

You sit on your bedroom floor, peering around your new room - full to every corner with pieces of yourself, your friends, and your life. You smile a little to yourself, though still feel suspiciously blue.

After breaking down the final box and adding it to the pile of cardboard recycling you’ll need to take to the garbage the next day, you pause.

What now?

You’ve finally exhausted your primary source of distraction that you’ve been relying on to keep your mind off of things for the past few days.

Well, thing.

You flop atop your bed with a miserable groan, and reach across your sheets to clutch Oscar the Bear to your chest.

“I think I might’ve really gone and done it this time, Osc,” you mutter quietly into the plush fur between his ears.

“I’m home!” A chipper voice suddenly calls out from the other side of your closed door - the muted sound of keys jingling as they’re dropped and shoes being kicked off reaching you shortly after.

You sit straight up in your bed, Oscar tumbling off the edge to the floor, frightened by Sasha’s unexpected arrival.

“Connie and Jean are here too!”

Oh.

Good.

You panic a little, hopping out of bed and pacing the length of your floor as you grapple for what to do. You wring your hands nervously as you try to come up with some sort of plan.

Should you act like you’re not home? No, your shoes are at the door and your keys on the counter - Sasha has to know you’re already there.

Do you pretend to be asleep?

You’re just contemplating feigning slumber when a knock at your door startles you, a little squeak slipping from your lips. You slap your hand over your mouth.

“We’re ordering pizza! Do you want in?” Sasha’s voice calls cheerfully through the door - having seemingly missed your sound of surprise.

You clear your throat a little, trying to keep your voice steady and unsuspicious as you reply: “Yeah, I’ll be out in just a sec!”

You can hear the trio’s voices conversing from the living room as you lean your forehead against your door, mustering every shred of resolve you have to force yourself out into the main area of the apartment. You take a shaky breath, yanking open your door and stepping out.

“Hey!” Sasha says happily when she catches sight of you - she’s in the kitchen rifling through the cupboard where she keeps her snacks. “They’re just going through the menu over there!”

Your eyes turn to the living room where two sets of eyes are waiting to meet your own.

Connie grins, waving enthusiastically. Jean smiles a bit too - though it looks a little pained.

“Come look!” Connie beckons you over, holding up the takeout flyer for a little pizza place down the road from your apartment.

You pad towards the couch, leaning over the back of it to scan over the menu in his hands while the four of you decide amongst yourselves what to order.

It’s a bit awkward between you and Jean; neither of you really acknowledge the other, though you can feel his eyes on the side of your face as you read the menu. It seems that you’re both trying to play it cool and not let on that anything has transpired between you around the other two people in the room.

Once the order is decided upon and called into the restaurant, an argument breaks out over who should be the one to go and pick it up. Connie and Sasha eagerly volunteer, which surprises you until you find out that the nice Italian man who runs the shop always gives them extra breadsticks.

Jean is rather unwilling to let Sasha go to retrieve the order, which turns into a spirited spat.

“She’ll eat half the pizza before she even makes it back!” Jean argues, pointing accusingly at Sasha as he looks at Connie - who has somehow been deemed adjudicator in the matter.

“Will not!” Sasha counters, but no one in the room quite believes her - not even you, and you’ve barely known her for a week.

“If you go, you’re not allowed to eat a single piece of pizza on the walk home,” Jean says warningly, and Sasha gasps in dismay.

“What? How can you expect me to make the whole walk home and not eat any of it?” she defends herself ardently as though he’s asking her to work a miracle, and not make a five minute walk home without eating a slice of pizza. She puts her hands up in a concessional kind of way, tone softening as she tries to strike a compromise. “How about no more than three slices?”

“One,” Jean counters.

“TWO and TWO BREADSTICKS.”

“Fine, but if there isn’t any marinara dipping sauce left by the time you get home again I’m making you walk your ass back and get more,” Jean rolls his eyes as he concedes, though you suspect it’s mainly because the argument has gone on for so long that the pizza will soon be ready to be picked up.

“Deal,” Sasha says happily, grabbing eagerly his hand and shaking it like they’ve sealed a business deal - he rips it from her grasp with a laugh, shoving her by the shoulder.

Sasha and Connie begin pulling on their shoes when you all seem to come to the same realization at the same moment.

“Oh, are you cool hanging out here with Jean?” Sasha asks you, looking up as she slides her foot into her sneaker.

Your heart feels like it’s been dropped off the top floor of the Empire State Building, plummeting down all 102 floors of it towards the asphalt below.

What the hell are you even supposed to say to that? No? How weird would that look?

Your lips part, but no sound comes out.

“This way you guys can get to know each other since you didn’t really get to talk much when you left the party early the other night!” Sasha adds, and it’s so absurd that it’s almost funny.

Almost.

She wasn’t wrong in saying that the two of you didn’t talk much at the party, but it’s precisely because you had been “getting to know each other.”

In the biblical sense of the word.

You simply settle for a nod, forcing a smile that you hope doesn’t look as anxiety ridden as you currently feel. Evidently it doesn’t - either that, or Sasha is so preoccupied with the thought of pizza that she doesn’t care to investigate - because soon her and Connie are slipping out the door with one final wave back and the promise to return soon.

The door swings shut with a gentle thud behind them, leaving you and Jean standing alone in the apartment which suddenly seems much too small for the two of you.

You keep your eyes fixed on the back of the closed door for a moment, your breath stuck painfully in the back of your too-tight throat.

“Do you want a beer?” you ask quietly without looking to him.

“Yeah, that’d be great,” he grunts out a reply and you shuffle towards the kitchen.

You hide with your burning face tucked behind the door of the fridge for far longer than you need to, eventually forcing yourself out again. You feel Jean’s eyes on you as you cross the kitchen to the drawer with the bottle opener - popping the tops off both bottles you’d retrieved from the refrigerator.

You have no choice but to look at him as you hand him his drink.

“Thanks,” he says, warm eyes boring into yours as he reaches for the outstretched beverage.

His long fingers - the very ones that had been consuming far too many of your waking thoughts over the past few days - brush against yours as he takes the cold beer from your hand.

You suppress a shiver.

“Wanna go sit on the balcony?” you ask him quietly, nodding you head towards the other side of the living room. He agrees, and the two of you make your way towards the sliding doors.

“It’s warm out,” Jean remarks idly as the two of you step out into the balmy night.

“Not as bad as it has been, thank god,” you say with a little sigh, taking a long swig from your drink - if for no other reason than to give yourself something to focus on that wasn’t him.

The two of you sit side by side on the concrete ground of the balcony, your knees brushing against his as you sit cross-legged, his own posture mirroring yours.

“You haven’t been in to get your slushie the past few days,” he finally says after a few moments of quiet. “Are you avoiding me?”

You choke a little on the mouthful of beer you’d been in the process of swallowing.

“No,” you reply, too quickly to be sincere. “I was… worried I was cutting into Mr. Tompkins’ argument time.”

“Is that so?” he asks, head tilting. If his tone isn’t enough to tell you he doesn’t believe you, the playful glint in his eye as he pauses with the lip of his bottle poised at his mouth sure is.

You hum a little, focusing your eyes on the convenience store on the other side of the road. You take a moment to appreciate the way that the fluorescent light from inside the shop filters out into the street, washing the pavement just beyond its walls in a soft light and casting shadows into the street as the occasional car drives past.

You have been avoiding him. You both know it.

“I think you might be lying,” he doesn’t hesitate to call you out on the truth, and his forthrightness surprises you a little.

You knew the conversation would end up here eventually, but it didn’t help you feel any more prepared for it.

“You’re right,” you sigh, setting your half-drained bottle down on the ground beside you. You place your hands flat on the ground behind your hips, leaning back against them and letting your head loll against your shoulder to meet his stare. “I finally looked into the nutrition of those things. Turns out drinking 24 fluid ounces of pure sugar every day is pretty bad for you, who knew?”

He only snorts in response, draining the last mouthful of his beer.

You watch as his eyes shift a little, flickering down to your lips as he sets his own emptied bottle aside. Your tongue peeks out to moisten them without thinking, and you watch as his gaze follows the motion.

“What - so now that your air-con is fixed you don’t need me to get your fill anymore?”

He inches closer to you than he had been a moment prior.

“Don’t sound so sad, what we had was special while it lasted,” you muse, though you’re undeniably affected by the dwindling distance between your bodies. “You even put your job on the line for me and everything - you must have cost Big Convenience a whole nine dollars not charging me for those slushies.”

“It was worth it, if you ask me,” he laughs a little as he says it, and he’s so close now that you feel the burst of air hit your parted lips.

“Really?” you ask quietly, still feigning as though you’re not wholly and helplessly tormented by the way you can almost taste the beer he’d just drained on his lips.

“Every penny,” he breathes, eyes scanning your face for just a moment before finally leaning down to press his mouth to yours.

The brush of his lips against yours is hesitant - measured almost - as though he’s not certain if he should be doing it at all. This moment of doubt quickly melts away, like ice on a hot sidewalk - dissolving into a puddle and then evaporating into nothing but raw want.

Your hands reach quickly to grip the material of his t-shirt, pulling him closer. His own hands rest on the ground beside your thighs as he dips down to meet you from his towering height.

You should have known that this is how things would end up.

Though you can’t say you’re disappointed in the slightest.

Jean’s tongue swipes along your lips, which part eagerly at the call - allowing him to steal the breath straight from your lungs.

Your arms reach up to loop around his craning neck, and with an unexpected dexterity he picks you up by the waist, pulling you into his lap to straddle him. Your bare knees scrape uncomfortably against the rough concrete below them, but you hardly notice as his hands find the curve of your ass - large palms moulding to your flesh through the denim of your shorts.

It’s hot, only amplified by the warmth of his body pressing into yours. You feel the slight perspiration at his nape as you curl your fingers through the ends of his hair, tugging gently to pull his head back - separating his lips from yours and earning you a groan that originates somewhere deep in his chest.

The material of your tank top clings to your body as you move your lips across his lightly stubbled jaw - you can taste salt on his skin as your lips brush the column of his throat, but you like it.

He only allows you to run the sharp point of your canine across his pulse once before he’s impatiently catching your mouth with his again - his hands gripping you a little tighter from their position on your ass.

You continue like this for a while - teasing and tasting and seeing which noises you can pull from the other with a graze or a nip or a particularly pointed suck. Eventually you can no longer tell if the beer you can taste in your mouth is from his or from yours - and frankly, you couldn’t care less.

It goes without saying that this can’t continue on forever.

The making out and the… whatever else was going on between the two of you.

You brace your hands on his shoulders, fingertips pressing into the firm muscle you can feel beneath them as if to ground yourself.

You pull away a fraction of a millimetre, his hot breath still breaking across your lips on every exhale.

“For what it’s worth,” you mumble into his mouth, and he pulls away just a little bit more to hear you clearly. “I would still like to get my fill from you every once in a while… if the offer stands.”

His eyes, lidded but attentive, watch you carefully as he processes your words.

“We’re open seven AM to midnight every day,” he teases, tilting his head to bump his nose against yours gently. “You know where to find me.”

You huff, hiding your suddenly flushing face in the equally warm crook of his neck. You draw in a breath that smells like laundry detergent and lemongrass and you wonder idly what kind of soap he uses.

