pretty flower

You were the only thing on his mind. Lingering just in front of the grief and shock of his last few days was the thought of you. Your voice, your warm skin and equally warm smile, holding him close and telling him everything would be alright, that this was okay. That you would still be there. 

As he fought to breathe through the poison in his lungs and the pain blurring the lines of his vision, he was thinking of you with exceeding desperation.

He had to see you. Hear your voice. Let himself be held by you. Let the radiance of your proximity wash over him, sustaining him better than the sun ever could. He didn’t call you sunshine for nothing.

Gosh, it was all he could think, after everything. It was all he could say.

Sunshine. My sunshine. Have to see my sunshine.

Lois was giving him odd looks that he caught whenever he managed to keep his eyes open for longer than thirty seconds. He was well-accustomed to her scrutiny, but the way she was looking at him now gave him the impression that she was far more concerned about her friend than she was journalistically inquisitive. Even so, Clark knew her well enough to know that she was undoubtedly dying to pry—to wedge the shovel of her poison pen beneath his weakened exterior and dig up the history in his pleading eyes.

The fact that she did not question a single thing said a lot about their friendship. Distantly, Clark thought to thank her later with a gift card to Jitters. Maybe a freshly baked platter of cookies that he’d take the credit for but really he owed everything to his Ma’s recipe, scribbled in the margins of a small notebook she’d given him for college.

He would write a little note as though pen and paper could make up for the hell he’d put her through. Sorry you had to save me from a pocket universe, it would read. I promise to try and not have another identity crisis that results in my incarceration and slow, painful torture from which you feel obligated to rescue me from.

Unfortunately, any remuneration would have to wait until he could lift his head without feeling like he was going to nosedive through the floor.

“I think we’re here,” he heard Lois’ voice, steady and even despite everything that she’d been through in recent hours.

Hours. Had it already been hours? Time passed funny when you were wading in and out of consciousness.

“Sunshine,” he was mumbling before he could stop himself. “M-my sunshine—”

Thankfully, he had enough of his wits about him to not say your actual name, at least not until the T-Craft had landed safely on the edge of the Kents’ forty-some acres of farmland. Who knew what kind of bugs Mr. Terrific had in his aircraft. And no one—not even the members of the Justice Gang—knew about you. Of course, Lois was surely about to find out, but the ramifications of that were the furthest thing from his mind.

My sunshine. I need to see you. I’m coming home. I think I’m almost home.

“Yes, we’re here, Clark.” Darn it, he must’ve said all that out loud. “You gotta help me, okay?”

Yes, he sighed, and his lungs burned in protest. Internally or externally he could hardly discern. Please. I need to see her.

Krypto was prancing in anxious circles the moment the aircraft touched the ground. A violent shiver wracked Clark’s body when Lois appeared at his side, struggling to curl his arm over her shoulder and hoist him out of the comparatively small seat. His hulking size didn’t help matters, though Clark did everything in his limited power to help her.

Unfortunately, most of his brain was preoccupied with finding you. Seeing you. Hearing you. Feeling you.

My sunshine.

Golly, his head was spinning.

“C’mon, big guy,” Lois strained with the effort of lifting him. He felt horrible. Guilt-ridden and ashamed that she had to see him like this, broken and battered. He worried about his parents’ reaction, too; because of course he’d inherited his obsessive level of worry from them.

Everything about everything was just…awful.

Please, oh please. My sunshine. I need you to make it better.

The stairs of the T-Craft whirred mechanically as they unfurled. Together they trudged down the stairs and into the misty midwestern night. Clark had no idea what time it was, but sincerely hoped it wasn’t too late. His Ma and Pa needed their rest. He shouldn’t be disturbing them like this, least of all after what they’d just learned. For Pete’s sake, he shouldn’t even be showing his face—

His parents were in front of him, worried expressions drawn tight across their faces. And the guilt was quickly replaced with relief at the familiarity of their warm eyes. 

Family. Home. 

“I’m Martha, this is John,” Ma explained as Pa stepped forward to help Lois.

“Lois,” she greeted as Krypto loped across the dewy lawn.

“Oh, goodness gracious. What on earth happened?” Ma was frantic, eyes scanning his disheveled body as the four of them trudged slowly to the ranch.

“Very long story,” he heard Lois mumble. “He’s…it’s from Kryptonite,” she offered as Ma urgently scanned his tattered face. Her own face fell at Lois’ words.

Perhaps a little selfishly, Clark was still mostly distracted by his thoughts of your proximity and how close he was to being in your arms. Your shared residence was about a two hour drive West of Smallville, which was a hell of a lot closer than he usually was to you in Metropolis. 

If he were in better shape, he could find you by your heartbeat. He’d done it so many times, it was like breathing. But breathing right now was a grueling effort, and his senses were depleted. He wasn’t himself, in more ways than solely physical. Simply put, Clark didn’t know who he was anymore.

But you did.

You carried a piece of him with you, always. Perhaps without realizing. You cherished every part of him in ways he’d never understand, and right now he needed more than anything to have you remind him of who he was. To the world as Superman, but more importantly, to you as Clark Kent.

He must’ve been babbling again, because his Ma was hushing him in the same tone she’d used when he would cry as a boy. “You’re alright, son. It’s okay. She’s on her way, comin’ as fast as she can.”

She’s on her way.

The relief punched through his body harder than the Kryptonite had.

He didn’t remember being ushered up the front porch, down the hallway of his childhood where he struggled to fit in. Now, in more ways than one. The pictures that lined the walls felt mocking; representative of a life he thought he’d known. A weight he thought he knew how to carry.

Pa and Lois helped him onto his bed, which was uncomfortably small. Even as a sprouting teenager, the twin XL did little to contain his abnormally large frame. As a grown adult, his feet hung awkwardly over the end of the bed, calves digging into the footboard.

Clark hardly knew what was spewing from his mouth—garbled sounds, distressed huffs. A few incoherent words, distraught pleas to his Ma and Pa about the ugly truth of his heritage, as tears seared down the sides of his sweaty face. But once again, you were always right there, lingering just beneath the surface of his pool of sorrow.

Sunshine. Sunshine. Sunshine.

It was too dark without you.

“She’s on her way, sweetheart,” Ma spoke, and nonsensical as he was, he could still hear the pain bleeding into her voice at the sight of her son, so obviously wounded beyond what the eye could see. Pa was on his other side. He could feel a hand, calloused as his own, resting gently on his shoulder.

“Who is she?” it was Lois, somewhere across the room. Curious, as always, but careful.

Pa says your name. Even hearing it is like feeling the sun caress the cockles of his heart. “Our other Mrs. Kent,” he adds.

There was a pause. Then, the single, incredulous “oh,” from his colleague.

“Sh-she’s almost here?” Clark hears himself ask Ma, because he can’t help it.

“Yes, Clark,” Ma says, her fingers in his hair. He doesn’t know how much longer he can stay awake.

“I had no idea that he was…” Lois trails off, sounding slightly mesmerized.

“Nobody does,” Pa supplied. “And we’d sure like to keep it that way, hm?” Pa’s voice was threatening in the way that calm lingered before a storm. Most often, the cell would pass with nothing but the threat—the smell of rain, a warning of downpour. But the threat, the promise, was there.

“Of course. I would never say anything,” Lois responds. She sounds sincere. Lois Lane is sharp and cunning and full of more spitfire than the Kaiju he’d fought, but she is always sincere.

“Ma,” Clark could feel himself fading. “Ma. I need her. Please, I n-n—”

“I know, Clark. I know. You just relax. You’ll be alright. If you can't wait up for her tonight, you’ll see her in the mornin’, okay?”

He’d been about to protest when he felt it. Felt you. Even with muted senses, there was no denying the slam of the screen door. The spike in his hearing, reaching out to listen for your breath. He felt his body lift slightly off the bed, only to be gently pushed back down by his parents.

Sunshine?

He calls for you. Your real name, this time.

“Clark?!”

Your panicked voice makes his stomach twist.

No, don’t hurt, sunshine. Please, it’s alright.

You burst into the room and the entire atmosphere shifts. Pa gives his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. Ma loops her arm through Lois’, whose eyes had immediately locked onto yours. Everyone vacates the room quickly and quietly; even Lois goes with nothing more than a questioning look, though Clark knows he owes her an explanation in the near future.

Meanwhile, you haven’t torn your eyes from him.

“Oh god, oh god,” your face twists in misery at the sight of him. And although he hates to see you hurting—especiallybecause of him—the selfish bits of his soul can’t help but feel relieved. He feels it in every bone in his body, the way you lift the burden of his sorrows simply by existing in the same space, pouring your light onto him without even trying.

Between the two of you, you had always been the stronger one. He’s not afraid to admit that.

Despite his body’s protests, his shaking arms encircle you the moment you’re within reach. His nose burrows into the junction of your neck and shoulder, and he doesn’t even care that he’s crying anymore. Can no longer hear the sound of his own warbled voice above the pounding tempo of your heart.

“Clark,” you breathe, voice low and trembling.

“My sunshine,” he stammers. “You’re here.”

“Of course I am, baby,” you say as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. He shakes beneath you. You’re real and warm and smell like home. He can no longer discern why he’s crying—physical pain? Emotional turmoil? His parents’ message? Or is it nothing more than the relief of feeling you?

“Oh Clark.” Like him, you’re shuddering. “You…they told me…are you—” you start and suddenly stop when his muscles spasm with phantom pain. He doesn’t mean for you to see, but close as you are there’s no hiding the way his body shakes like it’s just now remembering the poison in his blood.

The usual firmness in his embrace is lacking and he knows it. You know it.

“Okay, okay. Just relax,” you say next, and your voice shifts like day to night, slow and seamless. It’s remarkable how easily you’ve slipped into the tone he needs—soothing, calm. Simply present. Your palm splays at the top of his head before combing through his messy curls with the kind of tenderness that makes him think you’ve forgotten that he’s indestructible.

Well, maybe not entirely.

“I’ve got you, Clark.”

His jaw quivers against your skin. “D-did…you see the…the video–”

“That doesn’t matter right now. Just breathe, rest.”

“I’m so sorry, I–”

“It’s okay.”

“Tha-that’s not me. I would never hurt anybody– please, I—”

“Clark,” he feels a kiss pressed to the crown of his head. When you pull back to look at him, there’s a desperation in your eyes that he’s helpless to ignore. “I know that. Right now you have to focus on healing, okay? You’re very hurt.”

“M’fine,” he tries. A last-ditch effort to abate the deepening concern in your eyes.

“Right. And I’m Batman.”

“M’jus’ a little banged up…”

“It’s Kryptonite poisoning, Clark. That’s more than a little banged up.” You’re examining him, he realizes. Cupping his cheek and tracing the lines of his face, neck, and shoulders with your worried eyes. Gosh, he can’t stand it. Can’t stand to see you fretting over him. Even if it secretly means the world, even if all he wants is the reassurance that someone still sees him for him in spite of the world’s shifting view. But he doesn’t want you to suffer for it.

He tries to speak, but his voice catches like sandpaper against his dry throat. The sound is mangled, rough. It pinches your brows together and you’re cradling his face now. Horrifically, he sees your eyes turn glassy. He moves his shaking hand to rest over yours.

“Oh god, Clark. You could…you could’ve died—”

His heart clenches again.

It’s okay.

I’m okay.

Don’t worry.

All that comes out instead is a disoriented whine.

“Don’t go.” he finally manages instead of the comforting words he’d wanted to give you. “Please. Don’t go.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” you say with as much finality as you can muster. But then you try to move like you’re leaving, like you’re lying, and he can’t have that.

“Stay,” he slurs, and uses what little strength he has left to ensnare you in his hold.

You grumble in protest. “I am. There’s just not enough room for both of us.” You’re right, but he doesn’t care.

“Stay,” he repeats, and that’s all it takes. Maybe you’re equally as helpless in denying him as he is in denying you. Maybe you both care a little too deeply and that’s part of why he can’t let you go and why he knows you wouldn’t actually leave this room if your life depended on it.

You clamber awkwardly onto the bed, and it squeaks as you give your best attempt to get comfortable in the tiny rectangle of space that remains after he’s filled almost the entire mattress. You flinch like he’s burned you when he winces as you’re getting settled, and all he can think about is how badly he wants to kiss away the pinch in your brows.

“Clark, I’m going to hurt you,” your eyes threaten to spill over. “I don’t want to make it worse. You…please. You need to heal.”

Unfortunately, he’s already content to doze off now that you’re here; one arm draped across his chest, your legs carefully brushing his. He reaches a hand down to the bend of your knee and swings your leg over his waist to bring you closer.

“Could never hurt me,” he mumbles into the top of your hair. “Jus’ stay. Need you t’hold me, sunshine. Please.”

He hears a sigh of defeat leave your lips when he shudders through another sharp ache that wracks his entire body.

Right, Kryptonite. He was poisoned. He was injured. He is hurt. It’s easy to forget when you're this close.

“Oh, Clark,” you whisper. The hand across his chest moves to caress his cheek, fingertips ghosting over his stubble before tracing the black tendrils of his sickened veins down the side of his neck.

“My sunshine,” he manages as his eyes slide closed. He sounds pathetic, and although he wants nothing more than to be strong for you he knows it’s more than he can manage right now. You’re right—he needs rest, but he couldn’t have gotten it without you.

“Shh, I’ve got you,” you exhale into the space beneath his jaw. “It’s okay. I’m here. Just rest. It’s okay.”

“M’ s-sorry…”

“It’s alright. I’m here. I love you, Clark. I don’t care about the video, okay? I’m here because I love you. Without exception.”

I love you. It makes his heart want to sing it back, but he’s just too tired. So he hums low in the back of his throat, attempting to let his body relax now that you’re at his side.

As it always does, your presence works like cough syrup around a sore throat. Soothing and calming the inflamed bits of him.

“We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”

He vaguely feels himself nodding.

My sunshine.

