"Yes, you."

"You committed my efforts without first seeking my agreement?"

"It was easy when you weren't there to defend yourself," you reply lightly, leaning in to inspect the vegetables beneath his knife. They're a little limp, colours dulled and beginning to brown at the tops. "Besides, Coco is very excited to hear you do all the voices. You wouldn't say no to her."

"Both that child and you severely overestimate my talent and willingness," Qifrey huffs, though you can see him fighting to keep the corners of his mouth from turning upwards. "Still, as a reward for successfully getting those little terrors to sleep… would you like some dumplings for supper?"

It's almost embarrassing how quickly the fatigue leaves your body. "Dumplings!"

Qifrey laughs quietly at your immediate enthusiasm. "Yes, yes. I'm making some now." He sweeps the chopped vegetables into a bowl with practiced ease, and only then do you notice the rest of the ingredients spread across the counter beside him: minced flying shrimp and meat, a little dish of carefully measured seasonings, and a neat stack of dumpling wrappers lightly dusted with flour. So that's what he'd been doing the entire time you were upstairs battling the girls into bed. "I was taking stock of the kitchen earlier and realised these vegetables needed to be used soon. But I haven't wrapped them yet, so you may have to wa—"

"—do them with you," you finish for him, already reaching for the wrappers before Qifrey can protest. "Double the hands make for half the work, don't they?"

Qifrey just sighs. He knows better than the argue by now. The sound is touched with quiet amusement despite the air of resignation he tries to maintain—helplessly fond, in all of its indulgences.

The two of you stand at the kitchen counter to wrap the dumplings. Quiet nights in are often your favourite—not that you don't enjoy the company of the girls—but moments like these are made all the more precious in their rarity. Little stretches of time where it is only you and Qifrey, where he can simply be himself and not the witch or the master, the two of you sharing in the stillness of the sleeping atelier together.

By the time you finish wrapping the dumplings, the water on the stove has come to a rolling boil. Qifrey lowers a handful carefully into the pot while you gather the rest, sliding them neatly into the cold box to keep for another day.

Your hips bump together every now and then in the cramped space between the counter and kitchen table, and your fingers brush with murmured apologies neither of you truly mean when you reach for the same wrapper more than once. You watch Qifrey's hands while you work; long fingers pleating the dumplings shut with practiced ease, each one cradled lightly in the cup of his palm before being placed in neat rows upon the tray. There is something strangely tender about the motion—careful and familiar in the same way he handles all fragile things.

When you turn back, Qifrey is already holding a single bowl in his hands, waiting for you. Steam curls upward lazily from the broth.

You glance up at him. "You're not having any?"

"Hm?" Qifrey hums lightly as he sets the dumplings down on the table. "I assumed we could just share. It'd be less to clean up."

The easy casualness of his words makes something warm unfurl quietly in your chest.

The two of you eat the dumplings at the kitchen table, shoulders brushing every so often as you pass the spoon between you. The dumpling skins turn almost translucent in the broth, pieces of shrimp glowing a faint pink under the lamplight like small crystals. Qifrey nudges the bowl slightly closer when he notices you slowing down, waiting patiently for you to take the next one before reaching for his own. Between bites, the bowl slowly empties until there is nothing but broth, and then, even that too, is gone.

"I'll do the dishes," you say as you gather the bowl and spoon, already beginning to rise from your seat. The quicker you get it done, the sooner you can return to his side. Qifrey's brow furrows behind his glasses.

"It was my suggestion to cook, so I should—"

"Qifrey." Your hands slip over his shoulders before he can stand, fingers idly combing through the soft hair at his nape as he peers up at you. "You already stayed up late last night preparing snacks for us and Olly's lunchbox. Let me."

He tries, regardless. "But—"

"Qifrey, dear," you interrupt, voice dropping into something unbearably sweet. You can already see the first signs of impending embarrassment creeping across his face. "My love, my moon and stars, the apple of my eye, the keeper of my heart, won't you please let me have the honour of—"

"Oh, stop it." Qifrey pulls away from you halfheartedly, one hand coming up to cover part of his face as though it might hide the warmth gathering there. His voice is exasperated, but weakly so—far too flustered to carry any real force behind it. "Do as you like."

You think you want to kiss him, then. Desperately, a little. But experience has taught you the moment your lips touch his, neither of you will accomplish anything you intend—so instead, you settle for a light peck to his cheek before carrying the bowl over to the basin. Warm water laps softly against your hands as you scrub at the porcelain, the quiet clink of dishes filling the kitchen.

Even so, you can still feel Qifrey's gaze lingering on your back. A few quiet moments later, there's the soft scrape of chair legs against the kitchen floor, and you barely have time to glance over your shoulder before his arms are slipping around your waist from behind, warm and loose. He folds himself against your back with a quiet sigh.

"I missed you," he murmurs into the crook of your neck.

"I was with you the entire day."

"Not like this."

Qifrey's lips find your neck first, trailing warm kisses along your skin unhurriedly in a way that makes your breath catch. Your head tilts back instinctively to give him more room, and you feel the gentle nip of teeth against the sensitive underside of your jaw before he finally turns you just enough to kiss you properly.

It starts off slow—soft, familiar in a way only Qifrey can be around you; careful without restraint, gentle without hesitation. Your breaths mingle warm and wet in the spaces between each kiss as your mouths part and meet again, his glasses nudging lightly against your cheekbone as he leans closer. To your dismay, your hands remain suspended awkwardly over the sink, dripping wet and a little soapy. You want to touch him properly, to turn fully into his arms, card your fingers through his hair, and tug just enough to earn that quiet little sound he always tries and fails to swallow.

Instead, you make a helpless noise against his mouth and Qifrey laughs softly into the kiss, like he already knows what you're thinking. He's leaning in again when—

There's a sudden creak from the staircase. The two of you freeze instantly, Qifrey's fingertips still gently cradling your jaw. A second later, you hear the unmistakable sound of whispering—poorly hushed, at that—followed by the muffled shuffling of feet retreating back up several steps in frantic succession.

You and Qifrey slowly turn to look at each other.

“…Were they spying on us?” you whisper, more amused than anything.

“I am choosing,” Qifrey says with an immense attempt at dignity, despite the lingering flush across his face, “to believe they merely came downstairs for water.”

Another loud whisper drifts from the stairwell.

“I told you they were kissing—”

"—really just like in the book—"

"—can we go back to bed now—"

“Shh!”

The last one is definitely Agott. You bite down hard on your laughter, glancing up at the man behind you. Qifrey closes his eye with the exhaustion of a man enduring profound and arduous trials, one hand coming up to rub briefly at his temple before he leans in to steal one last kiss.

Qifrey doesn't know how long he stands there in the hallway, a restless spectre in the dark. Only that by the time he manages to pull himself away his feet are aching, and his breathing has slowed to the same steady rhythm as your own. He lingers for only a moment longer, still reluctant, before turning and making his way back down the hall.

His feet carry him over to one of the windows without thinking. Outside, the sloping hills reach for the edges of night's canopy, unfurling like a rug of silver-sheened fox fur toward the distant coast. And if he squints, Qifrey can just make out the scattering of mountain apple shrubs in the dark; its fruit he'd picked with you this morning chartreuse-yellow and not quite ripe, still carrying a faint, tart edge on the tongue.

The bandages on your arms had been clean when he'd changed them after dinner. Whatever other wounds you'd earned from your little misadventure are healing as well, smaller scabs darkening and already flaking at the edges. You're still young, your body more forgiving in ways his is less so, and Qifrey is thankful for that. More than he can put into words.

But thankful isn't enough anymore.

He's been selfish. Qifrey had taken you in to save himself—to keep the silverwood repressed dormant, to give himself sufficient worry so that the parasite in him wouldn't kill him. Somewhere along the way he'd convinced himself that this careful distance—that feeding you, teaching you, keeping a roof over your head—would be enough. And in doing so, he'd unintentionally made you the receptacle for all his fears, his neglect, for every single one of his cruel words.

He's a poor excuse of a master. You deserve better.

Qifrey tries to remember what he needed once, as an apprentice. The recollections emerge in faint remnants. The stone floors of the Great Hall, his master's breezy voice weaving between the columns—they blur together like the night fog, each memory dissolving into the next until none stands clearly apart from the rest.

None except Olruggio.

They had snuck out together once, after passing the Pentacle of Proving's third test. Qifrey can still remember the thrill of it: the night wind in his hair, the dark plains of the Naakiwan Downs stretching endlessly into the night. The hut had appeared abandoned—perhaps once a shepherd's shelter, left to the slow mercy of time—its stairs half-rotted from rain, sagging dangerously under their own weight.

They'd taken to the roof with their sylph shoes instead. There, Qifrey had looked properly at the night sky for the first time—impossibly clear, strewn thick with stars, as though some divine hand had cast a scatter of diamonds across the velvet dark. And with nothing else around for miles to hem them in, the heavens had felt so very close—close enough for Qifrey to believe he could reach out with his hand and pluck the stars from the sky himself.

In that moment, even his dreams had felt within reach. Qifrey had once believed that if he could recover the past he'd lost, his joy might become something real—something worthy of standing proud beside Olruggio's without feeling like a poor facsimile of it, a shoddy imitation. A foolish ambition, perhaps, but it was his.

A child can dream, after all.

Qifrey exhales, a sigh catching between his teeth as he pulls his gaze from the window. There's no point dwelling on what-ifs and has-beens. He slips a hand into the pocket of his robes, fingers pushing into the spelled space folded within. The envelope he withdraws is slightly crumpled, edges creased from the many times he's folded and unfolded it again.

It's an official summons to the Great Hall, a request for his presence to discuss the status of his atelier. The tone employed is courteous, but there's no mistaking it. This is not an invitation he can refuse.

Qifrey's thumb lingers at the corner of the page, letting the edge catch against his skin. The Great Hall. He's never been fond of it despite its grand resplendences and easy conveniences. There's a reason he came all the way out to the quiet edges of the Downs, to build something that belonged solely to him.

But you… you must be bored here. The atelier is so far removed from everything else, the quick, lively rhythm of other witches and apprentices. Even with the windowway, it is not the same. Here you only have him for company, the same brick and limestone walls day after day.

You've never complained, of course. You never do. Still, you should have others your age. Other witches. Friends.

Qifrey folds the letter one last time and makes up his mind.

The next morning, Qifrey takes you to the Great Hall with him. The windowway deposits the two of you somewhere at the edge of Deepwater Castle, the world within its rings shifting as stone and sky give way to sea. Qifrey steps out first, taking a moment to steady himself on the slick platform. The air here is different—heavier and wetter, saturated with salt and a faint tinge of magic, and sunlight filters down in pale, weaving ribbons, catching on fish whose scales flash like scattered coins. Beyond the boundary of sea-mist, the ocean presses in on all sides, held at bay by complex spells written long before Qifrey was even born.

Qifrey turns, one hand already lifting to help you from the windowway. Despite his feelings towards the Great Hall, the sight of Deepwater Castle never quite loses its ability to take his breath away. Some quiet part of him hopes see the same wonder on your face.

But you aren't looking. Not at the fish, the shimmering barrier, or even the mighty castle rising from the ocean floor. Instead your eyes are fixed on him, and your face is pale. Paler than he's ever seen it, even when he'd plucked you from the cliffside with serpentines coiling overhead, ready to tear you apart.

At some point you've grabbed hold of his sleeve. It's almost as if you're afraid he might vanish if you let go. Qifrey frowns, concerned.

"What's wrong?"

You shake your head. Qifrey waits, but nothing follows. You remain where you are—pale and wordless, knuckles stark against the dark fabric of his sleeve. Above, fish glide past with slow currents, a myriad of light and shadows shifting across your cheek, the flagstones. A bell tolls in the distance.

He doesn't want to push you. Not in this unfamiliar place, at least.

"Alright," Qifrey decides at last. "Come on."

The shopping gallery is a long corridor of shops, located somewhere within the lower levels of Deepwater Castle. It's just as Qifrey remembers it—crowded, lively, storefronts overflowing with eclectic wonders. Some hawk candied kelp and enlarged bunches of willowgrapes, others display glowing components in transparent jars, contraptions that whir and tick and occasionally emit small puffs of smoke. One roadside stall even offers miniature glass orbs no larger than a palm, each containing a captive, miniaturised sea creature—harmless, Qifrey knows, carefully calibrated spells etched into the glass to keep them comfortable and happy.

He walks slowly, careful to stay close by your side. You haven't let go of his sleeve, though your grip has loosened somewhat since entering the castle. Qifrey isn't sure if the gallery or countless unfamiliar sights is reason, but he's grateful, whichever it is.

"The baths are down this way," he says, gesturing down at a side corridor. "They have spells that mimic the ocean waves, and water sculptures enchanted to move like living creatures. Oh, and past that fountain—there—is the dining hall I used to eat at as an apprentice."

Qifrey glances at you as you walk. He'd brought you here to see the witches' stronghold with your own eyes, to experience its strange wonders the way he once had long ago. But watching you from the corner of his eye, he is unsure whether you are truly enjoying any of it.

"They served the best yam and horncap soup—filling and perfectly seasoned. I still dream about it till this day. Do you want to take a look?"

You don't answer immediately. Your eyes drift, a rudderless boat caught out at sea, though you meet his when Qifrey looks at you. Your gaze dips after a moment, however.

"If Master wants," you say.

Qifrey's frown deepens though he keeps it from his face. The last thing he wants is for you to think he's displeased with you. Qifrey likes to believe he knows you—not perfectly, of course, but enough to recognise the differences between your silences and your hesitations. This one, though, he cannot place. He doesn't know if your answer means you're unsure how to say no, or if you are uncertain about saying yes.

He considers pressing. But you've given him nothing, and Qifrey has learned—if a little slowly—that there are moments when that is all you're willing to offer.

"Perhaps later," Qifrey answers, keeping his voice light. "We'll see then."

You only nod.

The corridor eventually opens into a vast indoor courtyard. The high walls of the Argentgard rise steeply before you like the sides of a pale mountain, old sigils carved deep into stone. It's quieter here, removed from the bustle and chatter of the shopping gallery, as though even sound knows better than to linger. And for good reason: flanking the arched doors stand the Knights Moralis—their backs straight and rigid, clad in black and crimson ceremonial armour—holding on to banners that manage to look proud even when they're hanging still.

Qifrey stops at the threshold. He knows what awaits him on the other side of these doors. He's never much cared for these proceedings, the careful scrutiny dressed in civility. They unmoor him less than the grove of pale trees lying just behind these walls, anyway.

He slips a careful smile into place before turning back to you, bending slightly at the waist so that the two of you are eye to eye. "There is a courtyard just through that archway," he says, with a nod towards the columns on his left. It's outside one of the libraries he used to frequent as an apprentice—you might run into a few younger witches coming and going. "There are some benches for you to sit on, and a little fountain that sings. You can wait for me there. Or—" He reaches into his robes and draws out a small leather pouch. It clinks softly when he places it into your hand. "You can explore the shopping gallery. Spend this on whatever you want—food, books, even one of those glass orbs, if you like. Anything."

You glance down at the pouch, unblinking. After a while, Qifrey reaches for your hand and cups it in his own, gently folding your fingers over the worn leather.

"I won't be long," he says, softer this time. "It'll be an hour, two at most. You'll be fine on your own."

Your other hand tightens its grip on his sleeve. Then, slowly, you let go.

Qifrey hesitates. For a fleeting second he considers taking you with him—making you sit through the council's dry questions and pointed looks. He can already foresee it: their relentless probing into your past, the dogged interrogation about your origins as an unknowing. No, no. It is better to leave you here.

"Don't wander too far, alright?" Qifrey says gently as he straightens, glancing over his shoulder at the looming doors. "I'll be back soon."

He manages a few steps towards it before he looks back at you. You simply nod, like you always do.

"Okay."

The Argentgard is cold.

Not in terms of temperature, so to speak. The Great Hall is kept comfortably warm year-round—the same spells that generate sea-mist threaded carefully with seals to trap heat and prevent the place from feeling like a tomb. Perhaps the lingering chill comes from someplace else: the measuring and the weighing, the unshakeable sensation of being observed by eyes that see too much and miss very little.

Still, the gardens themselves are pleasant enough. Qifrey sits while the council members regard him across the table from their high-backed chairs, expressions unreadable as they scrutinize his files.

It isn't long before they begin their line of questioning. Have you been adhering to regulation? Of course. How many apprentices do you have? Just the one. Have you noticed any irregularities with the unknowing as of late? None. These interrogations are nothing new to Qifrey; he's learned to keep his voice steady and his answers brief, to offer nothing more than what is required.

When they've finally exhausted their endless list of questions, they move on to other matters. The council informs him of the Watchful Eyes—Pointed Hat witches tasked with overseeing ateliers too distant from the Great Hall, ensuring compliance and reporting any irregularities deemed worthy of concern. Qifrey doesn't like the idea of being monitored, but knows better than to push. The Council's decisions are never only suggestions, and resistance will only further invite the very scrutiny he'd prefer to avoid.

Yet, the meeting stretches on for longer than he'd expected. Questions are followed by more questions, which are in turn followed by discussions of revised protocols. By the time they start on the topic of procedural adjustments, Qifrey's mind is already beginning to drift—away from the council's murmurings and the silver trees of the Argentgard, back to the corridor where he'd left you.

Are you doing alright? he wonders. Did you find the courtyard? Did anyone approach you? Have you eaten anything?

The conversation drags. Each topic bleeds into the next, until Qifrey starts to think words themselves are beginning to lose all meaning. And then—

"One final matter," one council member says, pushing her glasses further up her nose to squint at the papers in her hand. "For your atelier's Watchful Eye—do you have anyone in mind?"

He's too tired to care, and eager to leave. "Choose whoever."

They exchange glances. A scribe sitting to his left jots down a few words, and then—thankfully, mercifully, finally—the meeting is adjourned. Qifrey is already halfway to the exit, perhaps a touch too quickly, when a familiar voice halts him.

"Qifrey. A moment, please."

He knows who it is even before he turns. Qifrey looks back, reluctantly, to see him—perched elegantly in his sealchair, hands clasped loosely in his lap, wearing that familiar half-smile of his. Briefly, Qifrey wonders whether it is truly him or merely another of his smoke clones, though the distinction stopped mattering years ago—sometime around the third occasion Qifrey spent twenty minutes arguing with one, before realising the real thing had never been there at all.

"I have other matters to attend to."

"Nonsense." The ram legs of Beldaruit's sealchair tread lightly through the grass, carrying him over to Qifrey's side. "You have time for tea. I insist."

"I really don't."

"Not even a few minutes to spare for your poor old master?"

At least the old man's fondness for theatrics hasn't changed. "No."

"That's so cruel, you know. I take you under my wing out of the kindness of my heart, raise you with all the care and devotion of a loving master, only to receive this kind of gratitude in my old age…"

He ends up following Beldaruit deeper into the Argentgard, albeit unwillingly. Here, in one of its more secluded groves, the silverwoods grow oldest and thickest—branches twisting towards the high, arched ceilings, their pale leaves gleaming softly like moonlight caught over the surface of a still lake. Qifrey sits across Beldaruit at a small table already set with a silver tea service, delicate porcelain cups and a plate of untouched pastries waiting neatly between them.

Qifrey pours, the same way he used to when he was an apprentice, and Beldaruit was still his master. They exchange the usual polite niceties: updates on mutual acquaintances (Qifrey hasn't kept in contact with some in years), comments on the weather (it never changes down here), and mild inquiries regarding the atelier. Qifrey answers in monosyllables, counting down the minutes until he can excuse himself without appearing discourteous.

"So," Beldaruit hums upon finishing his third pour. He sets down his teacup with a soft click. "Tell me about your new apprentice."

Qifrey's hand stills on his own. He should have known better than to think being confined to the ocean floor would keep anything from reaching Beldaruit's ears. "Word travels quickly."

"Can you blame us? There is very little to be excited about, under the sea." Beldaruit waves a hand vaguely through the air. "The fish are lovely, I suppose, but they make for dreadful conversationalists. One grows desperate for interesting news eventually."