“I wasn’t talking about the slushies,” you mutter after another moment of quiet.

He laughs, a warm breath of air ghosting across the shell of your ear as he leans his head towards you.

“Neither was I.” He presses a fleeting kiss to your temple - barely more than a brush of his lips against your skin, but surprisingly tender.

Your fingers tighten in the material of his t-shirt and you smile.

///

“So,” Connie draws out the monosyllabic word with a stilted sort of nonchalance as the four of you sit around the coffee table of your apartment’s living room some time later, sharing the pizza that he and Sasha had returned with not long prior. His eyes flicker between you and Jean as he says it, a slice of pizza poised halfway to his mouth. “Do you guys want us to like, pretend we didn’t see you two making out on the balcony while we were walking home, or wha-OW!”

Jean immediately reaches over and smacks Connie on the back of his buzzed head in response to his unfinished question. You can’t help but notice the taller boy’s cheeks have flushed a sweet shade of pink in spite of his annoyance, but he avoids your gaze.

Connie ruffles the side of his head that was just so unceremoniously accosted. “I was just asking because I was trying to have some tact, thanks!”

“Yeah, real tactful,” Sasha snorts from beside you through a mouthful of food.

“Says the girl who almost choked on a breadstick when we saw them swapping spit,” Connie mutters lowly, taking a large, resentful bite of his pizza.

It’s quiet for a moment as you all chew over the food in your mouths and the comment Connie had just made.

You’re the first to giggle - the sound slipping through your lips before you can stop it. You immediately press the piece of paper towel you’re using as a napkin to your mouth in an attempt to cover the sound, but it does little good.

The rest are soon joining in.

This seems to shatter the heaviness that had momentarily settled over the four of you - everyone relaxing a little as the laughter peters out.

You and Jean’s eyes meet as Sasha leans forward to grab another breadstick from the pile on the table in front of you. There’s a rosy hue flooding the apples of his cheeks that you’re certain is just as apparent in your own, his tawny eyes crinkled at the corners in a smile.

You’re not used to this; jumping into something so risky, so impulsive, headlong and without forethought. It’s unlike you - and goes against what you normally stand for: stability, predictability, certainty. But as Connie launches into a terrifying (though almost inspirational) story about how he once watched Sasha devour two entire large pizzas on her own - which the girl beside you makes no effort to refute - you can’t help but feel like things are gonna work out okay even in spite of your complete lack of a plan.

After the pizza is finished and the mess mostly tidied up (AKA moved from the coffee table to the kitchen counter to be dealt with later) the four of your settle in to watch a movie, dimming the lights in the living room as Connie scrolls through whatever streaming service he’d elected to browse for the evening - whose membership you were likely stealing from Niccolo.

“Oh, god. Not a horror movie,” you groan, burying your face in your hands as you see Connie’s attention linger on some terrible looking movie about a little ghost girl that you know will inevitably leave you with nightmares.

“Come on, new roomie! It’s not that bad! I’ve seen this one a million times,” Connie says with a laugh, hitting play - and you have no choice but to go along with it.

Connie is seated on the floor - propped up on a bunch of throw pillows and blankets he’d dragged off of the sofa to burrow into. Sasha was seated in the armchair just behind him, having already moved on to her second course of the evening: the largest bag of gummy bears you’d ever seen in your life. Jean on the other hand was seated at the opposite end of the sofa from yourself, an entire cushion’s length between you.

Unspokenly you seem to have agreed to maintain a safe distance - things are still new, after all.

As the movie plays you relax into your seat a little, though you do keep a pillow clutched to your chest should you need a place to burrow your face and hide from whatever frightening scene lights up the screen.

Throughout to film, you draw your legs up into your seat with you, though eventually you find them stretching out towards the other end of the sofa and the boy who’s seated there - never close enough to touch, but nearer than they had been when the movie started.

During a particularly scary scene, you jump in your seat - even Sasha squawks from her own seat across the room, and Connie laughs maniacally as a result. Your face is burrowed into the pillow in your lap, your cheeks burning and your pulse pounding in your ears.

But it’s not because of the movie.

It’s because suddenly there’s a warm hand settled on your thigh.

You pull your face slowly out from the pillow, your eyes flickering over to see Jean smirking. His eyes are still glued to the TV, but his hand is undeniably resting just above your knee, his thumb idly sweeping across the smooth skin beneath it.

You go to push him off in annoyance, thinking he’s making fun of you for being such a baby when it comes to horror movies - but before you can do so, his hand grabs hold of yours and twines your fingers together.

He shyly looks at you from the corner of his eye, almost as if to ask if it’s ok.

You purse your lips, turning your own attention back to the movie in front of you, but you’re undeniably trying to fight off a smile.

An even scarier scene comes on not long after Jean took your hand, and you’ve got his fingers in a veritable vice grip as the eerie music plays - tension building for what you’re sure is about to be an even worse fright than the last. Even Connie is hiding behind Sasha’s legs - who’s shielding her own face with a slice of leftover pizza.

Suddenly there’s a loud thunk, and a garbled hissing noise.

Then complete silence.

A girl on the screen in front of you screams - high pitched and shrill - but none of you are paying much attention to the movie anymore.

Slowly, everyone’s eyes turn up towards the air-conditioning unit overhead.

It had stopped.

★ SMUT TAGS; lots of teasing, oral (m & f receiving), vaginal fingering, orgasm denial, unprotected sex, aftercare, dom diluc

If someone told you that every day is a festival in Mondstadt City, you’d believe them in a heartbeat. From bards serenading passers-by in every street to the taverns welcoming patrons left and right – you had infinite choices on how to spend your Friday night. 

But as fate might have it…you’re stuck tending to a game booth in an actual, official Favonius-mandated festival instead.

You have nothing against celebrating Ludi Harpastum. It’s your favorite time of the year! It’s everyone’s favorite time of the year! But this week’s set of commissions from the Adventurer’s Guild have become more ridiculous than the last – how the hell were you assigned to escort transport balloons five days in a row?! – and honestly? You want nothing more than to go to town with your buddies for a drink or two. 

Plus, wreaking havoc at Angel’s Share with Kaeya and Rosaria was practically routine now. Having to forego the sacred tradition in favor of covering for one of your colleagues at the Guild was more of a drag than you initially expected. 

After said colleague injured his leg on a field job, he practically begged for you to take this special commission from his hands. It’s from a big-shot client, he said. He’ll nuke the Adventurer’s Guild if we turn him down, he said. Overdramatized explanation aside, you took it without that much of a fuss. 

The commission sounds simple enough on paper – the main reason why you accepted in the first place. It said all you had to do was watch over the ring toss booth near the city gates, and you’ll get seventy percent of the revenue as compensation. You’ve heard enough hearsay about how much these booths actually earn during festivals, so you agreed to watch over it for a week, tops. Maybe you could squeeze a bit more cash to splurge at the bar once everything’s said and done.

On your third night on the job though, you finally start asking yourself if this was all worth it.

“Rough day?”

You startle to see Kaeya approaching as you begrudgingly close up your booth – shooting him a puzzled stare as the cavalry captain simply grins. Like he knows you’re having more than just a ‘rough day’. 

“Didn’t I tell you how I hate taking commissions that require me to deal with people?” you grumble before tossing a sheet of cloth over the ring toss pedestal, hiding it from view. 

Kaeya chuckles. “For someone who loves buying rounds for the entire tavern once the alcohol finally sets, you’re terrible at public relations. When it comes to your job, at least.”

“Drinking and having to run around doing everyone’s weird errands are two completely different things,” you argue.

“If it’s so terrible, why don’t you just quit?”

…Damn it.  

“Anyway,” you emphasize, eye twitching with annoyance. “Where are you headed? Usually, you’d be terrorizing the people at Angel’s Share by now. And by people, I meant Diluc.”

“You flatter me!” The captain laughs again. “Well, I figured I’d flutter off to Cat’s Tail since Master Diluc’s flock of admirers tonight is a bit…stifling.”

Once you’re done securing the booth to make sure no burglars try anything funny, you flash Kaeya an unconvinced look. “Oh? Finding a group of ladies stifling instead of smooth-talking them into admiring you instead?”

“Hehe, though that’s my usual modus operandi on any other evening, what kind of fiend steals the thunder from the birthday boy?” 

That makes you pause. 

“It’s Diluc’s birthday?” 

He nods. “While he may appear holier than thou – a god amongst men – Diluc actually has a birthday! Shocking, isn’t it?”

“Shut up,” you huff. “I’ve been drinking with you guys for years, but he’s never celebrated it. Not even once!”

“Well, that’s probably because he’s always out there saving the world even on his special day, no?” Kaeya shakes his head with a smile. “We’re lucky enough to have him in our midst this year, but I’m afraid his suitors know that very well, too. Just when I thought I could talk him into mixing me that limited edition Dead After Noon…”

You find it a bit funny, picturing the owner of Angel’s Share dealing with a bunch of customers-slash-admirers that just want to greet him a happy birthday. If you aren’t fond of human interaction on the job, Diluc is most definitely allergic to it. But with how exhausted you are, you can’t bring yourself to give an outward reaction.

“I take it you’re not in the mood to drink until dawn at the moment?” Kaeya follows up, brows raised. “I was actually patrolling the perimeter earlier today. Children can be quite…competitive when it comes to carnival games, if I do say so myself.” 

Oh. He must’ve seen those stubborn kids who wanted to keep playing despite having no mora left to fork over. Too bad for them – you haven’t been in the most stellar of moods today, much less a generous one.

“Katheryne told me that jobs like these require the patience of a saint,” you say. “Sister Rosaria would argue that I wouldn’t gain any of that even in my next life.”

“I second that,” Kaeya hums along. “Speaking of Sister Rosaria, I believe she’s waiting for me with a mugful of ale. If you change your mind, come over to Margaret's, will you?” 

You hesitate for a moment. Spending time with these odd vision-wielders took off the day's stress better than simply sleeping it off – you know that pretty well. But you're just so sick of these tedious commissions, that you kind of want to have some time for yourself. Gods, the things you'd do just to snag a job that requires you to venture off somewhere faraway instead of where you are now...

Giving Kaeya one last apologetic look, you say: 

“Maybe next time.”

Are you really a Mondstadter if you don’t like Ludi Harpastum?

The question has been plaguing your head since your first day on the job. It’s the same question you ask yourself as you pass by the taverns and restaurants still bustling with business even this late into the evening. As the jovial noise flits through your ears, instead of being filled with the festive spirit, all you feel is annoyed. 

Things weren’t always this way, though. You wonder if you’re just frustrated about being stuck in the city for longer than usual. You’re an adventurer, for archon’s sake. Sure, accepting boring commissions was part of the job, but anyone would lose their mind if they had to keep repeating the same routine. 

Instead of heading home like you originally planned, you decide to make a quick detour.

The docks just outside the north-east gates are always empty come nightfall. More so now, with the festival in full swing. Usually, you amble by the lakeshore to clear your mind when you don’t want to rely on alcohol to do the job for you. There’s just something so…calming about the sound of water running beneath your feet, and the evening breeze blowing past your face. If you couldn’t go on riveting adventures, at least you can imagine the wind taking you somewhere else, right?