You settle over him like dusk, and he slips into a dreamless sleep.

~~~~

It’s just his luck that he wakes feeling almost as miserable as the night before. Despite being physically restored, the doom and gloom of his thoughts did not seem to evaporate overnight. He wakes feeling just as bad about everything—the video of his parents, Mali’s death, his failure to save the rest of the prisoners in Luthor’s pocket-prison, Lois and Terrific putting themselves in danger for his sake. Heck, he still feels awful about the Justice Gang’s rather violent elimination of Kaiju.

And of course, he’s sickened by the stress he’s put you under. Because he knows you as well as you know him, and he’s aware that you worry yourself sick every time that he’s gone. Which recently, has been more than he’s preferred. Now, with everything that’s happened, he knows you were beside yourself at the news. At the unknown. And he despairs over the fact that he couldn’t get to you sooner to explain—that you were the one finding him, and in this wretched state no less. Really, he should be the one comforting you.

But golly, does it feel nice to be on the receiving end of your warmth.

When he wakes, you’re no longer in bed with him. He’d expected as much; it wasn’t ideal trying to sleep whilst half hanging off the mattress. In your place is the white fuzzy mass of his cousin’s mutt, tail thumping rhythmically against the comforter with barely contained energy.

Clark sighs, bringing a hand to stroke Krypto’s head when the door creaks open.

Krypto’s ears flop up, the left one obnoxiously high in his signature look of curiosity, and he starts shaking in excitement at the sight of you. He pushes off of Clark’s stomach, and his groan of protest makes you scold the dog softly.

“I thought you’d be in here. Hey! Gentle. What did we talk about?”

For whatever reason, Krypto listens to you more than he listens to…well, anyone. The dog gives a soft whine before nuzzling your legs as you approach. Clark smiles at the sight, sitting up in bed as you give Krypto a scratch behind his perked ear.

“Alright. I think Ma cooked up some extra bacon. Go pester her for a bit, yeah?”

He gives your shorts a playful tug before loping down the hall. You close the door softly behind him and wander over to the side of the bed.

You look tired in the way that someone who just woke up does, and he adds your lack of sleep to the long list of things currently dampening his mood. 

“Hey,” you say.

“Hi,” he greets. Although he is just as lost for words as he was when he was writhing in pain, Clark is sure his eyes convey enough of his inner turmoil given the way that you sit at the side of the bed with a steadying breath.

His hand immediately seeks yours. He brushes his thumb over your wedding ring, eyes settling on your face. Right away, you get the message.

With a shy smile you remove your hand from his to click open the large, intricate locket you never go anywhere without. It sits right over your heart, made from bits of the Fortress’ sunstone crystals. A single ring falls into your palm, and you click the necklace shut again. Then you’re grabbing his left hand to slide the band home at the base of his ring finger. You press a kiss over the jewelry. Then another for every knuckle.

Clark is watching you fondly the entire time, like you hold the sun itself in your hands. His smile broadens when a gorgeous flush appears on your cheeks under his stare.

Your eyes dance across his face and upper body. “How are you feeling?”

He can’t stop looking at you. “Better. Normal.”

You nod with a shaky sigh. “Good. That’s good.” Clark watches your throat dip as you swallow, before looking between his eyes with a raw sort of pain that all at once makes his chest feel like it’s being cracked open. “I was so worried,” you say in a whisper.

“I know,” his voice is just as quiet. “I’m sorry. Gosh, I’m so sorry, baby…” he lets his head thunk back against the headboard.

“Hey,” you grip his fingers. “Don’t. Don’t do that, Clark.”

“What?” he asks.

“Talk like everything bad that’s ever happened is a result of your personal failure.”

His jaw clenches. “It sort of feels that way right now.”

“I’m sure it does,” you say. “But that doesn’t make it true. You’re a good person, Clark. The best I know. The best any of us know.”

He can’t look you in the eye as he huffs derisively. “Doesn’t matter. None of it was real. None of it was honest.”

“Why?” you challenge. “Because your birth parents said so?”

Clark shakes his head. How is he supposed to explain? How is he supposed to tell you how utterly unwound he feels? As though someone unstrung his innards and used them to spell out his truth for the whole world to see? How is he supposed to tell you that he's responsible for an innocent man's death? That that very thing is what his parents would have wanted? 

“You don’t understand,” he says weakly. “It…I thought I knew who I was. That I was sent here to help people. To keep them safe.”

“You are. You do.”

He shakes his head. “It’s not the same anymore.”

“It is to me,” you say firmly. “Clark, you’ve dedicated your entire life to helping others. That doesn’t stop or magically go away because the context of that video is different from what you originally thought. And…” you pause for breath, and maybe for courage. “And I don’t believe that you’re the person you are today solely because of your biological parents. I’m sorry, but I don’t.” You hold his hand a little tighter. “You never knew them. Not in the ways that mattered. And I know that’s bothered you, but…if that's who they were, then you're nothing like them, Clark. You’re an amalgamation of the people who know and love you now, the people you’ve helped. Your Ma and Pa. Kara. Me. Lois and Jimmy. Every cat you’ve rescued from a tree. Every person and life you’ve saved.”

He can’t break away from the fierce determination in your eyes even if he wants to. With the gravitational pull of a burning star, you draw him in. “You get your never-ending caring and hope for this world from the people you’ve surrounded yourself with. They’re just as much a part of why you do what you do as your birth parents were.”

Clark feels his jaw tremble. Feels the words seep in through his skin like rays of sunlight. This is why he needs you. Why you, above everyone and everything else, were more precious than anything.

Still, it’s difficult to believe, even coming from you. How is he supposed to accept that his parents’ intention was for him to destroy the planet? To harm the very people he’d sworn his life away to protect? Even if he was the result of his upbringing, the foundation of his morals as Superman were all wrong. Corrupted. Misguided.

“I don’t know how to exist without that part of me,” he says.

“No one said you had to,” you say gently. “You’ll always be Kryptonian. But it’s what you value about that heritage that counts. And to me, what you’ve valued the most is the very thing that sets you apart from the rest of us.” He grounds himself in the way your fingertips brush across his knuckles. You continue with a fire in your eyes that warms him to his core. “The strength. The speed. Every other one of your gifts. Clark, you’ve spent your life using what makes you different not to harm, not to conquer, though you so easily could. But to help. To do good. And I think that selflessness is what makes you just the same as any decent human who’s ever known what it means to be different.”

He’s lost for words any longer than, “thank you. I love you. I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t realize he’s pulled you close until you’re nearly chest to chest in an awkward standing-sitting hug.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” you say. “I love you too.”

“Thank you,” he breathes. “For just…just being you. Being here.”

“Of course, Clark. We'll get through it together, okay?” you soothe, and he feels your breath travel down his neck. He wants you closer. You hesitate at the push and pull of his hands.

“I’m better. Promise. No more pain,” he reassures you.

Through the curtains, the early afternoon sun flickers across your face, and it makes the sparkle in your eyes dance as you allow him to pull you into his lap. Your arms go around his neck and then he’s falling into your chest, letting you cradle his skull as he breathes you in.

“I missed you,” he mumbles, the cool chain of your locket pressing into his cheek.

“I missed you more,” comes your response.

“Is Lois still here?” he asks. He’s certain that she’s buzzing to interrogate him.

“Left early this morning,” you say. “Something about Jimmy’s unimaginable penchant for snagging women and saving the day.”

Clark presses a kiss to your collarbone, making a mental note to send her a text. Right now, though, he’s content to feel the way you rise and fall slightly in his lap with every one of his breaths.

“Are you upset that she knows?” he asks, because he’s genuinely curious. When Lois had pieced together for herself that he was Superman, there was no talking himself out of it. She wasn’t a sharp-witted, Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist for no reason. But for as long as you two had been together, Clark had kept your marriage a successful secret from everyone who knew of his alter ego. You’d agreed it was better off that way, even if it was difficult.

He’d been Superman for nearly three years now. He believed in the good of humanity, but he’d also seen some of its worst. If the wrong people got word that he was married, he might as well paint a giant red target on your back, and he couldn’t stand the thought of you put in danger because of him.

“No,” you say carefully. “I liked Lois from everything you’ve told me about her. And she was very understanding when we spoke this morning, if not a little shocked about the whole thing. But I trust her. And I know you do too.”

He absently rubs his hands up and down the length of your back. You’re in one of his high school t-shirts; he’d long outgrown them and had been more than happy to donate them for a better cause.

“Okay,” he says, before kissing the heart-shaped dip of your collarbone.

Clark withdraws slowly to look at you. You’re beautiful. So, so pretty. He doesn’t deserve you. Your kindness and honesty. Your willingness to be patient with him, to understand when he has to miss dates or anniversaries and still welcome him with open arms when he returns to you. To stand at his side even when the rest of the world has turned against him. To patch his wounds in the ways only you know how. 

That beautiful blush reappears, and you give him a bashful smile. “Stop it.”

“Hm?” he hums innocently.

You fiddle with the fabric of his cape. “Looking at me like that.”

“I’d apologize, but I’m not actually sorry, so that’d be a lie.” He rubs his thumbs over the apples of your cheeks. “I just like looking at you. You’re so beautiful. So bright. It’s like having my own personal sun following me wherever I go.”

You lean in to brush your nose with his. “You’re a hopeless romantic,” you say breathily, and he hears the way your heart speeds up.

“Not hopeless. Heartfelt.”

You giggle, and it flutters around in his ears like birdsong.

“I’m so grateful you’re okay,” you say softly, nudging his nose. “When Ma told me what happened, I thought—”

“Hey,” he stops you with a reassuring squeeze of your hips. It’s fascinating how he reacts to the intense way in which you fret over him; he craves the attention of the person who knows him better than anyone while simultaneously wanting to prevent anything negative from ever harming your spirit, including himself. “I’ll be okay.”

Your gaze turns firm. “You’re a good man, Clark Kent. Don’t ever let the Luthors of this world make you doubt that.”

“I’ll try,” is the best he can promise you. Because it still hurts, everything about it, and he won’t deny that. But you’ve done your due diligence in assuaging the guilt, just as he thought you would. Like a seasoned surgeon, Clark can feel the stitches of your words piecing him back together with meticulous precision. But scars take time to heal.

You place a gentle, barely-there kiss against his upper lip, and his body reawakens like prodded coals over a dying flame.

“I know the man I married,” you breathe against his mouth, hips shifting above his. “And I know he’s wholly good. Full of kindness. Compassion. Sincerity.” You ghost another kiss against his lips, and he chases you on an exhale as you withdraw.

“What’s the saying?” he asks, firming his grip on your waist to halt your wiggling. It’s making it difficult to focus. “Behind every great man there’s a greater woman?”

You chew on your lower lip, and it takes all his willpower not to pluck it from your teeth with his thumb. “I don’t know if that applies in our case. Is anyone greater than Superman?”

“I think you know my answer to that, sunshine.” Just like that, he can’t take it anymore. He kisses you soundly, reverent and slow. You breathe life into his lungs with the way you press closer, humming in pure bliss. Your fingers curl into his hair, tentative at first as though you’re still concerned with breaking him. Which, to be fair, you absolutely have the power to do so. Just not in the sense he thinks you’re worried about.

Clark often forgets that you need air a great deal faster than he does, but is reminded of this fact when you’re the first to pull back. You don’t go far, especially not with him chasing after you, nosing along your jaw and peppering kisses on any spare inch of skin his greedy lips can find. 

After a few long breaths you guide him back to your lips. He lets you tilt his head with your palms across his jaw. He lets you lead. Lets you have anything and everything you want, always.

You’re running your hands down his front, fingers catching over the dirtied crest across his chest when your kisses turn breathier.

“Mmm. You need a shower,” you murmur into his lips.

His answer comes in the way he swings his legs over the side of the bed, easily lifting you into his arms. You squeal in surprise, fingers curling into his cape as you giggle into his neck.

“Ma got breakfast keepin’ warm in the oven?” he asks, relishing in the way your thighs squeeze around his abdomen.

You nod. “More like lunch. It’s past noon, Superman,” you tease, scattering kisses across the muscles of his neck.

“Sorry,” he apologizes. He had been exhausted and more than needed the rest, but he shouldn’t have kept you all waiting so long. But since you already had… “Surely a few more minutes won’t kill anyone.”

In truth, he doesn’t think he could let you go if he tried. He’s drawn to you in a deeply intimate, inexplicable way. Has been since you were bumbling, bashful, teenagers dancing together at Smallville High’s homecoming. And though he’s usually perfectly content holding you without expecting anything more, right now he needs you close in a way that is only satisfied by his baser instincts.

Especially considering recent events, he just can’t help it—he needs your touch, craves it like a bird longs for empty sky, captivated by the promise of freedom and light. In the wake of his reputation’s imminent destruction, he needs it now more than ever. Craves the pacifying nature of your touches; in equal measure, he longs to undo you as much as you undo him.

“Clark,” you’re breathing heavily against the crook of his neck, hiding as he walks down the hallway to the sole bathroom in the Kent residence. “I'm sure your parents will notice if we're hogging the bathroom.”

“You said it's past noon? I’m sure Pa’s already tending to the cows,” he counters. “Ma’s likely on the porch micromanaging. And,” he gently nudges the bathroom door shut with his heel, “you’re my wife. I need you.” He sets you down, and the room feels laughably small as you both crowd the space. He doesn’t let you get far, cradling your skull and guiding you to look up at him as he draws near. “They understand. Wouldn’t have called you otherwise.”

It’s an obvious guilt trip and you both know it. But it works. Golly, does it work. Because you’re looking at him with a face full of surrender and he can smell the way the air turns between you.

“Please?” he asks next. He always does. It’s more than a courtesy, it’s about reciprocation. He only wants you if he knows you want him too. “Please touch me, sunshine? I needed you so bad these last few days.”

You nod, and in the next beat he’s already slanted his mouth to yours. You kiss with the blended weight of anticipation and relief, and when you touch each other next, clothes start hitting the tile.

He’s working down your shorts as you fumble with the faucet you both forgot to turn on so the water could heat. Your hands struggle with the clasp of his cape and the zip beneath. It’s always an adventure trying to get his suit off, and after all these years Clark has accepted that there’s simply no sexy way to do it. You share a few laughs and at one point he almost falls over trying to get down the ridiculous trunks, but he’s easily distracted by your scaldingly warm hands over his bare chest.

When the last of his uniform finally hits the ground, it feels like shedding a second skin. Despite everything, Clark still cherishes being Superman—it's a privilege and an honor. By now, it’s so intricately interwoven into who he is that sometimes he can’t distinguish between the two parts of himself. However, for once he lets himself accept the wave of relief as red and blue crumple on the floor. The weightlessness that comes with finally getting to be Clark Kent again. He has a lot to work through in the coming days, what with trying to re-learn what the cape means to both him and the rest of the world. Right now, though, he’s giving himself some grace. He’s being selfish.

He's forgetting it all in favor of feeling you, and letting you feel him in return. 

Your hands light a trail as you explore the planes of his body, which twitches and tingles beneath your warm fingertips. Clark is equally as exploratory, pinning you softly against the countertop as his palms skirt the outline of your naked body. 