Qifrey sighs. Suddenly the tea in his hand appears far less appetising than it did a moment ago.

"What do you want to know?"

"I want to know what they're like, of course. I'm curious as to what sort of student my apprentice is raising."

"Former apprentice."

Beldaruit dismisses the correction with an airy flick of his fingers. "Same thing. In my eyes, you're still the same old rascally apprentice." He leans back in his sealchair, ram legs dipping slightly, before he scratches thoughtfully at his chin. "Ah, I suppose that makes them my grand-apprentice, doesn't it?" Beldaruit's smile curls slightly at the edges. "I rather like the sound of that."

Qifrey fights the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose in exasperation. That, or do something equally childish—like pour the teapot directly into Beldaruit's lap, the way he might have done if he were still an apprentice.

"They're… clever," he begins slowly, if somewhat reluctantly. "They're exceptionally talented at complex spells—they can decipher the logic behind circles some fully fledged witches might struggle with. They learn quickly, too—they memorised every glyph in the foundational textbook by heart within a matter of weeks." Qifrey remembers the sight of you hunched over the kitchen table, tracing spells over and over until the bowl of water in front of you had run dry. "The only problem is that they work too hard. I have to remind them to eat, sometimes, and if there's a spell they can't master immediately, I know I'll find them awake in the middle of the night, still practicing it over and over—"

"B—o—ring." Beldaruit interrupts, dragging out the syllable out like a man enduring some unbearable inconvenience as he props his chin onto one hand. "Wow. That is all so terribly boring."

Qifrey stops talking to glare across the table. "Well, you asked."

"Spellwork this, textbook that." Beldaruit waves a disparaging hand, his sleeve rippling. "That's the sort of thing you put in an educational report to the Council. What I want to know is: what are they like to you?"

The question catches Qifrey off guard. And its answer drifts in, like incense smoke carried on the wind, without conscious thought or contemplation. He remembers the pale set of your mouth when you'd looked up at him from beneath his cloak for the first time. How wavering firelight reflects in your eyes when you're practicing spells late into the night. The dark, rust-coloured stain of your blood, drying slowly across his fingers.

The quiet cadence of your voice, and the faint upward lilt whenever you call, "Master".

Beldaruit is watching him differently now. The sharpness in those pale eyes has not faded—if anything, it has only grown keener, the edge of a blade freshly drawn across its whetstone. He appears to enjoying Qifrey's hesitation immensely. Qifrey isn't sure he prefers to know why—the inner workings of his former master's mind are a mystery to him.

"Let me make things simpler for you," Beldaruit says. He leans forward in his sealchair, fingers interlaced when he sets his hands on the table. "Do they surprise you?"

This time, his answer comes out without hesitation.

"Every day."

For a moment, Beldaruit looks almost surprised, himself. Then his expression slips into something softer, almost pleased, and for the briefest instant, Qifrey catches the faint shadow of the man he'd once called master—the man who'd sat beside his bed in the dark, distracting him from nightmares of suffocating darkness and unceasing rain with dancing figures shaped from smoke.

He doesn't push further. Beldaruit simply nods, and picks up his teacup once again.

"Good," he says. "That's what I wanted to hear."

The fountain is warbling a sweet, silver-bright melody when Qifrey finds you in the eastern courtyard. That's expected. What he wasn't expecting, however, is to find you amidst a handful of other witches your age.

He ducks behind a pillar before you can spot him. Qifrey should probably collect you, begin the journey home, but you look—well, not happy, exactly. You rarely ever look happy. But you look less solitary, at least, and that alone is something worth staying hidden for a few more minutes.

The young witches are talking about their own masters at the Great Hall. Qifrey catches fragments—familiar names he knows in passing, scattered mentions of the Three Wise. You wouldn't know any of these things—names and histories and hierarchies that carry weight and sway within the magical world—because Qifrey had never thought to teach them to you before. Now, he's wondering if he should have. Still, they speak with such easy enthusiasm it hardly seems to matter, their voices overlapping in excited bursts and trills.

"So, who's your master?" A girl with a tumble of chestnut curls asks you, eyes bright with curiosity. Qifrey stiffens suddenly before he can help it.

You answer simply, the same way you always do. "Master Qifrey."

The apprentice witches exchange glances. For a moment they look puzzled, until realisation ripples visibly throughout the small group.

"Oh," another pipes up. "You mean Beldaruit the Wise's apprentice?"

"Is he?"

"Yeah! What's he like?"

Qifrey's heart stumbles oddly in his chest, a brief, uncomfortable slip in rhythm. He should probably step out from behind the pillar, announce his presence before he overhears something not meant for his ears. But his feet refuse to move.

You seem to think about this for a while. Then—

"The prettiest."

Qifrey nearly chokes. The witches standing closest to you seem to echo his thoughts. "Huh?"

"Master Qifrey is the prettiest," you continue, matter-of-factly, as though clarifying something that ought to have been obvious to anyone with functioning eyes.

A ripple of laughter breaks through the group. "That's not usually a word people use to describe their masters," the girl who'd asked says between giggles, looking amused.

"Is that so?"

Qifrey's face burns so hot he fears he might combust like an overcast pyreball spell. He's suddenly grateful for the pillar concealing him from sight. Pretty. You could have said knowledgeable. Wise, kind, inspiring—any number of descriptive words more befitting of a teacher, a mentor, a master. Why would you…

He drags a hand down his face in an attempt to gather the scattered remains of his composure. It's painfully futile. When it becomes clear that the effort is hopeless, Qifrey steps out from behind the pillar, fixing what he hopes passes for a smile across his thoroughly frazzled expression.

"It's time to go," he says.

You look up at him. Your expression doesn't change in slightest—no flicker of embarrassment, no trace of awkwardness at the fact he might have overheard what you just said. You simply nod, offer the other witches a polite "goodbye", and cross the courtyard to stand at his side once more.

"Goodbye!" one of them calls, waving enthusiastically. "Hopefully we'll see you around again!"

You raise a hand in response, but nothing more.

"I'm sorry for taking so long," Qifrey says as the two of you walk away, leaving behind the chatter of the courtyard. His face still feels slightly warm. "But I think I needn't have worried—it looks like you made some friends."

You shrug. "They were nice."

It's not disagreement, though not quite agreement either—but Qifrey supposes that's simply how most first steps go; small, uncertain things, too fragile to name outright. He decides to count it as a victory all the same.

"I'll cook something nice for dinner." Qifrey glances sidelong at you. A carapace mash, perhaps, or the grilled vegetables he's noticed you favour. Judging from your empty hands, Qifrey doubts you've spent a single coin in the pouch he gave you. "You barely ate before we left this morning—you must be starving."

"Okay." You shift a step closer to his side. "Let's go home."

Your hand brushes his sleeve—not gripping, just touching—as though the proximity comes as naturally as breathing. Qifrey's breath catches softly in his chest.

After a while, he nods.

"Yeah," he says quietly. "Let's go home."

It rains that night.

True storms are rare out on the Downs, but a few times each year the weather falls into moods unpleasant enough to shake even the inland hills. Qifrey lies awake, listening to the wind howl across the moors surrounding the atelier while rain lashes relentlessly against the windows. He'll be getting no sleep tonight, he knows—he abandoned the attempt hours ago, resigning himself to counting the cracks in his ceiling and waiting for morning to arrive.

Then—

A soft knock sounds at his door.

Qifrey startles slightly amidst his tangle of blankets. For a moment, he eyes the faint shape of his bedroom door in the dark, wondering if his ears are playing tricks on him in the storm. But then the knock comes again—quieter, more hesitant this time.

He swings his legs over the side of the bed, hurriedly shrugging a loose robe over his shoulders. When he pulls open the door, Qifrey finds you standing outside in the hallway, absently smoothing over your nightclothes beneath the muted amber glow of the lamps.

There are only two people living in this atelier, yet Qifrey is still oddly surprised to find you standing at his door as you are now. You've never sought him out in the middle of the night before.

"Did something happen?"

You look faintly surprised to see him despite being the one who knocked. After a moment, you shake your head.

"I thought Master would be asleep."

Qifrey's lips twitch upwards slightly. He waits a little longer, expecting you to continue, but you say nothing more. You don't leave either. The two of you simply stand there, the door held ajar between you, rain clamouring noisily against the windows.

"It's, um," Qifrey coughs lightly, after an extended period of silence. "Rather late, isn't it."

 The observation hangs somewhat uselessly between the two of you. Still you nod solemnly, as though he's said something of grave importance.

"Mm."

"Do you need something?"

A shake of the head.

"Can't sleep?"

A pause. Then, slowly, you nod again.

"Oh."

His mind leapfrogs to a hundred possibilities at once. Is it the storm? The thunder, perhaps? Are the heating spells in your room inadequate? The questions crowd together faster than he can decide which to ask, but by the time he's settled on one, the silence has stretched long enough that interrupting it feels strange. The space between the two of you lapses into awkward quiet once again.

"…Can I stay here for a while?"

The request catches him off guard. This seems to be becoming a night of firsts—first the knock at his door, then this. You rarely ask anything of him at all. Qifrey steps aside quickly, holding the door wider for you.

"Of course. Come in."

You step over the threshold somewhat tentatively. Qifrey lets the door swing shut and ushers you towards the bed, where he carefully sits you at the foot of it. You're dressed only in your nightclothes, feet bare, so he quickly slips his robes from his shoulders to drape it around yours instead. It takes a few adjustments to ensure it sits properly—it's far too large on you—before Qifrey decides he's satisfied and settles next to you, mattress creaking softly beneath his weight.

The two of you sit in silence, accompanied by the steady patter of rain. When the quiet eventually begins to fray awkwardly at the edges, Qifrey clears his throat.

"Is there a reason you couldn't sleep?"

You don't respond immediately. Your fingers knit loosely in your lap, absently picking at a loose thread with your nails. Qifrey is beginning to suspect you don't actually want to answer it at all when you suddenly speak, your voice barely a murmur beneath the storm.

"…I had a bad dream."

Oh. "What about?"

"Drowning."

Qifrey goes very still.

"I think being in the Great Hall might have reminded me of it," you say. "Being surrounded by water—or maybe being so far beneath the surface."

Qifrey suddenly remembers the way you'd clung to his sleeve, when you'd first stepped out of the windowway. A quiet sense of dread coils unpleasantly in his stomach. "You've had a bad experience with the sea before?"

You nod.

"My parents tried to drown me when I was little." Qifrey's head snaps violently to look at you. The horror crashes through him with the force of a physical blow, the words a knife shoved viciously into his gut. "They had too many mouths to feed and I was the smallest, so they took me to the cliffs and threw me in. I guess they hoped it would look like an accident."

You say this with the same calm, thoughtful tone that you might use when explaining a conjecture about spell theory to him. Qifrey opens his mouth but nothing comes out.

Nothing will.

"I don't remember much," you continue, when he doesn't say anything. "Just that it was cold and dark and water would fill my mouth whenever I tried to scream. A fisherman found me eventually, so I survived."

"How old were you?"

"I'm not sure. Five, I think. Maybe six?"

You were just a child. The image his mind conjures is unbearable: small hands grasping helpless over dark water, frightened cries swallowed by the wind and waves. Your hands. Your cries.

Qifrey finds himself thinking, suddenly, of rain. Silver-fingered and relentless, falling in chilly sheets over Havso and you—crouched beneath that poor excuse of tarp, thin and soaked and frozen to the bone. They way you'd looked at him when he spelled away the rain above your head—not with wonder or gratitude, but the hollow-eyed stare of someone who'd learned never to expect anything from the world.

He can't stand it. Qifrey wants—needs—to say something. To find the right words to comfort you, or at least make it hurt less, or better yet, cast a counterclock spell and rewind time itself—back to that cliffside, years ago, so that Qifrey can pull you from the water long before the sea ever touches you. But there are no right words, no spell capable of undoing what has happened so long past, only this—you and him, now in this moment, everything Qifrey wants to say but can't snared in the silence between you.

Because what can he say in response to that? What words does he possess that could possibly be worth speaking?

"I'm afraid of water, too," Qifrey finds himself saying, eventually. "But not because of the sea. Rain."

His confession takes even him by surprise. You blink at the admission, glancing up from beneath your lashes, and Qifrey has to look away; instead, he fixes his gaze on his own feet, dangling over the bed next to yours.

"My old master found me in a box." The words trickle out slowly, like water leaking from a cracked vessel. "Buried in the ground and left for dead. I didn't have any memories—of my parents, where I came from—all I remembered was the rain. Pounding on the lid, seeping through the cracks…" He laughs once under his breath, though it's devoid of any humour. "I thought I was going to drown eventually. It felt like hell, waiting for death in the dark."

He hears you inhale softly.

"Beldaruit dug me up." Qifrey continues, more quietly now. "He took me in, taught me magic… but I never really got over my fear of water. It's why I worked so hard to master it." A faint smile touches the corners of his mouth. "Well, that, and to get out of the washing duty Beldaruit would assign me to whenever I mouthed off at him."

That doesn't make you laugh like he'd hoped it would. You kick out your feet idly, gaze lowered to where your hands are gathered in the too-long sleeves of his robe.

"I wonder if it would be better to forget," you say, finally. "All those unpleasant things."

Qifrey looks at you. Despite your words, there's no bitterness in your expression—an utter lack of anger or resentment Qifrey finds faintly unsettling. The question escapes him before he can turn it over in his head.

"Do you hate them?" he asks, more softly now. "Your parents, I mean. For doing that to you."

You barely hesitate.

"No." Your answer comes out certain. "If they hadn't, I would never have met Master."

In that brief moment Qifrey feels entirely stripped of words once again. The rain continues its persistent pummeling, thunder snarling overhead like some ancient beast, but all of it suddenly feels so very far away. He feels vaguely sick. There is no world in which Qifrey would ever consider what happened to you a fortune—no world in which a child should have been thrown into the sea simply that fate might orchestrate some so-called fortuitous encounter with him. None.

And yet—selfishly, horribly—the thought of never having met you at all leaves him painfully bereft.

"…That's not how that should work," Qifrey manages, at last. His fingers take an extended moment to release their death grip on the edge of the mattress. "Someone should have protected you long before you ever needed to meet me." Cared for you. Treasured you. Loved you.

"I have Master now," you shrug. "That's all that matters to me."

Qifrey wants to argue—to tell you that what your parents had done was unforgivable, that you deserved so much more than the scraps of kindness the world had handed you. But you seem so strangely at peace with it all the words die before they can leave his mouth. And who is he to condemn them, when he's been equally selfish in his own ways?

It's silent after that. The rain continues to pour, until Qifrey exhales through his nose, breaking the stillness.

"We should head to bed."

Your shoulders curl inward ever so slightly. "Oh."

"You can sleep here," he adds on hurriedly, before you can think he's urging you from his room. "In my bed, I mean. So you don't have to be alone."

The words come out stilted, somewhat awkwardly, in a tangled rush. You blink at him, visibly surprised—but not unpleasantly so. After a moment's hesitation you nod, and move slowly to crawl beneath the blankets. Qifrey rises to his feet and immediately busies himself with the covers and pillows, smoothing down a wrinkle in the blanket that's barely visible at all.

When there is nothing left for him to fuss over, Qifrey sits back down at the edge of the bed. You watch him from beneath the blankets where he'd tucked you in, quiet eyes following his movement amidst the dim amber glow of the bedside lamp. He can feel your gaze—warmth prickling along the side of his face like a thousand fine needles. He's about to fetch a book from one of the shelves to occupy his hands when he feels you tug lightly at the back of his shirt.

"I would feel better if Master were closer."

Every sensible instinct in him attempts to immediately object. You're tired, shaken from the nightmares, emotionally vulnerable from old memories dragged back to the surface. As your master, Qifrey is responsible for your wellbeing and safety above all else; it falls on him to maintain some semblance of proper distance, no matter the circumstance. And yet—

He cannot say no to you. He's never been able to say no to you.

Qifrey slips onto the bed beside you before he can think the better of it. He stretches himself out carefully atop the blankets, making sure to leave a respectable amount of space between your bodies. But after only a moment, you shift, body curling inward, until the crown of your head brushes lightly beneath his chin. He can feel the slow rhythm of your breath, each exhale whispering through the thin fabric of his nightshirt, where your face rests inches from the center of his chest.

Qifrey goes very still. This entire moment suddenly seems encased in thin glass—like one wrong movement, no matter how slight, might shatter it completely.

"Meeting Master was my greatest fortune," you whisper, so softly he almost misses it. "I'm the luckiest person in the world."

Qifrey's chest constricts. It's as if all the air has been squeezed from his lungs. His fingers flex once at his side, hesitant, suddenly aching. Slowly, he lifts a hand to your head. The angle is strange, the motion clumsy, but he threads his fingers carefully through your hair anyway, stroking as gently as he can.

"Sleep," he murmurs. "I'm here."

He cannot see your face, but he can tell the moment your eyes close when you curl a little more firmly against him, the way your entire body seems to soften. Your breathing gradually slows, and evens out into sleep. Qifrey remains awake. At some point, your hand shifts unconsciously beneath the blankets, drifting until your knuckles brush lightly against the center of his chest, directly over his heart.

Qifrey closes his eyes. You think that you are the luckiest person in the world. You are wrong.

It's him.

Time passes quietly after that.

The days flow past in their slow, gradual ways, likes ivy creeping over stone walls or sand grains slipping soundlessly through an hourglass. Summer deepens across the Downs, the hills surrounding the atelier growing thick with crocuses and millflowers before they fade gold beneath the heat. And somewhere, amidst it all, the shape of life revolving around the two of you changes once again.

Qifrey begins teaching you more advanced spells. Compound sigils, inverted glyphs, circles layered so delicately they resemble lacework more than magic. He half-expects you to struggle at first, but you take to it with astonishing ease. Some evenings end with the two of you still seated at the kitchen table long after dinner has gone cold, debating back and forth over spell theories while the heart burns low, and Qifrey finds himself sometimes deliberately taking opposing stances simply to watch you continue.

You speak more, now. You ask questions—small, ordinary things entirely unrelated to magic. When he is too absorbed in his work to notice you, you tug at his sleeve to get his attention rather than silently staring holes into the side of his face. And you laugh more often, too. It's still sporadic, rarely unrestrained, but the sound no longer catches Qifrey by surprise.

The headaches are worse, some days. The silverwood continues to grow in silence, patient as rot spreading beneath bark. And yet when Qifrey recalls the old myths—tales of men who cast aside kingdoms, futures, entire worlds, all for the taste of a single fruit beyond compare—he thinks he understands them now. Never has he been so glad to grow accustomed to something so sweet.

And if there is anywhere in this world, anywhere at all, that Qifrey would choose to put down his roots, it would be here—in this quiet atelier he calls home, beneath the open sky, and the sound of your laugh still ringing inside it.

Qifrey hears the pegasus carriage before he sees it.

He's in the kitchen preparing lunch when the rush of distant wings cuts across the quiet of the Downs. It's not a common sound out here; very little ever flies this far across the peninsula except for the occasional courier and migrating ash-mottled dragons. Qifrey pauses with his knife hovering over some vegetables, half-chopped, before setting it aside, wiping his hands absently on a dishcloth.

The sound grows louder then abruptly fades, followed by muffled whinnying. Qifrey frowns. He crosses the atelier and pulls open the front door, squinting against the late afternoon sun, only to see—

"Olruggio!? What are you doing here?"

The man in question looks exhausted. His travelling cloak hangs crookedly from one shoulder, wrinkled from travel and pinned askew. There are several overstuffed bags—crammed to the seams with all sorts of magical trinkets and inventions, no doubt—abandoned by his feet next to the carriage platform. He drags a hand through his already disastrous hair, one eye twitching faintly in a manner Qifrey is all too familiar with.