“Hm? It’s you.”

That familiar voice is enough to snap you out of your temporary haze of relaxation – blinking at your present company with a scowl.

Up ahead, you spot Diluc seated at the edge of the dock, the sleeves of his dress shirt folded up to his elbows. His fiery hair shines even under the flimsy light of the street lamp, and it takes you a moment to process that he’s actually there – a pile of stones resting on top of the folded coat right next to him. 

Was he…skipping them across the water?

“Master Diluc,” you greet him with a lopsided smile – making sure your face doesn’t betray your curiosity too much. “What brings you here?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” he replies, taking one of the stones before making it skip four, five times across the lake’s surface. “I thought Kaeya and Rosaria would’ve dragged you off to drink elsewhere, yet here you are.”

You shrug. “They did, but I wasn’t really in the mood.” 

“I see.”

The silence settles over the both of you once more, and you dare to stride closer. With each step, the wooden platform groans beneath your weight. You train your eyes on Diluc as you take a seat next to him – half-wondering if he minds the intrusion. From the way the man quietly resumes his past time of skipping stones, though, you think you’re in the clear.

Your legs dangle over the edge along with his. You don’t really expect him to speak. Whether it’s about today being his birthday or the so-called admirers he’s garnered at the tavern, it’s all the same. Diluc Ragnvindr isn’t one for small talk. You didn’t have to be acquainted for years to know that.

“You’re running a booth this year, aren’t you?”

…Or not.

“I didn’t think the news would reach you,” you say, not bothering to mask your surprise. “I am – against my own will, but that’s besides the point.”

He breathes a sound that suspiciously sounds like a laugh. “Still can’t say no to jobs you don’t want to take. Didn’t Rosaria already talk you out of that habit of yours?” 

“Hey, I’m not some hero-in-disguise who has the freedom to choose who I’m gonna save for the day.” You scoff. If Diluc notices the direct jab at his alter-ego, he doesn’t show it. “Work is work, whether I like it or not. Gods, I wish they would assign me on an expedition soon, though…”

He stares at you passively, weighing a stone on his gloved hand.

“What about your booth then?” 

“It’s just some stupid ring toss booth.” you explain. “Maybe if you train enough out here, you can snag the grand prize in one go.”

Diluc simpers. “Bold of you to assume I’d actually spend my mora on a rigged game.”

“Excuse you.” You’re too late to stifle the gasp that you breathe in, a semi-offended grimace framing your lips despite the fact that you hated your job. “The wooden pegs are just painted for an added…optical illusion! It’s to increase the difficulty.”

“So you admit it’s rigged?”

You click your tongue. “It’s not my fault that customers think the pegs are closer because of the aesthetic! If they really want to win a lifetime supply of sunsettias, they shouldn’t let measly handicaps like that get in the way.”

Diluc tosses another stone into the lake – this one only skips twice before sinking to the bottom.

“A lifetime supply of sunsettias,” he repeats. “That’s your grand prize?”

“Hey, if you don’t like it, then don’t play.”

Again, silence – albeit more comfortable.

Sure, you didn’t get to drink and sing along to a bard’s tunes with Kaeya and Rosaria like usual, but Diluc makes for a good substitute. Even if he practically accused you of being a fraud. When you met him years prior, you never would’ve thought you’d be able to hold a casual conversation with Mondstadt’s wine tycoon like you are now. 

As you sneak a glance from the corner of your eye, you realize that Diluc looks more disheveled than usual. Dress shirt rumpled. Red tufts coming loose from his hair tie. You can’t miss his oddly unguarded demeanor as he sits next to you even if you try, which is a surprise in and of itself, since he’s so uptight even inside his own tavern.

“...A little bird told me you had a bunch of suitors hounding you back at Angel’s Share.”

Diluc pauses for a while before casting you a perplexed stare. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re no fun.” You pout. “I’m talking about all those birthday guests trying to woo you, who else? Don’t tell me you turned them all down without giving at least one of them a chance.”

He takes on an unreadable look – one that tells you he’s ruminating about how you found out about both his birthday and those pushy patrons. In the end, Diluc decides not to ask since the answer is as clear as day anyways.

“You shouldn’t believe everything Kaeya tells you,” he tells you gruffly. “All that ever comes out of his mouth is a melodramatic version of the truth.”

“So there’s still some truth to what he said then?”

He looks like he’s trying very hard not to say something unbecoming of a gentleman to your face. “I held no such event to commemorate anything. The daughters of some shifty business partners just wanted to secure their livelihood by currying my favor is all.”

“Harsh as always,” you sigh. “What if those ladies genuinely liked you? How could you dismiss a person’s feelings as nothing but a ploy instigated by their rich fathers?”

“I personally don’t understand why everyone is more concerned about the state of my love life than I am.” He shakes his head, and – oh. He does get context clues about romance after all. “I don’t concern myself with the…attention of my patrons, because first and foremost they’re my patrons. Second, I don’t have time for trivial things like that.”

Now, that’s just sad. The man sitting right next to you has a face worth a million mora, yet he chooses to live a maidenless life. 

“Look, I know you want to focus on protecting everyone from the shadows, but you should enjoy yourself from time to time, too,” you say, feeling a bit hypocritical given the fact that you were internally bitching about the festival before you ran into him. “It’s a miracle you’re even here, and not – I don’t know. Burning some Fatui bastards on a spit-roast or something?” 

“Who ever said I’m not enjoying myself?”

You scowl at him again, already pitying him at this point, but you know Diluc won’t have any of it anyway. “Diluc. Master Diluc. Famous wine tycoon. Most renowned bachelor in all of Mondstadt – are you seriously committing yourself to being celibate for the rest of your life in the name of justice?”

He laughs almost mockingly. “If I am?”

“Well,” you start, swallowing thickly. “You’re too cool for that.”

“...I’m too cool to be celibate?”

“Yeah! Maybe if you just tried talking to one of those admirers of yours, you’ll finally get some action,” you elaborate without a shred of shame. “Clearly, there are already those who are interested – all lined up outside Angel’s Share, I bet.” 

Diluc soaks up the silence once more before letting out a real laugh – one that catches you off guard, but is a welcome surprise no less.

“You and your insinuations,” he quips, sounding more amused than vexed. “Now who’s the one who told you I’m not getting any action?”

That makes you whistle. “Oh? He who doesn’t love anything else but Mondstadt is actually getting some? Now that’s something Kaeya, Rosaria, and I are going to have a field day talking about.”

“And why is that?”

Taking a stone from his little pile, skipping it across the water like he did minutes earlier. You even burn through his whole collection until you have nothing more to throw. Diluc’s eyes don’t stray too far as he waits for your response – making you flash him a patronizing smile. 

Others would’ve probably talked smack about you teasing someone as famous and powerful as Diluc, but he’s always let you off the hook every time. That’s enough grounds to assume you’re at least a bit special, isn’t it?

“I just can’t picture you holding someone else’s hand, much more taking someone to bed,” you admit, but there’s no animosity in your voice. The words weren’t meant to tease, they’re just what you’ve generally observed about him. And you know goddamn well that a hundred other people would agree with you, too.

You wonder if Diluc is going to take that as the last straw and finally give you a piece of his mind. Sure, he’s comfortable to let you talk so boldly, but at the end of the day you’re just a regular customer at best. Maybe you shouldn’t try to emulate the way Kaeya treats him too much, just because you’re all buddy-buddy.

“Would you like to test it out then?”

The silence of the evening rings in your ears once again – the water flowing, the breeze sighing. But no matter how hard you try to tell yourself that you must’ve heard wrong, you don’t have enough alcohol in your system to make a convincing argument.

“What?” you ask dryly instead, subtly giving Diluc some leeway to change the topic.

“Hold my hand,” he tells you, and it sounds more imperative than anything else. “Don’t you want to see for yourself if I’m actually incapable of human contact?”

“Now it just sounds like you’re messing with me,” you grumble.

His mouth twitches into an amused smile for half a second before that resting bitch face settles back into place. “Are you going to do it or not?”

Now, you’ve held a great number of hands in your lifetime. Your parents’, your friends’, Master Cyrus from the Guild’s during your first promotion, and even Kaeya’s whenever the occasion calls for a drunken dance at the bar. Needless to say, you’re well-versed in the art of hand-holding.

But right now, with your fingers intertwined with Diluc’s, you feel as if someone pushed you inside Good Hunter’s outdoor stove with how hot your face feels. 

Out of all the reactions you could’ve gotten, biting the bullet is the last thing you imagined Diluc would do. He’s usually the type who just lets every bit of slander thrown at him slide – always choosing to be the bigger person without really meaning to. The man just doesn’t give a damn about what other people have to say. 

So why the hell is he holding your hand just to prove a point?

It doesn’t help that his fingers – though protected by the coarse material of his gloves – are unexpectedly warm. You have no idea why you didn’t anticipate that from a pyro user, but –

“See?” Diluc says coolly, red eyes staring out into the lake. “I can hold someone else’s hand.” 

“That wasn’t the point I was trying to make.”

He turns to you with a miffed look. “What, do you want to test if I know how to hug, too?” 

You could’ve used that chance to make the situation slip back into familiar territory. Diluc wasn’t much of a talker, so most of the conversations you had with him in the past consisted of you ranting about anything under the sun while he quietly listened to your plight. All you had to do was downplay…whatever this was and go back to talking nonsense like usual. 

And yet… 

“Fine.”

This time, you’re the one who initiates the contact – shifting your weight across the dock before pulling him into a wordless embrace. You feel Diluc stiffen, obviously unused to this degree of affection. But his strong arms eventually coil around your shoulders, and you feel your heart pick up the pace.

Two unsuspecting adults hugging by the shore of Cider Lake. Nothing is weird about this at all.

You half-expected him to pull away once he’s proved that he was most definitely not the emotionless excuse of a man everyone thinks he is. But you remain locked in Diluc’s embrace for more than two minutes, and you’re starting to become more and more aware of a lot of things. 

First is his hair. It feels somewhat…fluffy from where the skin of your arms comes into contact with it. Then comes the scent of his clothes. You catch the faintest scent of booze on the fabric, and it’s probably from all the hours he’s spent behind the bar. 

Last is…how firmly he’s holding on to you.

You would’ve boasted about how you got to hug Kaeya’s brother when the captain can’t even get in close proximity without getting an earful from Diluc. Affection has never been the staple between the two of them, it seems. All this time, you thought it was because Diluc is the kind of man who can’t freely give that out to just anyone. But when he heaves a deep, deep sigh and buries his face in the crook of your neck, you wonder how he managed to conceal this side of him for so long.

Is he actually harboring some problems deep down? He’s so mysterious and reserved that hardly anyone can tell if Diluc’s in a good mood or not. Still, despite not being entirely sure, you pat his back in soothing motions – hoping to give him some respite.

He probably needs this hug more than he let on.

It feels like lifetimes later, but the two of you manage to pull away eventually. When you do, though, Diluc is still too close for comfort. Close enough that you can clearly make out the curve of his lips – slightly parted as he sucks in a deep breath. 