He'd been with you just over a week ago, but each time feels new, somehow. He gets the same thrill out of touching you that he did the very first time. He chalks it up to your mysterious ability of making him feel born anew every time you touch him—as though the way you beam unto him causes him to blossom into your light. In fact, he becomes so overwhelmed with the feel of your skin beneath his hands that he shakes. 

"Clark…" you notice right away, because of course you do. 

"I'm okay," he pleads, words muffled because he can't take his lips away from your skin. "Just…I missed you so much." 

That seems to shatter something in you, a broken whine rattling from your chest as you arch your body into his. In an attempt to not run up his parents' water bill, Clark blindly shoves the shower curtain aside, guiding you into the cramped space. 

You hiss in discomfort when you step over the lip of the tub. Clark quickly steps in behind you, bearing the brunt of the still-cool water that is clearly taking longer than it should to warm up. He'll have to take a look at the water heater later. 

As is the rest of the Kent ranch, the shower is quaint and by all means not designed to accommodate a 6'4 Kryptonian, let alone a 6'4 Kryptonian and his wife. But you've made it work before, and you're both too eager and too overcome with longing that you're willing to ignore the claustrophobia of the small tub. 

Clark's head sits a good few inches above the line of the shower curtain, but he doesn't mind at all. Particularly because he's not spending much time standing straight anyway, head and lips preoccupied with leaning down to ravage your mouth with his. 

Your bodies dampen quickly under the spray and every touch becomes slippery. Your nails clutch his shoulders as he tucks you against the corner of the shower furthest from the warming water; you're generating enough of your own heat, anyway. 

"Clark," you whine his name like a desperate prayer and he knows instantly what you're asking for. If he didn't, surely the way your hips were moving against his solid thigh would've clued him in. 

He manages to wrench a hand away from your beautiful face to slide down the front of your body. He detours at one of your breasts, distracted by the way your nipple—already almost fully erect from the cold water—hardens further under his attention. He can't help himself, leaning down to replace his fingers with the warm muscle of his tongue. You arch into him instantly, hooking a leg over his hip and shamelessly grinding against his cock as your head tilts back against the acrylic wall. 

Even with the water swirling over your bodies, he can feel the wetness of your cunt as it slips against his cock, intoxicating in its invitation of heat. He can't help his groan, mouth popping off of your breast when the sensitive tip of him just barely catches at your entrance. 

Suddenly there's two tight little hands entangled in his damp hair. 

"Clark," you beg. "Please, just…just—"

His brows pinch together as he attempts to distract you with a kiss. "Gotta prep you." His thumb finally swirls over your engorged clit as he says it, and the reaction is instantaneous, evidenced by the change in pitch of your whines. 

He's not trying to be cruel, but Clark knows he's—as Jimmy once crudely suggested—"largely endowed". Hell, he remembers the bulging of your eyes the first time you'd been about to have sex. He'd blushed profusely and stammered through reassurances, promising he'd take as much care and time as you needed to prepare for him. Suffice it to say that penetration had not been successful that night, but that was perfectly fine with Clark. It was the first time you'd let him go down on you as an alternative. 

Of course, several years of marriage later and he's gotten it down to a science. You weren't nearly as prepared to take him as you could—as you should—be. Especially standing up. 

Apparently, you're hellbent on torturing him today. Which is so, so cruel. Don't you remember the last few days he's had? 

"I don't care," you shudder the words against his mouth. "Please, I just want to feel you. I want…I want you to feel me, use me, just…just please." 

Good golly. He's stronger than this. He knows he is. But you reduce him to fragments of the man who's saved the world countless times. Fragments only you have the power to put back together with your lips and your hands and your sweet, sweet, pussy that's so warm and so wet and he can smell how eager you are—

"I don't want to hurt you," he forces himself to say it. In part because it's true, but also because it's the only way for him to cling onto his wavering restraint. 

You understand his hesitation. He knows this because when you guide his eyes to yours, they're purely soft. The lust lingers, simmering at the surface of your blown pupils, but the look on your face is gentle. Reassuring. Wanting. 

"You won't, I promise," you whisper. "I missed you, I missed having this. Especially with everything that's happened." You place a gentle kiss on his lips. "I want you to make love to me, Clark. Just wanna be close to you." 

The decision is made before you even finish speaking. All it took was one flash of those soft, overly delicate eyes for him to melt. 

Clark plants a peck on your kiss-swollen lips. "You'll tell me if it's too much?"

You nod. "You know I always do." Then your hips are resuming their torturously slow grind against his, and his eyelids flutter at the feeling. 

You kiss him as he reaches between you to align himself. He makes a show of rubbing the sensitive head over your clit, just enough to make the need boil over and drive you both mad with anticipation. When he can no longer stand it, Clark pushes into you slowly. Everything around him narrows to the singular point of your pleasure—the way your expression sharpens at the intrusion; the way your nails bite into his biceps. 

"Oh, sunshine." The sound he lets out is low and obscene, but in an attempt to be mindful of his lurking parents, he presses it into your mouth instead. 

You smother your own cry against his lips too, gasping at the feeling of being split open by him. The pause he gives you to adjust lingers longer than usual, because he'd meant what he said about not wanting to hurt you. That, and the feeling of your velvet-coated cunt wrapped so snugly around his cock demands a moment's hesitation lest this be over before it starts. 

He takes your impatient squirming as the sign to move. Clark starts slow, pushing himself deeper while pulling out slower. Several times, he slips out entirely, sliding the length of him through your sopping pussy up to your throbbing clit. You make the sweetest noises, soft in your attempt to keep them at a respectable volume. 

"Okay?" he checks in on a particularly deep thrust. 

You nod, lip between your teeth with a look that borders pain and pleasure; but you're starting to meet his movements and he can hear the way your heart pounds—you're enjoying it as much as he is. Your muttered praises and assurances melt through his skin and flow over every inner piece of him like magma. He feels like he's welded to you, sinking further into the molten heat of your body, helpless to do anything but fuse against your skin. 

"Stretching me so good." 

"I missed you." 

"So glad you're safe." 

"God, feel so full." 

"I love you so much." 

Clark has always been an overly emotional person who feels everything in troves; in moments like these, charged with too many feelings to put words to, that intensity increases tenfold. Telling him you love him nearly does him in. He loses himself in the feel of you, in the way your body feels like safety, your voice sounds like home, and it's simultaneously too much and not enough. 

His eyes fall on the silver locket—the one you never take off, especially when he's gone, housing his wedding ring for safekeeping. A piece of him with you wherever you go. He presses a kiss over it, its metal taste amplified by the water. He looks up to find your eyes hot on his, rapt with intensity. 

A hand cups his cheek. “Don’t scare me like that again,” you demand, though the sound is breathless and he’s eager to envelop your words with his mouth, but he waits. 

"I promise," he says, and he'll spend the rest of his days trying his hardest to keep it. Though, he knows you're aware that he can't keep every one. But you love him anyway, and it feels unfair, and now he feels bad, so he's kissing you again because he adores the way it makes you cling to him that much harder. 

When he retracts, there's a floaty look across your features as you tremble in his arms, hips canting to match his rhythm. Clark pinches your chin between his thumb and forefinger, your noses brushing as he guides your dreamy eyes to his. "You okay?" 

You let out a breathless moan as you nod, beautiful eyes searching his. "Feels so good," you say, silken and full of yearning. 

He presses kisses onto your shoulder. "Feels good for me too, sweetheart." 

Clark cradles the crease of your knee, shifting you higher and opening you wider. The angle changes, and you both groan at the subtle, intense difference. The open-mouthed kiss you share is messy, slow, and uncaring as you breathe into each other's mouths. Everything about it is sensual and close and perfect, exactly what his weary soul had longed for. 

Naturally, the pace increases as the tension steadily begins to build. He can feel your hard nipples scraping across his chest, the slip and slide of your bodies amplified by the falling water. He reads the focus on your face and can tell you're trying desperately to get there, to meet him in the middle. So of course, he has to help you along, because he exists for the sole purpose of your satisfaction. His own release is nearly inconsequential, a happy byproduct. 

Two thick fingers settle just where you meet, and he stimulates the nerves all around your quivering cunt as he moves, feeling the way his cock breaches you on every thrust. Up, down, up, down in sloppy lines that trace the lips of your labia. 

Clark watches your jaw fall and anticipates the sound that follows, quickly using his free hand to stifle it. 

"Shhh, honey. Not too loud." 

It seems that only invigorates your pleasure. Those beautiful eyes of yours roll into your skull. Clark takes the chance to be a little mean, as penance for your earlier goading him into skipping foreplay. His fingers settle at the apex of your thighs, and you jolt against the firm wall of his chest when he begins to circle your clit. 

You're moaning becomes unbidden, barely muffled by his hand as he increases the staccato movement of his hips. One of your own hands roots in his soaked hair, the other splayed across his ribcage as you drool into his palm, everything a mix of sweat and water and spit. 

You look blissed-out and beautiful. 

"I missed you," he breathes. "You're so pretty. I missed you so, so much. My sweet girl, my sunshine. You're everything t'me, did you know that?" He thinks that drawn out moan might be a yes. "M'nothing without you. I love you so—ah—so much. Yeah, I know, baby. It feels so good, doesn't it?" 

He lets his hand fall in favor of anchoring himself to your hips. 

"F-fuck, Clark—" 

He's begun to suspect that you've uncovered his dirty little secret—that hearing you curse drives him wild. He didn't typically enjoy profanities, but hearing them slip from your sweet little mouth entirely on accident, entirely because of him—well, that was a completely different situation. 

His hips snap forward and it yanks another expletive from your lips. 

"Gettin' close, honey?" 

Your nod smushes your nose across his face. "Clark…"

"C'mon," he pants into your ear. "Let go. Let it happen, baby. Oh, I missed you so much—"

The telltale quaking of your thighs alerts him that you're nearly there. Clark is suddenly overcome with his desperation to feel it, fully ignoring the tingling that's settled at the base of his spine, the weight in his balls, the taut feeling spreading through his abdomen. His fingers rock over your clit, frantic but precise, just the right amount of pressure. 

Your whines have increased in volume, and distantly Clark prays that his parents are actually outside, because there's no way they can't hear your sharp cries as your nails burrow into his skin, longing to leave marks that'll heal faster than they harm. 

He begs you again, your name tumbling out of his pleading mouth as he urges you to cum for him, and that does it. Your release is tense, the shock of your overwhelmed nervous system escaping your body in several jerks. It's too much to feel you clamping around him, and his control snaps like a rubber band. Before he knows it he's fucking you through your release, chasing his impending high. 

"Oh, baby," his voice shakes as it fans across your cheek, humid against your shower-soaked face. "You're gonna make me cum." 

"Please," you weep. "Clark, please, inside me, need t'feel it, please cum in me, baby." 

And finally, the next full-body shudder that wrecks his body is pleasant instead of painful. He whimpers like it hurts, but it's the furthest thing from pain and the closest thing to heaven. He burrows his head into your neck, body slumping forwards as he pumps his hips into you, feeling his warmth seep deep inside your fluttering cunt. Your hands run down his back, up his sides, down his chest, up his arms. You pull his face out of hiding, ushering his mouth back to yours with languid movements of your lips on his. 

"I love you," he says into the kiss, wet and messy, water and spit mixing in your mouths. 

"Love you too," you shudder. 

For reasons beyond his comprehension, Clark feels his eyes fill with tears. For a moment, he hopes the guise of the shower might keep you from noticing, but of course it doesn't. 

"Hey." Your warm hands spread across his face, thumbs tracing his cheek bones. "What is it?" 

His voice breaks. "I'm just…I'm sorry. Sometimes it feels like I don't deserve you." 

"Clark." Your voice isn't pitiful. It isn't bothered. It's overflowing with tenderness, and the kind of understanding that only comes with knowing a person better than you know yourself. "I wish you could believe me when I tell you that you're one of the best people I know. But even if you can't, at least trust in how much I love you." 

A tear falls, and it's is the one droplet of moisture among many that you choose to swipe away with your fingers. 

"I love you, do you hear me?" you repeat. "I'll be here for you, always." 

He nods, and there's a cracked feeling in his chest that he can't decide is good or bad. Maybe it's a mix of both—maybe it's the rawness of vulnerability, or the type of sensitivity that comes with being this known. 

You hold him for several more moments, the rain-sound of the water hitting the tub lulling him into a state of tranquility. 

"We should…probably actually bathe," you mumble eventually. 

He gives you a loving smile, pecking each corner of your lips before kissing you fully, because he can. Because he wants to cherish it. 

"Thank you," he says one final time. "For loving me. For giving me a chance." 

You press a kiss onto his lips as you reach for the shampoo. "Always."

Working with Reed…was something else entirely. It was a learning curve, understanding just how the man’s brain worked. Even to this day, you weren’t sure you understood it. Even when things went perfectly, when test runs on prototypes worked out better than you could’ve ever imagined, Reed was never satisfied. Something could always be better, be improved, as if his brain was factoring in the hundreds of thousands of possibilities that could occur and alter your data. You made it work, though–with patience and understanding–you managed to find the best way to work around Reed’s faults and work with him, to support him.

What was supposed to be just a job in the Baxter Building became so much more. Through it, you gained a family you never thought quite possible.

Reed’s wife, Susan Storm, was another one of the brightest minds that you had ever encountered. Kind, compassionate, but fiercely loyal and unafraid to step up to the plate when a challenge arrived, when the people she loved were threatened. You admired her and everything she stood for, the way she carried herself day in and day out. And since the day you had arrived at the Baxter Building, she welcomed you with open arms, as if you had always been part of the family.

Ben Grimm was the most talented pilot you’d ever had the pleasure of meeting. The perfect counter to Reed and his panicky mind at times, having known the man long enough to understand his quirks in a way you could only hope to. Ben was always kind, always open, always ready to lend a hand or be a shoulder for anyone that needed to listen.

Johnny Storm…was the bane of your existence, in the best way.

“Wrong address, sweetheart. The modeling agency is two blocks down. I could escort you over there, if you’d like?”

Those were the first words the hot-headed younger brother of Sue Storm had said to you, passing by you in the lobby of the building on your first day, a wink thrown in for good measure when he’d spoken.

Having followed Dr. Richards' work long enough, which meant knowing bits about his personal life, you were well aware of the reputation that Johnny Storm carried. The papers and magazines, talk shows and gossip blogs, all called him a playboy simply because he’d never been in a long-term relationship but was still a ladies man. You never saw him like that, though. All you saw was a brilliant guy, a lover of space, even if that passion of his was sometimes overlooked because of his ‘love for women’.

And, oh, how you wished his empty, blatant flirting with you didn’t bring a blush to your cheeks every time, or make your heart skip a beat, but it did. Every single time, it did. You weren’t blind: Johnny Storm was objectively handsome and much too charming for his own good, and you decided right then and there that you would use every ounce of your willpower to ignore his empty flirts. You didn’t need to become another girl hopelessly in love with the heartthrob of the Fantastic Four, even if your heart ached when you saw him with anyone else.

Those four had become important to you in ways that you would never be able to describe, but Sue always described it best: a family. 