"'What are you doing here', he says," Olruggio grumbles with a shake of his head. The pegasi whinny impatiently behind him, stamping their hooves in the grass. "I pack my entire life into suitcases, fly halfway across the peninsula by pegasus carriage to get here and this is the kind of welcome I get—"

Qifrey sputters, scrambling for something resembling a coherent response. He still hasn't the faintest idea what Olruggio is doing on his doorstep. "I—I mean, how was I supposed to know you were coming—"

Olruggio raises a dark brow.

"I suppose you don't know that I've been assigned as Watchful Eye to your atelier either?"

This time, Qifrey can truly do nothing but stare. Surely he's misheard. But the pegasus carriage, the luggage piled beside it, Olruggio himself standing here on his doorstep, arms folded across his chest—all of it says otherwise.

"The Council assigned you as my Watchful Eye?"

"Yes, and you'd know that already if you actually took the time to go through your correspondence—"

"You know I don't read most of the Council's letters!"

"And whose fault is that, exactly—oomf!"

Qifrey throws his arms around Olruggio before he can finish the sentence. Olruggio staggers back a step—words cutting off abruptly as Qifrey buries his face in his shoulder, taken by surprise—but only for a moment. Then strong arms close around Qifrey in return, tightening instinctively, drawing him into the safety of their embrace.

Beneath the scent of wind and travel dust, Olruggio smells of pine and woodsmoke. It's strange—Qifrey had almost forgotten what it felt like to stand this close to him again; how easily Olruggio's warmth still manages to disarm him, like some long-held vice he'd nearly convinced himself he no longer carried.

He's happy. There are too many emotions within him, sharp and tangled and colliding and overwhelming, but Qifrey chooses to focus on only one in this moment. He's so happy it hurts.

Eventually they part; Qifrey forces himself to pull away first, though his fingertips linger for a moment against Olruggio's arm, reluctant to surrender this closeness so soon after just getting it back. He's just about to open his mouth again when Olruggio's attention suddenly shifts over his shoulder, and his entire posture seems to stiffen at once.

Qifrey frowns faintly. He traces Olruggio's line of sight with his own, only to see you—standing in the doorway, staring openly at Olruggio. The brushbuddy hanging from your shoulder lets out a small, curious "pweee", before it wriggles free and plops onto the floorboards next to your feet. It circles your ankles once and scampers off into the atelier a second later, apparently deciding this situation no longer concerns it.

"Apprentice." Suddenly, absurdly, for no reason at all, Qifrey feels as though he's been caught doing something he shouldn't. He pretends not to notice the faint heat still clinging to his cheeks, stepping aside slightly so you can see past him as he gestures you closer. "This is Olruggio, the new Watchful Eye for our atelier. He's a dear friend of mine—we were apprentices at the Great Hall together."

You make no move to shift from the doorway. Behind him, Olruggio coughs awkwardly into his fist.

"Uhm. Hello."

You continue to stare at him in complete silence.

Olruggio's hand lowers slowly. "…Right," he says, after a beat. "Tough crowd."

Qifrey lets out a quiet huff. Normally, he's accommodating of your reticence, fond of it, even, but this is beginning to border on plain unfriendliness. "Apprentice," he reminds you gently. "It's rude not to greet people when they introduce themselves. I taught you manners, didn't I?"

Your gaze flickers toward him before it returns, reluctantly, to Olruggio.

"…Mr. Olruggio," you say, after a long pause.

Olruggio looks painfully out of his depth, mouth twisting uncomfortably as though he's not sure which shape best to put it in. "That's too formal," he mutters, in that brusque tone he always seems to default to whenever he's feeling awkward. His hand rubs over the back of his neck. "Look, you can just call me Olruggio, y'know. I'm not really one for all that honorific stuff."

"Mr. Olruggio," you repeat.

Qifrey presses his lips together, trying his best not to laugh despite the situation. Olruggio points accusingly at him, clearly flustered.

"Don't encourage this!"

He holds up both hands. "I'm not encouraging anything."

You stare between them for another long moment, expression unreadable as ever, before your gaze settles back on Qifrey. "Then, if there's nothing else, I'll go back to my room and finish my readings on recursive spells, Master."

Before either of them can respond, you turn and disappear back into the atelier. They watch you in silence until you're out of sight, footsteps fading up the stairs before Olruggio sighs heavily.

"I think they dislike me."

"Nonsense," Qifrey responds half-heartedly, still staring at the bannister. "They're just… well, shy. Besides, you're the most kindhearted person I know. There's no reason for them to dislike you."

Olruggio chokes on air. Qifrey glances over, frowning. "What?"

"Nothing." Olruggio coughs roughly, dragging a hand over his face before he meets Qifrey's eyes again. There's a faint flush dusting his neck, just visible beneath the rumpled collar of his shirt. "I just—ya sure you're alright with this? Your apprentice clearly isn't thrilled about me showing up out of nowhere."

"They're wary of strangers." Qifrey looks back at the hallway. He wonders if you're struggling with the idea of suddenly having to share the atelier with someone new. "I'm sure they'll warm up to you eventually."

"You know what? I'm not sure I believe you." Olruggio grunts as he stoops to gather his bags. Qifrey just laughs, putting a hand on Olruggio's shoulder to steer him towards the atelier door.

"Come on," he says. "Let's get you settled in."

After showing Olruggio to the atelier's side wing—the rooms he'd cleared out weeks ago in anticipation of the Watchful Eye's arrival—Qifrey returns to the kitchen. The vegetables still sit halfway peeled and chopped on the counter, knife exactly where he abandoned it earlier, but he finds himself oddly distracted now. Part of him still can hardly believe it's Olruggio, of all people. Fate has always possessed a strange, if somewhat twisted, sense of humour.

It's too late for lunch and still too early for dinner, but Qifrey busies himself tidying the counter for the sake of occupying his hands. This won't be enough, not when there's three to cook for, now. He's halfway through setting the vegetables aside when he suddenly notices you lingering in the doorway like a ghost.

Qifrey fumbles and nearly drops the carrot in the sink. "Apprentice."

"I finished my readings." There's a brief pause before you step properly into the kitchen, bare feet nearly soundless on the flagstones as they pad across the room. You hover by the table first, fiddling absently with his half-finished teacup, then linger near the pantry shelves before finally drifting over to the far end of the counter. Qifrey keeps you in the corner of his eye as he retrieves two more carapace yams and some onions from under the sink, watching your eyes move cautiously around the room.

"Is he gone?"

Qifrey picks up the knife again. "Olruggio's unpacking his things in the side wing. He'll be staying with us for the foreseeable future, as the atelier's Watchful Eye."

Your eyes flick briefly to the side, shoulders tightening a fraction. The corner of your mouth dips ever so slightly—subtle enough that most would never have perceived the shift in your expression. Qifrey does.

"Olruggio's a good samaritan at heart," he says, deliberately keeping his voice light as he resumes cutting the vegetables. "I've known him for years. He's not going to do anything to you."

"I didn't think that."

"Then what's wrong?"

You're silent for a while.

"Nothing," you say, eventually. "I just don't know him."

"You'll get to," Qifrey promises. "He's not so bad, once you get past the grumbling."

"Master sounds fond of him."

Qifrey's hands falter. You are merely making an observation; yet for some reason your words leave him feeling uncomfortably exposed—as though they have reached into a locked box tucked away in some dark corner of his heart and dragged it into the light, intruded upon something even he rarely allows himself to examine. He tries to think of a suitable response but comes up empty; anything honest feels too stripping to confess aloud, yet anything less feels woefully inadequate—a disservice to all that Olruggio means to him.

"He's a very dear friend to me," is what he says, eventually.

The conversation lapses into quiet after that. Qifrey finishes chopping the carrots into rough cubes before moving on to peeling the yams. The knife works steadily beneath his hand, rising and falling to strip away their tough outer layers to reveal the pale tuber flesh within. Beside him, the weight of your gaze follows—every shift and movement of his hands as he works.

And then—

"Can I help?"

That catches Qifrey off guard. He has to pause to make certain he's heard you correctly. "You want to cook with me?"

You hesitate for a moment before nodding. Surprise, warm and pleasant, flickers through him like the afternoon sunlight spilling in from the window. He shifts aside to make room for you at the counter. In all the time you've been a student in his atelier, you've never shown even the slightest interest in cooking. And more often than not, you neglect your own meals entirely unless he places food directly into your hands—a poor habit that seems to have carried over from your early years of living on Havso's streets. It's something Qifrey has yet to successfully change.

He hands you the knife. You hold it awkwardly at first, grip uncertain as you lower the sharp edge to the yam. Qifrey hurries to stop you before you can nick your fingers.

"No, no. Like this." Qifrey steps in behind you, gently adjusting your hand around the handle. "Careful. Keep the fingers of your other hand tucked inward, always resting against the flat of the blade." He guides your knuckles into place over the yam. "Just like that. That way, you'll never cut yourself."

You remain still for a moment. Then your fingers curl slowly beneath his, obediently taking on the shape he guides them into.

"Very good." The praise comes naturally. It's as if he is simply teaching you another spell—you've always been a diligent student, and it is easy to praise you. For a second Qifrey is reminded of a moment much like this one, though far longer ago—of the first time he'd placed a wand into your grasp and held his hand, guiding you carefully through lines and circles. Your fingers had been almost entirely swallowed by his own, back then. But now, they curl easily against his palm, and when he leans over you like this, your shoulders brush closer to his chest than he remembers.

"Master?"

Qifrey startles. He hadn't realised he'd gone still. He looks down just as you look up—eyes bright and intelligent and touched with the faintest trace of concern, as though trying to decipher where his thoughts have wandered.

"I just—I was just thinking about something," Qifrey fumbles to say, quickly smoothing it over with a smile. He starts to pull away just as you bring the knife down hard against the cutting board, and the sound startles him into grabbing your hands again on instinct. "Not so hard! You'll cut a finger off."

"…Sorry."

"No, no, don't apologise." The fault is his—it's your first time using a knife, and just because you're good at drawing spells doesn't mean you will instinctively know how to cut and slice. He guides your hands through the motions again, patiently correcting the angle of the blade, and soon enough you pick it up with the same speed you seem to do everything else. Eventually Qifrey leaves you to slowly cube the yams on your own, while he moves on to peel the remaining vegetables in the sink.

For a short time, only the soft rhythm of chopping fills the kitchen. Then, Qifrey asks, idly. "Should we invite him over for dinner?"

You don't look up from the cutting board. "I think Master should give Mr. Olruggio some time to settle in."

Qifrey blinks once before deciding you're probably right.

"That's true," he concedes. I'll bring him some food later, then."

He does just that a few hours later, after you've helped with the dishes and retreated back to the solitude of your room—to further practice magic, no doubt. Qifrey ladles a portion of the leftover stew carefully onto a tray, alongside a fork and spoon—because he knows Olruggio well enough to suspect he's neglected to pack a single item required for actual daily living—and covers everything with a cloth to keep it warm. The bridge connecting to the side wing is only a short walk, and it isn't long before Qifrey is standing outside, knocking on Olruggio's door.

Olruggio answers looking mildly disastrous, soot smeared across one cheek. "One of my warming devices exploded while I was unpacking earlier," he mutters in explanation before Qifrey can even ask. Olruggio looks exhausted—he must be tired from the long travel, the unpacking—but his expression softens ever so slightly when he sees the tray in Qifrey's hands. "You cooked."

"Knew you wouldn't have remembered to eat, otherwise." Qifrey steps inside as Olruggio holds the door wider, setting the tray down on a stool—the small table near the window has almost vanished entirely beneath piles of oddly-shaped knick-knacks and loose papers. "Cream stew with roasted yams. My apprentice helped."

Olruggio raises an eyebrow. "They did?"

"Yeah."

"You sure it isn't poisoned?"

Qifrey snorts softly when his friend reaches for the spoon, anyway. He watches Olruggio scoop up a generous helping of stew, thick and creamy and dribbling over the side, only blowing over it once before he shoves it impatiently into his mouth. Olruggio practically moans.

"You shouldn't have become a witch," Olruggio mumbles around the spoon between his teeth. "You should have become a cook in some castle somewhere. You would've been loaded."

"Don't be ridiculous."

The two of them end up sitting on the floor while Olruggio decimates the stew with barely any pause between bites. The bowl's nearly empty by the time Qifrey notices the yam pieces gathered at the bottom—his neat cubes sitting amidst uneven, slightly misshapen chunks. His line of mouth softens, fond, even before he realises it.

When he looks up again, Qifrey finds Olruggio's eyes on him, over the rim of his spoon. "What are you looking at?"

"Nothing, just—" Olruggio huffs softly through his nose, expression gentling in the low light. "You really adore your apprentice, don't you?"

Qifrey's mouth parts. Of course I do, he wants to say. They're my apprentice. Any master would. The words ruminate, strangely defensive on his tongue all of a sudden, but in the end, all that comes out is only a simple, quiet:

"…Yeah."

Olruggio's face cracks into one of those rare smiles. The sight makes Qifrey's chest ache faintly.

"I'm glad."

Qifrey blinks. "Why?"

"I dunno." Olruggio leans back slightly, one hand braced against the floor while the other rolls the spoon, licked clean, between his fingers. "You just… you stopped contacting me for a while, after the Tower of Tomes. I thought it was because you were giving up on searching for your past, so—" He blows out a breath, dark hair on his brow stirring faintly. "So I tried to give you your space, but you never really reached out after. I was… I guess I was just worried about you, this entire time." He shrugs, cut-sapphire eyes softening to a summer-sky hue. "But seeing you like this—an atelier of your own, an apprentice who's clearly territorial over you, by the way—you're doing far better than I'd hoped. I'm happy for you."

Qifrey's throat closes. He glances down at the tray sitting between them, feels flayed open by Olruggio's gaze, his unbearable kindness. Olruggio is so coarse with his words and yet tenderness spills out of him regardless—his actions, his spells, in everything he does and considers.

Qifrey had run from it. After Olruggio had excised his own memories, Qifrey could no longer bear to look his friend in the eye—could not bear the constant reminder of what Olruggio had chosen to sacrifice in his stead, nor the agonising knowledge of knowing he would never be able to confess. The separation had brought him comfort, for a while—enough solace for the silverwood buried inside him to begin growing once more, forcing him to take on an apprentice.

But perhaps that brief period of selfish respite had been enough. It has to be. Qifrey cannot run forever, and at the very least, being near Olruggio once again means the silverwood in him will halt its growth once more.

Thank you, I'm sorry, Qifrey doesn't say. Instead, he swallows the words thick in his throat, and smiles.

He finds you one afternoon as ordinary as any other. It's raining when he reaches the port town of Havso—a steady patter that turns the cobblestones slick and darkens the wood of every dock and doorway. For all the precision Qifrey has honed over water, getting wet remains an irritation he's never quite outgrown, and the sound of rain prickles at his awareness like a thousand fine needles, impossible to ignore. He hurries through the narrow streets, searching the shops—for a new cast iron pot to replace the one that had cracked last week, some twine for binding dried herbs, other small sundries—when he sees you.

The canvas awning you're huddled beneath is doing almost nothing at all—not to protect you from the cold spring rain, or from the sharp, biting winds sweeping in from the coast. Water drips steadily from the hem of your smock, your hair plastered in wet strings to your narrow cheeks. Despite this, you don't move.

Qifrey doesn't mean to stop. But he does.

You look up when his shadow falls over you. He takes the edge of his cloak, the water dispelling spell inked discretely beneath its hem, and sweeps it in a gentle arc above your head. The rain above you curves away. Your eyes widen ever so slightly, your gaze tracing the water trickling off the air as though sliding off an invisible dome, before you look back at him again.

"I don't like getting wet," Qifrey says, in manner of explanation.

You simply stare. For a moment, Qifrey wonders if you speak the common tongue at all—it's not uncommon for sailors from foreign kingdoms to abandon unwanted children in port towns like this—or if you're simply mute.

"You're soaked," he tries again, more gently this time. "Do you have anywhere to go?"

Silence stretches in the space between each of his heartbeats. The rain patters, fingertips dancing along the boundary he's drawn. Then, you shake your head.

So you do understand him. Qifrey should have guessed—children like you are a dime a dozen here, orphans, strays, the overlooked and unclaimed. No one would notice if one or more vanished from the edges of the docks.

Convenient, a colder part of him supplies. You are old enough to comprehend, young enough to be malleable, and compared to an apprentice born into a family of witches, you won't know enough of magic—and by extension, the silverwood—to ask questions that he doesn't want or know how to explain.

He takes you in.

The first few weeks are easier than he expects. You come to him with no poor habits to unlearn—no stubborn rune-drawing tendencies, no theoretical 'shortcuts' circulated by some of the lazier professors in the Great Hall. Teaching you is like working on a blank sheet of parchment. You simply watch what he does and try to do the same. And when you fail—which is often—you do not seem to be affected or frustrated. You simply do it again.

The only real issue is that you have never learned to write. Qifrey watches your hand wobble across the parchment—leaving dark splotches in some places, lines breaking off in others. Your fingers wrap around the ink wand like a stick you've picked off the ground, all knuckles and no finesse.

Qifrey lets out a quiet sigh.

"Your grip is wrong."

You look up at him, uncomprehending. Qifrey sighs again and hesitates, just briefly, before he steps closer and leans down. His hand slides over your fingers, carefully adjusting each one until the wand rests properly between them, the tip hovering just above the parchment.

"Like that."

The moment he releases you, however, your grip tightens again reflexively. The wood of the ink wand creaks faintly in protest. He quickly takes your hand again.

"Gently," he murmurs. "Like holding a robin's egg."

Qifrey guides your hand across the parchment. A straight line. A square. A circle. Your hand relaxes under his, just a little.

"Just like that," he says, and lets go. You look at the ink wand in your hand. "Now, try again."

You practice until the sun goes down.

He teaches you the basics. The three basic components that make up every spell, the five elemental sigils for fire, wind, water, earth and light. The keystones that govern a spell's direction and strength and purpose, how the sizes of the rings can affect its range and potency. Everything he says, you memorise. And everything he teaches you, you practice until you can reproduce it by heart.

After only about a few months of training, Qifrey dares to say that you've reached the standard that most witches your age who've grown up around magic would be at. The rate at which you're learning is… unexpected, to say the least. He should be pleased. Any decent teacher would be.

Qifrey tells himself this as he watches you inscribe a heating spell along the belly of a copper kettle. It's a reasonably complex problem for a beginner—the spell must conjure heat but not fire, be stable enough to maintain an even boil, hot enough to warm but not so fierce as to warp or melt the metal. It's a careful balance of precision and power that tends to elude most newcomers to spellcasting.

You hand him the kettle when you finish. Qifrey pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and lifts it up to his good eye, turning it slightly in the flickering light coming from the fireplace. The dispersion keystones are neatly drawn, arranged around the central fire sigil in two concentric circles. The limiting keystones sit where they should, too—balanced on either side, ready to dampen the spell the moment the heat climbs too high.

"Good," Qifrey says at last. The word feels thinner than it should be. He lingers a moment longer than necessary, as if searching for some flaw to justify a correction, but finds none. "We'll be able to use this to brew tea in the mornings, now."

You nod once at his assessment from where you're watching him by the kitchen table, then ask, "What next?"

There is no flicker of pride. No satisfaction in your work, no pause to take in what you've done. Just a simple what next, as if each perfected spell is nothing more than a marker on a long road you don't care much to tread on.

The first thin root of worry pushes through the soil of his chest.

Qifrey tries to keep his distance at first. He really does. A master-apprentice relationship only needs to go so deep for one to learn and the other to worry, and too much closeness would be counterproductive in his attempts to keep the silverwood at bay. He buys you all sorts of magical books and supplies you with wands and ink when you need it. He cooks, too, warm and filling meals that nourish the body and are rich in nutrients, until the hollowness in your cheeks softens, replaced by a healthier, rounded plumpness. He corrects your glyphs when he spots mistakes and guides your hand when your lines falter. It barely assauges the guilt in his chest.