You’ve always been aware of how handsome this man actually is, despite the fact that he shoots down every single person who tries to hit him up. But getting up close and personal like this gives you an even deeper understanding of why people are vying for Diluc’s attention in the first place.

“Do you want to test out one more thing?” you whisper, not quite sure where your courage is even coming from.

The moment the words leave your lips, you worry that the message won’t translate well. Would he even get what you’re trying to insinuate? If he does, would Diluc even agree to it? You’re a pretty laid-back person, but you don’t think your pride can take it if he flat out rejects you right then and there.

Though it seems like the gods are on your side when Diluc leans forward without uttering a single word – capturing your lips in a chaste kiss.

Your mind is blank for the entirety of it, given that it’s a bit difficult to process the fact that you’re kissing one of the most untouchable men in the city. There’s nothing special about the way Diluc kisses you right now. He just meshes your mouths together firmly together – no teeth, no tongue. But the feel of Diluc pressing you against him alone is enough to drive your body into a fever pitch.

When he pulls away, he rests his forehead against yours, shoulders heaving with bated breath.

“How was that?” he asks breathlessly.

At that point you don’t even think anymore. You lace your arms behind his head before diving in for another kiss – prying his lips apart with your tongue before threading your fingers through his hair. An animalistic noise rumbles low in his chest, making a full shiver skid across the length of your spine. Diluc holds your face with one hand, while his free arm coils around your waist in a near-possessive fashion. Once a shuddering moan slips past your lips, his grip tightens even more. 

You only disengage when you feel like your lungs are about to burst – so lightheaded that you’re momentarily entranced by the red of his eyes. A trail of saliva even connects your lips, and Diluc stares at you with such a heated look that  you hide your face in embarrassment.

That is not how people with no game kiss at all!

“Sorry,” he rasps, yet he sounds anything but apologetic. “I got carried away –”

“You think?” you laugh, palms gripping his shoulders as you muster the courage to look him in the eye again. “Remind me to never cross you like that again?”

To your surprise, Diluc doesn’t miss a beat. “Very well. Only if you let me do one more thing.”

“...What’s that?”

You barely stifle the yelp that escapes you as Diluc maneuvers you onto his lap – a continuous mantra of what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck ringing inside your head. He stares at you with a semi-amused look, and even if the kisses you shared made you all hot and bothered, you still have the decency to feel embarrassed.

“If you drop me, I’m not going to talk to you for a month,” you hiss.

Diluc breathes in a soft laugh, and you tense up as you feel him massaging the curve of your thighs through your skirt. You know you should probably stand up and just walk the hell away, but when he nuzzles your neck with his nose, you’re too weak to refuse him.

How did things end up like this? One moment, you were teasing him like usual, and now Diluc is having his way with you. His mouth slots so perfectly against yours – swallowing each sound that climbs up your throat before groping your ass. Even through his gloves, you can feel the heat of his fingers, making you unintentionally roll your hips as Diluc devours your lips.

You’re fully aware that, even if everyone else is celebrating Ludi Harpastum to its fullest, you can’t let him whisk your consciousness away. Some poor Favonius guard might spot you sprawled across the lap of none other than Diluc Ragnvindr himself, and both your reputations could be done for. But still, you find solace in the fact that some of the crates stacked nearby are enough to conceal this unlikely tryst from prying eyes.

Kaeya wouldn’t believe it if you told him. Rosaria would bet that you simply had a fever dream. But when Diluc trails his mouth across the cut of your jaw – teeth grazing your skin until he finds your skittering pulse – you surrender yourself to the reality that you might’ve bitten off more than you could chew.

He hasn’t even done anything yet, yet you’re already aching. Diluc leaves bright red marks along the column of your throat, and despite your constant heed for appearances, you let him do as he pleases. 

Something hot and hard prods your middle as you shift your weight. He takes a sharp breath, blood red eyes shining with lust and impatience alike. When you realize that you just got the most coveted man in Mondstadt to pop a boner, you can’t help the hint of smugness that paints your features.

However, your triumph is fleeting. Because even if both of you have long descended into a haze of debauchery, you’re still high-strung. The moment you hear a loud crash somewhere nearby, you violently jerk away from Diluc – failing to realize that there’s nothing behind you but a body of water. 

Despite himself, Diluc is taken by surprise by your knee-jerk reaction, too, and he can only watch in befuddlement as gravity hooks you in with a backward force. 

You’ve always wondered what swimming in Cider Lake feels like. A lot of kids dived into the nearer shores during summer, but the temperature tonight is absolutely not fit for a late night dip. Once you break through the surface, you gasp out loud – completely soaked as the wind mocks you with a soft but chilly breeze.

This is fine. You know how to swim. You’re just going to ignore a certain redheaded liquor tycoon for not being quick enough to catch you, but it’s all good.

Diluc doesn’t exactly feel the same way, though.

Faster than you can voice out your complaints, he kicks off his boots and dives into the lake – splashing water all over your already damp face.

Is this how the people he saves feel about his unsolicited help? Archons, the Dark Knight Hero can be so goddamn unaware –

“Are you alright?”

Diluc wraps his arms around your shoulders swimming closer to the shore until you find your footing again. Amidst his breathlessness, you find traces of concern in his voice. When you dare to look at him again, Diluc’s brows are creased together as he fusses over you, and you can hardly believe the two of you were just making out in the open two minutes ago.

He frowns when you let out the ugliest laugh. “What’s so funny?”

“I just feel like this is the culmination of my shitty week,” you admit with a sheepish smile, wringing out your hair as the heat he’d aroused from your body dissipates with the cold air. “But hey, at least I got to know you in...ways better than anyone else. How about we head back before one of the guards spots us, yeah?”

You thought Diluc was going to be reasonable and agree. It’s not like the two of you can just bring back the atmosphere you unintentionally shattered. Best case scenario, you’ll both walk away like nothing happened, and take this secret to the grave. 

But when you realize that his eyes are transfixed on your chest – blouse suddenly see-through from the splash – your face heats up several degrees higher. 

Gods, who needs dignity anyway?

Surprisingly, he doesn’t resist when you grab him by the collar of his equally wet dress shirt, meeting him in another sloppy kiss. It’s like nothing ever occurred to interrupt the both of you. Diluc snakes a strong arm around your frame, pressing you against his rigid body. When his gloved hand finds its way to your cheek, you nearly whimper. 

You’d be an idiot to let a chance like this slip away, right?

“On second thought…” you whisper against his lips – trembling with anticipation under his ravenous gaze.

“You’ve got a spare room back at Angel’s Share, don’t you?”

Slipping past the knights stationed at the north-east gate is a bit difficult when you and Diluc are soaked from head to toe. Even if his coat is draped across your shoulders, it’s not enough to hide the fact that you both definitely took a swim one way or another. It’s a good thing that younger ones who know about Diluc’s history with the Knights are smart enough to pretend they didn’t see as the two of you make your way back to the tavern. 

You have to admit, though, Diluc is very…impatient.

The man can’t last ten seconds without trying to feel you up – groping your tits, leaving small hickeys on your neck, and even sneaking a kiss or two. You would’ve laughed at how desperate he’s being with you right now, if only you weren’t as horny and pent-up as he is.

“Down, boy,” you breathe. “We’re almost there.”

Angel’s Share is already closed by the time you finally arrive, which must be at the birthday boy’s behest. Speaking of which, Diluc rummages around the pockets of his coat – the one you’re still wearing – cussing under his breath when he doesn’t immediately find the keys to the back. But when he manages to grant both of you entry, Diluc pulls you inside, shuts the door and slams you against the solid surface.

It shouldn’t feel so fucking good, how rough he’s being with you. Diluc tosses his coat to the side, practically ripping off the buttons of your blouse as he reclaims your lips. With the newfound privacy, you allow yourself to be a bit bolder – inching your thighs apart to accommodate the man in front of you. 

“For someone so celibate, you’re pretty pent-up, aren’t you?” 

He hums at your words, making you throw your head back with a moan as he massages your breasts. When Diluc laughs, you feel your chest flutter at the sound of it.

“You have no idea.”

The trip to the second floor takes longer than you’d otherwise like. Things would’ve progressed more swiftly if Diluc didn’t keep pressing you against every piece of furniture in the bar – leaving you with less and less clothing as you drew closer to the spare room. By the time you’re standing in front of it, you’re left with nothing but a flimsy bra and your soaked panties – something that Diluc obviously enjoys seeing. 

In the back of your mind, you wonder if he’s tried to ravage other women like this in the past. Did he strew their clothes around his own tavern, too? Did he exhibit the same, raw desire that he has for you now? 

You decide that it doesn’t matter in the end. After all, today is Diluc’s birthday. 

What kind of friend would you be if you didn’t give him a present he won’t forget?

When the bedroom door clicks shut, you’re quick to sink to your knees – taking Diluc by surprise as you fumble around with his belt. The erection straining against his wet trousers makes your mouth water, and despite his protests, you haul out his cock without a word. The length is impressive enough to have you squirming, and just imagining how his thick girth will spread you open makes you even more impatient.

But before that, you’d like to do a little something for him first.

“What are you – nghh!” 

Diluc tilts his head back when you take him into your mouth, lathering his length with saliva as you stare up at him the whole time. His face is flushed as he struggles to peel off his gloves, attempting to pull you off his cock, though the effort is weak.

Oh, what a sight to see: Diluc Ragnvindr’s stoic façade, torn asunder by a blowjob.

Though that’s as far as your teasing goes.

The moment you pry your lips off him for a breather, Diluc leans down to hoist you into his arms – an unnecessary display of strength, but one that sends a rush of heat straight to your cunt. He’s pissed. You can tell from the stiff set of his jaw, and how little heed he has for your comfort as he tosses you onto the bed.

You shoot him a scowl as he strips the rest of his clothing. “Hey, I wasn’t –”

“You’re starting to become more and more cocky, aren’t you?” Diluc shakes his head, freeing his damp hair from that flimsy tie as the red tresses fall across his shoulders. “I let you do as you please for a while, and suddenly you think you’re the one who’s calling the shots? Hmph.”

You’ve never heard him talk like this before – like some master chastising a disobedient pet. It doesn’t help that you’re given a generous view of his toned chest, marred with scars you’ll probably never know the stories behind. You want nothing more than to reach out and kiss every single one, but when you try to move, Diluc quickly pins your wrists against the bed – restricting your movement in more ways than one.

You’re stunned into silence as Diluc continues lecturing you. The words, however, are lost in the haze of your own arousal – nerves set alight as he trails his lips down your thigh. He teases you with these fleeting sensations until he’s up close and personal with your clothed cunt, red eyes boring deeply into yours.

“You need to stop provoking me if you don’t want to get burned.”

He allows you a moment of reprieve when he drags the fabric of your underwear off your legs – tossing it somewhere behind him as he marvels at the sight of your bare pussy. You’re wet and waiting for him, just like he wanted.

Diluc doesn’t waste any time, doing a few experimental licks across your slit as he quietly observes you. It fills him with a sick sense of pride when you have adorably sharp reactions each time his tongue makes a pass over your clit – fingers threading through his hair as you bite down a moan. 

He laps up your essence like a man starved before easing a finger into the tight ring of your cunt, and you sandwich his head between your thighs as he loosens you up. It’s hard to think about anything else apart from the skillful licks of Diluc’s tongue. When he teases your weeping entrance with the tip of his appendage, you let out an embarrassingly lewd sound.