That’s why when four of the closest people to you in life went up into space for Reed’s exploration mission, and came back cosmically changed forever, you never left their sides. They were your family, and family stuck together, no matter what.

“Reed,” your comment was cautious, hands stilling at your work station in the lab of the Baxter Building. Glancing over your shoulder, Reed was hunched over the machine he’d built in just a day, specifically to monitor the health of the baby growing inside of Sue’s stomach, as Herbie rocked back and forth beside him. “You’ve scanned Sue a thousand times at this point-”

“That’s an exaggeration. I’ve scanned her 123 times-”

“That’s not the point,” he glanced over at you then, looking away the second he saw the pointed look you were throwing at him. With a sigh, you abandoned your work, leaning back against the table behind you to watch him fret over the device. “We have run every test possible, scanned for every data point that links back to the fluctuations in your DNA from the cosmic rays we noted years ago, and we’ve gotten nothing. Your baby is okay.”

“There are still more tests to run,”

Another sigh escaped past your lips, and you allowed yourself to hang your head with a shake.

Since the moment Sue had announced her pregnancy, he’d been like this: even more on edge than usual. Baby-proofing the kitchen, smoke detectors in every single room and hallway, baby gates around every corner, it was getting insufferable. A sweet gesture, overall, and a testament to how much he loved and adored Sue, but exhausting to everyone else that had to be in his presence.

“Fine, but I’m not breaking the news to Sue that you want to scan her…again,”

“I already told her to meet me down here before dinner for another scan. We can adjust the parameters tomorrow. I want another data set from today’s scan at the current parameters to compare the changes with,” Reed never looked in your direction, still fiddling with the machine in front of him. “You’re staying for dinner, yes?”

“I’m making it,” was the response you shot back to him, powering down your workstation in the lab and rising from your chair, crossing the room to stand in front of him. “Apparently Sue has been craving spaghetti, and requested my family recipe.”

“You can’t argue with a pregnant woman,” Reed muttered, just loud enough for you to hear, but he still never looked up. “I’ll see you up there for dinner, then. There’s a few more tests that I want to run.”

“You also have a meeting at 5:45 and one at 6:15,” you shot back to him as you turned to leave the lab, checking the desk calendar lying beside your work station. There was a hum from the man, the smallest acknowledgement you were going to get, so you set your sights on Herbie and waved him forward. “Come on, Herb. An extra hand in the kitchen is always nice.”

As much as you thought of the Fantastic Four as your family, you never stayed for dinner often. You always tried your hardest to uphold the lines between your work life and personal life, not wanting to blur them completely (though, you were sure you had already blurred them enough for it to be too late). There had been plenty of times over the years where you’d stayed for dinner, usually once a month at this rate.

Sue always invited you, and you never wanted to disappoint her, and you gave in often. Ben had a way of wrangling you into saying yes before you were ever given the chance to speak at all. Reed had only asked once, asking you to stay back for the dinner months ago in which they announced to you that Sue was pregnant.

Johnny asked every day. You said no, most of the time, but when you did stay for dinner it was usually because those captivating, bright blue eyes were staring into your soul and pleading with you to stay.

Speak of the devil: there he sat at the dining room table. Clad in a white t-shirt with their logo resting over the pocket and the blue pants of his suit, a weird sight given that you had been in the lab with Reed all day and didn’t think any of them had left to attend to any ‘hero’ work.

You didn’t say a word as you strolled past him into the kitchen with Herbie on your heels, simply plucking the box of Lucky Charms from his hands as you swooped past. It was impossible not to smile to yourself at the scoff of indignation he let out at your actions.

“Hey-!”

“You’re going to spoil your appetite,” you shot back at him, throwing him a smirk over your shoulder before slotting the now closed cereal box into the cupboard where it usually sat.

Herbie beeped out a set of beeps that, over the years, you had come to understand. This time, he was agreeing with you, pointing out some facts about how eating out of the box lacked moderation, and would in turn actually spoil his appetite. You gave the little robot a fist bump for that, something that Johnny shot the little helper a glare for.

“Come on, Herbert, you’re supposed to take my side on these things!” There was no real malice in his words as he got up from the dining room table, rounding into the kitchen as you took the pots and pans that Herbie had gathered for you, setting them out along the counter where you needed them. “Baby, you didn’t tell me you were staying for dinner.”

When you told yourself that you weren’t going to fall into the trap that was the charming and charismatic Johnny Storm, you weren’t prepared for two things.

One: when he got comfortable around someone, he could be an even bigger flirt. Pet names were constant. Baby, sweetheart, honey, doll, love…you name it, Johnny called you it. Constantly. So constantly you were sure the blush on your cheeks was a permanent staple. He’d even once called you his little flame–that had been met with the tip of your heel being dug into his foot.

The second thing you weren’t prepared for: touch. Johnny Storm didn’t understand personal space, not when he was comfortable around you. If you were in the room with him, he was standing less than a foot from you, and you always knew because you could feel the warmth that radiated off his unusually hot skin. His hands would always rest on your arm, your elbow, right at the bottom of your lower back.

Moments like this in the kitchen were normal, and yet they still fried your brain. That simply little pet name, and Johnny’s warm hand ghosting over your lower back, before coming to rest on your hip. Clearing your throat, you gently pried his hand from your body, shooting him a look as you moved around to get the ingredients for dinner, hoping your flushed cheeks didn’t give you away.

“When your pregnant sister has cravings for my personal family recipe spaghetti, I’m required to oblige her,”

“I asked you to make this for me two weeks ago and you refused,”

Johnny followed close behind you, like a little puppy following its owner. You tried, and failed, to contain your smile at his actions. The media might paint him as some sex god (you weren’t going to lie…if he wanted to be, he could be) but you saw him for what he was: the epitome of a little golden retriever at times.

“Well you aren’t a hormonal pregnant woman with super powers,” you shot back at him, taking the opened jar of spaghetti sauce from Herbie’s hand and dumping it into the pot on the stove top, turning up the heat on the boiling pot of water for the noodles Herbie had laid out for you.

“No, but Johnny is a hormonal guy with super powers, who adores your cooking,” bumping his hip with yours, Johnny stole the wooden spoon from your hand with ease, dipping it into the simmering sauce to stir. With that same ease, he leaned down just slightly, leaving a kiss to your bare shoulder that felt as if it had left a brand into your skin. “Johnny also happens to just adore you, and loves when you stay for dinner.”

You had given up on the blush by now. He’d surely seen it enough over the years with his incessant flirting, there was no use in hiding it. Bumping your hip back with him, biting into your bottom lip in a failed attempt to conceal the smile spreading across your lips, you stole the wooden spoon back from him.

“Johnny also talks in the third person too much, and is an insufferable flirt half the time,” he dipped his hand into the sauce, coating his fingers in red as you whacked lightly at his hand, forcing him to withdraw as quickly as he’d dipped in. “What have I told you about doing that!”

He’d laughed, one of your favorite sounds, as you glanced over at him with a bright smile, unable to truly stay mad at him…ever.

That was, until he dipped his sauce-covered ring finger and middle finger into his mouth to lick the sauce clean off, eyes never leaving yours and a smirk curling up on his lips. It forced you to swallow the lump that had formed in your throat and look away as quickly as you could, feeling a different kind of heat swelling in your body: yeah, Johnny knew exactly what he was doing.

“Not sure, baby, that look you’re giving me right now doesn’t scream that I’m insufferable-”

“Oh, that’s exactly what it’s screaming,” you shot back, even with the ghost of a smile pulling at your lips as Herbie readied the garlic bread on the counter behind you. “If you’re not going to help, you can leave this kitchen. I don’t care if you live here.”

Johnny rolled his eyes in response, hopping up onto the counter next to the stove where you worked. You caught the box of noodles he knocked over before they could fall to the ground, shooting him a look as he held his hands up innocently, dumping them into the boiling water pot.

“You basically live here, too,”

“I don’t-”

“Yeah, because you keep refusing the room that Sue prepared for you,”

He…wasn’t wrong. Two years ago, Sue had transformed what was previously the guest room into a room that looked like it had been built just for you. Your favorite color on the walls, a matching quilt set on the bed, and she’d offered it to you. A place to stay, to live, given that Reed sometimes had you in the Baxter Building until the oddest hours of the morning.

You declined, still desperate to keep that line between your work life and your personal life separate, as tempting of an offer as it was. Sue wasn’t slighted by your decision at all, instead offering it to you to use whenever you needed to. There had been times in which you had taken up that offer, a few changes of clothes tucked away in the room on the odd chance that you’d need them.

“This place is your home, not mine,” you didn’t look at Johnny as you spoke, simply shaking your head as you stirred both the sauce and the noodles in their respective pots. “I’m Reed’s assistant, I’m not family-”

“Stop it,”

Even with the heat that rolled off Johnny Storm, every time his bare skin touched your own it sent a shiver straight down the length of your spine. His hand curled around your jawline, thumb and index finger pinching at your chin to force you to look up at him, to gaze into those intense blue eyes and the look on his face that had morphed so quickly from playful to serious.

“Johnny-”

“You are family, whether you like it or not,” the statement didn’t surprise you, it wasn’t the first time in your four years of knowing him that Johnny had said something like this to you, or anyone on the team for that matter. It always made you feel warm inside, though, to hear him say it, to see that loyalty and love for the people he cared about shine through in his words, such a stark contrast to the way the media sometimes portrayed him. “There’s not a thing I wouldn’t do for you.”

That was new. He hadn’t made a declaration like that to you before.

It was something about the look in his eyes as he said it–so genuine, so soft–that had you melting into his touch. His hand curled back up to your cheek, thumb just barely caressing the apple of your cheek, leaving a trail of heat with every swipe of his finger against your skin. Your heart betrayed you, fluttering in that moment like it always did.

These moments used to be few and far between. You didn’t know how else to describe them besides just calling them moments. Over the first few years of knowing Johnny Storm, there were small moments where that empty flirts verged on the edge of something different, something raw and real. But in the last year, they happened more often than they didn’t. Johnny wasn’t pictured out with as many women anymore, wasn’t brazenly caught flirting with anyone with legs and a pulse at events. And in moments like this, even in front of his family, he’d touch you, caress you, speak to you in a way that felt so genuine, that felt like it was real. Like the flirting was no longer just empty, meaningless fun.

That line between your work and personal life might have been a muddled mess, but the line between being Johnny Storm’s friend and something entirely more was practically non-existent now.

“You say that to all your women?” you quipped back, trying to hold your own, even as you were melting inside and your voice came out as a whisper. The playful look on Johnny’s face returned in a second, his fingers instead pinching the cheek he’d just been so softly caressing.

“Never, honey. Those words are reserved for my brother-in-law’s pretty little assistant,”

In typical Johnny fashion, he was able to dissolve and ruin whatever the moment was in an instant with his usual ‘charm’. Swatting his hand away, you returned your attention to the food on the stove in front of you, smiling to yourself as Herbie beeped out a popular song you’d heard on the radio behind you.

“You always have a line, don’t you?”

“Hey, you know what you signed up for, being friends with all this,” he jokingly motioned to his body, and you caught sight of the smile lighting up his face again as you laughed incredulously at his actions. “As part of the package deal, being friends with me, you are legally required to attend movie night in the living room with me after dinner.”

You hummed in response, even if you were smiling the entire time just from listening to him talk.

“This sounds like an impromptu movie night-”

“All of our movie nights are impromptu, babe-”

“I saw earlier that channel 2 is playing The Sound of Music tonight,” you shot back at him, finally looking up at him with an expectant look on your face. “That’s what I want to watch.”

Johnny groaned, throwing his head back and knocking it against the cupboards with a wince on his face. You couldn’t help but chuckle at his overdramatic antics, as usual.

“But channel 3 is showing Psycho!”

“And you dipped your hand–which, god knows where that thing might have been–into my sauce for dinner,”

Johnny opened his mouth to speak, before mulling over your words, and effectively shutting it with a nod.

“You know what, if it gets you to have a movie night with me, then I’ll take it,”

God, you adored this man, more than you should. More than you wanted to. In his presence, especially now, you were pretty sure the smile on your face was a constant, that it would never leave, as you laughed at him once more. 

Finishing off the special blend of additions to your sauce, giving it another swirl with the wooden spoon, you brought it up to your lips for a quick taste. Satisfied, you held one hand under the spoon to keep it from dripping, holding it up toward Johnny.

“Alright, give it a taste,”

His eyes stayed locked on yours, that familiar intensity and warmth in them keeping you locked in place, holding your breath, as he took a quick slurp from the spoon. Smacking his lips together, running his tongue out along his lips, he gave a definitive nod.

“As always…perfection. Though, I expect nothing less from you,”

Before you could retort to his cheesy comment, his hand reached out, eyes still locked on yours, as he cupped your chin once more and ran his finger over your lips. With the slightest of glances down, you saw the small spot of red on his finger, the remnants of the sauce he’d so gently just wiped from your lips.

Glancing back up to those blue eyes you loved more than you cared to admit, you caught the way they finally glanced down at your lips, before looking away as if to not get caught.

“...am I interrupting something?”

As if Johnny had burst into flames and burned you, you jumped away from him immediately the second you heard the voice of Sue Storm across the room. You never even looked back up at Johnny, or turned around to look at the woman by the dining room table, just stared down into the sauce pot as you continued to stir it and the noodles.

“Actually, sis, you very much are interrupting something here,” Johnny called out across the room, and you could see him gesturing with his hands between you both from the corners of your vision.

“Johnny,” you rolled your eyes, glancing over at him with flushed red cheeks from what had just transpired. “Sue isn’t interrupting anything.”

“She kind of is. We were kind of having a moment here-”

“Johnny, we were not having a moment,”

You very much were having a moment, but you weren’t admitting that to him. His ego burned hot enough, no need to stroke the fire.

Sue laughed, rounding into the kitchen as she stopped by Herbie, thanking him and taking the garlic bread tray from him to pop into the oven he had preheated.

“Johnny, why don’t you go get cleaned up for dinner and stop bothering the poor girl. Bad enough I’m making her cook for me, she doesn’t need you hovering,”

The man let out a sigh, muttering something mocking toward his sister, as he threw himself off the counter with dramatic flair. He wasn’t done making your heart race, though, his hand curling around the back of your head as he planted a kiss directly to your hairline, before he disappeared from the kitchen with a pat to Herbie’s head.

The pots on the stove were forgotten as you turned around, simply watching him disappear with an incredulous look on your face. Quickly, your eyes shot to Sue, who was watching you with a smirk as she leaned against the island counter.

“There was nothing happening there,”

“I didn’t say there was,”

“But you’re giving me that look,”

“I’m not giving you any kind of look,” the blonde laughed, stepping up beside you to take the wooden spoon from your hand, tasting the sauce herself with a happy little sigh. “Just…enjoying watching the show from the sidelines, waiting for one of you to make a move.”

“Sue, there’s no move to make. He’s just…he’s Johnny,”