You don't make it easier for him. Through no fault of your own, he knows, and yet somehow, that only makes it worse. You don't seek him out for any needs outside of your magic studies, never ask for anything, and eat exactly what he puts in front of you without comment. You wake up at dawn to start the tea kettle, and from there you start practicing magic without ceasing until he has to firmly tell you to go to bed.

There are no tantrums, no complaints, no childish demands for attention or affection. Surely, even children must have their preferences. Trinkets they like, foods they refuse to eat. But you are quiet and serious and wrong in a way that he cannot name, and Qifrey finds himself watching you much the same way Beldaruit had once watched him.

"You don't have to keep doing that," he tells you one evening. You're hunched over the kitchen with a half-empty cup of water, the parchment in front of you crowded with dozens of identical glyphs. The fire sigil that you'd just traced over in water glistens for a moment, then fades as the parchment slowly dries. You must have drawn the same glyph at least a hundred times now.

You don't look up, dipping your wand in water again. "My circles aren't perfectly round yet."

"You don't have to master everything in a single day. You could take a break."

"Why?"

Qifrey doesn't have an answer for that. Or rather, it's perhaps that he has too many. Because you look tired but refuse to admit it. Because your hands will cramp if you keep going. Because watching you work yourself into the ground makes me feel something too similar to what I used to feel for Olruggio, and that scares me.

"It was only a suggestion."

You consider it for a moment, and then turn back to your parchment. Qifrey sighs, pushing aside his robes to lower himself into the chair across from you.

"Do you have any reason for learning magic?"

You rotate your wrist once in the air before setting the wand's nib to parchment. "You asked me to."

"That's my reason, not yours."

"It's the only one I have."

Qifrey watches your hand move across the paper, and something in his chest tightens. This arrangement is supposed to be simple—selfish, yes, but simple. You are supposed to ask things of him, to need him in small, manageable ways that keep him worried just enough about your progress and studies without causing him too much concern. You have done exactly just that.

And yet here he is, worrying about you constantly for a completely different reason.

He thinks of Beldaruit's gentle gaze, the soft curl of smoke illusions coaxed into being on nights when sleep proved treacherous, when the memories of darkness and rain pounding unceasingly against metal and claustrophobia set in. He remembers Olruggio's warm smile and even warmer eyes, the ribbon on his hat that Qifrey still touches sometimes in the dark, tracing the multiple preservation sigils he's inked onto the silk.

His reminder to never forget, to never grow complacent.

"Take a break," he says again, and this time, there's something in his voice that makes you stop.

You look at him for a long moment, head tilting slightly to the side. It reminds Qifrey vaguely of a sparrow. Finally, you speak.

"You're worried," you say, as though you're making an observation. Qifrey forces a smile.

"I'm your master. It's what I'm supposed to do."

You glance down at your parchment once more. For a moment he thinks you might refuse, ignore his words and go right back to practicing, but then you set your wand down next to the paper and push your chair back, legs scraping along the slate flagstones.

"I'll continue tomorrow," you announce, without looking at him.

"Good," he says in response, and the two of you sit in silence at the kitchen table, undisturbed except for the crackling of the fireplace, and Qifrey has to remember how to breathe without counting the spaces between each one.

Hearthglen Village is about a few furlongs from the atelier, more often than not in need of small, persistent fixes, and thusly, the ideal place for you to practice using magic after passing the Pentacle of Proving's second test. Qifrey walks beside you through the small handful of thatched cottages scattered through the patchwork quilt of farmfields, returning the villagers' greetings with easy familiarity. It's always good to maintain good relations with the unknowing, especially those living nearby.

Eventually, the two of you arrive in front of the client who'd requested Qifrey's services. The problem is simple: a farmer's irrigation ditch has gone haywire somehow, and now his turnips are drowning in mud. Qifrey could fix it alone in ten minutes, but that isn't the point. He nods towards the field, giving you an encouraging pat on the shoulder.

"Go on."

You hesitate only for a moment before you go, hovering tentatively over the knee deep muck with your sylph shoes as you float out to the irrigation ditch. Your expression is reminiscent of a wet cat's—vaguely displeased, faintly affronted, as though the world has committed a personal offense by being this unpleasant. Qifrey has to hold back a smile.

In the meantime, Qifrey chats with the farmer as you work—something about the summer heat this year, the stubbornness of the soil—but he makes sure to never let you slip from his sights. You're already at the ditch, hat bobbing as you hover over the mud. He can almost picture your hand beneath the shelter of your cloak: fingers wrapped around the wand, drawing those precise lines that you've practiced over and over again with unswerving confidence.

He's listening to a rundown of this year's cabbage harvest when a faint rumble echoes across the field. The earth shifts, groaning as though rousing from a long slumber, and then the water starts to move. Mud loosens and starts to drain from the fields, revealing the green leaves of the turnips peeking out through the soil once more. It's quickly replaced by a steady stream of clear water.

The farmer's face brightens with relief. He claps his hands together with a delighted laugh, already turning to call out his thanks as you drift back over to the solid ground of the path, the hem of your cloak splattered with drying mud. You don't smile back; instead you wipe the faint sheen of sweat from your brow and look to Qifrey for approval.

He pushes his glasses up and nods once. "Well done."

You accept his verdict the same way you accept everything else—quietly, without visible pride or disappointment. The farmer tries to press a basket overflowing with all variety of squash into your hands and your eyes find Qifrey's like you aren't sure what to do with gratitude. He takes it for you.

"They're a natural," the farmer nudges Qifrey as he moves to leave. "Where'd you find a talent like that?" Despite the surge of pride that races through him, he hesitates.

"They found me," Qifrey says, instead.

More villagers request your help over the course of the afternoon. A family's goat wandered into a small ravine, a child's kite got stuck in a tree. You lift the frantically bleating animal to safety with a levitating spell, and coax the wind into tugging the kite loose from an elm's tangled branches while the village children gather to watch you work with eyes full of wonder. The girl bounces on her heels as the toy finally drifts down into your waiting hand, and you hand it over without a smile.

She hugs your legs anyway. You stand there awkwardly, arms glued to your sides, and Qifrey has to look away before he laughs.

Hours later, after the last request has been fulfilled and the sun is low enough to turn the clouds a warm ombre-ochre, you and Qifrey decide to walk home, the path stretching before you like a pale ribbon through the fields. You walk next to him in silence, as you always do, fingers stained with smudges of black ink and clay soil.

"You did well today," he says.

"Thank you."

"But."

You glance at him then. Just a slight flicker of the eyes, darting sideways and upwards. You've learned, by now, that your master is far from straightforward around topics that are necessary but difficult to broach.

"But?"

"But magic doesn't seem to make you happy," he finishes.

You neither deny nor confirm it. Your steps just slow slightly against the gravel scattered on the path, stones crunching beneath the soles of your boots. For a while, there is only the sound of the wind moving through the wheat fields.

Eventually, you speak.

"Does it have to?"

Qifrey thinks about that. About the way you've perfected every spell he's taught you but never once asked to learn any out of your own desire. About how you can spend hours, days, drawing circles and lines over and over again simply because he tells you to. About how quickly you've become good at magic—and how little of it seems to belong to you.

"It doesn't have to," Qifrey says, at last. He's cast all sorts of magic in his life, spells that have burned and hollowed, ones that have scarred and pained him beyond what any physical wound can. Not all of it was joy. Not all of it was kind.

Yet.

"But you should find a reason. To desire magic, I mean."

You glance at him, eyes briefly searching, as though weighing the shape of his words, their meaning. He licks his lips, suddenly dry.

"Magic is meant to grant wishes of the people," he says, more gently now. "To bless them. That includes yourself." His lips press together, smile half-formed before faltering, and the wind moves through the fields, rustling restlessly through the long grass. "I—I hope you can learn magic not because I tell you to, but because you want to."

The last sentence escapes him in a rush, as though forced from his lungs with some sort of wind dispelling spell. The thought settles heavy in his chest again, the silverwood shuddering. For all his care—for all the effort he's poured into teaching you properly, responsibly—one truth remains unchanged: Qifrey had taken you in because he needed an apprentice. Not out of kindness. Not out of any noble intent he can comfortably name.

He doesn't know what he would say if you ever asked him why. Any lie would feel too great a disservice to the one person he'd thrust this fate upon, and the truth feels brittle, insufficient—something that would fracture the moment he speaks it aloud.

But you never have. Sometimes, he suspects that you already know.

The remainder of the walk back passes in silence. The sky fades from sienna to lavender before deepening to a dark indigo. One by one, the first stars emerge at the very top of the firmament, their light faint and trembling. You say nothing, and Qifrey tells himself to give you time—you need space to process things, and pressuring you would only make you retreat further into yourself, like a snail hiding in its own shell.

The atelier comes into view at the end of the lane, its windows dark. Qifrey steps ahead, undoing the sealing glyphs on the door. It swings open with a soft creak, and he pauses, holding it ajar for you to step through.

You don't.

He turns back to see you standing a step behind the threshold, gaze lowered to the path at your feet, as though something he cannot see there has snared your attention and taken it captive. Qifrey frowns, head tilting.

"Apprentice?"

You don't answer immediately, hands in your pockets, the tip of your boot scuffing the ground. Then, quietly—

"I want to cure Master."

For a moment, Qifrey forgets how to breathe. He can only stare at you, mouth slightly parted. The words fail to catch despite him having nothing to say. Your voice had been small, careful—like you'd been turning the words over in your mouth for miles, smoothing their edges so they wouldn't cut your tongue on the way out. Of all the things he'd imagined you might say, this had never even been within his considerations.

He grips the door handle a little more firmly for support. The brass carvings bite its patterns into his skin of his palm.

"Cure me," he repeats, dumbly.

"Yes." You nod, the movement slow, as if hesitant in your admission. "The headaches that you try to hide from me. And your right eye, too," you add, pointing at the side of his face covered by his hair, as if he might not know the one. "You touch it when you think I'm not watching, but it seems like it hurts."

Qifrey didn't realise you'd noticed. He thought he'd been careful.

"I thought I asked you," he says, more quietly, more unsteadily now, "to want something for yourself."

"I don't like seeing Master in pain."

Qifrey’s grip on the door falters. Something tightens in his chest—perhaps the silverwood, perhaps something else, so sharp it cuts him open like a blade, and yet he doesn't know whether he wants to let go. For so long, he's been waiting—for you to want something, to reach beyond instruction, to claim even the smallest piece of magic for your own.

And you have.

Qifrey exhales slowly, the sound thin against the quiet of the evening. For once, there is no ready answer waiting behind his teeth. He thinks of Olruggio's face, the path to salvation he'd offered Qifrey paved with the pieces of his own memory. He thinks of the tree growing inside of him, its roots tangled in his ribs, its branches seeking the sun through where his eye once used to be.

Healing magic is a direct alteration of the body, and every form of body alteration is forbidden—banned on the Day of the Pact, enforced by the Knights Moralis with iron and fire. And even if it wasn't, the silverwood is not merely an illness. There is no cure for what grows inside of him.

But you don't know any of that.

So Qifrey smiles softly. Releases his death grip on the door, pulling away to rest a hand on top of your head, the same way Beldaruit used to do for him.

"That's very kind of you," he says.

Your expression doesn't change, but the tautness in your shoulders loosens just a fraction, as if you'd been bracing for him to laugh at you, to dismiss your dream as a fool's flight and fancy. Instead, he pushes the door open wider and gestures you inside.

"Come on," Qifrey tells you, swallowing the sudden thickness lodged in his throat. "Wash up. I'll make squash stew for dinner."

You nod and disappear up the steps to the second floor. Your footsteps fade quickly, and soon Qifrey's ears pick up the sound of running water, of the bath being filled.

He remains in the doorway a moment longer, one hand braced against the frame, the other lifting—almost unconsciously—to brush over where his right eye used to be, featherlight. The motion is familiar, thoughtless. Almost habitual.

But he's been exposed, now. A deprecating laugh escapes him, the wisps of it slipping between his teeth. It's only now, Qifrey thinks, that he's beginning to realise just how foolish he'd been.

He's fallen into the pit that he'd dug with his own two hands.

Sleep eludes Qifrey that night.

He lies on his back, one arm thrown over his forehead, the other resting on his chest. Beneath skin and bone, the cage of his ribs, the silverwood pulses its slow, patient rhythm, waiting. The ceiling above him is indistinguishable in the dark, but he's stared at it so many sleepless nights that he can recall to memory the grain of every plank, the small water stain in the corner that faintly resembles a bird in flight.

Just above him, in the room upstairs, you are sleeping soundly—or he hopes so, at least. Belly full of squash stew, dreaming of pleasant things. That you are warm and resting, and that, for once, you are not pushing yourself past the point of sense simply because he asked it of you.

I want to cure Master.

Qifrey turns onto his side, facing the wall. His pillowcase smells faintly of lavender—scented sachets you'd made last week, making use of some aromatics a village herbalist had given you for your help. He'd accepted one when you'd offered it, almost without thinking, assuming that it was thoughtful but practical gesture.

Now, the scent lingers like smoke.

Beldaruit used to say that the best apprentices were the ones who could surprise you. Qifrey always assumed he meant talent, insight, some brilliant intuition that no one else could replicate. Someone who could make teachers lean forward in their seats and think, that's the one.

But here, lying in his bed, your words from hours ago still sitting warm in his chest, he wonders if the old man had meant something else entirely.

Qifrey pushes out a breath, the tip of his tongue pressing behind his teeth. You will learn about the forbidden magic, eventually. Every witch does—and as your master, it will be his responsibility to teach you about it. Some things are too dangerous. Some lines cannot be crossed. All magic that is drawn on the human body or affects the human body is outlawed.

And that includes healing magic.

You will learn that, and then you will not ask too many questions about why his eye cannot be fixed. Eventually, you will move on and find another, better wish.

But for now, Qifrey takes your words and folds them carefully, tucking them away into the furthest corner of his heart where the silverwood cannot reach. He closes his one good eye and waits for the sun to rise once again. And when it does, Qifrey will greet you in the kitchen downstairs with a cup of hot tea and a smile, he will teach you combination sigils and binding spells, and he will never bring it up again.

Because some wishes are too heavy to be said aloud, and some teachers are too selfish to let them go.

Summer slips unnoticed into autumn, and autumn, in turn, yields to winter. Qifrey teaches you to crochet, then to knit—awkward at first, fingers too stiff around the slumbersheep yarn until Qifrey takes your hands and guides you through the movements, much in the same way he does when teaching you spells. He shows you how to tend to the heating spells that keep the house warm without burning it down, how to summon precise gusts of wind to blow snow off the atelier's sloping roofs. And the months pass just as the weather changes—gradual, inevitable, marked only in hindsight by the shift in the air, the thinning of light.

And as you grow older, Qifrey finds the distance he once tried so carefully to maintain eroded by the same unrelenting tide. Bit by bit, day by day—until one morning he wakes up and realises he cannot quite remember what it feels like to not have you there.

It's not something that changes overnight. Instead, it is a thousand small, mundane things—the way his hand moves without thinking to drop two cubes of sugar into your teacup, the copper kettle with your heating spell whistling behind him on the stove. You're at the basin with your sleeves rolled up to your elbows, washing a skillet faintly smelling of bacon while a brushbuddy dozes on your shoulder. Everything is good, and everything is warm.

This is dangerous, Qifrey thinks. And then he thinks it again, because the first time hadn't been enough to make him stop.

The morning he's forced to confront it comes without warning. Quietly, unassumingly, a thief in the night.

Qifrey notices that something is different the moment he steps into the quiet of the kitchen. The kettle is cold, and the matching cups that a travelling potter had made for you sit upturned on the counter, untouched from where you'd set them aside to dry last night. He stands in the doorway for a moment, listening. The atelier breathes around him like an extension of his own body—the soft creak of timber settling, the low whisper of wind along the eaves—but beneath it, nothing. No quiet patter of footsteps in the floor upstairs. No water running in the washroom.

Perhaps you're sleeping in, he tells himself. The idea is almost pleasant. You never do; you're always awake before him, tea already steeped, moving around the kitchen to prepare breakfast—presence slipped so easily into his morning routine that he'd stopped noticing it altogether.

Qifrey sets the kettle to heat, before rummaging for the battered tin of tea leaves in the overhead shelf. He prepares a cup for you, placing it at the chair that has become yours in all but name, and sits across it with his own. The brew's a little more astringent than he's used to—steeped a touch too long, perhaps—but he drinks it anyway, idly sorting through the neglected stack of mail from the council.

The sun climbs higher in the sky. Light spills through the kitchen window, between the gap in the curtains, inching slowly across the table to catch on the rim of your untouched cup. Qifrey looks through the latest spell you've been working on: an attempt at replicating his Palm Dragon Teacup. He makes small suggestions in the margins, noting down more efficient arrangements and combinations of keystones, ideas for refining its precision. Still, it's good work. Your work is always good.

More time passes. He finally completes drafting a letter to the Great Hall—something about independent ateliers and watchful eyes—and sends it off before picking up a book about complex fire spells. Qifrey thumbs through the pages slowly, more out of idleness than focus, pausing every now and then when something catches his eye. A variation making use of the stabilising keystone. A more efficient heat-dispersal glyph. He dog-ears about six different pages with the intention of showing them to you later, when he looks up and realises that your tea has long gone cold.

Qifrey closes his book, sets it aside, and heads for the stairs.

Your bedroom door is closed.

That isn't surprising to Qifrey. You've always been a private person by nature, and you're even moreso protective of your few possessions, your personal space. Qifrey learned early on not to intrude without invitation or cause.

But your diversion from routine is… odd. Surely you will forgive his worry.

Qifrey hesitates, knuckles hovering over the wood of your door, before he knocks. "Apprentice?"

No answer.

He knocks again, a little sharper this time. "It's past noon. If you want to sleep in, just let me know, alright? You deserve the rest."

Still no answer.

The thin thread of unease tightens around his chest.

"I'm coming in."

The door swings open easily beneath his hand. The room that he steps into is familiar and empty. Your blankets are carefully folded at the foot of the bed, your traveling cloak absent from its hook by the window. And your sylph shoes, the ones that he'd helped you mend just last week, are missing from their place next to the dresser.

Qifrey stands in the center of the room, the air suddenly going very, very still. The silverwood in his chest trembles.

Calm down, he tells himself firmly. Your bed is made—your absence must be deliberate. There must be some sort of explanation. Perhaps you wanted a taste of mischief, to act your age for once. Perhaps you snuck out to one of the nearby villagers, Hearthglen or Azmar, to meet people, make friends. Be normal. You mentioned the daughter of Azmar's baker last week. He recalls a girl your age with flour on her apron who'd been fascinated with your magic. Perhaps you've gone to pay her a visit.

He turns slowly, forcing his gaze to move along with him. Your ink wands are in a little cup on your table, textbooks sitting in rows on the shelf where they belong. Encyclopedias, histories, grimoires he'd deemed safe for for your learning. Nothing out of place. He's about to leave the room, fetch a guidance orb just to make sure that you're alright, when—

Something small and furtive shifts between a gap in the books. The brushbuddy's tail twitches into view before it darts back into the narrow space behind, as though caught somewhere it shouldn't be.

Qifrey frowns.

He reaches up and pulls the entire front row of volumes aside, setting them down on the table with a heavy thump. Dust stirs in the air. Behind them sits another, shorter stack of books, tucked neatly out of sight. Aside from him, there isn't another occupant in this atelier for you to hide things from. Which means you meant to conceal this deliberately. From him.

Why?

Qifrey ignores the cold uncertainty in his chest, picking up the first book. Medical journal. Second. Herbal remedies of the Southern Continent. Third, an encyclopedia on human anatomy, although only the section on ophthalmology is bookmarked, annotated so densely that barely any margin is left untouched. The rest of the books are of a similar vein.

Only the last one is different—a notebook, worn pages filled with a cramped but script that he would recognise anywhere. The rest are filled with sketches—plants that even he doesn't recognise at first glance, roots and leaves and bulbs rendered with careful attention to detail. Analgesic properties. Toxic in high doses. Antispasmodic. Causes hallucinations.

He flips through more rapidly, pulse quickening, but the later pages only get worse.