You hear him chuckle. “See? Isn’t this better?”

When he manages to slide two fingers inside you, he curls the digits just so, making you keen his name as your toes curl with pleasure. Diluc is relentless; not giving you any space to breathe as he eats you out. He’s loosening you up real good, and you can only imagine what’s yet to come when he frays your overstimulated nerves.

That coil in your gut is wound up so tight, you fear like you’ll explode. As your heavy pants fill the room, you give your lover a few telltale signs that you’re close. The grip you have on his hair is more fervent, and you even roll your hips to meet his tongue. You feel like such a vixen, defiling Diluc’s face like this, but from the way he vigorously responds to your desperation, you’re fairly certain he just wants to get you off as much as you do.

Diluc teases the beginnings of your g-spot with each curl of his fingers, and every time he does, your eyes roll to the back of your head. How the fuck did he learn to eat pussy like that?!

But when you’re finally tethered across the edge of climax, he stops.

“Why…?” you half-sob, bemoaning the loss of his heat as Diluc untangles himself from your thighs. He smirks, lips still slick with your juices.

“Open,” he orders before leaning forward, prodding your lips with the fingers he’d buried inside your pussy not five seconds earlier. To his delight, you’re all-too willing to comply, tasting yourself on his skin as you lather your tongue around his thick digits. Diluc meets your wanton reaction with an amused sigh. He’s gotten quite lucky tonight.

“Good girl,” he whispers, and you feel your cunt throb at the praise.

He sinks into the mattress with you when he takes those fingers out of your mouth – replacing them with his lips as he meets you in another fervent kiss. A strong hand rests on the curve of your waist, possessively tugging you close to leave no inch of space between you. Despite the tangy aftertaste on his lips, you welcome him all the same.

When he slides his hard length between your thighs, you don’t even flinch – letting Diluc tease your folds with the head of his cock. With that little edging stint he pulled, you’re very much aching and desperate to have your pussy stuffed to the brim.

“Diluc,” you mewl, sighing against his lips. “Want you…inside.”

He growls, reaching behind you to finally unclasp your bra – the last piece of clothing you had. Diluc practically nuzzles his face into your breasts as he angles his hips, biting down hard once his cock breaches your entrance. A broken moan slips past your lips as you take every inch of him, and you nearly sob once he finally bottoms out.

His forehead rests against yours as he catches his breath, and you nearly lose it from the feel of his dick pulsating inside you. Everything feels so hot, it’s like you’ll melt from his touch alone.

“Not so celibate now, are we?” he says, and you would’ve laughed, if he wasn’t stretching your pussy so goddamn good. 

Diluc snaps his hips sharply, catching you off-guard before setting a steadier pace. His dick rubs against the velvet walls of your cunt as he leaves even more marks along the curve of your tits. He even presses one of your legs against your chest to introduce a better angle, and tears quite literally dot your lashes when the head of his cock brushes your cervix. 

He’s so big inside you, prying your pussy open with each drag of his length. Even if you want nothing more than to wrap your legs around his waist to bring him closer, Diluc is adamant about keeping you in place – both thighs pressed against your breasts as he pounds you into the mattress.

You’ve never had sex that felt as mind-shattering as Diluc’s. You didn’t even know it was possible to be this wet for someone. The lewd squelch of flesh ringing in your ears is a testament to that. Archons, if you knew Diluc could dick you down this good, you would’ve jumped him ages ago.

“Turn around. Hands and knees.”

It’s so pathetic, how you blindly follow him as if you’ve traded in your autonomy to be his cocksleeve. You whimper when you feel Diluc take out his dick, but silently comply with his orders – getting down on all fours on the bed as you stare at him in anticipation.

He breathes out a long-winded sigh, large, warm hands smoothing across the swell of your ass before hiking up your waist, making you shiver with delight. 

“Who would’ve known this body can take my dick so well?” Diluc chuckles, and you feel the head of his cock gliding along your slit once more. Obviously, the question is rhetorical, because before you can even slip in some underhanded remark, he’s already slipping himself back into your aching pussy – hitting you in places that have you struggling to prop yourself up.

“D-Diluc, I –” Your words are cut off by a moan as he forces you back down on the mattress – chest pressed against the bed as he continues to mount your ass. 

“So good for me,” he praises, fingers wound around the nape of your neck. “You’ve got such a lewd cunt. Did you always want me to claim you like this?” 

Of all the discoveries you’ve made tonight, the fact that Diluc is actually capable of talking so filthily might’ve made it on the top of your list. He whispered the words in your ear in such a tantalizing manner, you unintentionally clamp around his length – making him groan as each pass he makes in your cunt suddenly became tighter. 

“Yes,” you gasp when he makes a particularly deep thrust. “Yes, yes, please. Diluc, I-I want it.”

Diluc leans closer, taking the lobe of your ear between his teeth as he relentlessly moves his hips in time with yours. “What an honest girl. You deserve a little reward, don’t you think?”

Faster than you can blink, Diluc flips you onto your back once again – not giving you any time to breathe as he fills you up again. He wastes no time easing you into a mating press, and you can barely utter out the syllables of his name as he drives his length into you over, and over again. The heat in the pit of your stomach threatens to boil over, along with the goosebumps that erupt across your flesh. Closer, closer – you can almost taste it.

You end up coming with starbursts exploding behind your eyelids, and Diluc muffles the high-pitched keen of his name with a kiss. He rides out your orgasm – despite your spasming walls doing little in helping him keep it together. But when his own climax finally crests, he pulls out just in time, painting your breasts, your stomach, and your thighs with his white-hot release.

He marvels at the sight of you – blissed out with his cum staining your tits. Will the gods ever forgive him if this’ll be the same picture he thinks of during the lonelier nights he has out there?

Unless…

It takes you a while to anchor yourself back to reality and regain the feeling in your legs. You could’ve sworn you’d passed out for a moment, but the feeling of something soft being dabbed across your skin rouses your consciousness even just a bit.

That’s when you realize Diluc is wiping his own emission off your body.

“Can’t have you sleeping all gross like that,” he grumbles as he disposes of the cotton towel he got from gods-know-where in a basket sitting in the corner. “Unless you want me to prepare a bath for you?”

You smile at him sleepily, grabbing his face to give him a long, sweet kiss.

“Happy birthday,” you giggle. “I wouldn’t mind doing this again at all.”

Diluc tenses for a fraction of a second, but it completely goes over your head – still buzzed from the intensity of the orgasm he just gave you. As you tug him under the sheets, he figures that you might be too tired for a bath, and admittedly, he’s a bit drained too.

You get the feeling that Diluc is skirting around a question he wants to ask – red eyes darting with uncharacteristic uncertainty before shying away when you try to meet his gaze. You’re no body language expert, but you know a curious man when you see it.

“Got anything else to say to me?” you ask.

He swallows thickly, a slight redness dusting the high of his cheekbones. Yet another first for you – seeing Diluc Ragnvindr blush like a preteen.

“You were talking about wanting to go on expeditions instead of tending to boring commissions, weren’t you?” he starts, wrapping a muscular arm around your waist. You nod. “How about you come with me? I’m headed to Sumeru in a few days because there’s someone I need to track down.”

Now that definitely wakes you up. 

Seeing Diluc become a beast in the bedroom is one thing, but hearing him invite you to travel with him is another story. Sex and companionship are two very different things. You can have sex without completely trusting the person you’re with, but…constant companionship for his travels? He could’ve proposed to you and it would’ve meant the same thing!

That, or you just have such a skewed view of romance that you might be reading his offer wrong. 

“I-I’ll think about it,” you tell him instead – not wanting to make the situation awkward because of your own assumptions. “If I’m going with you, then I might have to file a pretty long vacation leave.”

He simpers. “Who said it’s for vacation? I’m commissioning you for your expertise as an adventurer, you know? Don’t sell yourself short.”

Well, now you’re not very sure if you should feel flattered or offended.

“Hey, wise guy, I can so go on adventures without the incentive of a reward.” You scowl. “You think I’m only in the Adventurer’s Guild for the money?” 

Diluc nods. “A week ago, you drunkenly proclaimed to the whole bar how much you loved the Guild because of the good pay. Even if your jobs are such a chore, you’ll let them exploit you as they please.”

…Note to self: stop spouting off nonsense when Diluc is there to remember every word.

“So you’re going to exploit me next?” you deflect with your pride all chinked up. It’s just so hard to get the last word with this guy!

“Well –”

Your quarreling is interrupted by the sound of the bedroom door groaning on its hinges. To your horror, the intruder comes in the form of two people. One is Kaeya, who’s drunk out of his wits as he shifts his weight onto his poor companion. Said companion just happens to be Rosaria, who gapes at the sight of you and Diluc both conspicuously naked under the sheets.

Oh, fuck.

Rosaria soundlessly moves her lips for a moment, like she can’t quite find the words until Kaeya mumbles something under his breath and leans against the doorframe. 

“Hey, how about you go sleep at my place tonight, big guy?” She pats his shoulder, keen eyes shying away from the spectacle in front of her. “Master Diluc might just castrate you if he finds out you’re crashing in his spare room again.”

Kaeya gives her a sleepy smile. “Oh? Trying to make a move on me, are you?”

“You know I’m allergic to penises, asshole. Come on.”

When she successfully hauls the oblivious cavalry captain out of the room, Rosaria flashes you a knowing smirk – mouthing the words: you owe me one before shutting the door behind her.

Then, the silence.

You don’t know if it’s proper to laugh, when two of your closest friends quite literally walked in on you in the midst of your pillow-talk (pillow-argument?) with Diluc. Even if only one of them was remotely aware of what was going on, that doesn’t make it any less embarrassing.

Diluc sighs, carding his fingers through his hair before padding over to the door to put the lock in place. When he returns to your side, he pulls you in a tight embrace that you can’t help but return.

“If you come with me, I promise…” he begins – and the husky undertone his voice takes on makes you shiver, “that the next time I get you mounted on my cock, it’s somewhere we won’t get interrupted by anyone else.”

When he peppers your neck with a trail of fiery kisses, you realize that Diluc Ragnvindr is playing with such unfair stakes. How the hell can you say no to that?

When the vigor in the both of you finally wanes, you doze off next to him in the afterglow. It feels comfortable, resting in the middle of Diluc’s strong embrace. The steady rise and fall of his chest is enough to lull you into slumber, and you find it somewhat amusing to know that this all started because of a harmless conversation at the docks.

Ludi Harpastum really is your favorite time of the year, after all.

★ MASTERLIST . AO3 ★

If Tides Could Speak (They'd Call You Home) by @shibaraki {mature} an unlikely hero comes in the form of a barbarian. your stolen pelt is returned by his hand—but for a selkie that is more than simple kindness. it is a proposal.

bakugou katsuki x reader

accidental marriage ✧ fantasy au ✧ falling in love

“here,” he thrusts the pelt into your arms. you scramble and clutch it to your front. something inside you shifts. “this is yours, right? we took it during the raid”.

you’re frozen to the spot, mouth gaping around words that won’t come. bakugo frowns, the party members behind him glancing at each other and shrugging when they find no answer to your silence.