“And Johnny is my brother,” she shot back with a grin. “And Johnny has never been like that with someone, just with you.”

You didn’t get to respond, before Herbie cut in with another series of beeps. Your eyes shot wide as you listened to what he was saying, cheeks flaring an even brighter shade of red as Sue choked on air, laughing to herself at your side.

“HERBIE! THAT’S SO INAPPROPRIATE!”

❤︎

It had been two weeks, and Reed had somehow managed to scan Sue a total of 142 times, now. Sometimes, you wondered how she was able to put up with his hovering, the hovering that had gotten exponentially worse since she announced she was pregnant.

“I’m not getting clear imaging,” Reed called out from the other side of the lab, the only sound in the room being the incessant beeping of the machine he’d built to monitor the baby, and the solder iron in your hand as it worked away on the small device in front of you. You shook your head at his comments once more, adjusting the eye protectors resting on the bridge of your nose as little sparks jumped up as the last piece of the triangular device was finally attached. “I’m going to have Herbie recalibrate this, I don’t like the data output I’m getting, I want a clear image on the next scan. Is the second bridge device ready?”

“Just finished fixing the soldering on the stand, so it should be good to go,” you shot back, tossing your eye protectors down at your workstation, lifting the device carefully and carrying it over to Reed’s station, setting it down with the matching device. “And, once again, you really don’t need to scan the baby again.”

You were met with silence, unsurprisingly. Until, the workstation down the room set off its alarm bell, a familiar tone that had you stand up straighter where you stood.

“New deep space transmission,” there was a hint of elation in Reed’s tone as he said it, quickening his pace across the room with Herbie hot on his trail. “Let’s identify the origin, then record it for further analysis.”

Quickly walking back over to your workstation, your eyes drifted to that desk calendar sitting next to you, and to today’s date: a poorly drawn flame, and the time “2:15” scribbled in a barely legible handwriting that you recognized instantly. Even if you hadn’t, the terribly drawn heart with your initials in it scribbled in the corner would’ve given it away.

“Your analysis is going to have to wait, Reed,” you called out with a sigh, knowing you weren’t the one who put this meeting on the calendar, but you sure knew who had. “You have a 2:15 incoming.”

“2:15? What 2:15?” Reed never even looked in your direction, focused on the new transmission. “You didn’t tell me there was anything on my calendar.”

“Well, I didn’t put this one on the calendar myself, but you must have cleared it at some point…”

Just then, the elevator doors to the lab popped open with a familiar ding sound.

“Ah–Reed!”

Good god, Johnny Storm was trying to kill you. You weren’t even sure if that was an exaggeration at this point, because you wouldn’t put it past him.

Blue looked good on him, it always had, but the navy blue button up he was wearing was doing nothing for your mind that was screaming at you to “keep it professional.” It didn’t help that the first few buttons were already undone, giving a slight peak to his chest. The white chinos–those were the nail in your metaphorical coffin. They had no right to be that tight, and he had no right to look so damn good in them.

“Ah…that 2:15,” you tried your best to conceal your laugh at Reed’s comment across the lab. “Johnny, do we have to today?”

“Johnny, do we have to today? As if I didn’t ask to put it on the schedule,” the blonde man in question mumbled mockingly to himself as he slid up to your side at your workstation as you laughed at his antics. One of his hands grabbed the back of your neck, tugging you closer before you could even think about it, pressing another kiss to your hairline. Suddenly, you felt like you were back in the kitchen weeks ago. “Darling, have I ever told you how breathtaking you look in your lab coat?”

“It’s a white coat, Johnny, it’s nothing special,” you deflected, taking just a short glance up at him before you had to look away, already knowing you were as red as the table beneath your hands.

“But the girl wearing it is-”

“Johnny, do you want to have this meeting or do you want to flirt with my assistant?”

You hung your head with a groan, even as Johnny laughed at the comment from his brother-in-law. His arm slung around your waist, hand settling on your hip as the heat that rolled off his body enveloped you for a moment, letting yourself lean into the side hug he gave you and the squeeze to your hip, before he was gone.

“There’s enough time in the day to do both! No, I had some thoughts about the new suit designs,”

“There are no new space suit designs-”

You glanced over at the pair as they met face-to-face in the middle of the lab, Johnny holding up the sheet he was concealing behind his back.

“You finished them years ago…they have dust on them,” Johnny deadpanned, letting out a sigh as Reed took the design sheet from him. “Look, I get it. You’re going to be a father soon, you’re scared-”

“I’m not-I’m not scared,” Reed cut in immediately, and you could hear the anxious undertone that overtook him immediately at Johnny’s words. Without even having to be summoned, knowing how his brain worked after all this time, you simply shrugged off your lab coat and stalked over to the pair, taking the design sheet from Reed’s hands without a word and placing it on his chalkboard full of equations. “I’m-I’m busy, Johnny. I’m busy. I’m busy, there’s a difference.”

“He means busy on his pace to scan Sue at least 200 times before she gives birth,” you shot back, sending Reed a bright smile that he frowned at, clearly seeing that you were siding with Johnny here. “Not terrified of becoming a father at all, those two things definitely don’t correlate.”

Johnny laughed, smile bright, and it only brightened the one on your face, a tug somewhere deep in your chest pulling on you when he locked eyes with you. Reed snapped your attention back to him in an instant, running a hand down his face as he gestured in Herbie’s direction.

“Just handle the new deep space transmission, please, instead of ganging up on me with Johnny,”

You laughed, heels clicking against the floors of the lab as you joined Herbie’s side as he waited for the transmission to be scratched into the record. There was a woosh of air, the air beside you heating up instantly as a hand found its way to rest on your lower back.

“Have you listened to it yet?”

The smile on your face softened as you glanced over at Johnny, who was staring down at the record in front of you both with pure excitement in his eyes. Beyond the physical moments, his flirtatious moments, these were the moments that had your plan to not fall for Johnny Storm splitting at the seams, if it hadn’t already.

“Seems to be a lot more of the same, just another complex signal,” Johnny left your side, the heat going with him, as he leaned against the blue table behind him. Herbie took the record from its place, rolling over to Johnny to hand it directly to him. “You’re more than welcome to take it with you, give it a listen.”

He twirled the record in his hands with a grin, absentmindedly reaching out to scratch the top of Herbie’s head. That simple little action elicited a giggle, hand coming up to cover your mouth as Johnny glanced up at you with a smirk.

“What’s so funny?”

“Herbie isn’t a dog, and yet you treat him like one,” you explained, stepping up just in front of him and grabbing his hand lightly, stopping the twirling of the record in his hands. “Also, you do know you aren’t supposed to get your fingerprints all over these, right?”

It was Johnny’s turn to laugh as he spun his hand, catching it in his palm and bringing it up to his lips, leaving a scorching hot, but gentle, kiss to your knuckles, sending a shiver straight through your bones. He didn’t even have a retort to your comment, just simply held your hand in his, thumb stroking along your skin, while your entire body flushed with a feeling you wanted to ignore.

“Johnny, what have I told you about flirting in my lab? I need my assistant, we’re trying to run a test,”

The moment was gone in seconds, your hand dropped from Johnny’s as he raced to the other side of the lab, following closely behind Reed and tossing the record onto the closest table.

You could only shake your head with a laugh, walking beside Herbie to join them, knowing Reed would be mumbling to himself the rest of the week about this moment and how much Johnny liked pissing him off.

“Cool! I got time,”

Reed didn’t roll his eyes as you and Herbie joined them back at your workstations, but you could see how much he wanted to. Holding the device you’d just finished off in his hand, you watched in the same awe you had for four years as his arm stretched across the length of the lab, placing it right back beside your own workstation.

“Bridge teleportation test one,” grabbing the notebook lying beside the device that contained your notes on the project, you flipped to a new page, prepared to note down any disparities that occurred during the test, as Reed placed an egg on the newly soldered stand. “Movement of organic matter six meters.”

Johnny grabbed the protective glasses beside the work desk, about to slip them on, before Reed took them with no hesitation and slipped them on himself. The blonde turned to you with an incredulous look that simply drew a laugh from you.

“Those are his pair, you can’t touch his pair,” you teased the man, who simply shot you a wink in return, as you both took the pairs that Herbie was holding out to you both. Johnny gave the little robot a quick fist bump.

Such a simple action that still had you grinning in childlike adoration at the side of his face.

Reed gave you a simple look, confirming you were ready. You gave him a nod, as he took hold of the switch to activate the device.

“Let’s run it,”

The whirring of the machine sounded, three silver beams of energy emitting from the device and encasing the egg within a sphere of energy. There was a shift in the room as that energy grew, as the hum of the machine filled the air, before there was a simple POP–and the egg was gone.

One glance from each of you over your shoulders was enough to confirm that the egg was, in fact, sitting on the opposite platform. Completely untouched and intact.

“It worked!” Johnny exclaimed, gesturing toward the egg.

That’s when the power to the building cut out.

It wasn’t surprising, given the notes you both had taken. The amount of energy that needed to be funneled through the device in order to channel enough energy to actually move organic matter without hurting it was sure to be beyond the energy limits of the Baxter Building. A full power outage…not what you were expecting. Not that you could write that note down in the pitch black of the room.

“Johnny,” Reed’s voice called out in the dark, steady with no hint of any emotion you could decipher in it. The man in question came to life beside you, body engulfed in flames, the flame resistant fabric of his specially tailored clothing working overtime to keep him from being stark naked. He stood with his hands on his hips, and even from the side you could see the smirk curling up on his lips. “Could you reset the breaker?”

You’d known Johnny long enough now, been his friend for enough years, to know him. Know him better than a colleague should. The instant dip in his smirk to a frown was clear, the tension in his broad shoulders, as he tossed his glasses down onto the table. He didn’t spare either of you another look, crossing the room to grab the record.

“Other way-”

“I know,” Johnny snapped, beside his flame engulfed body was on the other side of the lab, flipping the breaker as the electricity of the building roared to life again. The second it did, he was in the elevator, doors shutting without another word.

Neither you nor Reed spoke for a moment, simply looking down at the bridge teleportation device on the table in front of him.

“I’ve upset him,”

Reed didn’t phrase it like a question, he said it like a statement. Both were true, though. Reed always knew when he had upset Johnny, but never how he had really upset him.

You took a deep breath, nodding, as you scribbled a note in your notebook before turning on your heels, stalking back to your own workstation.

“Well, he went out of his way to put time on your calendar just to talk to you about the suits, and you did dismiss him…” you trailed off as you reached your station, eyes flickering back down to that desk calendar beside you. You couldn’t help it, letting your fingers lightly trail over that little heart with your initials, smiling to yourself, wishing it meant more than what it did mean: nothing. “Johnny loves space, he only got to go up once before…this all happened. You can’t blame him for wanting to go back.”

It was quiet for another moment in the lab, before Reed spoke up again.

“You know him well…better than I think I do,”

The flush in your cheeks was inevitable at that, embarrassment flooding you as it was easy for you to read between the lines of what Reed was trying to insinuate.

“I-I just listen to him. I always listen,”

It was quiet again.

“Go check on him,” was all Reed said. “If there’s anyone he’d want to talk to right now, it’s you.”

You wanted to argue, to save the crumbling bits of that wall between work and personal, but even you knew it was too late for that.

Johnny’s bedroom door was just two down from the guest room Sue had offered you years ago, a bathroom being the only thing that separated them. Ben’s room was at the other end of the hallway, along with the nursery where the soon to be baby Richards would sleep.

You may not have stayed in that guest room often, but you’d been in these hallways enough to know it like the back of your hand. To know it like it was your own home. 

There were countless nights, before you’d make the short walk back to your apartment, where Johnny had coerced you into movie nights in his room. He’d never try anything, never push you into something, always leaving the door open to make sure you knew he wasn’t bringing you upstairs for some alternative reason. His room was just quieter, and felt more private. It gave you the chance to see the side of Johnny that the world didn’t get to see.

The space lover, who spent his life dreaming of being an astronaut, of going into space and seeing the stars. He was a thrill-seeker, always wanting to live his life on the edge, to find joy in those rushes of adrenaline. But beyond it all, just a good man. A man who had an entire collection of records lining one wall of his room, organized from his favorite records to his least favorite, even though he claimed there wasn’t really a least favorite. The world got to know the Human Torch, but in  the confines of those four walls, you got to know Johnny Storm. The second you did, you knew your heart was fucked.

You found him in a spot you’d found him in before: leaning against the floor to ceiling windows of his room, staring out at the spaceship he hadn’t stepped foot in for four years. Your heart broke slightly from where you stood in the doorway, able to see the longing that was woven into his frown, that shone through his eyes that never strayed far from the Excelsior.

“You know,” with a few steps into the room, standing beside the record player, you lifted the needle to stop the replay of the foreign language from the deep space transmission that played on a loop. Johnny looked over, a soft smile overtaking his frown at the sight of you, as you kept your own voice soft and light. “I don’t think deep space transmissions are the right background music if you’re going to stare longingly out your window.”

Johnny laughed in a huff, turning on his heel to flick through his record collection.

“And suggestions then for a melancholic moment such as this?”

“Elvis typically has some hits that can set that mood,”

You watched him, the slight shake in his body that hinted he was laughing again, before he plucked a record from the shelves and rose back to his feed. Standing beside the record player with you, he slid it into your hands without another word and plopped into the chair just across from the player.

With care, like you’d done it a hundred times before (you had, right here in this room), you slipped the record onto the player, dropping the needle down as it coasted along the grooves etched into the record.

When no-one else can understand me, when everything I do is wrong…you give me hope and consolation. You give me strength to carry on.

The lyrics settled in you heavily, but it made your body feel lighter. It was impossible not to read into them, to not think too hard about the deliberate music choice that Johnny had made. You couldn’t help that, somewhere deep in your heart where you had buried your feelings for the flaming man years ago, you were hoping these lyrics were a personal message to you.

“Reed send you to check on me?” Johnny asked after a moment, leaning back in his chair, arms folded over his chest as he watched you. Composing yourself for a moment, shoving the flurry of butterflies beating against your chest down, you turned to face him and his blue eyes with a shrug.

“Technically, but I would’ve come on my own,” Johnny hummed, the ghost of a smile on his lips, as his gaze found its way back to the spaceship taunting him just beyond the window. “Come on, matchstick, talk to me.”

He huffed out another laugh, stretching his arms above his head as you tried your best to keep your eyes trained on his face and not drift down his torso. Eventually, his arms settled back across his chest, his gaze still stuck out the window.

“I don’t know…it’s stupid. Last time we went up, we came back with superpowers, trust me, I get that. Now, he’s got a kid on the way. But I know–I know–that he knows how much space means to me. So, when he just dismisses me like that-”

“It makes you feel inadequate? Like you’re a child?” Johnny’s gaze found you again as you shrugged with a light smile. “I’ve worked in an enclosed space with him almost every day for four years, Johnny. He used to make me feel that way all the time, until I realized that Reed’s never trying to make me feel like that.”