Burn, left forearm. Applied tincture from ground monoceros horn and milkwort. Moderate pain reduction, mild nausea. Bruise, right knee. Poultice from steeped elderwood and nightpoppy. Significant pain relief, but results in complete loss of sensation and movement in area. Lasts three hours. Burn—

Qifrey's vision blurs. His other hand grips the edge of your chair, knuckles white, breath coming out sharp and shallow as he forces himself to breathe. You've been hurting yourself. On purpose. Testing remedies for… for—

He doesn't dare to let that thought complete itself. He turns the pages quickly, skimming past entries until he reaches the last one. The ink is smudged where the parchment presses together, as if you'd jotted it down and closed it in a hurry. It's still faintly wet.

There is a rough sketch of silvery stems and thin, needle-like leaves. Spineneedles, you've labelled them. Your notes crowd the margins: potent pain-relieving properties. Possible long-term restorative effects. Grows only in steep valleys inhabited by winged serpentines, venom necessary for germination. And below it—

Kestrel's Maw, eight furlongs north of atelier. Serpentines least active at dusk and dawn.

Qifrey feels his blood turn to ice in his veins. Outside the window, the sun hangs high in the cold winter sky, almost at its zenith—long past dawn, past any reasonable margin of safety. It's far too late. You should have been back hours ago. No, worse—you should have never gone at all, risking your life for such foolish, pointless endeavours. You should have been in this very room, sleeping soundly beneath the blankets, unharmed and safe and under Qifrey's protective eye. Instead—

He'd flown over Kestrel's Maw once, years ago. He still remembers the way the cliffs drop away into nothing, wind screaming through the narrow ravines, strong enough to throw even an experienced witch off balance. And the serpentines there are especially aggressive—great, winged creatures with beaks like drawn swords—nesting in the crevices where the spineneedles grow.

And that's where you've gone.

I'm responsible for this, Qifrey thinks numbly, and the words are a realisation as much as an accusation aimed at himself. I did this. I made you this way. I wanted someone to worry about, and now—

The image comes to him, unbidden: your body, broken at the base of the ravine. Impaled by sharp spikes at the bottom, limbs twisted at unnatural angles. Cloak ripped and dark with blood, flesh torn from your bones by monstrous beaks. And your face—that quiet, serious, earnest face—pale, chest still, eyes open yet blank and vacant and unseeing and—

No.

No.

Qifrey runs. He doesn't think. He doesn't allow himself to. The door is too far—he shoves your shutters open and throws himself out of the second floor window, into the harsh midday sunlight. For a second, wind rushes up to meet him, flailing, falling—before the sylph seal beneath his feet flares. And then he's airborne, rising too fast but not fast enough, the wind tearing at his hair, the fragile control he's forcing himself to hold together.

Please, not them, is all he can think as he hurtles through the sky. Not my apprentice. Not them. I'll do anything. Please, please, please—

He doesn't know who he's begging, only that he'll beg anything, bargain everything—if it means that you're still alive when he arrives.

Even from a distance, the ravine makes for an unnerving sight. The karst pinnacles spear upwards as though they seek to pierce the sky, like the vicious teeth of some enormous, long-dead beast. Qifrey had forgotten how sharp they were, every edge honed to something hostile. Even the light falls strangely, splintered by stone so that shadows fall where they shouldn't, fractured into shifting planes that make depth and distance difficult to judge.

He clears the plains beneath him with unmatched speed, wind tearing past him—

—and then, he sees you.

You're clinging to a narrow outcropping perhaps fifty feet below the cliff's edge, body pressed close to the rock wall as though trying to become one with it yourself. Your sylph shoes are missing from one foot, and there's a long rend in your cloak. You aren't moving—only holding on, just barely—feet perilously close to the edge of a fatal, yawning drop below.

Above you, three winged serpentines circle patiently in the air. Their beaks hang slightly open, tongues flickering you as if tasting the air—your blood, your fear, the inevitability of what's next. The only mercy here is that they're not attacking. They are waiting, drawing it out. The same way a cat toys with a mouse it already knows cannot escape.

Qifrey doesn't stop or slow. He dives.

The wind screams past his ears, rising to a fever pitch as he plummets. His palm quire slips into his hand by instinct alone, wand flying over the paper in sharp, practiced strokes before he can even spare a thought as to who might be watching.

The spell takes shape in a single breath. Water wrenches itself from the air, the thin moisture caught in wind and stone, surging upwards into a coiling mass until it takes shape—a great, fluid dragon, its body twisting through the open air with a roar that echoes throughout the entire length of the gorge.

Two serpentines are caught in its jaws almost immediately, their cries cut short amidst the sound of snapping wing and bone. The third shrieks, veering sharply away before wheeling back, beak gaping in fury—but Qifrey is already moving, one arm wrapping around your waist and tearing you off the cliff face, hauling you bodily into the open air. You make a quiet sound in the back of your throat—the closest to afraid he's ever heard you—fingers gripping at the front of his shirt.

"Master—"

"Don't call me that right now."

The serpentines shriek behind him, rallying. Qifrey presses the sylph seal on his boots together, the weight of you unwieldy and palpable in his arms, and flies home.

You don't speak on the way back. Neither does he.

The atelier rises into view at the edge of the fields, its familiar shape cutting through the blur of wind and motion. He lands harder than he intends, knees buckling for a second before he forces himself forward—half-carrying, half-dragging you through the front door. Your cup remains where he left it, untouched on the kitchen table, and he sets you down onto the chair—the same one he'd been sitting in just an hour prior, drinking tea and so, so oblivious—more roughly than he intends.

You don't complain. You never do. The same way you never protest, never ask, never tell him anything—

Qifrey turns away. His hands are shaking. He wrenches open the drawers, rifling through them with none of his usual care, yanking out bandages, salves, clean gauzes. Something clenches in his chest like a fist, squeezing, tight, so tight.

"What were you thinking?" he snaps. He almost doesn't recognise his own voice—low and taut and cutting. "Going to such a dangerous place—alone—without telling anyone—without asking—"

He finds the antiseptic, shoved into the back of a drawer. His fingers slip on the stopper, trembling faintly.

"You could have died. Do you understand that? You could have died. Those creatures—they could have—" Sent you plummeting down the cliff. Eaten you. Torn you to pieces. He can't bring himself to finish the sentence. The images they conjure are too much to bear.

He whirls around again, still not quite looking at your face, and takes your left arm. The cuts are worse up close—long, ragged scratches that split skin, dried blood flaking at the edges. Your palms and fingers are raw and abraded from where you must have clung to the sharp rock.

Qifrey dabs at them with more force than necessary. You flinch just once, before going still again.

"Rash. Reckless. Stupid." The words spill out of him like water from a broken dam. They're sharp enough to wound, meant to hurt, and he knows this even as he says them but cannot bring himself to stop. "I didn't teach you that. I taught you to think, to assess, not throw yourself off cliffs for—for worthless plants—"

"Master—"

"I said don't." Hearing that title alone makes him want to scream. "Don't call me that now. You don't have any right to when you—"

"It's Master's fault."

The words land like a slap. Qifrey turns to look at you—one hand frozen over a roll of bandages, the echo of them stinging—only to find your mouth drawn taut in a stubborn line. And your eyes, those quiet, watchful eyes that have always followed him so carefully, are hard with something he's never seen in them before. Not guilt. Not shame. Something closer to accusation.

As though he is the one who has wronged you.

"Oh, it's my fault," he repeats, his voice rising sharply on its own, an unpleasant mixture of anger and incredulity. "I didn't tell you to sneak out without telling me. I didn't tell you to seek out winged beasts you have no experience fighting. I didn't tell you to—"

"Yes, because Master never tells me anything—"

"For good reason!" He throws his hands up, the dishcloth—stained with your blood—twisting taut between his white knuckled fingers. Qifrey wants to shake you. Maybe tear his hair out. Another part of him—a smaller, quieter part—wants to lock you in this atelier and throw away the key forever, just to make sure that you are safe. "There are things I don't tell you because they are dangerous, things that I am trying—I have been trying—to protect you from—"

"I don't need to be protected like a child—"

"Then stop acting like one!" Qifrey is shouting now. He knows that he's shouting. He can't stop. "Sneaking around behind my back, hiding books in your room, burning and cutting yourself, putting yourself in mortal danger for a cure that doesn't exist!"

Your obstinate expression only darkens further. "Master can't know for certain—"

"I do!" His hands come down hard on the tabletop, and you flinch. Your teacup jumps, porcelain clattering as it tips. Cold tea spills across the gingham patterns. "I know because—" Because he's already been to the Tower of Memories, and he knows that what ails him is no illness or curse. "—because I've already read every book, tried every remedy—I know that there is no cure! There is no cure, and there will never be, so stop trying to throw your life away for something so—"

"I won't!"

Something in Qifrey snaps.

"If you're so unwilling to listen to me," he says, his voice suddenly cold and flat in a way that doesn't belong to him, "then maybe you should no longer be my apprentice."

The moment those words leave his mouth, Qifrey knows at once that he would do anything to take them back—tear them out of the air, swallow them whole even if they cut his throat to ribbons—but the damage is already done.

You go very still. The anger doesn't leave you, not entirely, but something beneath it fractures—hairline cracks spiderwebbing across thin river ice. Your mouth works soundlessly, shaping around words that don't make it out, before pressing into a thin, bloodless line.

When he dares a glance up again, your lashes are wet. You're not crying—you never have, not in front of him, at least—but your eyes are bright, too bright now, in a way that feels dangerously close. Your lower lip wobbles only once before you sink your teeth into it and force it still.

Qifrey hates water. The sound of rain makes his chest tight, and the feeling of being wet makes his skin crawl. He hates the way it blurs the fading remnants of his vision, the way it soaks through his clothes and leeches the heat from his bones, the way it reminds him of things he's forgotten and things he wishes he could forget.

But this—this—is worse.

Qifrey's hands falter, then drop back to his sides. Why had they even been raised in the first place? The kitchen is too quiet now, empty except for the phantom ghosts of your anger and his, the steady drip of tea from the table's edge, forming a puddle on the flagstones beneath. He feels exhausted all of a sudden—wrung dry and scraped hollow.

It's only then that he notices the bag. Your hand—the other one, still dirty and bleeding—is curled around a small pouch of cloth, pressed so tightly against your chest that your knuckles have gone white. Even after everything, you are still clinging to it. Still trying, desperately, to keep it safe.

"Give me the bag," he says.

Your eyes jump to Qifrey's face. You glance down at the bag, as though just only remembering thtat it's there, before your fingers tighten around it again, spine curving over it protectively. Hesitation flickers across your expression for a brief second, before you give a small, stubborn shake of the head.

No.

Qifrey sucks in a sharp breath through his teeth, patience fraying, before he reins himself in forcefully. He's done more than enough damage, today. "I won't—I'm not going to do anything to it," he says, trying to sound reassuring, more gentle. He doesn't know if he succeeds. "Just—please. Give me the bag."

You stare at him for a moment longer, as though wordlessly weighing whether you can trust his words. Then, slowly, reluctantly—you loosen your death grip on the pouch and hold it out.

It's surprisingly light in his hand, once he takes it. Almost as though it holds nothing inside at all. His fingers, still faintly numb and tacky with your blood, fumble with the drawstrings as he pulls them loose. He looks inside.

A handful of silver leaves lie scattered across the bottom of the pouch. Thin and gleaming, each one shaped like a sewing needle. Spineneedles. Carefully gathered, but so few of them—barely enough to brew a single thumb-sized vial of tincture.

Yet the mere sight of them is enough to strip all the anger from him in an instant. Qifrey stares down into the pouch, the thin scatter of silver leaves there glinting faintly like stars in the night sky, and feels something inside him give way.

He isn't angry with you. He's never been angry with you. The one whom Qifrey is so unbearably angry with, so deeply ashamed of—is himself. Because the only reason you did any of this—pushed yourself to such lengths, put yourself in harm's way—is because he let you believe he could be cured. He'd smiled and selfishly kept the words you'd uttered that day close to his heart, like a precious treasure, and in doing so, he'd unwittingly sent you hurtling straight into danger's embrace.

A slow, quiet breath escapes him. Qifrey slowly lets himself sink to his knees in front of your chair, suddenly weary in a way that he cannot quite name. You shift at the movement, glancing down at him with something uncertain in your expression, unsure of his moods.

"…Master?"

He sets the pouch on the table and carefully takes your hands in his. You try to tug them back to your chest on instinct but he holds on to your wrists, gentle but insistent. Qifrey turns them over, palms out, your fingers curling slightly, and looks at the small, round marks he's never looked close enough to notice before. Burn scars. Old and new, layered together, a wordless record of every time you had pressed pain into your own body in search of something that might help him.

His throat closes around the words he doesn't have.

"Thank you," is all he can say, in the end. Even then, it feels inadequate. "For trying to cure me. For going to such lengths to ease my pain." Qifrey pauses, his thumb brushing over a half-healed scab on your knuckle. "But it… it won't work."

You look at him, then. The defiance has receded from your eyes, leaving behind a thin, wavering uncertainty in its place. "How can Master be so sure it will not work?"

Because I've already tried everything. Because I read about it in the Tower, and I know the truth. Because the problem isn't my eye or the headaches—it is the tree growing inside of me, the parasite that will kill me if I stop worrying, if I stop hurting, if I let myself be happy for even a moment.

But Qifrey cannot say that. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. His fingers drift down unconsciously to brush the ribbon trailing from the top of his hat.

"Because, like I said, I've tried every remedy in existence." He shakes his head with a defeated smile, squeezing your hands. "Nothing works. And it only hurts me more—more than my eye or any headache—to see my beloved apprentice put themself in danger for my sake."

You go still, fingers curling loosely under his own.

"I should be the one protecting you," he continues. "Not the other way around. That—that's the whole point of having an apprentice." Qifrey almost laughs at that, the line of his mouth twisting into the shape of a half-formed, self-deprecating smile. Oh, he was so, so foolish. "I'm supposed to keep you safe. And yet, here you are, throwing yourself into danger for me."

His gaze drops back to your hands, the small scars scattered across your skin.

"I'm content," Qifrey says quietly. "With what I have now. The atelier. You." And as the words leave him, he realises that they are not merely for your sake—they are true, plain and simple. "The pain is small in comparison."

You don't speak for a moment. The afternoon light has shifted, turning golden and syrupy, pooling on the floor between you like liquid honey. Qifrey can hear the sound of his own heartbeat in the silence, a slow, steady march in his ears.

"But I don't like to see Master in pain."

Your voice is small, but matter-of-fact. You say it in the same way you might state an obvious truth, such as fire is hot and water is clear and the sun rises in the east. As if it's simply a fact of the universe that you dislike seeing him in pain—and therefore, you must do something about it.

Qifrey's heart clenches, a sharp and sudden thing. Before he can think better of it he's already leaning forward to gather you into his arms. It's the first time he's ever hugged you, he realises distantly. He's held you when you were learning to use sylph shoes for the first time, guided your hand and wand through careful strokes, rested a light hand on your head once or twice—but never anything like this. Never returned even a fraction of the quiet comfort you've given him simply by being there. Some master he's been.

You go stiff for a moment against his chest, caught off guard by the suddenness of the gesture. A few breaths pass before your shoulders loosen, ever so slightly, and then your forehead dips, coming to rest slowly against the line of his collarbone. And your hands, one half-bandaged and the other still dirty with smeared blood and dirt, come up to grip tentatively at the back of his shirt.

When had you become so precious to him?

He closes his one good eye and presses his face into the top of your head, ignoring the way his glasses push up on the bridge of his nose. Your hair smells faintly of lemon verbena and soap. "Don't do something so dangerous again, alright?" His voice comes out muffled, even to his own ears. "Promise me."

There's a long pause. Then: "I don't want to give up, Master."

Qifrey sighs, something between an amused sigh and weary acceptance. Clearly, it'd been wishful thinking at best to hope otherwise, and the fault for it lies squarely with him. He draws back just enough to look at you. Your fingers tighten in his shirt.

"If you have any ideas," he says at last, the words coming together with reluctant resignation, "tell me first. Before you do anything. We'll experiment together—here, in the atelier, where it's safe." His eye narrows slightly, a faint edge of sternness threading through the softness. "I won't stop you from trying. But I'm not going to lose you to a cliff face or anything else, and there will be no forbidden magic. Do you understand?"

You hold his gaze. For a moment your expression is unreadable—eyes too much like mirrors, reflecting too much of him back at himself, too clearly, too honestly. Then, slowly, you nod.

"Okay."

"Good." The word leaves him more easily than expected, as though some heavy weight has finally been lifted from his shoulders. Qifrey pulls you in again, a brief but quieter second embrace, before he lets you go and leans back. Even with the space between you now, the residual warmth of you lingers, settling into the hollow places between his ribs like sunlight.

"I'll make dinner tonight," he announces, getting to his feet. "You should get some rest. But first—let me finish treating your arms."

"Okay."

You hold your arms out obediently. He takes them, careful as though he's handling some priceless, irreplaceable magical artifact, tutting softly under his breath at the state of you. The cuts, the burns, the bruising—he tends to each with attentive hands, and insists on drawing you a bath of milk and herbs as he works, all while you squirm and offer half-hearted rejections in protest.

Somewhere in his chest, the silverwood stirs.

the pens on your desk clatter against your laptop whilst itadori leans into you and the fellow students around you cast you both a brief stare before turning back to the lecture at hand. where you shrink in your seat, your boyfriend shines — hardly paying anyone attention with his focus entirely on you. 

“what happened to yuuji, aren’t i your boyfriend?” the pink haired jock whines like a child seeking attention, words warm as they coast along the pocket of skin between your neck and shoulders. you roll them as he clings to you, as if trying to rid the heated flush that flashes through your body against his. “snuck in through the doors at the back. did you hear me babe? sit on my face?”

the way he asks is enough to make the room spin and something dangerous twist in your gut. yuuji asks like it’s nothing, unaware of the effect he has on you on a day to day let alone when he gets like this. needy, hungry for it. you can tell he’s been waiting for it from the way one hand smooths over the swell of your thigh underneath the lecture theatre’s pew. his nose nudging  the sensitive spot underneath your ear.

swallowing thickly, you push your laptop further away before itadori can knock it over. subconsciously, your head tilts back to make room for him, even though you want the ground to swallow you up — afraid of being noticed. “h-here? in front of all these people?” 

“no, honey,” yuuji laughs softly under his breath, squeezing you closer. “course not, i was just thinkin’ i’d pick you up from class — i got you somethin’ sweet on the way here by the way. then you could come over to my place after! then we’d watch a movie or something.” animatedly, he details your plans and earns himself a shush from those in the very back row. with a wince and sheepish smile as apology, he quietens down. “i miss you, coach gojo finally let us go early for once and i’ve been thinking about you all day.”

“thinking about me sitting on your face?” you squeak, acutely aware that your oversized, muscular, puppy-dog-like boyfriend was about two seconds away from mauling you in front of a bunch of third year biomed students. “all day?”

he pauses for a second and when you look down, brown eyes are locked on your face and burn brightly with unspoken desire. you’ve seen him look at you like that before, right after a game when he comes looking for a kiss. the first time you went down on him and the first time you let his fingers stretch you open in his lap. to others, yuuji may seem like a cool and calm guy — keeping it level headed on the field and when it really counts… but with you, he’s able to unravel. 

show the parts of himself that need hiding from the light, yearning without shame — a type of yearning that surprises you everyday with how much he wants you. how he chose you over all the people that want him so. 

itadori’s gaze on you never wavers, there’s a confidence that shimmers beneath the surface. one that knows what you want, that you’re curious and that you heard him. “well i was thinking about how your thighs looked in that cute little skirt you wore to the library the other night and yeah, then i started thinking about eating you out,” he muses simply, quiet enough not to disturb the other students around you. low enough to get you worked up. “but that’s besides the point — do you want to or nah?”