“Well?” he demands, embarrassment staining his ears pink.

You wet your lips, breath shaken. “Bakugo. Do you understand the significance of what you just did?”

posting: may 3

Something in the Water by @andypantsx3 {mature} as a future marine biologist, you’ve scored big on your final internship: a summer in the tropics, researching the waters off the coast of a lush, sunny island. but what you thought would be all beach days and piña coladas turns out to be the revelation of a lifetime when you haul in a handsome merprince, and discover not everything in these waters is quite as it seems.

todoroki shouto x reader

interspecies relationship ✧ mating rituals ✧ case fic

the merman’s gaze slowly trailed down your body and you fought back a strange wave of embarrassment. his fingers flexed on your ankle, those claws rasping sweetly, dangerously over the thin skin there. he pulled your leg out a little bit like he was inspecting it.

“how strange,” he murmured, his tone going soft.

you didn’t know what to think, just stared at him as his gaze roved over the bare skin of your thigh in your sea-soaked shorts.

posting: starting may 5

Blood in the Water by @petrichorium {explicit} in which jade leech is hungry for something only you can give him and, because he's jade leech, has a roundabout way of asking for it.

jade leech x reader

period sex ✧ established relationship ✧ pwp

“i can smell it,” jade says hazily.

“wh—what?”

“it’s… maddening. all-consuming. it takes everything in me to remain civil when you’re dry but then you bathe and it becomes agony.” his eyes seem glazed over, a look that reminds you of his erratic other half and has you feeling a little like a butterfly pinned under glass—or maybe like you’ve been carefully placed in one of his beloved terrariums. his chest heaves with a long, slow inhale. clawed fingers grip harder at the flesh of your thighs and he moves closer, lifting your knee to rest atop his shoulder. when he speaks it’s a murmur, and you wonder if you’re meant to have heard at all. “blood in the water. all of my instincts searching for the prey, writhing and helpless, ripe for the taking.”

posting: may 6

What the Water Gave Me by @shibaraki {mature} when your sailboat is caught in a vicious storm you are saved by a whale sized mer that cannot keep his curiosity—nor his affections—at bay.

midoriya izuku x reader

courting behaviors ✧ modern fantasy ✧ macro/micro

it's a mer. it must be. mer sightings are incredibly rare— rare enough that tourists in your port town still call them myths. you’re in the palm of a legend. a giant one at that. 

what you know to be the mer’s thumb passes over you cautiously. you flinch despite his obvious attempt at telegraphing the movement. to someone your size it still happens a little too fast. the sinew in your neck hurts, wrung with tension as the thumb stops an inch short of your crown. seconds elapse. there’s a light pressure, liquid streaming down your face, a back and forth motion, a low warbling. 

the mer is petting you.

posting: may 10

My Life, My Lover, My Lady (Is the Sea) by @odieoats {explicit} your underwater home becomes collateral damage in a war waged by the humans above you—and you aren’t going to let the loudmouthed pirate captain ever forget it.

bakugou katsuki x reader

enemies to lovers ✧ pirates ✧ language barriers

“you think i don’t like books?” bakugou leers, snatching the soggy tome from your hand. the pages stick to your fingertips for just a second as he pries the book away. “just ‘cause i ain’t a fuckin’ philosopher, doesn’t mean i’m a dumbass.”

posting: may 13

Pharos by @auraxins {mature} a sailor by nature, you’re called to the seas. when you end up stranded on an island with an ancient lighthouse, you expect the act of fixing it to bring you help—not to leave you stuck with the human vessel of an equally ancient sea god who is just as clueless on how to escape.

chuuya nakahara x reader

oceanic eldritch deity au ✧ mutual pining ✧ strangers to lovers

upon the beach stands a man. 

unremarkable in stature, yet with an aura surrounding him that fills you with a strange sort of dread deep in the pit of your stomach. 

“who are you?” you call. “what business have you here?”

“you don't know?” barks the man, incredulousness in his tone. “you summoned me here.”“i fixed the lighthouse,” you correct. “i did not summon anything.”

posting: may 20

Don't Touch the Glass by @shibaraki {mature} merfolk are otherworldly creatures that fall victim to human greed all too often. your team happens upon an abandoned aquatic theatre housing a single converted shipping container full of water — inside it is an adult siren, left behind to die.

shinsou hitoshi x reader

recovery ✧ interspecies relationship ✧ strangers to lovers

you creep onto the platform and lean carefully against the railing, scanning the area. the surface is covered in dense scum. you barely make out a silhouette in the tank, suspended lifelessly. their body twitches as the metal creaks. 

instinct puppets your limbs as you stumble back. a shout comes from the doorway. your eyes squeeze shut to the sudden splash of water, narrowly missing the clawed hand hooked in the treads. attached is a thin arm, gauzy fins protruding from the wrist upheld by chitinous spines. 

a siren.

posting: may 21

An Itch to Scratch by @coopigeoncoo {explicit} kirishima eijiro is everything you never thought you’d find when you packed up and moved to a dilapidated fishing town.  he was handsome, funny, and kind; the sort of man who took your breath away. 

and that might actually be a bit of a problem.

kirishima eijirou x reader

medical issues ✧ interspecies relationship ✧ practical jokes

"good girl," eijiro praised, his hands like a vice on your hips as he pulled away from your mouth with a satisfied grin.  you returned his smile with one of your own; the vibrant joy that had churned in your belly unfurled throughout your body, leaving you feeling breathless and lightheaded.

"eiji," you gasped, eyes widening in panic as your lungs seemed to seize in your chest.  "i- can't breathe!"

posting: may 24

Hidden in the Sand by @smashboxgirl26 {mature} seeing your face again wasn’t something he’d ever expected: though you don’t normally think about seeing your dead childhood friend as a mermaid.

bakugou katsuki x reader

pro hero au ✧ childhood friends ✧ angst

the face it bore was familiar: with rosy cheeks from the cold, the same eyes he’d known ever since he was a child, hair curled around her face as if it were the frame of a painting.

the resemblance was uncanny. he knew her.

it all hit him so suddenly: the late nights spent under the stars, running around the forest barefoot, sneaking in through the window at night, getting drenched from the hose; secrets, stories, lies — they all came back as easily as he’d repressed them all those years ago.

when she’d lost herself to the sea and left him forever.

posting: may 28

The Moon Will Sing by @petrichorium {mature} in which you find yourself torn between your dear friend, the village's strongest protector... and the very creature he's sworn to hunt, who is determined to take you as his mate.

kokushibo x reader (ft. gyoumei)

interspecies relationship ✧ courting rituals ✧ love triangle

The boat sways.

At first it doesn't faze you—like a large wave, nothing more. But then you’re rising up and the wood is dipping beneath your feet and your head snaps down to find a very large, very tripled set of bright orange eyes right in front of your face, and you’re falling.

The boat tilts entirely; you scramble for the edge of it, mindless, stupid panic gripping you with nothing in your brain except how utterly foolish it was to come out into the middle of the bay to search for an apex predator in a boat barely half its size. The water is so icy that you gasp and inhale on contact, as it surges over your head and you’re plunged into cold, endless black. Those claws find your waist and you know two things with grave certainty: it’s only been playing with its food, and you’re going to be dragged under and torn apart.

posting: may 29

In the Eyes of the Tide by @namodawrites {mature} hoping for a quieter life, you uproot your life in the city in favor of a quaint, coastal town. but as the seasons flip, you discover there's more to it—and your new friend, oogami banri—than meets the eye.

oogami banri x reader

secret identity ✧ au ✧ friends to lovers

“oogami-san?” you resist the urge to press your ear against the door. “are you alright in there?”

his tone comes back, muffled but cheery. “no problem! don’t worry about me—those shrimp are probably ready to take out of the water by now. would you mind putting them in the ice bath for me?”

there’s a feeling in the back of your mind, coaxing you, tempting your hand to reach for the door. but you’d rather jump into the ocean on a stormy day than barge in banri in his own bathroom, and you take a deliberate step back, staring at the blank canvas of the door.

“yeah,” you say, sounding unsure even to your own ears, “yeah, i can do that.”

posting: may 30

High Tide (Came and Brought You In) by @pikatsum {teen} you’d originally rescued the injured merman out of kindness, and perhaps a healthy undercurrent of fear of what others in your town might do to the creature. 

the last thing you ever expected after returning him to the sea, was for him to want to stay.

todoroki shouto x reader

courting ✧ slight angst ✧ strangers to lovers

you‘d heard of hysterical strength before, but you’d never truly acknowledged the sensation until the soaked, dripping netting was held high above your head. but very quickly, you couldn’t process anything outside of the form that waited underneath. 

a pair of bright dichromatic eyes blinked at you through the gloom. it would be almost ethereal, if their owner wasn’t literally heaving for breath, both arms stuck akimbo in the holes of the netting. evidently, he and you had had the same idea. you gave voice to the only thought that actually did make sense in this situation.

“…what the hell…?”

posting: may 31

Morning glories. Buds of deep-blue, trumpet-shaped blossoms and leafy stems. The delicate petals taste surprisingly bitter, with a bite that lingers in the fissures between his molars after it has been ground into thin paste and swallowed. He had long since gotten used to the astringency— drying his throat, twisting his stomach.

“…At best it causes severe breathing difficulties and discomfort. Worst case scenario, it can be fatal…”

In the beginning he thought it would pass. Dabi has endured sickness all his life and a cough wasn’t about to stop his long laid plans. But it worsened, mutated into something he could not control. He remembers sitting in your bathroom on the toilet lid, the little blue burgeon rolling in the shallow of his palm. It’d been covered in bloody mucus, but still a pip, still harmless.

Any sane person might have been afraid at that moment, realising what fate awaited them. Dabi, however, felt oddly resigned. One in one hundred million. Of course this would happen to him. Death clung to him everywhere he went.

“Dabi, are you listening?”

Doctor Tereda had been the one to stitch him up back then. A quack with a near useless cell activation quirk and glasses lenses thick enough for a bullet to bounce off. You’d dragged him into her office, sat him on the bed with surprising strength, and she attended to him no questions asked.

Dabi tried not to make a habit of visiting one place too often, but between your pleading eyes and his rapidly worsening health, he ended up back in her office more times than he cared to.

He makes a noncommittal sound.

“As a medical professional I must strongly advise you to talk to the individual these feelings have bloomed for,” Terada says. Dabi does not like the sympathetic pinch in her brow. “That is the least invasive option”.

Prying open his chest and baring himself to you seems pretty damn invasive. “Not happening,” he mutters airily.

There’s a sense of satisfaction when her frown strains with frustration. Her glasses slip down the bridge of her nose. “Your case is incredibly advanced. It may be your only chance to tell—”

“You got something wrong with your ears?” he interrupts. The stitches beneath his eyes sting, pulled taut by his glare. “I said no”.

Tereda sighs and turns to her screen, pushing her frames back up. The keyboard clicks under her fingers. Every computer here was ancient, their systems totally outdated, but they made do.

“You have two more options. The best results are produced if both treatments are done together,” she explains. “First is surgery. You’ll be put under general anaesthesia and the disease will be removed along with some surrounding tissue in the lungs for biopsy. Memories of the loved one are usually lost”.