“I know he’s not doing it on purpose…doesn’t mean I’m not going to shit talk him in the confines of these walls,” he gestured around the room as you laughed, coming to stand beside his chair, looking down on him as he sighed once more. His hands fell, gripping his knees, as he rubbed them back and forth against the fabric of his pants. “I love space. Simple as that.”

You hummed, bending down beside the chair Johnny sat in so that you were essentially squatting before him, having to look up at him. Hesitation caught you for just a second, your brain actively fighting a war with your heart as you raised your hands, but you ultimately took his hands in yours. 

All it took was a second for your eyes to drift over to the table beside him. One lamp, a stack of books, and the flash of a polaroid photo leaning against those books: a photo of you. Taken at some point in the lab, laughter written across your face, your hand almost blocking a portion of the lens as you tried to stop him from taking the photo. You didn’t even remember it being taken in the first place.

Good god, he was really going to be the death of you.

Eyes quickly back on him, with a little squeeze to his hands, you gave Johnny the most comforting smile you could, even as your heart did somersaults in your chest.

“I know you do. You’ll go back to space, Johnny, I promise,”

His eyes watched your hands, and you could see it on his face: that hint of adoration, that hint of something genuine that suggested it wasn’t all just a game, that you weren’t imaging moments for more than they were.

“What if I don’t?”

“You’re Johnny Storm, I’ve never seen you not get something you wanted before. Especially not something you want this bad,”

His mouth parted just slightly as he hesitated. You watched as his tongue darted out, just barely grazing over the edge of his bottom lip, before you flicked your eyes back to his.

“You’re wrong…I think there’s something I want more. Been trying to get it for awhile, but…she just keeps slipping through my fingers somehow,”

That tug on your heart was back. Your heart was surely beating so fast that it could be heard, hammering against your ribcage, as his thumbs glided back and forth across your skin. You could barely think of a response, too stuck on his words: the closest thing to a confession of any kind you’d heard in four years. Raw, real, genuine.

Johnny stood quickly, barely giving you a chance to potentially think of a response as he tugged you back to your feet. His arm enveloped your waist, your hand falling to his bicep as he still held your other hand in the air beside you both. You weren’t sure now if the flush crawling up your neck into your cheeks was from the moment, or from the heat radiating off of him.

“W-What are you doing?”

“We’re dancing,” he said it as if it was the most casual thing in the world, that usual smirk of his back on his face. Whatever had happened moments before, whatever confession may or may not have been said, was brushed away in an instant, that charming, flirty personality of his back in full force. “Can’t turn on Elvis and not dance, I think that’s a literal crime.”

“I didn’t know you even knew how to dance,”

“Oh, I don’t, Sue’s been telling me for years that I have two left feet,” Johnny shot back, shooting a wink down at you as his hand readjusted its grip along your waist. “Can’t be that hard with the prettiest girl in the building in my arms, right?”

Swaying back and forth, wrapped up in the heat of his body, in the faint smell of the cologne that coated his clothing, you were very certain that Johnny Storm was going to be the death of you.

And when you smile the world is brighter. You touch my hand and I'm a king. Your kiss to me is worth a fortune, your love for me is everything.

Johnny tilted his head back from you by just a hair, and you followed suit. Deep blue eyes, as captivating to you as they were the first time you ever saw them, shone with an emotion you couldn’t quite decipher. If you could, you weren’t sure you would survive knowing. 

Faces just an inch away, the closest and most intimate moment you’d ever shared with the man you knew in your heart was never going to be just your friend, your colleague, you were verging on the edge of making a terrible choice. Of opening the floodgates, of unlocking the feelings you’d buried away so long ago and letting them flow.

“This is an interesting little relationship you and I have, you know,”

Johnny always found a way to ruin these moments, and this was just another example. Lips tugged up into a smirk, mischief swarming his eyes as he teased you, that fleeting moment of raw vulnerability was gone.

Hand slipped from his, body pulled back from his and a roll of your eyes, you turned on your heel within seconds.

“So typical of you, Storm,”

“What-? What did I do!”

You huffed out a laugh, a smile creeping onto your lips even as you tried to keep it at bay, as you threw your comment over your shoulder as you walked toward the door.

“You went and killed the moment, Johnny, as per usual,”

“...so you admit it, we WERE having a moment!”

You barked out a laugh, shaking your head as you crossed through the doorframe. You could never stay mad at him, not when your heart yearned for him in a way you wish it didn’t.

“Come on! At least let me make it up to you. Will you stay for dinner?”

With a final glance cast over your shoulder toward him, you shot him a bright smile.

“If you’re lucky, flame boy!”

❤︎

Yeah, you really couldn’t say no to Johnny Storm.

Not when he’d spoken so sweetly to you, held you so tenderly, and all around just invaded every part of your brain and your heart. To be fair, he barely had to try honestly to do that.

It wasn’t shocking to see Ben in the kitchen, it seemed to be one of his happy places. You weren’t complaining: on the nights you did stay for dinner, and Ben was cooking, you knew you were going home with the best leftovers the city of New York had ever seen.

“Decided to stay for dinner again?” Sue called out toward you with a smile, giving Herbie a pat on the head as he worked away at carving a pumpkin. You shot her a smile in return, pouring yourself a quick glass of water before making your way toward Ben.

“Johnny asked…and I decided to be nice and oblige him,” you didn’t miss the teasing hum that Ben let out, lightly whacking him on his rocky shoulder. Not that it did you any good, hurting your hand more than it would ever hurt him. His laughter was ignored as your eyes lit up, catching sight of the familiar black and white cookies he was dumping onto a plate. “Oh my god, did you go grab these from Maisie’s?”

“Yes,” Ben waved your hand away when you went to reach for the cookies, producing another paper bag and sliding it your way. “These ones are yours.”

The smell that wafted from the bag was enough to have you almost moaning in the middle of the kitchen, eagerly digging one of the cookies out. Maisie’s famous snickerdoodle cookies, the perfect blend of cinnamon and sugar that you had adored since you were a little girl. One bite of the cookie had you in absolute heaven.

“Oh my god, I haven’t had these in ages!” Ben and Sue both laughed at your excitement as you took another bite of the warm cookie in your hand. “How did you know these were my favorites?”

Ben’s smirk wasn’t hard to miss at all.

“Oh, I didn’t. Johnny asked me to pick those up for you,”

It was probably time to accept that blushing around this family was the only thing you were capable of.

Sue’s laughter rang loudest as she rounded the island counter, high fiving Ben as she shot you a pointed look.

“You really have my brother wrapped around your finger without even trying, huh? You know, before I went to get scanned–again–in the lab, I stopped by the nursery to check out the crib progress. Heard a little The Wonder of You from down the hall, thought I’d peek in…”

The groan you emitted could probably be heard from the other side of the country, leaning down to barely bang your head against the countertop. Ben and Sue’s laughter rang through the air again as you looked up, desperately waving your hands.

“I swear, it wasn’t what it looked like-”

“What wasn’t what it looked like?”

Of course, Johnny chose to make his grand entrance at that moment. Thankfully for you, he’d changed out of that ridiculously hot button up. Unfortunately for you, he was still wearing those god forsaken white chinos.

“Your little dance Sue was telling me about earlier,” Ben teased, easily catching your hand as it came up to whack him again in his rough, oversized one. “What’s with the long face?”

“Oh that dance was exactly what it looked like. Thanks for coming to dinner though, sweetheart, glad you like the cookies,” Johnny tacked on a wink in your direction, one you affectionately rolled your eyes over, before his smile was back to a frown. “And what of it, Ben?”

“Sounds like your 2:15 with Reed didn’t go well. I’m sorry, pal,”

From across the room, you could see Johnny’s shoulders move in a huff of laughter as he clapped, bringing down the cabinet shelf that held the same box of cereal you had taken from him two weeks ago. You moved around the island counter, filming your cup with more water before standing opposite of Ben while Johnny made his way back over.

“Hey, I’m fine,” he spoke, though the edge in his words was clear as he did, coming to stand directly at your side. “I don’t mind or anything, it’s just, uh-”

“I hear you, pal. We’ll go to space again,”

“That’s what I was trying to tell him earlier,” you tacked on, bumping your hip with Johnny’s, who quickly did the same back to you.

That smile you adored was back in moments, though, as he dug his hand into the box and produced the action figure waiting inside: a miniature Johnny Storm. His bright grin was turned in your direction as he waved the toy toward you, his signature catchphrase from the cartoon–flame on–ringing through the air as Reed entered the room, greeting his wife by the dining room table.

“They captured my likeness so perfectly, don’t you think?” he quipped, activating the catchphrase once again as you rolled your eyes. “Do you still have the one I gave you a few months ago?”

“Yeah, buried in the junk drawer of my kitchen,”

Johnny feigned shock, pinching your side quickly as you squirmed away with a laugh.

“At least upgrade me to your bedside table so I can be with you while you sleep,” that stupid line was accented with another wink before Johnny thrust the toy in Ben’s face. “Come on, admit it’s cool.”

That catchphrase just kept repeating.

I’m Johnny Storm! Flame On!

Flame On!

Flame On!

Ben grabbed the toy from Johnny’s hand in seconds, crushing it to nothing but dust and blowing it back in Johnny’s face with a smirk. You tried everything to conceal your laughter, but it was inevitable.

“Flame off!”

Sirens rang outside the balcony of the building’s living room. The flying cars of the police force raced past, bathing the room in red and blue lights. The second they disappeared, another squadron flew past in the other direction, the sirens all intermixing in the air.

These were the moments you never got to see often, when the team sprung into action. It was clear in Johnny and Ben alone, how their silly little moment was forgotten as they thrust into action, prepared to go running out of the building into danger. Reed simply held up a hand, shaking his head at the group.

“No, no, it’s alright. This is me,”

Ben and Sue followed Reed out onto the balcony, but Johnny hung back, his gaze stuck on you as you hadn’t moved from the kitchen. He simply tilted his head toward his family, holding his hand out for you. Such a simple move that shouldn’t have kickstarted your heart into what was surely an irregular rhythm, but it did.

The second you were at his side, Johnny’s hand rested at the small of your back, fingers curling into the fabric of your shirt just so to tug you slightly closer to his side. Together, you stepped out onto the balcony of the Baxter Building beside Ben, overlooking New York as it was bathed in every corner in red and blue.

“For the past few months, I’ve been tracking a small number of criminal organizations throughout the city,”

You shot a look down at your boss, eyebrow raised.

“That’s what you’ve been doing in that notebook by your desk?” Reed simply waved your comment off, pointing just down the block, fairly close to the area in which your apartment resided.

“47 of them, to be exact. Including the Puppet Master in the Bowery, the Wizard in Gramercy Park, and Diablo in Washington Heights,”

Everyone on the balcony went quiet for a moment.

“You…baby-proofed the world,” Ben finally spoke. Sue’s sigh could be heard from the other end of the balcony as she tried to defend her husband.

“It’s a sweet gesture,”

“It’s a little insane,” you mumbled to yourself, just loud enough for you and Johnny to hear. The blonde at your side simply shrugged, glancing down at you and catching your gaze.

“It’s not totally crazy. He’s trying to protect the things he loves, what’s most precious to him…” Johnny’s lips quirked up just slightly. “I’d do it too…I’d do it for you.”

He said it so…so earnestly. With so much conviction in his tone, as if this was a certainty to him. That protecting not just his family, but you, was something he needed to do. That if it came down to it, he’d do it without a second thought.

“You…you have to stop saying things like that to me, Johnny,” you hated how breathless your voice came out, how wrecked you sounded as you whispered your response back to him, the conversation still droning on in the background between the other three.

The smile on Johnny’s face only widened, his hand slipping around from your lower back to your waist, as he gave you a light squeeze.

“Stop saying what, the truth?”

No, you need to stop saying things that are making me fall in love with you.

Love. That was a word that had only crossed your mind once when it came to Johnny Storm. 

It was two years ago, a week to the day that you had lost your mother, your biggest supporter in life. You stood at that funeral, surrounded by estranged family members you hadn’t spoken to in years, and family friends who wept for your loss. Reed, Sue, Ben and Johnny had come, offered their condolences, paid their respects.

When the others left, Johnny stayed. He stood by your side through the first viewing, never left it during the second viewing, and stood with you in the pouring rain an hour after they’d put her in the ground. You had cried, he held you, and he’d simply never left you alone that day. The colleague that had quickly become a friend, who flirted with you every chance he got, never uttered a single flirtatious comment that day. He’d simply been there, been the shoulder you needed.

That was the day you realized you may have fallen in love with the one man you told yourself not to fall in love with, and you buried those feelings in your heart for what you thought would be forever.

“Stuck in your head over there? Come on, it’s dinner time,”

Ben’s voice broke you from your stupor. The team had all started to make their way inside while you were left at the balcony railing, hands white knuckled on top of the rail. 

Johnny’s hand was held out toward you, and you ignored every part of your brain that told you not to and slipped your hand into his, letting him pull you back in toward the living room.

That’s what their watches all went off, alerts blaring in sync with one another.

It was like a firework went off, a boom shattering the night air of the city. The clouds, the sky, were painted in gold, streaks of meteors and debris crossing the sky as they fell to the earth. The sound that emitted from the golden cloud that stretched across the sky, bathing the city in its light, felt…otherwordly. Like a scream, like a warning.

A warm hand enveloped your face, turning your wide eyes away from the scene.

There were very few times you saw Johnny as serious as he was now. Jaw locked, eyes narrowed but still soft as they looked at you, the cascades of gold shone over his face, highlighting his features as another boom sounded off in the distance.

“Go inside, don’t come out,”

Words were caught in your throat. All you could manage was a nod, his thumb doing a single swipe over your cheek, before he patted Reed on the shoulder and launched himself over the railing and into the air, igniting himself as he went.

If not for the moment, you would have stopped to admire him as he flew, bathed in the reds and oranges of his fire. You were awestruck every time you got to witness those cosmic powers firsthand.

Reed, Sue, and Ben had followed not long after, as you could hear the familiar whirled of their car through the air, chasing after Johnny through the city, following whatever had just appeared from the sky.

You? You sat on the living room couch, wringing your hands together to keep them from shaking. You’d been there as they had dealt with Red Ghost, or even Moleman, but this? 

This was different. This was otherworldly. This was terrifying. And when Herbie flipped the switch of the television, rolling to your side, you were greeted with the sight of the silver alien woman hovering in Times Square for the first time.

“Your planet is now marked for death. Your world will be consumed by the devourer,” 

Her voice sent a single chill down the column of your spine. Herbie’s robotic hand reached out for yours, ceasing the endless wringing of your hands together. You took it without hesitation, though you wished in your heart it was someone else’s hand holding yours in this moment.

“Hold your loved ones close, and speak the words you’ve been afraid to speak. Use this time to rejoice, and celebrate, for your time is short. I herald his beginning…I herald your end…I herald, Galactus.”

And thus began the longest night of your life since the day your colleagues went into space and came back forever changed.

Sending the team into space was the only option, to confront this mystery at its source. Reed had given you the basics in passing: the threat was real, there was documentation of plants across the universe disappearing entirely, the chrome woman’s signature left on each of them. He’d tasked you to the launch team, to prepare Excelsior for launch in T-16 hours.