“oh…yuuji, i don’t know,” guilt starts to bubble up inside, and warp the cadence of your hushed voice. your inexperience in comparison to yuuji has always been a point of insecurity for you. you’re not even sure you could ever live up to standards already set by the people and partners itadori’s had before you. they don’t matter, you know that – but a slight sense of insecurity always bites at you whenever you think about how much better he is at this sex thing compared to you. it’s not yuuji’s fault, he’s nothing but reassuring, always making sure you know you’re his number one. you just can’t help but worry.  so you hesitate. “i know we’ve done stuff together and…you’re more experienced than i am but i—”

itadori jumps into action. quick to comfort you. “hey, hey look, if you don’t want me to touch you, i won’t. alright? i’m not that kind of guy,” he expresses sweetly, pulling back on his flirtations to give you some breathing room. “there’s absolutely no pressure or anything. i just really, really want to make you feel good. though, if you’re not ready, that’s okay too. i’ll wait until you are.” 

with that, he kisses the side of your head and leans back into the lecture seat he’s taken residence in — digging out his phone to play some games and pass the time. “you’re not leaving?”

“why would i?” the pink haired jock laughs, pressing his lips to the back of your shoulder in a quick attempt to reassure you. “i said i wanted to pick you up from class, so i can wait! besides, i really did miss you, practice has been killing me lately and i hate being away from you.” 

itadori’s so sweet it rots you from the inside, like a toothache you can’t seem to get rid of. you feel giddy that he likes you the way that you like him.

all you can do is smile at him, turning back to the lecture playing out before you — reminded of how wonderful your boyfriend is, how patient he can be when it comes to anything you’re unsure of. dating, your experience, your sex life. fucking you isn’t at  the top of yuuji itadori’s bucket list, simply being with you is.

that thought alone is enough to make your stomach swim with need.

—

no matter how you feel, you end up at yuuji’s dorm anyways.

the strawberry blonde, pink haired boy of your dreams rewards you with your favourite muffin for attending class as a treat. then later thumbs away any crumbs on your cheek as you walk back to his place. it’s a simple gesture that ties your tummy up in delightful knots, especially when he sucks what remains from the tip of said digit. slow, tongue swirling over it — lips pulling into a pleased grin….

you’re distracted. you have been for the entire morning and afternoon. ever since he brought it up, casually as though he were asking you for a favour, you haven’t been able to stop thinking about the very idea of sitting on yuuji’s handsome face. you picture it while staring at his back while he unlocks his dorm for you — he’s strong, he could take it. it crosses your mind when you catch a glimpse of his golden skin whilst changing clothes in front of you — getting cosy, tossing you a pair of his boxers and a clean jersey of his if you want it. he’d look good, naked and wet and soaked around the face if you did it.

even now, when you’re innocently snuggled into his side, your head tucked underneath itadori’s chin whilst you lay on the broad firmness of his chest and his arm slung lazily over your waist to keep you close. you can’t help but mull over his proposal from earlier, how it might feel to sit on his face. how it would feel to look down at him while he sent you higher than heaven.

“hey, yuuji?” 

you breach the surface of silence with as much confidence as you can muster — toying with a hangnail on your thumb as you speak. 

“yeah, honey?” yuuji responds instantly, in tune with your thinking even though he’s got his brown eyes trained on a movie playing from his laptop — you put it on half an hour ago. some action-romance coach gojo had suggested would be good for date night. what did he know?

without thinking, the jock grasps the hand that you fiddle with and presses a soothing kiss to the slopes of your knuckles  — as if he knows you’re nervous without even looking at you. he slows his own breathing, giving you something to follow and calm yourself down with. you match it before you move. 

carefully, you hook a thigh over his waist and shift  into his lap to straddle him. instinctively, yuuji’s grip jumps to the warm flesh at your hips in order to steady you above him like he’s done a thousand times before — still, the gesture makes your heart and stomach swim. 

his head full of soft pink-milk hair swerves just a tad, gaze curving around you in order to remain on the movie. “baby,” itadori laughs without knowing the affect the sound has on you, rumbling through your frame hotly. “kinda can’t see with you sitting on me like this, we’re just getting to the good part!” nevertheless, his calloused palms smooth over the apex of your thighs, running downward from their place settled on your hips — giving them an affection squeeze. itadori doesn’t look away from his movie.

deciding that now is the time to be bold and brave, you wind your hips down against the loose and silky material of your boyfriend’s basketball shorts experimentally. giving him a hint without words. momentarily, there’s a catch to the way he exhales through his nose and a flicker in his amber eyes that never hold any judgement. nothing but unadulterated love for you. they darken as yuuji turns rigid underneath you — unsure of what you’re asking for or weary in regard to crossing a boundary of yours.

“y-yeah but i kinda thought that we’d um…” taking a deep breath, you lean forward until you’re chest to chest — you lips a breath away from your boyfriend’s earlobe as you whisper to him as seductively as you can. “i thought that you’d let me…sit on your face.” 

“oh…” yuuji mumbles to himself quietly, as if the words are processing in his mind — he tilts his head, much like a puppy confused by a command and causes your breathy laughter to filter over the film in the background. his gaze is still focused on the scenes flickering behind you suddenly shoots to your face, intense. he’s always had had a way of looking at you, yuuji does, dissecting you underneath brown-ish amber pools until you fall apart and your heart opens up for him, revealing how you truly feel. the nerves, the need. itadori sees it all, in every colour and every shade. 

he doesn’t judge, pass on the ugly insecurities that rest between your heart and lungs — he accepts, simply because he loves all of you; wants every bit of you too.

“ohh!” then it hits him, like a light bulb moment above his head, not too overwhelming and bright. just a quiet realisation. big brown eyes shoot across your face in the dim lighting much faster now, holding rays of excitement between their amber flecks. your boyfriend’s grip on you tightens a pinch, as if to hold you steady and stop you from running. slowly, carefully, yuuji begins pulling you back and forth against the familiar hardness that begins to grow between his legs, concealed by the thin layer of his shorts. “you really want to? you’re gonna let me make you cum on my tongue?” 

“yuuji.” something familiar and heated begins to trickle down your spine, his eagerness sending a twinge of pleasure through your empty center. trickles of arousal leak through the gusset ot your underwear, giving away just how turned on you are by his words, by the idea.

your boyfriend’s voice turns low, gravelly as if he’s fighting the lust catching in the ridges of his throat. “sorry… too much?” you shake your head his grin widens like he’s proud.  “fuck, you’re so cute. especially when you’re shy like this. got no idea what you do to me, do you?” yuuji used his grip on your ass to pull you further forward to rest on his stomach, hissing through a laugh when your warm cunt that spasms around nothing catches on his erection. “oh baby. seriously, i can’t wait… been thinking about having you like this for… for ages.”

“the noises you’d make, the way you’d pull on my hair.” with every breath he takes, yuuji’s diaphragm rises and falls between your thighs as you straddle his body – causing a subtle shift, a slight drag of your warming epicentre along his rigid and brawny torso. the sensation against your clit as your heartbeat thumps within is enough to send a hazy veil over your mind and a wobble in your posture as you sit atop yuuji. you don’t miss the streak of amusement that flashes through his amber eyes, the slight slant of enjoyment that weighs down the corner of his scarred lips - but he’s quiet with his voice when he uses it. “oh honey…” yuuji’s tone stays mellow and chocolatey as the pet name slips out from underneath his fidgety tongue, the sound running through you like it's turned molten after being a solid thought in his mind for too long, dipping low by an octave or two whilst wandering into a dangerous, lustful territory.

he’s taunting you without saying much, pupils dilating like a wild wolf that’s spotted its prey meandering meekly through ferns and tree fall and your chest heaves. your breath hitches and a freshly lit fire sets your lungs alight. the bronchi acting like paper kindle as it menacingly spreads through every vein in your body, boiling your blood to new and high temperatures. itadori peels back your layers, your fears and in response – your expression twists into one of agonising need, especially when thick fingers – dexterous, skilled and callused from sport pinch your waistline. 

“yuuji, please.” you drawl, much whinier than you expect yourself to sound. your lower lip bounces between the anxious grip of your teeth, tongue darting out to wet their surface out of habit. your gaze lowers, shying away from the intensity of his own.

as though he can tell that you’re getting restless – the pink haired jock sits up just a tad, head diving down to kiss you tentatively, lips moving slow like your boyfriend is trying to coax you from your shell and remind you – he is your safe space. “hey, it’s okay, pretty. i gotcha. it's just me…” yuuji murmurs, one hand moving up to cup the back of your neck and pull you into his orbit – fingertips looping through the curly baby hairs that lie at your nape in a soothing manner. “let’s not get too worked up, don’t want you gettin’ psyched out.” your forehead rolls against itadori’s, the space between you both limitless and non-existent at the same time.. 

it’s like you’re frozen against him. yuuji asked for this, waited for it too – but now you feel out of your depth. swimming with the sharks and other creatures that target what you think are your shortcomings and flaws. your brain lags behind your physical reality, sitting on top of the beefy and powerful jock – half way up to his chest and closer to his hungry mouth than a few minutes prior. you know that he can feel your sweet cunt clench over and grind down on his chiselled and firm frame – the want that you feel raising the temperature in his dorm room, in a way that’s real and makes your heart start to rattle out of its place and – 

and you’re so scared. of disappointing him, of being nothing like what yuuji expects. you don’t doubt him, he’s been the most loving and doting first boyfriend, you count your lucky stars that he’s yours just as he does when it comes to you. though, even still, you worry that if this intimate act goes wrong… you won’t be able to satisfy him.

but then he’s there, squeezing you, lips under your ear – wet, demanding your attention. “stop getting in your head,” yuuji breathes hotly, offering you something to float on. keep you above the murky surface waters of your doubts. “stop gettin’ in your head… and stay here with me.”

it’s not said to pressure you, just a quiet confession of love. one that reads, i’ll wait if you’re not ready and we can stop here if you want to.

you shake your head, tilting it to kiss itadori again. hot tongue brazenly licking over the swell of his lip and your delicate hands looping around his strong neck. he lets you fall in love with him and the moment once again, this little intimate bubble created just for two where he swallows your simpering sighs licks into your mouth just to taste your burning soul.

your boyfriend treats you gently, like you’re something precious, something sentimental and when you keen into him – the pink haired jock follows, pressing his forehead back against yours, nose nudging your own. his lashes flutter against your temperate skin and he casts a glance down to your boxers. “how about we start with somethin’ easy,” he states, firm but kind. the way yuuji exhales each word is rugged, meant to ground you and you can taste the desire on his breath as it coasts over your damp cupid’s bow. “can you take these off for me?” the thumb at your hip sinks beneath the elasticated waistband of his boxers. which look way too fucking good on you, by the way. a dream come true. a secret he’ll giddily let slip to fushiguro or todo later. yuuji scorches loving circles into the flesh hidden beneath them, eyes burning equally hot into your soul. “i want you to keep my jersey on though, wanna see what it looks like from down here.” 

“y-yeah, okay,” you don’t even attempt to seem cool nor collected, voice wavering cutely with nerves and wanton. “i can… i can do that.”

“‘course you can. you’re my good girl, my pretty girl,” awe weaves its way through yuuji’s cadence, cross stitched between every phrase and syllable as if to pull all the praise together. nice and tight. he watches you, waits with the patience of a saint as you nervously shimmy out of the boxers he’d loaned to you. “don’t care what anyone says, what nasty thoughts make their way into your head… you’re so fucking perfect. even if we stop here, i’ll be happy. just love having my baby on me…”

even still, you fail to miss the way that yuuji’s hip jumps from underneath your comforting weight, they rise from his ruffled and blue stripped bed-sheets, seeking the friction needed to alleviate the ache throbbing through his thickness. on shaky legs, you stand and kick the undergarment off – pulling a low, greedy groan from yuuji, like he’s starved. like his stomach is being tugged and jerked about by sharp talons of hunger, turning him hollow. 

with him above you like this, he’s able to get a bird’s eye view of your perfect cunt. they way it shines with arousal and twitches around nothing. the tightness in his muscles liquifies at the sight of you, wet and waiting, and his fingertips inch up your calves, reaching up to the curve where your ass meets your thighs to pull you down onto his abdomen again. “fuck, honey. you’re drippin’,” yuuji laughs, but it isn’t mean. it’s airless and ruined, like he can’t believe how aroused you are already. he sits up quick, tucking his face into your neck with his lashes fluttering against your skin — as if he needs a moment to cope or breathe.  “and you smell so good, like a confetti cake. how are you so perfect, i’m literally gonna go insane.”

he nuzzles into you to the point where it’s almost comical, trying to become one with your skin 

“yuuji, oh my gosh.” grasping at strawberry pink hair with a giggle, you push itadori onto his back once more — grinning ear to ear. it’s almost crazy how comfortable he’s able to make you feel in a matter of seconds. he loves you so much it burns through you like a solar flare hanging amongst the stars — an all consuming ball of gas that remains entirely within your orbit instead of a million light years away. yuuji loves you and only you — putting you at the centre of his universe every time.

“what?” he whines and pretends you’ve got the force of a brute — dramatising the way his torso falls back to his sheets. the palm of his hand tenderly squishes the meat of your bare thigh, grazing it without rush. it a moment of confidence, you scoot forward enough for his lips to graze you, the sharp edge of his teeth nipping your thigh. “what’s so funny?”

“nothing it’s just—” for a moment, you flounder – unsure of your next words or what to say. there’s this warm, mushy feeling that settles in between your lungs and syncs with the rapid pulse of your heartbeat. yuuji has always made intimacy look effortless, made it feel like you’re floating through the clouds and like there’s nothing to fear. you’re grateful, that he’s kind and patient and understanding. though you’re sure he’d say he’s the one that should be grateful. after all, you chose him too. “i love you.” 

scarred lips split into a wider smile, born like a star in a distant galaxy, accompanied by warmed breath that ghosts tenderly over the expanse of your flesh.. “oh, baby,” he croons, worshipfully, brown eyes big and earnest. “i love you so much. you have no idea how lucky i feel… being the person who gets to call you mine. i feel like i was created to love you and only you. ‘m sorry it took me so long to find you, but all of me is yours now…” yuuji confesses with slow, delicate cadence as if to let each word absorb into your mind and become your reality. there isn’t anyone who he wants aside from you, no one to worry about. no one he would run to the second you found yourself to be scared.  

he checks in one last time, the hands on your thighs reaching further up, squeezing you in the right places and inching towards the center of his earth, the very mid point of your being where your core burns hot with lust. “you ready? don’t worry… i’ll go slow…” the jock swallows thick, each syllable catching on the ardour lodged in his throat as you involuntarily press down into him. itadori lets out a shuddering breath at the welcomed weight and pressure, all the want and need he’s been holding back for the last few weeks finally coming to a head.

yuuji slips underneath the jersey draped over your frame and drags the pad of his thumb, rough from sports, over the hood of your clit – drawing it back just enough to make you jolt. this desire, hankering hunger to eat you out hasn’t just come from nowhere, weeks of seeing you flit around in cute skirts and nerdy, dark academia outfits accompanied by those sinful thigh high socks that hug you just right… they’ve driven him to this very point. practises haunted by visions of you squealing and shaking on top of him, your thighs almost appearing as ear-muffs – the jock has surely gone insane.

he’s more pent up than he cares to admit, not wanting to pressure you into something you’re not ready for. if only you could see yourself the way itadori did, this adorably shy, sexy little thing that makes him feel like his heart is going to stop right there in his chest. today will be about you, showing you that you’re the only thing on his mind. he’ll worship you until even you believe you’re the most precious thing on this earth.

“o-oh my god!”

you squeak in a way that makes his burly body bristle with an intense affection. yuuji presses harder against your naked mound and his digits draw the delicate kanji of his name over the little nub tucked between your folds. his touch is electrified as pleasure zaps through your clit and crackles in the bone at your pelvis – making you waver above him. 

“yeah i know, feels so good, right?” he praises you gently as you begin to rock your pussy against the seat of his palm, juices spilling warmly against it. all a result of the jock’s candied cadence and obvious desire tangled within his darkening, russet coloured eyes. “god, soaked already. you’re like a dream, baby.” yuuji’s freehand skims over the red and navy nylon mesh at your back, forming a fist in the material. it’s almost as if he’s holding back, all forms of restraint evident in both his tone and the quick swipes he makes against your cunt, teasing what’s to come. he can’t give in, reward you with an orgasm or more than his simple touch until you’re rutting against his silky tongue and cumming against his lips. 

the slow strokes to your warm wetness, mouth falling open as you try and fail to hold back a loud, echoing wail that brews on the dampening seam of your slightly chapped lips – you’re already starting to feel it, the poke to the flames sparked in your lower belly. prodded and poked and stoked by your boyfriend’s deft digits that know you so well. the jock beneath you laughs dotingly, mirroring your expression of bewildered lickerishness and love. eyebrows pinched and lips parted.

because yuuji itadori gains his own pleasure from watching you descend into an ocean of your own, he’d be willing to drown in it if you asked. sink to the bottom of the salacious sea floor with just one pleading look from you. there isn’t anywhere he wouldn’t follow you, that’s how much he loves you. 

“up you go,” yuuji pushes you forwards with a little less tolerance, using his strength and grip to haul you onto your knees – biceps bulging as manhandles you into a position that has you hovering above his watering mouth. he suppresses a starved growl, tongue writhing behind his pearlescent perfect teeth. “come on, baby. sit on my face, don’t be shy. i’m a big boy, i can handle it.” his patient gentle fascade starts to wither away, replaced by an awful greed that winds around his internal organs. “please? you’re killin’ me here, wanna show you how much i adore you..”

“but yuu… i–”

plush pink curls bounce when itadori shakes his head defiantly, even as his gut seizes at the way you whimper the nickname like you can’t even think to form proper words. its cute, how nervy and needy you are all at once… but he has to taste you. can’t wait anymore. “promise i’ll be okay, swear on it… just…” he starts to lose his train of thought, watching as you tenderly lower your weeping slit down to his face.

“promise?” you ask shakily, swallowing down the desire that bubbles up to the surface. “y-you’ll say if it’s too much.”

It's almost comical how itadori goes from shaking his head to nodding it furiously, so hard you’re afraid he might get whiplash. “swear on my life. no – on my scholarship. fuck, baby, my team–” comes his desperate ramble to reassure you. “yes, pretty girl. i promise… fuckin’ promise. holy shit–!” the jock cuts himself off when you finally lean low enough for his running mouth to press a sloppy kiss to your dewy sex. his gaze upon you as he begins to feast turns predatory – voracious as if he’s become undernourished without having you and there’s a hollow hole in his stomach from not tasting you. he licks the crease of your thigh, tasting the salt and sweat that begins to gather there from your lustful fever, trailing back to the point at which you leak sweet arousal.

yuuji basks happily in the way your hips delightfully twitch downwards to meet him, as if your body is aware of the heavens it’s about to reach. he’s close to where you need him, where he’s been begging to be lately, dreaming of, even – you’re so perfect. wonderful even. everything about you, not just your body but the way you search for him and trust him in everything that you do. “you know, you smell so good? fuck, like you wouldn’t believe…” the jersey that you wear, rustles around your frame as a mop of rosy pale pink sinks beneath it and large palms settle on the globes of your pert ass to bring you down onto his chiselled features. the manner in which yuuji speaks is nearly thoughtless, his brain lagging centuries behind his actions, shoving his face deep into the blazing heat of your throbbing mound. inhaling as though he’s addicted to your smell and what you drip.

he begins by opening wide and running the tip of his tongue through the length between your puffy pussy lips – its a slow, tantalising drag that pulls a veil of darkness over your mind and wilting thoughts. yuuji immediately sucks, slurping on all of the delectable essence gathered there, nearly glueing you together despite how you’re practically spread across his face. your boyfriend releases a longing, yearning sigh that sends a snowballing vibration echoing through the bones assembled to form your body, starting between your legs – it makes you spiral, arching away from the eager mouth that laps at you like a piece of hard candy on a stick. you reach for the stars yuuji hangs for you in the evening sky but winds down to the headboard instead – so that you can steady yourself.