Dabi slouched to feign disinterest, betrayed by the restless bounce of his knee, “And?”

“Your second option is to attend an interpersonal psychotherapy programme,” she lifts her hand to silence him before he can interject. “This is highly recommended to patients after surgery to prevent relapse. But you can do it regardless, as it is helpful in reducing your symptoms, and while the disease becomes chronic, it is more manageable”.

Dabi’s jaw shifts as he grits his teeth, pulling at the staples by his mouth, “Calling me fucking crazy now, eh Doc?”

“No,” she replies cooly, schooling her features into something kinder. “As people we underestimate the influence our mental well being has over our physical condition. Hanahaki disease is rare, yes. But over a quarter of all cases are found to be psychosomatic”.

Dabi laughs dryly and brings a fist down hard, smoke squeezed from between his knuckles marred the desk with black. “So this is of my own making, is that what you’re saying?”

“This isn’t something you plant into yourself, Dabi. It isn’t your fault and I could be completely wrong. I’m not all knowing, I’m just a doctor,” a smooth hand is placed over top of his own in effort to comfort, “But torturing yourself will only feed it”.

He scrambles to his feet, the chair legs scraping piercingly across the tile, and snatches his fist back to hold behind his back. The doctor levels him with a sad, soft look, her upper body still leaned across the table.

“If you leave this as it is it will only hurt you. It is already hurting you,” Tereda continues critically. “We can mitigate this, Dabi. Before it kills you”.

That unearths some ill-gotten memory from the recesses of his brain. A film strip he replays often in solitude; the day Endeavor sat him down and told him he shouldn’t use his quirk anymore. At first it was a fatherly suggestion, unnaturally low and soft. “You should stop. It’s hurting you, Touya,” as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

That never made sense to him. In training they used to focus on fire, usually— on intensifying his flame power— but on occasion they would spar. Between poor footing and wrong steps, Endeavour always reprimanded tears and quick surrender.

“But it hurts…”

“Strong heroes fight through pain,” he said. “The world does not stop just because you are crying. Get up! Or are you weak?”

Touya took it to heart, back then. Clenched his chubby little fists tight and got to his feet with a wobbly snarl on his damp, swollen face.

Young minds are impressionable and his own had already been moulded by the very hands on his shoulders. Endeavour’s fingers had held on tight, dwarfing Touya’s frame; heat soaking through his shirt from those searing palms and the sting of old wounds had been enough to keep him grounded in reality. You should stop this. It’s hurting you.

Those words festered and ate away at his soul like an infection. Giving up was against everything he knew— and against everything Endeavor told him a hero should be. It was not an option he was willing to take, and so Touya trudged forward, just as he was taught.

Eventually Endeavour’s words evolved into demand. He became furious. Touya became accustomed to long sleeves and learned how to treat burns alone. Hands made for saving left oval shaped bruises and finger painted the entire family.

How do you abandon something stitched into the very fabric of your being? Being the Number One hero was his hereditary purpose. His father gave up on him so readily but Touya would have rather died than surrender when it got tough. Giving it up would be dying all the same.

Pain was a toll necessary for growth. He grew until his ambition and greed swallowed him whole. And now, there was you. A garden of weeds in his lungs. You were rooted into the capillaries and harvesting his yearning. Every time he coughed it felt like self immolation; a cruel cycle he can not stop repeating.

Hanahaki discriminates. It happens to those who feel deeply, people whose hearts are hemmed by the ones they love. Dabi is selfish but more than that he is lonely, and you’re the one good thing he has in this shit hole.

Accepting the surgery would just be another loss. A surrender. It wouldn’t matter in the grand scheme of things; Dabi is going to die either way. A walking corpse. Skin, esophagus, tear ducts, tissue— his fire burns all of it. Deep within him, eating away at his soft insides like dry grass. And what withstands that heat are the seeds you have unknowingly sown.

There is something disturbingly satisfying about carrying a piece of you to the grave with him, flowers proliferating around the earth that houses him. Call him twisted. It isn’t as if he’s unaware he’s got a few loose screws— he also has no desire to get better.

The silence is broken by the quiet scratch of pen to paper. Doctor Tereda offers a thin smile and slides a prescription across the table, signed and ready to be collected. “Here. This should help with the pain for at least a week or two. We know how easily you burn through medication so… don’t take too long to make your decision,” she hesitates before shaking her head. “And go to the emergency room if your breathing worsens”.

Dabi eyes her suspiciously, grabbing the slip and shoving it into his coat pocket. Worrying at his lower lip he offers her a short nod, the ‘thanks’ implied.

As he turns and makes his way toward the door, Dabi pauses just before turning the handle. He doesn’t look back as he mutters, “Keep this to yourself, yeah? That means no putting it on my records”.

Tereda hums curiously, “No one else has access to your records”.

He scoffed, turning his wrist and pulling the old door to demonstrate his point; a groan reverberates throughout the room as it opens, “Yeah right. This is hardly a fine establishment”.

“I resent that!”

Dabi strides through the familiar corridor toward the waiting room, ignoring Tereda’s indignant shout. He wasn’t off the mark about how shoddy the place is— atleast, in comparison to other medical centres. The building is small and narrow. It was built during the pre quirk era and handed off to the quirkless by the government to honour their status. The whole thing stank of ridicule and it pissed him off the more he thought about it.

You’re exactly where he expects you to be. Sitting pretty at your desk, twiddling your thumbs, keeping watch over the empty space and quietly mumbling some melody from Mount Lady’s latest hair care advert over the unremitting whirr of the fan above.

A laugh bubbles in his chest, drawing your attention, and it chokes him in effort to smother the sound. You are alarmingly predictable. There, plain as day on your computer screen, are his supposedly secure medical records.

Dabi pressed the heel of his hand to his sternum as he violently coughed. You’re talking to him now, on your feet and rubbing along his back. A viscous lump of petals forces its way into his throat and he feels his quirk react. Still, you don’t pull away.

“Deep breath,” God, that’d be nice. “You’re okay. I’ll get you some water,” Don't go.

You stop and let him drag you back by the wrist. He rights himself on his feet and forces the flowers down. “I’m—” bile stings the back of his mouth and he gags, turning his face into his coat collar to hide a grimace.

Dabi exhales and it sounds so thin. “Fuck. I’m fine. Don’t start,” he croaks, hardly convincing. Rooting through his pocket, he shoves his prescription slip forward to distract you, the paper crumpled into a small ball. “Doc gave me a prescription. It’s just a chest infection”.

He lingers and observes as you unwrinkle it. You’re careful to smooth out each corner and wrinkle. The tension swells as the silence stretches. He tempers the urge to snatch it back.

You squint at him, “A dosage this high for a chest infection?”

He shrugs and reaches over his head to yank his coat hood forward. “Doctor’s orders”.

After a beat, you relent and glance over to give him an exasperated smile, “Whatever. As long as it helps clear your lungs. You freaked me out last night with all that wheezing”.

You begin switching off your monitors, patting down at your pockets for the keys. To synchronise with the end of your shift, Dabi purposely chose the last appointment. That was another thing he has been doing a lot— trying to fit his life around yours.

“Watching me sleep now, perv?”

“Yeah. I love when a guy sounds like a punctured squeaky toy, really gets me worked up,” you drawl, falling in line with him after turning off the lights and checking the locks. Tereda would close up the rest.

You brought a tonal shift to his life he couldn’t have anticipated; enough that he regularly spent nights crashing on your couch to wait out the bad weather. There was something about you from the beginning that he couldn’t put a finger on. Nothing as simple as your attractiveness— you had a good heart, but not by society's standards, much like Twice.

A quick internet search would pull up listings of buildings he had burned and the trail of bodies left in his wake. But it didn’t matter. Villain, vigilante, hero, a person is a person, even him.

That first meeting, winter settling in, you admitted to him you were quirkless. A shitty olive branch effort, he’s sure. That whole instinctual radar that comes with being a misfit in this world. You left a strong impression. He recalls how he gave you the name Dabi, cackling harshly as if he were leaving you with a ticking time bomb, and you simply said: “Maybe I’ll see you again. Hopefully without all the blood, next time”.

He latched on and desperately wanted to hate you for it. Yet your arm is linking through his once again, pressed close to his side as the rain hammers down onto the empty street, and everything he can’t bring himself to say has taken root in his windpipe.

“Wanna come up?”

“For coffee?” he swipes his tongue over his teeth, raising a suggestive brow. Your offer is as innocent as it always is, and the sight of you flustered is as welcome as ever.

“Tea, actually,” is your poorly veiled response.

Dabi knows he’s getting too comfortable. You might be quirkless but you’re not stupid. Infact, at times you’re unsettlingly perceptive; his only mercy is that you are too nice to pry.

He should tell you ‘no’. Giran could probably set him up. He might even get away with crashing at the bar. Instead he says, “Not like I’ve got anywhere else to be”.

Your apartment building is nothing to write home about. Slightly run down, maintained by residents rather than their pig landlords. It stands shorter than the neighbouring buildings, the entire right side eaten by withered wisteria. Nobody bats an eyelid at his appearance in a place like this.

Inside is a mirror of the outside. Unremarkable in every way, yet he feels remarkably at home. You go in first, kicking off your shoes without bothering to line them up, waddling to the narrow linen closet in the hallway. You’ve managed to cram a dryer right beneath the shelves, since there was barely any space elsewhere.

“I can grab you something to wear while I put our stuff on a spin”.

The rain sticks to his forehead, thin streaks of black dye running down his temple. Grinning, you hand him an old towel, already stained and fraying at the hem, “You look harmless like this. Like a wet cat”.

He pats carelessly at his face while shucking off his coat. The nerves are long dead and it’s painless. You squawk when the heavy fabric hits the genkan floor with a wet slap. “Dabi!”

“That’s what you get,” he rolls his neck and bends to untie his boots, the towel thrown over his shoulder. “Harmless. I burned down a money laundering front just a few hours ago”.

“I saw it on the news. You’re such a dickhead,” you laugh, heading into the kitchenette. “There was no good reason for you to melt the asphalt of that entire city block”.

A smile works its way onto his face. Gross. “Can’t have them mistaking me for a good guy”.

“You are a good guy”.

“You’re delusional,” he shoots back, an unbearable fondness swelling in his chest. The pressure is the worst part. Spools of vine and leafy green pierced into lung tissue, stems squeezing through his rib cage.

You’ve been staring at him for too long. That sweet smile hasn’t wavered. Dabi clears his throat, first to dispel the awkwardness he feels and then again as a stray petal sticks to his throat. It brushes against his tonsils and he quickly covers his mouth.

“Sure you’re okay?” your voice is quiet, testing the waters.

A fingernail catches on a staple by his chin as his hand drags down his face, answering on an exhale, “Fine. Stop asking. Didn’t you say something about tea?”

“Can’t help it,” you huff, shutting the overhead cupboard with too much force. "You’re not a good liar, you know”.

Dabi gives a dismissive wave and heads over to the couch. The distance is barely four strides but he manages to unbuckle his belt, jeans unbuttoned and falling loose around his hips. Kicking them off with little to no grace, your eyes are heavy on his back as he pulls his shirt over his head and throws it at the laundry pile tucked away near your bathroom.