Hold your loved ones close, and speak the words you’ve been afraid to speak.

Those words rattled around your brain the entire night, into the wee hours of the morning. Even as you helped Lynn set up the press conference, as you conferred with the launch team to ensure that the Excelsior was prepared in every conceivable way, as you checked and double-checked every data point throughout the entire ship, her words never left you.

Hold your loved ones close, and speak the words you’ve been afraid to speak.

The anxiety was clawing at you, even as you threw yourself into work. The notion of what her words meant, of what could happen, of how close the end could be.

The clock read sometime around 2 a.m. when you had finally stepped foot in that guest room made for you. There was no way you were walking home tonight. Besides, come morning, there would still be too much to do, too many data points that needed to be checked, too many scenarios that would need to be run through to make sure your team came back to you.

You knew sleep wasn’t coming to you, though, not when that metallic voice was rattling around your head. Not when an alien threat was upending your life. Not when, two doors away, there was a man that you did, in fact, want to hold close…in case you never got the chance to again.

You loved him. All it took was the end of the world to admit it.

Clad in nothing but an old t-shirt with the 4 logo on the front, one you were sure was Johnny’s, and a pair of shorts, you didn’t care what you looked like as you tore out of the room and into the hallway. Not now, not when your world was being threatened, not when your entire life could be ripped from you in a matter of seconds.

Johnny was awake, just as you knew he would be. White shirt, plaid blue pants you’d seen him sleep in so many times, he stood in his dark room by the windows once more, watching the crews rush around on the ground as they prepared the ship for launch in just a few hours. That same record from earlier in the day was still playing.

I guess I'll never know the reason why you love me as you do. That's the wonder, the wonder of you.

With a step into the room, shutting the door behind you and flicking on the lamp just beside the door, Johnny finally met your eyes.

“I couldn’t sleep,” was the only thing you could manage to say. Johnny tilted his head, studying you silently, before he held out his hand just as he had done hours before.

“Come here,”

Crossing the room in a matter of moments, you all but fell into his arms. His outstretched hand ignored, he was frozen in place for just a moment as you curled your arms around his neck, throwing yourself into his arms. The faint smell of his cologne lingered, as did his bodywash, and the sigh you let out the second the smell hit you was in comfort.

It didn’t take Johnny long to unfreeze, his arms finding their place around your waist. One hand rested on your upper back, one pressing into your lower back. A faint kiss was placed to the side of your head, heat lingering for a second. Heat lingered in your entire body, radiating off of him in waves.

“You have to talk to me, baby,”

Talk? The truth was, you didn’t know where to start. How were you supposed to explain that, since the moment you had met Johnny Storm, your heart was already his. That in all your moments over the years, you’d fallen for the man you told yourself not to fall for. And as the threat from the metallic woman loomed over the world, as he prepared to try and save life as you knew it, the only thing you wanted was to be held by him. To know he was here, that he was okay, that he was with you.

“I-I’m scared,”

Those were the only words you could settle on. Johnny pulled back, his hands sliding gently around the fabric of the shirt hanging loosely from your body until they reached your face. He cradled you, so softly and gently in his hands, it was almost involuntary the way you closed your eyes and leaned into his touch, his warmth, chasing the feeling of security it brought you.

“It’s okay to be,” the gentle tone in his voice washed over you, covering you like a blanket. It’s exactly how he had spoken to you that day, standing in the rain when you refused to leave your mother’s side, reassuring you he was there. “I don’t care what the herald said, I’m not going to let anything happen to you. You know that, right?”

Of course you knew that. If there was anything you knew for certain in this world, it was that when Johnny Storm said he’d protect you, he meant it. He’d spent long enough proving that to you.

There was no hesitation on your part when you laid your own hands overtop of his. Fingers curling around them, tugging his right hand just barely from your cheek, you turned and pressed the lightest of kisses to the palm of his hand.

Johnny froze. You could feel it. The slight tilt of his head, the questioning look that flickered across his face in the moonlight that shone through the windows. It was all fair. You were never the one to cross the boundary like this, to make a move such as this.

“I can’t stop thinking about what she said,” was how you tried to explain yourself, stopping and starting your sentence over and over as you tried to find the right way to explain yourself, the walls crumbling and the floodgates bursting wide open. “Hold your loved ones close, and speak the words you’ve been afraid to speak…it’s why I came to you.”

A single emotion crossed Johnny’s face in seconds: understanding.

That signature smirk of his was back in moments, even if it was twinged with a softness reserved only for you. The heat left your cheeks, but found your hands as Johnny’s fingers intertwined with yours, hanging your joined hands down between you both. There was a bright light that passed over the window for just a moment, bathing the two of you in bright light, before you were plunged back into the darkness of his room yet again.

“You did come to me…why’s that?”

“You know why-”

“I do,” he said it so matter-of-factly, that smirk growing just a tad as he leaned into your personal bubble by just a hair. “This push and pull, four years of ‘will they’ or ‘won’t they.’ I want to hear you say it, baby.”

“It’s not that easy,” you immediately shook your head, teeth gnawing at your bottom lip as Johnny simply watched you. “Saying it…makes it real.”

He scoffed, the sound mixed with laughter, as his head cocked slightly more to the side.

“You came into my bedroom at 2 in the morning–wearing my shirt, might I add–is that not real enough?”

“When you’ve spent years trying to ignore how you feel and refusing to say it, it’s not that easy to say,” you desperately tried to explain. “If I say it…then everything changes.”

Johnny took barely another step forward, and you almost wanted to step back, to bring back the space between you and preserve the small, crumbling wall that still stood between you both.

“A sexy, naked alien woman came to earth and basically prophesied our demise, darling. If there was ever a time to ‘change everything’ and lay it all on the line, I think it’s now,”

Your heart wanted to hang onto the word darling, but your brain was too stuck on the ‘sexy, naked alien woman’ part of his sentence. The sigh that escaped you was instantaneous, as well as the frown, as you shot the blonde man a pointed look.

“Sexy, naked alien woman, Johnny? Seriously?”

“Come on! She was–objectively–attractive. You can’t deny that!”

It was your turn to scoff, tearing your hands from his in a heartbeat, before spinning on your heel. You felt like an idiot–on the precipice of finally confessing your deepest, darkest secret you’d kept locked away for years, and this is what you got.

“I try to be serious with you, Johnny, and you turn it into a joke once again-”

You didn’t get far from him. A hand enveloped your upper arm mid sentence, tugging and spinning your back around. A gasp fell from your lips as you collided with the chest of the man before you.

Whatever you were going to say never saw the light of day. Not when Johnny Storm gripped at your hips, tugged you as impossibly close as he could, and finally–finally–kissed you.

The kiss you’d dreamed about for four years, finally yours.

Johnny’s lips were soft as they slanted against your own, enveloping you in his warmth. They moved against you in a steady rhythm, passionate but still gentle, still testing the waters of the line you had never crossed before. 

His hands curled into the fabric of the t-shirt clinging to your body, pushing it up just enough so that his hands could dip underneath. Your breath caught, even as his lips continued to move against yours, as his heated skin made contact with yours, and any part of your brain begging you to stop this was silenced as you melted into him.

Hands landed on his broad chest, gripping the fabric as you let him mold your body to his, the scent of his bodywash enveloping you as your body almost became one with him. In the pits of your stomach, as those heated hands trailed up your waist and ghosted over your ribcage, another flurry of butterflies erupted as a moan slipped past your lips, swallowed by his mouth.

A moan left Johnny’s lips at the sound of your own, one hand leaving your waist to curl around the back of your neck. Those slender fingers buried themselves into your hair, gripping just enough to have another groan of pleasure tumbling from your lips, as he guided your mouth against his own.

“You can’t keep making little noises like that,” his mouth barely left yours as he spoke, lips moving against yours, as he dove back in for another kiss the second he was done speaking.

“Your fault,” was all you could manage out, trying to back away just enough to speak, but Johnny never let your lips go far. Your hands glided up his chest, his neck, curling into his short hair as your thumb crested the ridge of his ear. “I’m trying to be mad at you.”

“Be mad at me later,” was his immediate response, his lips leaving yours just to find their place along your jawline and slide down into the hollow of your neck. His tongue danced its way across your skin, leaving tingles of electricity everywhere he touched you, his words murmured into your neck as he buried himself there. “I’m trying to kiss you.”

There was some part of you that wanted to protest him–over what, you weren’t even sure at this point–but you couldn’t. Not when his teeth dug just so into the side of your neck, leaving his mark on your skin as if he was claiming you as his.

You were always his.

“You c-called–oh god–you called the alien sexy while I was trying to confess,” you just barely managed to get the words out through your moans. Johnny was slowly walking you backward, straight in the direction of his bed while his lips never left the side of your neck, leaving his mark on every inch of skin he could see.

Your foot caught on the raised edge of the platform his seating area sat on, your feet stumbling backward. Johnny was there–he was always there–and tugged you back into him. And god, if you loved those blue eyes before, you loved them even more now: pupils blown wide, Johnny Storm looked about as wrecked as you felt.

“Your confession was four years late, and I’m impatient,” he stole another kiss from you, his teeth sinking just barely into your bottom lip, tugging gently. He let go, pressing a messy kiss to your lips to soothe the pain of his bite, words fanning out over your lips. “I’ve been trying to tell you I’m in love with you for four years now, so please just shut up and let me show you instead. Now–jump.”

At this point, you’d do just about anything he asked of you.

Johnny caught you with ease, both of his hands splayed out across the bare skin of your thighs, locking your legs around his hips. A choked moan fell from your lips the second your core was dragged against the painfully hard length bulging against his own pants, hands curling into his hair as you, this time, desperately pulled him into a kiss.

I’m in love with you. Those words repeated like a mantra in your head. Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, the world’s fire boy and hero that they painted like a sex symbol. The ‘playboy’ with a new girl all the time, never able to hold down a girl…was in love with you.

Your back hit the bed, body bouncing just slightly before settling. His eyes never left you as you crawled back just slightly, propping yourself up on your elbows to look up at him in the dark of the room, lit only by sky and the lamp by the door. The music played faintly in the background, but at this moment, it meant nothing to you.

Johnny’s hands gently touched your knees from where they dangled off the edge of the bed, parting them just so in order to step between them. You watched, entranced by every move he made, body flushed from the heat that coursed through your bare skin at the slightest of touches from him. With a practiced ease, his hand took hold of the back of his shirt, yanking it over his head without hesitation. It found a place to lay somewhere across the room, discarded until the following morning.

It was impossible not to stare. His broad chest, those biceps that always threatened to bulge out of every shirt he wore. His toned abdomen and the trail of hair that led straight to the waistband of his pants, the outline of him still prevalent and straining against the fabric.

“I need to know that you’re sure…about this,” you weren’t used to it, the vulnerability in Johnny’s tone. He leaned over you now, hands splayed across the bed on either side of you, barely a few inches from your face. Those blue eyes flickered down to your lips time and time again. “Because if I kiss you again, I’m not stopping until you’re mine.”

There was no hesitation on your part. Just a single movement of your arms, tossing the old shirt hanging from your upper body across the room to join his. As simple as that, you sat bare before him, chest heaving with every deep breath you took in.

“I was already yours. I always have been,” there was only certainty in your tone as you held his gaze. “Speak the words you’ve been afraid to speak…that’s why I came to you. Because if this is the end of the world, I needed you to know that I love-”

He didn’t let you finish your words. His next kiss was anything but gentle.

Messy, spit coating your lips as Johnny’s tongue seemed to invade your mouth and every one of your senses, his lips devoured yours as if you were his first meal in decades. He kissed with the hunger of a starved man, his hands grasping at every part of your skin they could–your waist, your hip, before finally your ass. The squeeze he gave to your skin, the uptick in heat you felt as if he was burning himself just slightly hotter on purpose, had another moan tumbling from your lips and into his mouth.

The hand still gripping your ass tugged you upward on the bed until your head fell against the silk pillows at the headboard. Your hands never left Johnny’s hair, carding through the strands as you frantically kissed him back, addicted to the feeling, as his hips ground into yours. That bulge in his pants pressed heavenly into your core, the friction rolling your eyes into the back of your head as you let your head fall to the pillows with a moan.

Johnny’s lips were everywhere. From your jawline, to your neck, until they finally reached your collarbone. He lavished you with his lips, tongue running over your skin as his hands trailed up the sides of your lower abdomen, stopping just as they reached the swell of your breasts.

“Since the day you walked in, I’ve thought about this,” his voice was raspy, the words barely understood as they were spoken against your skin. “Since the moment Reed introduced you to us.”

“I-I was wearing a lab coat,” you choked on your words as Johnny’s lips reached your sternum, trailing kissing down your chest, but never where you wanted him. “Hardly sexy, I’d argue.”

“It is when I’m picturing you in that coat and your heels, and nothing else,” he tacked on, before his lips wrapped around your nipple without warning.

You mewled at the sudden contact, one hand returning to his hair on instinct as your back arched off the bed and into him. Johnny’s hand on your abdomen was quick to push you back down, holding you down against the bedding beneath you.

God, with the fire that felt like it was burning through your body, you could’ve sworn that Johnny had caught you on fire. His teeth just barely grazed the sensitive bud in his mouth, a sharp intake of breath leaving your lips on instinct. He was quick to soothe you, tongue swirling around the erect and sensitive bud with rapt attention. A moan slipped through him, felt through your entire body, as your other hand tore into the bedding. Desperate for something to hold onto. Something to ground you in your pleasure.

“I’ve dreamed about you under me. Kissing you, tasting you, loving you,” his practically purred out every single word, tongue flicking back and forth over your sensitive nipple. He moved to the other one easily, delivering the same rapt attention to it.

“I’ve thought about you, too,” you relented, divulging every secret you held dear to the man who lavished every inch of you in love and adoration. “In the kitchen, the lab, in that stupid button up from earlier-”

“I knew you liked that shirt. Wore it just for you,” his husky tone sent another shot of pleasure through you, heat curling through every inch of your body.

The tips of his fingers trailed lightly down your stomach. When Johnny’s head lifted for just a moment to lock his eyes with yours, that familiar smirk on his face, you weren’t given a second to react before heat poured through his touch.

Gasps mixed with moans of pleasure fell from your lips on instinct, that unnatural heat of his pouring through his touch and into your skin. Every movement of his fingers over your ribcage and down your abdomen felt as if it was leaving your skin on fire, branding his touch into your skin so that you would never forget the feeling. Burning him into your memory so that you would always feel the phantom sensations of his touch on your skin.