“fuck…that’s… so hot,” drawling, yuuji tilts his head to an angle – bobs it up and down in a nodding fashion in order to circle the tip of his nose into the sticky surface of your clit. wetness smears across it, the weight of the gesture being enough to make you cry out like a lamb headed towards the slaughter house. “just dripping into my mouth, needed this. needed you.” your flavour spreads like wildfire across the palette of yuuji’s tongue as it easily plunges into you, guided by the slickness clinging to your quivering entrance clamping around it’s thick base. he swipes soothingly over the ribbed nature of your insides – soothing you where you’re unable to do so yourself.

lewd suckling and popping sounds fill the ambience in the room, layering over your waxing and waning angelic wails – spurring the jock on, he eats you out rabid and hungry, practically scooping  your arousal into his mouth in an attempt to drink you dry. he would if he had to. if you let him. strings of saliva are pushed deep into the impatient throb of your insides. blood rushes to the tips of his ears, warmed by your thighs that bracket them comfortably – like they belong there.

if your nails were sharp enough, they would draw claw marks against the headboard you cling to for stability taking the form of a stark contrast against the white wood. you need something even more grounding, because you suddenly find the urge to rut keenly against yuuji’s handsome face – essentially covering his swollen lips in your syrupy juices, the mess running down to the point of his chin as well. your own face begins to grow messy with tears, tight and hot because you’re nearly embarrassed from how high your mewls are becoming. turning your throat ruined and raw.

it doesn’t help that the sight of yuuji underneath you, ravaging you like it's where he’s meant to be… is one completely new to you. the lilt of his voice as he groans and grips into your hot cunt is fattened up with an air of cupidity to the point where each word turns rough, cheeks and nosebridge struck with an intense shade of carmine which contrasts complimentarily against his golden skin. not to mention the way the pitch black of his pupils eclipse all colour in his eyes. you like this side of him, unabashed and avid – ready to devour you whole.

itadori moans with you in tandem, pleased by the seemingly instinctive and eager roll of your hips that come in manic, miry waves. “y-yuuji, it feels… god, it feels like i’m,” you struggle to finish your sentences – feeling his tongue wriggle deeper inside and streak along the pleasure spots only his fingers are capable of finding usually. the jock’s mouth briefly sweeps upwards, the top row of his teeth rolling against your clit until you shake with agony like bliss. merciless until you’re gargling on your own spit and saliva, nearly biting the damn wall to cope.

there’s no room to breathe, each swish and sweep of his tongue raising you higher and higher towards the pinnacle of ecstasy. you simply crumble from the attention he pays to every inch of your soaked slit, tongue swirling loops around your entrance that locks and unlocks around nothing – pushing out a dribble of slick. sometimes your clit falls victim, pinned to it with his content hums only worsening the way your soiled and shiny thighs tremble. 

briefly, yuuji pulls his mouth off of you, lips rimmed with a cherry shade, before he quickly replaces them with three of his dexterous fingers. thick, rugged, like a man hard at work. he remains tied to you by warmed, clear strings of slick that only snap when the pink haired jock licks it up. he rubs at you frenziedly, the creaminess of your cunt fills the pocket of silence that had once only been interrupted by the way the two of you panted. your thighs twitch further apart to make room for the action, more webs of your arousal forming and breaking apart over him. “so messy, honey,,.” the jock goads you, offering up a toothy smirk to your wet stare. “you havin’ fun up there? know i am…” he pinches your folds together just to watch you leak, gushing a bubbly mix of essence and spit. “you have no idea how long i’ve wanted this, how perfect you are. bet the guys on the team would kill for a chance to see my pretty girl like this…”

the idea alone has you nodding  tearily, brainless and away with the fairies. perhaps one day, you might enjoy being watched by the likes of fushiguro – and yuuji whimpers dreamily, at how you jolt at the mention too, brimming with pride that rises in his damp shorts. your mound glistens under the artificial light of his dorm, making your desires obvious. “you’d like that, baby?” yuuji croons whilst he leans back up to licks you up and down with fever and newfound vigor. “too bad, kinda wanna keep you all to myself.”

gentle taps land on your swollen folds, turning to smacks against your pulsating pussy. the action renders you weak, thoughts becoming jumbled up in your mind. your grip on the headboard slips due to the ill-like  sweat that overtakes you, luckily, yuuji holds you tight by the tacky and bouncy meat of your ass. “love this pussy too much. she’s all mine, just like you are.” the jock snarls, voice so deep you almost fail to recognize it. it lacks his usual chipperness and warmth, replaced only by possession that has you breathless.  “just like ‘m yours…”

“y-yes! mine…” you shriek sweetly, followed by a mumble of his name for the nth time that night as your head hangs low. positively flustered and a teary mess. “fuck, yuu. yuuji please keep going. i wanna, fuck, i wanna cum on your tongue.”

it’s getting harder to keep yourself up, pain stinging in your knees despite how they kneel against a plush feather filled duvet – though its almost as though that had been yuuji;s plan all along. to have eaten you out to the point where every part of you trembles and your muscles feel like nothing but wobbly jello. what he really wants, is for you to let it all go completely and trust in him to get you to the peak of pleasure like you rightfully deserve. it’s like you’re still not quite getting it, still hovering above his earnest mouth like you’re unsure of how much itadori can take, ignoring what he’s willing to do for you. to you. this is more than just sex to him, its about soothing your wounds left so doubt and making you feel so good that you forget they ever existed.

no longer in the mood to tease, itadori lines his mouth up with your sluice center once again – the warmth of his breath only adding a layer of sensitivity of it all. and you realise, that somehow, somewhere there is some kind of higher being that has gifted you this man. the one with the gentle soul and bright smile that lives to devote himself to you – you bucks his hips upwards for some kind of friction against his erection, because he gets so turned on just from you gushing into his mouth like a fruitful stream. yuuji whimpers like a kicked puppy as your taste coats his tongue once again, tangy and sweetly addictive in a way that makes him feel high. dopamine crackles along the tiny gap between skulls and brains a he’s drawn into the succulent delicacy of your pussy. you’re like that first sip of an iced beverage on a hot day, and yuuji must admit – he enjoys the humid atmosphere from underneath tour jersey. small jolts of felicity leap across your synapses like an eclectic current, puling you away from the self doubt that plagues you. leading you into a world where you know that you will always be it, for yuuji itadori. 

it helps that the tip of the pink haired jock’s tongue squirms against the pleasure spots you can’t typically reach on your own. crying to the high heavens for a bit of mercy, you feel walls contract around the base of his pink muscle, stretching to accommodate the thickness there before he wags it back and forth eagerly.  committing to memory each ridge or spot within your silken walls puts you on the verge of exploding. the more itadori takes care of you, the easier it is to succumb to him. trust him. still, your head rolls forward against the small slab of wood that makes up the dorm’s headboards in some form of respite and an attempt to cool yourself down from all the sucking and humping and whining. nonetheless, a trickle of hot desire slips into your system and only itadori can calm it.

yuuji’s movements grow sloppier and pace at which you grind your hips starts to turn uncoordinated, as though you can’t keep up. the whole ordeal remains a mess – like a snake, your boyfriend relaxes his jaw and greedily sucks one of your pussy lips into his saliva packed mouth before offering up the same treatment to the other. he shakes his head between your thighs as he laps at your cute, prominent clit – tongue taut against the overstimulated bundle of nerves. yuuji licks you until you’re practically clean, but then your hips jerk and your eyes roll back and you;re spewing copious amounts of honeyed nectar down his chin once again. from below, he works you up to the highest point of satisfaction, using teeth and tongue in coordinated attacks as though he’s tearing through his final meal.  an orgasm slowly begins to cement inside of you, curated perfectly by tactical flicks agianst your gooey g-spot deep within. yuuji gives and gives until he’s able consume you like an unrelenting forrest fire that swallows up every living thing in it’s bath – be burns through you with a bright orange flame and fries every single nerve ending you possess until you;re left a tingling, gasping mess. the jock is so lost in you, carried away between your godly thighs that he doesn’t even realise how much of you covers him.

he doesn’t seem to mind much, big arms flexing around your middle – one large palm splaying up your spine to bring you downwards. there’s so much slick and arousal in between you, that as his mouth tirelessly works you towards release – it smears along your inner thighs like a crystalised sugar glaze. his cheeks are in no better state with his cheeks and chin in a shimmering whilst cloudy white keeps his lips connected to your slit.

if you’re being honest, you feel so good that it almost seems like the end of the world. everything tilts slightly on his axis – you can barely hear yourself snivel and sob with the blood rushing through your ears and the loud slurps coming from your boyfriend underneath you. exuberance and delectation curdle viscously in your bloodstream, especially when itadori uses his strong grip on you to start bouncing you up and down on the thick circumference of his tongue – thrusting it up into your welcoming little hole as though it were is rock hard dick. the one that you’ve taken so many times now and had to prep yourself for weeks prior in order to swallow every inch down and fully seat yourself on. the sick ‘schlick’ of your pussy increases crudely in volume the harder yuuji laps at you in rapid circles twisting inside – earning him a squeeze to the head with your thighs.

and of course, a precious shout of his name. “y-yuu, yuuji please. t-think ‘m getting close…” you whinge, recognising the rapturous rip through your gut. you still on top of him after a shockwave runs through you, attempting to calm your overwhelmed senses and get back the breath you’ve lost from moaning in whistle tones.

the blush-pink haired jock is also familiar with the signs of your orgasm and suddenly switches tactics. as you, without noticing, rise on your knees to escape the final notes of pleasure – yuuji grabs both of your ass cheeks in bare, veiny hands harshly bringing  you down onto his face and yanks  you back and forth across his wet, panting mouth. “please sit on my fucking face, baby. ride my tongue like you own it,” yuuji begs like he’s a man pleading for his life that hangs in the balance. “i know… god, i know that you’re scared…but you won’t suffocate me. hell, even  if you did, i wouldn’t care. wanna die here, between these pretty thighs tasting this… gorgeous pussy.” maybe it’s the desperation that liters his town like treefall and kindling for the fire of lust crackling within him, but you turn wobbly and limp, unable to resist for much longer.  “holy fuck, so sweet. mnnmm so fuckin’ sweet, honey. taste amazing. can’t even—” the needy groan the jock lets out as you finally, completely sit on his face, inches down your spine deliciously and drowns you in deep depths of ravishment. 

all that wetness, all those juices – you pour them directly into yuuji’s mouth, which overflows like a chalice full of only the finest of wines. he avariciously gulps them down – not even daring to waste a drop as you begin to put your trust in his strength – rapidly rocking yourself back and forth over the swell of his tongue. simpering like an angel, your hand shoots down to scratch at yuuj’s fresh undercut – mussing up the curls of his hair. “yuu, right there. k-keep it there… feels so hot. can’t…” you blubber like a baby, the jock’s cherished baby girl. you sit right there on the edge – the fact glaringly obvious in the quiver of your laments, doused in euphoria and sprinkled with salaciousness. his response is muffled, a howl of idulgence causing a twinge in your pussy when you rut down on his tongue that flickers brutally in and out of your turbidly sticky hole.. “oh my god, your tongue… fuck, yuuji!”

“that’s more like it, baby. s-scream for me, let them hear how good you feel.” he pulls and gulps down some air – spitting onto your sex only just to selfishly suck it up from between your folds. “ride it like it’s yours honey, don’t stop fucking my face until you cum.” he looks just as wrecked as you are, riding his mouth like its meaty cock. yuuji’s cheeks redden even further, the blush spreading like water colour down his neck and chest, indicating how flustered he is by the sway and bounce of your hips. underneath his short, his shaft kicks, coated with so much precum that it might as well have been encapsulated in a white, seedy mess. this is the reality of what you make him feel. his own version of paradise. so turned on by you in the same, delirious state that he’s on the verge of cumming too. brown eyes disappear into the dark depths of his skull, but his grip traverses your body since it knows the way off by heart — hands reaching up through his navy and ruby sports jersey to fondle the soft sway of your breasts and hopefully drag you closer to the edge. “don’t care if i can’t breathe, keep it going. you’re doing so well on top of me. so pretty, shit.” 

praise seems to be your final straw, yuuji’s warm complement whispered into your abused and ruined pussy being the only thing needed to send you hurtling off the cliff and into your high. static rings true in your ears, a familiar tune that only itadori is able to play for you ad your body succumbs to every lick, suck, kiss and touch it’s received over the course of the evening. all that tense, wound up pressure coiled within your lower belly releases all at once, rendering you a lank and floppy mess above your boyfriend who zealously works to sip and guzzle down the scorching outpour liquor that rains down on him from your palpitating pussy. every doubt and insecutiy you’d felt, about not being good enough to sexually please yuuji is quickly cast away as though it meant nothing. you can’t ignore that yuuji loses himself and his way at the very vision of you fucked out like this.

so drunk on you that he can barely hold back his own orgasm as the first taste of your orgasm hits him. sugary and slightly musky as it splashes across his lips and face. yuuji bursts then and there, following suit. he creams the inside of his shorts with a few shots of white hot seed, a strangled moan vibrating against your sensitive core as he cums with you, his sturdy and well-built body breaking out into its own set of mind-numbing shakes and shivers – moans almost incredulous. 

“my fuckin’ god, I love it when you cum. all over me, all. over. me.” yuuji huffs and punctuates his words with a final lovetap of his tongue against your viscid pulsing mound, not even caring that his lungs are dying for a hit of oxygen from the sex-tainted air. his mouth returns to you, eagerly  pressing kisses to your swollen and abused nub in the hopes of making you cum just like that all over again. “fuck baby, just wanna—“ he hisses, feeling your pretty smaller-than-his fingers tug hard at his mussed orchid coloured locks.

“n-no yuuji! too much.” comes your soft whiny complaint as you tiredly push him back by the roots of his hair. when he lets go, you immediately collapse to his side, breathing uneven but your face completely at ease. relaxed and love struck, until you perk up with realisation. “w-wait! yuu! did you want – um…” 

carefully, your hand inches down the swell of his thigh but a calloused and larger one is quick to snap it up at the wrist. “did i need your help?” itadori asks softly, overcome with simple affection at your large doe-like eyes searching his face. “nuh uh baby, came already.”

“you…did?” you blink.

“in my shorts,” itadori bashfully responds. “you’re just that sexy and hot and pretty when you’re on top of me, honey. can’t help it, you make me so hard.”

“oh…” looking down at the now prominent wet patch at the crotch of his loose basket ball shorts, you squeak in surprise – part satisfied and part shocked that your boyfriend was able to cum untouched, right alongside you. your heart sings. yuuji itadori really does love you.

“god, you’re so stinkin’ cute!” yuuji rolls onto his side to face you, peppering it with kisses and linking your fingers tightly. “i could just eat you up!”

this time, you duck your head into his neck – much shier than before. “lets wait a little bit, yuuji. ‘m sensitive.”

“so i’m not hearing a no…” your boyfriend pipes up. “how long is a little bit, exactly?”

he’s rolling his massive frame on top of you before you can even blink – arms either side of your head as airy light laughter bubbling up on your lips when you realise he’s half hard against your thigh and his damp puce pink hair is tickling at your neck ever so slightly. itadori already leaving an array of possessive hickies along the column of it. 

“yuuji! gosh, you just ate!”

end. reblogs and comments are always appreciated! just liking doesn't do anything. so leave a comment to motivate this writer if you'd like to see more!!

The worst part is that you should've expected it. But how could you. Both of you had yet to present the last time you'd seen him. Before he'd been whisked away into some soccer deathmatch.

Your eyes search what skin it could see, finding no trace of patches or anything else designed to hide his scent.

He sighs, taking a step towards you like a fool. "I can sm-"

"I know that," you bite out. Another breath. It stings where your nails are biting into your palms.

You'd known Rin as long as you could remember. Perhaps that was why this pained you as much as it did. Truly, you wanted to believe the excuse he'd made as soon as he'd realized. You wanted to believe that he was oblivious enough to not consider the discomfort of an omega entering an alpha's home unprepared.

The scent had overwhelmed you nearly the moment the door had closed behind you, which was why you had yet to move from the entrance. It was oppressive, a perfect reflection of how your peers had used to describe Rin's presence. Something you suspected had only been cultivated further by his time as a pro.

"You really didn't think to tell me?"

Rin shakes his head.

"I didn't think you could be-..." He trails off, voice far more gentle than you wanted.

It sounded too much like pity.

You knew the stigma. As a child, you'd have laughed at anyone even suggesting you could present as the 'weaker' secondary gender. But it had never been something you could control.

"I thought you'd be clever enough to at least ask, or don't they teach your kind any manners?" The soft growl that rumbles in his chest tells you it was too far. Guilt sinks like a stone in your stomach. You'd wanted to refer to star players, to geniuses. But you knew exactly what it had sounded like.

The growl dies out fast, the only thing left in its wake being that disappointed glimmer in those turquoise eyes. Rin smelled so good, it was unfair. Everything in the apartment had his scent clinging to it like a heavy blanket. You'd met by chance out on the street, spoken for a few minutes before agreeing to catch up at his home, eager to avoid any passerby capturing the reunion on camera.

"Don't act like you're without any responsibility."

His scent had been so muted out among others that you'd immediately thought him a beta. But here in his home? There was a distinct edge of mint, sharp as the crunch of fresh snow beneath a heavy boot. Another breath peeled back the layer of what you suspected was cologne, revealing softer notes of lavender and petrichor.

"Well- no but.."

He smelled like home. And you hated that both your mind and body agreed. He'd been 'home' to you, years ago.

"If it's a problem, you can leave." Before you can protest, Rin's entire being softens a fraction once more. "We can always meet another day," he adds, almost like an apology.

It was the sensible thing to do. Unfortunately, your stomach churned at the prospect of leaving the warm embrace of his pheromones. To your own surprise, you realized that your hands had relaxed and your initial discomfort passed.

You shake your head, kicking off your boots with renewed resolve.

"No way. I've missed you," you stride past him, briefly overwhelmed as you enter the tidy living room. "Last time we pushed plans you ended up disappearing into some soccer jail and next thing I know you're a proper adult working a - well I wouldn't call being an athlete a proper job - but you know what I mean!"

Rin scoffs at the jab, his presence looming behind you.

Unsurprisingly, his apartment was rather minimalistic. The treadmill placed between the couch and television makes you laugh.

It feels almost painfully natural to sink back into what you'd had with him. Pressed against his side while he shows the group chats and pictures from the other young men he'd trained with.

You ask what it'd been like and he answers with a single word that makes you laugh, 'hell'. Rin's voice has gotten a little deeper with the years, it vibrates against his chest when he speaks. It beckons you to relax. To press closer against him. And Rin doesn't stop you.

It's nearly midnight when you ask, tongue loose from the elation of finally being in the presence of each other once more. "But how did they handle it at soccer jail when you started presenting?" Rin tensed at your question, but you noticed neither that nor the spike of anger in his scent. "With that many guys in such close quarters it must've been awful for them to manage it."

Rin shifts his hand, cradling your head tighter against his chest. The answer he gives is whispered against your hair, so quiet it nearly drowns in the night. "They didn't."

You mindlessly parrot his words, like repetition could somehow make sense of it.

"They-.." Rin shivers, the hard planes of his torso tensing beneath your hands. You don't think you've seen him look this uncomfortable since you were children. But he swallows what had stuck in his throat, the act of so blatantly hiding something away making your instincts flare. The urge to nuzzle, coo, curl around and comfort him all makes you struggle to listen when he continues. "The number one doesn't have time for such trivial distractions. If we couldn't separate ourselves from our baser instincts we would've been told to leave. Just another stupid test."

You couldn't help but wince at the change in his voice, it sounded like he was repeating a mantra. "But that's inhumane, so they just let you go through your first ruts without any-"

"And heats," Rin adds, and nausea crashes over you.

He must've noticed your unease, awkwardly trying to haul you into his lap and rub at your sides.

It feels like taboo to ask, but morbid curiosity and the memory of your own first agonizing heat pushes your forward. "Could you at least... help each other?"