The quaint studio can barely house you, never mind him. Dabi was always small for his age but here it feels like he could stretch and touch every wall.

You’re moving in his periphery, following his lead and gradually revealing swaths of bare skin. You’ve seen him half naked before, in the clinic, but never the reverse. Dabi swallows thickly, ignoring the intimate atmosphere he unintentionally created. The kettle is electric and he takes comfort in the loud gurgling sound that comes with it, fixing his gaze on the blank TV screen.

“You can turn it on, you know. You are allowed,” you coaxed, voice warm and teasing. You’ve rummaged through the pile of clothes and found a hoodie that falls below your hips. “Or are you just going to sit there with your dick out?”

“You fucking wish,” he objected, reaching for the remote. Is it? His eyes fall to his lap. No, it isn’t.

He slouches, reclining into the cushions as some old rerun of Mighty Man plays. “Hey,” idly picking at a loose thread, he asks, “do you get many people come through with hanahaki?”

That gives you pause, and immediately he regrets asking. It’s hardly a common question. Hell, a good percentage of the population thought it to be an old wives tale, even in the wake of quirks. There was no plausible excuse as to why it would be on his mind.

Cautious in your approach, you stop by the couch with a steaming mug cradled in your hands. He sees those naked thighs, soft and uniquely yours. “Is… is that why you’ve been coughing?”

“No,” Dabi scoffs. In one forceful yank he rips the seam open and watches the foam innards spill out. You linger, weight shifting between your feet, and irritation prickles under his skin. “Who the hell do you think I would be chucking up flowers for? Not like I’ve got friends”.

Your shoulders lose tension and he tries not to think too hard about it; he doesn’t want to know. He feels his own airways clear at the sound of your laughter, “I dunno. Stain, maybe?”

Pursing his lips, he sucks back the copper from between his teeth, “Fuck you”. You try to smile. You pass his tea and he forgoes the handle. The warmth of the mug seemed to seep into his bones and ease the ache.

“Right right. Big bad villain. I forgot you’re supposed to be an empty husk without a heart,” you teased, sitting unnecessarily close and burying your feet beneath his thigh, careful not to touch his staples. The hoodie slips and pools around your hips. Dabi’s throat constricts as his body goes rigid. “Ah shit. Are my toes cold? Want me to grab a blanket?”

Forcing himself lax he clicks his tongue and tastes iron, grip tightening on his mug as he brings it to his lips. “Doesn’t matter. I run cold anyway”.

The tea is soothing. Sweet for a ginger tea— brown sugar, maybe. You must’ve boiled it for his sore throat. Molasses swirl on his tongue. They wash down the blood and clean his palette. A smooth, mellowed out aroma fills his senses and overpowers the delicate anise fragrance lingering at the back of his throat.

You concede, tucking your knees under your chin and regarding him with that look again. The one that feels as if you’re reading him like a page in a book. He has never been the type to worry about appearances but when it’s you he can’t help wondering what you think of him.

A cartoonish explosion fills the room with streams of orange and yellow as the episode comes to the halfway point. The light paints your silhouette gold, reflecting in your irises as they retract from the brightness.

Taking another gulp, he winced at the sharp twist in his chest. Two weeks was generous and Tereda knew it. He’s already vomiting full flowers. Corpses make for fertile soil, apparently. He read that somewhere online while he searched for information on morning glories; you are fast growing and frost tender.

A soft note breaks the silence and your toes start to wriggle. “I can hear you thinking. What’s going on in that pretty head of yours?”

Despite what you thought, he was a good liar. To those around him but most of all to himself. This is when he should retaliate with a biting comment and keep the equilibrium. He would, if not for the wave of heat that rolls through him at your words, and how obviously you felt it displace the air.

Dabi can lie. His body can not.

“Just that thing you said earlier, about being an empty husk,” he begins, bringing the warm mug to rest against his sternum, incognisant to the ring of heat stinging his skin.

Your expression wanes with regret and he hates it. “I was joking—”

“If you say sorry I’ll burn your couch to a crisp,” he fumes. Vulnerability made him defensive. Angry. It felt like cold air blowing on exposed muscle. “Didn’t ask for a meaningless apology”.

Deep in the cavity of his ribs another bud unfurls. Your patience with him is not endless but it is more than he deserves.

“Then what are you asking?”

Nausea curdled in his stomach. He feels it climb his gullet. “Guess I wondered what you really thought”.

“About…?”

He snarls, hackles raised. “Do I have to spell it out?”

A few beats pass. Your answer comes in a gentle murmur. “Well, our capacity to hate reflects our capacity to love. So, yeah. I do think you’ve got a pretty big heart. It’s just a bit bruised up”.

“Jesus,” he mutters. The worst part is you’re being entirely honest. His knees spread as his hips shift, the after credits begin to roll and reflect off the sutures around his thighs. It reminds him that he is half naked, literally and figuratively. “Forget I said anything. I need a smoke”.

“No smoking,” you bat lightly at his shoulder. “Not until you’re better. If I catch you I’ll kill you before that cough does”.

And isn’t that fucking hilarious.

Pressure prickles behind his eyes that he can never relieve. There’s a florid mass in his thoat; his pulse is thrumming now, singing in his ears. He needs to throw up.

You shout after him as he stumbles over toward your bathroom. He slams the door behind him, hears you curse as his ceramic mug hits the floor and breaks. This isn’t romance, or a fairytale. It isn’t like it is in the movies.

Lifting his fist, he brings it down hard on his sternum. The force barrels him over and he retches. Sour, viscous threads of saliva drip from his mouth into the toilet bowl, but nothing more comes up.

You’re banging at the walls. “Dabi, open up!”

Dabi lurches again, forcing a deep cough and watching a few small heart shaped petals dance in the air as they free fall. Again, collapsing to his knees, he can taste your ginger tea. He vomits a clump of bloomed morning glories, wrinkled and smooshed into a misshapen ball. Blood muddies the water.

Another knock, this one somewhat pitiful. There’s a soft noise that sounds like you’re sliding down the door. “Please don’t make me break this open. My landlord will kill me”.

Trembling. Dabi reaches his fingers into his mouth and feels around the teeth to dislodge what was left. Settling back on his feet, his hand uncurls like a slow sprouting shoot and reveals another morning glory in the shallow of his palm.

Colour streaks across his vision, filled with hazy undulations. White noise drowns out the frantic tone of your voice. Mouth hung open, Dabi inhales until his lungs bloat, and keeps it held until the lights begin to fade.

His consciousness tips from one dream to another. When he wakes up on his back surrounded by soft, freshly washed sheets. A sigh escapes his lips as he turns into the downy pillow beneath his head. It smells like you.

Fingers comb through his hair, pushing the bangs away from his forehead. It’s then that he notices the mattress dipped towards the weight of another.

Dabi squints, prying his eyes open. You’re laid beside him. At first he considers that he’s dreaming, but you feel so real. Your thumb strokes over his cheek in a tender back and forth motion, “You comfy?”

“Better than the couch,” he rasps. There’s an awful taste in his mouth. Intermingling mint and copper. “Did you brush my teeth or something?”

“I rinsed your mouth out,” you admit bashfully. Now that he’s looking he notices your eyes are red. Puffy like you’d been crying. Your smile fractured as you added, “I had to make sure nothing else was stuck”.

Realisation creeps in slowly. It’s gentle with him, like you are, acclimating him to reality. Just like that— you know.

“How’d you get me in here?” he deflects.

You prop yourself up on your elbow and reach to trace the topography of his scarred chest. His breathing stutters and your fingers stop right over his heart.

“Might’ve pulled a muscle or two but it wasn’t so hard. You weigh almost nothing,” you reply. Quiet, as though you were afraid to break the illusion. “Kinda concerning but it seems you have bigger stuff to worry about already, huh?”

Eyes falling closed, he inhales, counting to three. He replies on the end of a long exhale, “Didn't want you to know”.

“Tereda does?”

Dabi nods and the movement knocks his brain loose. He hisses at the throbbing pain. You take him into your palms with a frown, “You hit your head on the way down. You’ll have to come in with me again in the morning”.

“Fuck that,” he groans. You tap at his temple and pout your lips, glaring disapprovingly. “You can’t make me”.

“I can and I will,” his eyes widened at the crack in your voice. Tears gather along your lash line and you sniff harshly, “You could have died, Dabi. And now you might have a head injury. How the hell could you not tell—?!”

“Alright, alright. Shit,” uncharacteristic of him, Dabi let himself have this. His hand cups round your neck and brings you down into his bare chest. He hushes you softly, running his palm down the length of your spine, wrapping you in a clumsy embrace. “Don’t cry about it”.

You settle into the crook of his neck, nose bumping his jaw as you turn to speak, and he suppresses a shudder. “Don’t cry about it,” you repeat mockingly. “You really have no idea, do you?”

“Enlighten me”.

Frustration bursts, and you lift your head to look at him. You’re so close. “I care about you, idiot. I don’t want you dead on my bathroom floor! Sue me!”

Dabi cracks a crooked smile. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me”.

“Who is it?”

And he sours, his stare fixed on the ceiling above. “Does it matter?”

“It matters,” you lean over him until all he can see is you. “…Is it me?”

There’s an echo in his ribs; a phantom knife’s twist. Sure, Dabi is a good liar, he thinks. Touya never was. Touya wore his heart on his sleeve. He was terrible at concealing his hurt. Dabi tries to find the words and comes up short.

The silence is answer enough. Your mouth wobbles and you nestle back into his neck before he can see you cry in earnest. “You are so fucking stupid, Dabi”.

Despite the seriousness he laughs, tucks his nose to your crown and tightens his hold around your waist. He’s only ever imagined what your weight would feel like pressed against him like this. Maybe he’s imagining it, but his lungs are lighter.

“What did Doctor Tereda advise you to do?”

He pouts where you cannot see it. He doesn’t want to think about that quack right now. “She told me either I get the surgery and go to therapy, or I get the symptoms to calm down with therapy on its own”.

“Of course you’d…” you huff. “She didn’t tell you to talk to me?”

“That too,” he shrugs, grinning at the warning press of your teeth to his throat. It’s disturbing how comfortably you both fell into place. A soft kiss replaces your bite, and he holds his breath.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” you tell him, kisses trailing up his jugular to his cheek, unperturbed by the scar tissue and metal in his skin, or the tremors rumbling through his body. “I’m sure there’s no way in hell I can get you to agree to therapy. So instead I’m going to take you out on a few dates and see how your symptoms change”.

Dabi’s mouth opens for air and your lips brush, stealing his breath. “What the fuck?” he says. “Why?”

There’s no point, he wants to tell you. It won’t change a thing.

“Because I want you to believe me,” you murmur, nose knocking his own. Inexplicably drawn to you, Dabi tilts up to align your mouths again, barely a kiss. “If you die it won’t be because of me. And I atleast want you to go out knowing that I love you too”.

The swell in his throat is different this time. He has never been so glad about his inability to cry. Dabi grins, wide and all teeth, pushing the staples in his cheeks up by his eyes. “There’s something really wrong with you, you know that?”

“No kidding,” you laugh. “Guess we make a good pair”.