“You’re absolute perfection, you always have been,” Johnny moaned into your skin, lips trailing over the mounds of your breasts with another series of a thousand kisses. Those heated fingers dipped past the waistband of your shorts, pressing directly against your clothed clit without a warning. The moan you let escape mixed in the air with the moan that tumbled from Johnny’s lips against your skin. “Jesus Christ, baby, you’re so soaked.”

The heat was still there in his fingers, setting off every little nerve ending in you even through the soaked fabric of your panties that you desperately wanted gone. Your hips ground up into his hand, whimpers falling from your lips as you chased after the feeling of him, desperate for friction.

“All for you,” even this hint of pleasure had you stumbling toward the edge, babbling almost incoherently. With a tug to his hair, you were quick to bring Johnny’s lips back to yours, arms wound around his neck. He gave into your needs immediately, devouring you in a kiss as heated as his touch was, fingers rubbing slow circles over where you needed him so desperately. “Please–Johnny, please! Please, I need you. Need you–need you so bad.”

“I got you, baby. I got you. Keep moaning my name like that, and I’ll give you the world”

Those whispered words stayed on your lips, lingering, as Johnny left you. His touch wasn’t gone long. Fingers curling into your shorts, they were discarded across the room in a flash, panties gone with them as well.

For the first time, you laid completely bare in front of the man you loved–the man you denied loving for so long. And Johnny Storm was a mess. His hair stuck up in multiple directions, skin flushed, but he was still beautiful. The most beautiful man you’d ever met, inside and out.

Johnny didn’t give you a second to truly breathe once he was done admiring you. He sprawled out along the end of the bed, head dipping between your thighs, as he licked a single stripe with his flattened tongue directly up your center.

“Fucking beautiful, and all mine,” his words were growled into your core, two fingers lazily moving between your folds and spreading every ounce of wetness around, holding you open so he could see every inch of you. “Sweeter than I ever dreamed you could be.”

He dove into you like you were the only thing that mattered. Fingers spreading you open, giving him access to every square inch, his mouth devoured you. A cool drink of water for a starving man in the middle of the desert. Johnny moved his tongue with precise expertise, as if he knew exactly what your body craved.

Delving into you, flicking back and forth as he drank in every secretion of arousal that dripped from you. That same tongue dragged its way up to your clit, swirling around in figure eights, flicking back and forth.

Cries fell from your lips wantonly, hands digging into his hair. Eyes fluttered shut, head tilted back to the ceiling, there was only one word you could repeat over and over again: Johnny, Johnny, Johnny. 

His name was all you knew anymore, too lost in your own bliss and pleasure.

In one fell swoop, your thighs were settled over his shoulders, before his head was back where you wanted it more than anything. His lips and tongue focused on your clit, still swirling back and forth, as his fingers dipped slightly lower, dancing right across your opening.

It started with one long, slender finger sliding into you. One of your hands was forced to leave Johnny’s hair, falling over your own mouth to try and conceal the cry that threatened to burst from you, afraid that the others would hear you.

“Let me hear you, baby,” he laughed against your core, his finger curling just perfectly against your walls as they clenched around him every time he dragged his finger back and forth. “Want to hear you.”

“Don’t want to–fucking hell, Johnny–let the others hear,” 

“Let them. Let them hear me love you,”

Fuck Johnny Storm and his stupid lines. His stupid dirty talk that had your walls clenching around him again and again.

Another finger joined the first, followed by another, before you were stretched as wide as you could be around Johnny. The squelch of your juices rung through the air with every move of his fingers–dragging so deliciously into you, curling up, before dragging out just to the edge of your opening. His mouth–god, his mouth–never let up, lapping away at your core like it was his job, what he was meant to do.

That coil of pleasure deep within your lower body came out of nowhere, sneaking up on you just like your love for this man had.

“Johnny–baby–I can’t. I can’t–I’m gonna-”

“Let go, darling,” came that growl in his voice again, the speed of his fingers increasing. “I got you baby, let go.”

That coil snapped in seconds after he spoke. The precipice of your orgasm was earth-shattering, like you’d never felt before. Like trails of fire through your veins, the pleasure coursing through you had your head buried into the pillow behind your head, desperately trying to conceal the wails of pleasure that tumbled from your lips. Your thighs snapped shut around Johnny’s head, but his ministrations never let up as he eagerly drank up every bit of your arousal that leaked from you.

The come down was slow, like waking up. Your breath was uneven, heart beating erratically when you finally pulled your head from the pillow. Eyes bleary, it took a moment to blink them back to life.

Johnny stood at the edge of the bed, discarding his pants and boxers to the pile of clothing littering the other side of the room. And even in your fucked-out, blissful state, one look at him for the first time had that burning desire coursing back through your veins.

He was big. There was no way around it, no denying it, no other way to put it. Flushed, hanging with that beautiful reddened tip, one large and prominent vein throbbing along the edge of it. Beads of precum collected at the tip, his hand smearing it down along his length as he gave himself one single pump before he was crawling back onto the bed.

Johnny knelt between your legs again. Even with limbs that felt like Jell-O, you met him halfway, dragging yourself into a seated position. It was the smile on his face right now, the one erupting those butterflies once more, that you decided was your favorite: soft, adoring, loving.

It was your hands that cupped his cheeks, bringing him into a soft kiss. The taste of you lingered on his lips, sweet just like he said. You poured every ounce of emotion into your kiss, trying to convey to him the years you’d spent loving him so quietly that you couldn’t admit it.

“I might be addicted to you, Johnny Storm,” your words were mumbled into his lips. He laughed so gently, stealing another peck.

“Glad you finally caught up with me, princess, I’ve been addicted since day one,”

Pressed to him, his lips stealing a thousand pecks from yours, the lust in your bones was back in full force. All you could do was hum in response, one of your hands trailing down his chest, nails dragging slowly over his abdomen, before you finally took his throbbing cock in your hand.

He felt even bigger than he looked, which didn’t even make sense in your mind. But he was hot, the skin searing into your hand in the best way. You gave him one squeeze, one tug, and you smiled at the hitch in his breath. The twitch of his cock in your hold.

Johnny’s hand quickly grabbed yours, though, unlatching it from him. All you could do was shake your head, practically whining as you tried to take your hand back.

“Johnny-”

“God, it’s so hot how eager you are to touch me,” he laughed again, tilting his head to leave a single kiss to the column of your throat. “This is about you, doll. Save that for next time. It can be a ‘welcome home from space’ gift for me. A ‘thanks for saving the world’ gift, if you will.”

Space. 

That word was enough to have your next words caught in your throat as the weight of everything came crashing back down on you. The threat, the herald, the space launch commencing in a matter of hours now, the events that brought you here in the first place.

You weren’t sure when you started crying, when a single tear slipped down your cheek, but Johnny caught it. Eyes full of concern, but understanding, he simply wiped the tears from your cheek, laying a kiss to the wet splotch of your skin.

“No crying, none of that. Just lay back, baby,”

You listened, letting his hands guide you gently to rest back against the pillows once more. Parting your legs, Johnny placed himself between them, holding himself up over your body on his forearms. Right where he belonged.

Your hands rested on his chest, sliding up so gently to his neck. His eyes never left yours, his length sitting right against your soaked and sensitive core, gliding back and forth with each gentle twitch of his hips.

“You didn’t let me say it earlier. So let me say it, for the first time outloud,” you gave him a watery smile, lips quivering as you looked up at him. “I love you, Johnny Storm. I’ve loved you for so long. I’m sorry it took the world maybe ending for this, that I didn’t let myself be yours sooner.

He smiled, that same charming smile he always did, as he rolled his hips once more. His cock caught just along the edge of your opening as Johnny dipped down, breath fanning over your lips.

“Like you said: you’ve always been mine,”

The first press of his length into your core stung. As wet as you were, as prepared as you were for him, it had been so long. He stretched your walls little by little, taking his time as your body adjusted to him. Then, inch by inch, he sunk within your walls that clung to him tightly.

His cock bottomed out, sunk fully within you, bare hips pressed to bare hips as you both let out shaky breaths. Your nails dug into the hair at the nape of his neck while his hands trailed up your ribcage, squeezing every moment or so as choked out moans fell from his lips.

“God–so tight for me, baby–you feel like heaven,”

His name was the only thing you could manage to choke out between your moans as he dragged himself back to the tip, before burying himself again to the hilt. Your moans, your cries and the way your hands threaded into his hair only spurred him on more, Johnny’s hips snapping into yours again and again and again.

His lips found yours amidst every snap of his hips, every drag of his cock against your walls. Every moan that slipped through your lips was drowned out by him, by the feverish movements of his lips against yours. They trailed away, back to your neck, leaving a trail of saliva connecting you together as he bit another love bite into the side of your neck. It didn’t matter to you how this would look to others, how scandalous you might look in the light of day to others.

All that mattered was Johnny Storm.

“Oh god, Johnny!” your head fell to his shoulder, teeth sinking into his skin as his hips snapped against yours over and over, driving him deeper with every thrust into you. “Holy fuck, w-why weren’t we doing this for years?”

“Because you’ve been a stubborn–fuck–little tease all these years,” his tongue dragged up the column of your throat, peppering kissing up and down your skin as his cock dragged against your walls. “Bent over your workstation in the lab–oh god–you don’t know how many times I’ve thought about it. Thought about walking in and taking you right there, making a mess right at your desk.”

“R-Reed would walk in and you’d scar him for life,”

“Sounds like a win-win to me,” there was shared laughter, punctuated with a shared moan as his cock dragged right against that spot nestled within you. “And try not to talk about my brother-in-law when I’m fucking you.”

There was no time to reply as Johnny scooped up your wrists in his hand in a single motion, pinning them down above your head. He adjusted your waist, suddenly driving into you at a new angle that had you mewling his name all over again.

Johnny whispered your name into your skin with every kiss, timed just so with every snap of his hips against yours. That coil of heat was burning, wounding itself tighter and tighter for the second time that night. All you could feel was him, was Johnny.

His warmth, the heat that burned off of him. It warmed your skin, it had beads of sweat dripping down your forehead. It was uncomfortable in the best way. His one hand still trailed up and down your ribcage, every so often tweaking your sensitive nipple between his thumb and index finger and coaxing another moan of pleasure from you.

He worshiped you, every inch of you, like you were the greatest thing to ever grace the earth. To him, you might have been

“Fucking perfect, baby. Fucking made for me,” his lips found yours again, slick with spit as his tongue dipped into your mouth to taste every inch of you possible.

His stroke faltered, the rhythm uneven, and you knew he was close. That coil of heat in your stomach was threatening to snap any second every time his cock pulsed and throbbed within your walls. His grip on your wrists was tight, even as you struggled against him, desperate to just hold him.

“Johnny–baby–please I-I’m so close-”

You choked on your words once more, the hand still trailing across your stomach heating up again, leaving a burning trail of heat in your skin. Those heated fingers found your clit like it was second nature, a cry of pure pleasure leaving your lips as they circle that bundle of a thousand nerves over and over again, hips still snapping into you as quickly and desperately as they can.

“Let go,” his voice was husky, eyes blown wide as he looked down at you. Your wrists were finally let go, your hands immediately finding their place in the strands of his hair again as his free hand cups the back of your neck, smashing your lips into his in a flurry of moans. “Let go, baby, let go.”

Your second climax burned hotter than the first.

The pleasure burned so hot, so bright, you were practically sobbing, every cry and moan of pure bliss muffled by his kiss. Your legs locked around Johnny’s waist–tightly–so tight he could barely move away from you. It was overwhelming, the shockwaves of bliss that ran through your veins, the shaking of your thighs as you held onto his hair like it’s a lifeline.

He ground himself into you over and over, rhythm so far gone he was struggling. But all it took was your lips lazily finding his neck, teeth sinking in to leave your matching mark to his, for his hips to still as he spilt into you.

Johnny breathed out every moan into the side of your head, your name tumbling from his lips along with a flurry of swears. The grip he had on your hip was bruising, so tight you think he could snap the damn bone if he held any tighter. And his cock? Seated so deeply inside of you it’s as if you are one, heat pooled within your lower abdomen with every wave of cum that filled you to the brim.

On the other side of the room, the record was still playing softly. Bright lights still flashed by the windows every so often, crews still at work on the spaceship set for launch by mid-morning.

None of it mattered in the silence of the bed.

You aren’t sure how long either of you laid there. Your heartbeat, eventually, returned to normal, even as your chest still heaved to take in every breath that it could. Johnny still laid half on top of you, pressing repeated kisses to the side of your head, but said nothing. Your hand stayed in his hair, carding through it, as your core pulsed. It would ache come morning–hell, it already did–but it was worth it. It was so worth it.

Neither of you were quite sure when he pulled out of you, or how long you simply laid there and basked in the afterglow of a moment that should’ve happened years ago.

Eventually, Johnny shifted down. His lips trailed down your body in worship, like they’d done already that night. From your cheek, to your neck, your collarbone, the swell of your breasts, and down your lower abdomen.

“Careful…not sure I’d survive a round three,” your voice was hoarse, mouth dry. Johnny laughed against your skin, still kissing every inch he could see.

“I don’t think I would, either,”

His hands were heated once more, but not for the same purpose as moments before. Now, his touch was gentle, massaging every piece of you that he could get his hands on. His thumbs rubbed into your wrists, your waist, and your hips, digging into the muscles. A sigh escaped you at the comforting feeling, taut muscles loosening at the feeling of the heat and the movement of his hands.

With every kiss pressed to your skin, you could feel it: Johnny was humming. It didn’t take long to know which song he was humming, which lyrics: that same song once again.

I guess I'll never know the reason why, you love me as you do. That's the wonder, the wonder of you.

“Is that our song now?” you laughed, even if your heart was clenching at the mere thought. The mere idea of that song belonging to the two of you–the idea that Johnny Storm belonged to you.

You could feel his smile against your abdomen as he spoke. “It should be. It’s accurate. Because I don’t ever think I’ll get over the miracle that is you…loving me.”

It’s not a miracle. What you really want to tell him is that falling in love with him was so easy, you barely realized you had done it. It might be the easiest thing you’ve ever done.

Johnny crawled back up your body, slotting himself onto the bed beside you, before tugging you in. There’s no hesitation on your part, simply curling into his side with your head over his chest and arm slung around his waist. Words aren’t needed in the silence, not when you’ve both clearly laid everything out on the table now. Instead, you just listened to the beat of his heart, the natural rhythm that lulls you into a state of peacefulness.

He’s yours. Johnny Storm is yours. He’s always been yours, you just didn’t know it.

He pressed a kiss to your forehead, hand cradling the back of your head as he said his next words confidently.

“We’re going to go up there tomorrow, and we’re going to stop this guy. We’re going to protect this Earth, like we’ve sworn to do. But me? I’m going to do it so I can come home to you, and love you for the rest of my life. I promise,”

He can’t promise that, you knew he couldn’t. There was no telling what might happen when that ship took off tomorrow, what they might encounter, or who this Galactus really was.