"Some of them probably tried. But if you were late for a training match, exercise, strategy lesson, anything... all of it would've lessened your chance of getting anywhere."

"So you've never-"

Rin doesn't answer.

Seconds pass into minutes as you both sit in silence. His hands on your waist feel less like a comfort and more a stark reminder of the difference in strength. It was a frightening thought, the ability to suppress such an involuntary act. Somehow it made Rin seem far more dangerous. When he finally snapped - because you had no doubt that they all would at some point - how far gone would he be?

It was another lapse of judgement when you looked up at him and smiled, trying to ease the odd tension in the room with what you thought could be an innocent confession.

"Hm, I always figured we'd be each other's firsts."

Whatever hint of softness that had been in Rin's eyes is gone by the time your lips stop moving. He pushes you off of his lap with enough force to send you flailing onto the floor. You whine, not from pain but shock.

"Fuck-" Rin is above you in an instant, reaching for your shoulders and pulling you back up to stand. "Sorry. I didn't think-"

You frown, nose twitching at the strangely bitter scent invading your nostrils.

"Don't say things like that so casually," Rin growls, rubbing at his jaw like he was trying to ease tension in the joint.

This was where you should've stopped, thanked him for his company and left. Promised to stay in touch this time. But something about the way he'd reacted. Almost like the thought disgusted him. It should've meant nothing, not after all this time apart. You'd been prepared to never see him again except on television screens and magazine covers.

The rejection grated on your ego.

So you steeled yourself, met his gaze despite the urge to cower in front of his imposing frame. "Would it really have been so bad?"

There's a distinct lack of response from Rin. No twitch of his lips, nothing in his eyes, you couldn't even smell a difference in his scent. If anything it felt like looking at a blank slate, completely devoid of any emotion.

You wanted to vomit. There'd been too much truth in your confession to take a rejection in stride. Hadn't thought you'd have to.

Your eyes caught a crack. A muscle in Rin's arm jumping beneath smooth skin. Next was a breath, drawn-out and staggered. His pupils had dilated as well, no more than a thin band of turquoise left.

Last to hit you was his scent. Angry, hurt, confused. Every breath felt like choking. Rin wiped at his mouth, a single drop of saliva escaping his sleeve and dripping from his chin.

"Out." It's absolute, an order more than a suggestion. Everything from his stance, chest now pressed against you as he backed you out of the living room, to the way his scent had taken on something that smelled like decay urging you to leave. "We'll talk later. Get out."

It's only when you're on the sidewalk breathing fresh air that your mind slowly catches up, everything about your exit feeling fuzzy around the edges.

Maybe it hadn't been disgust you'd caught in his eyes.

Disgust doesn't make tears gather.

It had looked more like regret.

Maybe his silence had said it all and you were too late to be his first.

Masterlist

just starting this off with rin saying //"don't be scared" //and that //he looks like a kicked puppy when you lie.// OUGHHH like we are going right into it!!! and the way you described their scents really set the tones so well!! his dominating one vs your sharp, guarded one

especially this TT: //He smelled like home. And you hated that both your mind and body agreed. He'd been 'home' to you, years ago.//

ohhhh how they pushed through to catch up as friends... how rin's voice beckons you to relax.... how he doesn't stop you from pressing closer... their conversation about how blue lock dealt with their presentations was so interesting!! i love your take on it on how brutal it was, and also how it builds up to the tension of //"Hm, I always figured we'd be each other's firsts."//

the rejection and misunderstandings afterwards was sooooo juicy.... i'm so curious as to what was going through rin's mind!!! what exactly are you regretting right now!!!!

you also mentioned that this was your first time writing for rin and i think you managed to capture his personality so well!! his emotionally constipated emotions... his outbursts... his subtle softness...

Only once have you encountered Bakugou Katsuki. Three years ago, if you recall correctly. At the time, you’d been running from the law, too; robbing and gunning your way through the never-ending desert until you'd found yourself on the same cross-country locomotive as the infamous outlaw himself. You were planning on looting the passengers blind. Now it’s not a memory you like to linger on; the sting of a humiliatingly quick defeat is all too easy to dredge back up. 

Anyhow, that was the proverbial kick in the head that started you on a new path. One on the right side of the law (not that the law was ever going to find out you’d been on its wrong side). And now you hunt down folk unfortunate enough to wind up with a bounty on their head, just like Bakugou Katsuki here. 

Not long have you been in this town and yet you’re itching to escape. To most people, you suppose it could be considered quaint–the long-lived rotting buildings, weary livestock, and the way everyone seems to know each other as one might a family member. To you however, it’s suffocating and you can already feel the curious stare of the townspeople wedging into your skin like a splinter you can’t remove. Behind you, disordered piano notes spill out from the saloon and into the night air. Drunken patrons cheer as though they recognise the song but you find that hard to believe.  

$100,000, you muse. A hell of a sum of money. Enough to retire, if I wanted to. 

Although scrawled above the money, the outlaw’s fierce red glare pierces straight through you like an arrow. Somehow, you’d wager that capturing him would be a prize worth more than every penny combined. You spit your toothpick out and push away from where you’re leaning against the boardwalk paling. 

See you awfully soon, Bakugou Katsuki.

—

“Howdy, old friend,” you call, shielding the sun’s low glare with your gloved palm. 

Bakugou thrashes, dust kicking up in plumes around him from the impact of his fall. There was nothing he could do when your lasso landed true, tightening around his torso like a noose. All it took was one small tug and he was tumbling down, no different from the tin cans you line up for target practice. 

Sat atop your horse, it isn’t hard to relax into the familiar triumph of a capture singing through your veins. You’ve gotten real good at this whole right-side-of-the-law shtick. 

Bakugou throws himself onto his back, and light slices across his face through the cloud of dust. Sweat and dirt is caked into his every nook and cranny. 

“Friend?” he snarls, affronted. 

Palming your Stetson from where it’s hooked on the flank of your horse, you tug it down to your brow. A second later, you swing a leg over the saddle and jump, boots thumping on the dry dirt gracelessly. 

“Now, now,” you tut, meandering closer. “Don’t be tellin’ us you ain’t recognise little old me?”

“Fuck no I don’t,” he spits. Although he clearly means to sound threatening, it's undermined by the way he’s shuffling on the dirt like a worm in fresh rain as he struggles to put more distance between you. You chew on your new toothpick, smothering a grin. “Nobody’s make as much of an impression as wind on water.”

Huffing a laugh at his jab, you ask, “You a humorist, outlaw Bakugou Katsuki?” 

Your worn boot finds its home on Bakugou’s chest, halting his escape. 

“I don’t make a habit of it,” he says, glaring at you. 

“Could’ve fooled me,” you remark, absently fingering the pearlescent gun that’s tucked in your holster. “Perhaps you need a helpin’ hand.”

“Hell no! I am mighty fine without your help, I assure you,” Bakugou protests, wriggling under your boot. 

Below you, smeared in dirt and coiled in your rope, he looks strangely pathetic. Nothing of the big, bad outlaw you remember meeting on the train—the one who proceeded to strike you down as though you were mere reeds under the blade of his scythe. This thought sours the high you’d been riding and you frown. 

“C’mere girl!” you yell, and click your tongue until your horse trots closer. 

From her neck, you snatch a deep red banana. She snuffles your hand with wet lips before walking off to chew on a nearby tumbleweed. You lay the bandana across the bridge of your nose and secure it behind your head. When you glance down a moment later, Bakugou has his face thrown back as he strains to watch the horizon, clearly searching for the gang you’ve heard he often rides around with. You kick him to get his attention. 

“This ringin’ any bells, cowboy?”

Bakugou squints up at you, mouth already curled as though to instinctively hurl more barbed words your way. But then his face slackens and his eyes flare wide. 

“Yeah,” you croon. “You remember me now, huh, hotshot?”

“Who let you in law enforcement?” Bakugou asks, bemused. “Last I saw, you was tryin’ to rob my train.”

“Times change,” you say, a finality to your tone as you pivot the conversation. “Where’s your pals, hm?” 

Miles of desert stretch in every direction and there isn’t a soul to be seen. 

“They’ll be here soon enough,” he says. “And trust me when I say, you’ll want to be gone with the wind by then.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” you agree, pressing your boot down harder just to hear Bakugou growl. His leather vest creaks under the pressure. It’s fancy, that much you can tell, and you wonder who’s back he stripped it from. “I better be gettin’ you back to town, then.”

“You ain’t gettin’ me nowhere,” Bakugou barks, bucking up to dislodge your foot. It’s wildly unsuccessful, and you stare impassively to say as much. “Yellow-bellied lawdog, actin’ as though you ain’t stained down to your roots.”

He spits at you, but it misses its mark and splatters on the stained cream of his shirt. Your gaze flicks from the damp spot up back up to his wild eyes. 

“Now that is just plain mean,” you say, feigning hurt. “You hardly above the snakes yourself, cowboy.”

Bending at the waist, you peer at Bakugou under your boot. Rope digs into the bare skin of his forearms where they’re plastered to his sides, and you know from experience it’ll chafe into blood and bone unless he stills. With a hundred thousand bills hot on your mind, you grab a fistful of rope and yank him up to his feet in one swift movement. You don’t even have time to react before Bakugou kicks you hard in the shin and legs it west towards the setting sun. 

“Shit!” you shout, stumbling back a step and spitting out your toothpick. 

Within the blink of an eye you’ve unsheathed your gun and fired off a warning shot in the cracked mud of the ground nearby. Bakugou ignores it, running like your fate for him will be much worse than a bullet in the calf. At your feet, rope slaps the dirt viciously as the spool unwinds. Suddenly amused, you step atop the knot signifying the end of your lasso and let Bakugou run until the slack tightens. He jerks back harshly and lands in a crumpled heap. 

“Slow as molasses in January!” you jest across the desert, relishing in his frustrated shout. 

You tighten the cuff of your leather gloves before snatching a length of rope, bracing your feet, and yanking Bakugou back in yard by yard like a fish on a reel. 

“Fuckin’ prick!” Bakugou doesn’t decide to make your life easy—twisting and struggling and hollering at you all the while. “No good, bottom feeding, sidewinding, son of a gun! You an’ your god damned rope! My gang’s goin’ to hunt you down! Peace won’t meet you ‘til you rollin’ in your grave, I’m fuckin’ tellin’ you!”

It isn’t hard to tune out his screeching and you grunt rhythmically each time you wrench him closer, content to let Bakugou tire himself out. When the rope runs out, you stare down at his flushed face below you, unimpressed. 

Sunlight drips from him and his red eyes seem to dance in it, coming alive like a cave gem unearthed for the first time. Oddly transfixed, you find yourself lowering your knee to his chest and, forcing your weight onto Bakugou, you leer at the sight. When the barrel of your gun gets tucked under his chin, digging into the meat there, he falls silent. 

“You think this’ll scare me?” he asks carefully. 

“No I don’t,” you answer truthfully. The mottled gold of your gun flashes as you twist it deeper. “But I’m bankin’ on it aidin’ some good behaviour here. Because we both know you’re gettin’ locked up for a long, long time, cowpoke. Ain’t no amount of strugglin’ in the world gon’ get you further than you just ran there.”

Bakugou kisses his teeth and regards you disdainfully. 

Just for the hell of it, you jab your gun harder under his chin and force his head to tilt backwards. You’re not usually this vindictive but you almost welcome the change of pace. Leaning over him, you let your words drip onto his face. “Show’s over.” 

“Ain’t over ‘til I’m in jail,” Bakugou mutters, “even then, I’m sure I’ll find some lawdog willing to roll over for a handful of bills.”

You laugh, humourless. “I’m quite sure you will. That don’t matter to me though, not when the bounty will be already fat in my belt.”

You yank your bandana down and let it pool around your neck, licking at your dry lips. Bakugou follows the movement scrutinisingly and you frown. 

“Problem?” you ask calmly.

“Hell of one,” Bakugou states. “You’re ugly enough to back a buzzard off a gut-wagon.”

Of all the things you expected Bakugou to have an issue with, your appearance is not one of them. You bark a startled laugh, veering closer to his face just to get under his skin. 

“Well ain’t that unfortunate for you. I suppose it’s a mighty good thing you won’t be starin’ at my face for long.” 

“Thank the Lord for that,” he says, squirming under you. 

“Right then, cowboy,” you say, figuring you’ve manhandled him enough. You move to stand, fingers tightening in the rope to hoist him up with you.

“Hey now!” Bakugou calls, panic lacing his voice. “What’s the rush?”

“‘What’s the rush?’” you repeat incredulously. 

Bakugou nods, dirty blonde hair falling over his eyes. “You got me, alright! I clearly ain’t goin’ nowhere—”

“I know that’s right,” you cut across him, smirking. 

“And, I’m…” Bakugou looks around, searching for his words in the air. “Injured!” he says triumphantly. “It’d probably be best if I lay here for just a little while.”

“This is quite an act you’ve got going, outlaw Bakugou,” you scoff. You’ve been in the desert long enough, dust settled uncomfortably in the back of your throat. “And I ain’t buying none of it!”

Quickly, you lift your knee and scan his tensed body for a firearm. If anyone would find a way to shoot your head off on your own damn horse, you don’t doubt it would be Bakugou. Humming carelessly, you tug at his waist to roll him towards you slightly and bullseye: a surprisingly non-descript gun is wedged under his jeans on the small of his back. You snatch it and tuck it in the back of your own. 

“Prick,” Bakugou mutters as you drop his body back to the earth. 

“Yeah, yeah, you think I ain’t heard such shit from the likes of you before?” you say mildly, glancing down at the spurs on his boots and contemplating if he could find a way to use those as a weapon. “You’ll find I’m a well worn path of unkind words that—”

The words lodge in your throat, frozen there like a deer staring down the barrel of a hunting rifle. You stare perplexed at the unmistakable sight of Bakugou’s hard cock tenting his jeans. The man in question growls and bucks again, trying to free himself from your restraints as though he will have renewed luck in such an endeavour. It takes a few moments before you feel brave enough to glance at his face. He’s flushed a bright, sun-burnt red.

“Manhandlin’ your thing?” you find yourself asking, though you can’t explain why for the life of you. 

Bakugou sputters indignantly, kicking a leg out at your face. You catch his ankle with ease and jail it in the air before he can have a second attempt. He screws up his face. 

“No!” he yells. The leather of your gloves squeaks against the ankle of his boot; your hold is punishingly tight. “No it certainly isn’t!”

“Then what has you…” you trail off. “I heard some people enjoy rope business but I ain’t never encountered it myself.”

Bakugou is too busy to reply, twisting on the ground like a dying bug as he attempts to dislodge your grip. 

“Or maybe it’s my face, ugly enough to back a buzzard off a gut-wagon?” you mimic in his low growl, pleased when he reacts in kind and swears under his breath.

“Yeah,” he finally pants, “your ugly face got me hard.”

You hum, taking the slight in your stride, and watch him curiously. He fidgets before abruptly slamming his head back against the dirt to avoid your gaze. Gun still in hand, you trail the barrel down his chest until it stops just above his cock.

“Ain’t this curious,” you drawl. 

Against the dark, dirty denim Bakugou is wearing, the flare of your polished gun is blinding. He hisses in warning when you run the muzzle from the root to the tip of his cock. 

“I ain’t never met an outlaw who likes being caught.”

You grind the cylinder into him, listening to his shaky breath. 

Bakugou growls in protest. “You ain’t caught me.”

“Oh?” you say, punctuating the sound with another particularly harsh dig of your gun. “Well, then. I suppose you’ll be makin’ your great escape soon?” 

Bakugou huffs, avoiding your eyes and that’s all the confirmation you need. 

“Now, you goin’ to keep runnin’ your mouth, cowboy, or should I find a better use for it?”

Bakugou’s eyes shoot to yours, flaring wide. “Like hell you will! You ain’t sticking anythin’ near my mouth you prick.” 

You chuckle at his expression and cheerfully lift your gun from his cock to nudge at the side of his face. “Open up.”

Bakugou squares his jaw and stares at you defiantly. You raise your eyebrows in retaliation. 

Realistically, you ought to be slinging him over the back of your horse and riding into town to turn him in. There’s absolutely zero benefit to lingering out in the open like this. But you can’t bring yourself to resist. And you don’t recall triggering the trap Bakugou seems to have snared you in. 

You break the staring content and surreptitiously flick your gaze across the horizon. Still no sign of his friends. 

“I won’t ask twice, buck,” you say carefully, directing your attention back to him. 

“I don’t know who you think—” 

But the rest of his sentence never comes—your gun shoved deep in his mouth. He chokes around the intrusion in surprise and you ease back the pressure to let him adjust.

Look, you wish to say. I can be nice. 

“See,” you murmur instead, eyeing the dry stretch of his lips around the barrel of your gun. “Wasn’t so hard, now, was it? God knows a loudmouth like yourself needs to be shut up every once in a while.”

He’s gone suspiciously still, muscles drawn tight like a bow. You lower his leg back to the ground though you don’t release his ankle. Bakugou breathes slowly around the gun and his gaze never wavers from where your gloved fingers wrap around the grip. For a brief moment, you wonder if he’s actually scared you might blow his brains out. 

Dead or alive, the poster read after all. 

“Relax, cowboy,” you say. “You ain’t fit to shoot if I wanted to unload and clean my gun.”

Bakugou makes an unpleasant sound in the back of his throat and shoots a deadly glare your way. But he relaxes ever so slightly. And unable to help yourself, you release his ankle and brush a finger up the length of his cock. You finger at the button of his jeans, his hips cant up and you fit the warm breadth of your palm over him. Nearby, your horse huffs before throwing her head back impatiently.  

“You really oughta tell me to stop, cowboy,” you murmur. Wind whistles through the desert and Bakugou remains silent, unable to reply with the gun shoved halfway down his throat. You really wish that little fact didn’t turn you on. “Tell me to stop,” you repeat. 

Should bounty hunters derive this kind of pleasure from their catches? Should you really  be gloating in the compliance you’ve forced onto him? You’re not sure you want to know the answer, and guilt sharpens in your mind, feeling much like drugged up sparrows zipping aimlessly from tree to tree. 

Bakugou makes a rough, choked noise and the hair on your arms stands up on end. You give him a breath, two, and then he’s kicking his hips up into your palm as though the battle is lost. Smiling, you undo the button of his jeans and slide your hand under the hot denim, tracing your fingers through the wiry hair at the base of his cock. You take him in your hand and he grunts sharply.

Moving your finger away from the trigger, you pull the gun back to rest on his bottom lip and Bakugou takes in a gasping breath.

“Suck it.”

You expect him to kick up a fuss again, yet he only leans forward carefully to fit his lips around the barrel at your demand. It’s sure to taste like gunpowder, seeing as though you fired it only a matter of minutes earlier, but Bakugou doesn’t flinch. His tongue flicks into the muzzle. You groan lowly at the debauched sight of him straining to take it deeper. 

Arousal leaks from the tip of his cock, and you smear it along his length. The slide of your fist turns smoother. Bakugou must appreciate it because he keens, eyebrows scrunching in embarrassment at the sound. 

“Actin’ like you ain’t like this,” you say softly. “I never knew a cowboy to be so stupid.”

At your undressing, Bakugou grits his jaw again and locks his teeth around your gun. He flattens his expression. The attempt to remain unaffected is pathetic. All it takes is a twist of your wrist and a dig of your thumb in the slit of his cock for a strangled noise to worm its way from behind his clenched teeth. 

You watch as his face flashes through emotions too fast for you to place, and then as though making a sudden decision, Bakugou plants his feet on the earth. You startle, realising you have no free hands to defend yourself against his boot this time. However, he only uses his new hold to buck up into your touch. 

Bakugou doesn’t see the satisfied smirk you bear, nor the warmth you can feel in your cheeks. The outlaw is too busy thrusting into your fist like a dog in heat. Broad shoulders are planted in the dirt. Rope squeezes his chest. And his shirt, untucked from his open trousers, is getting rucked up with each movement. You bite your lip as the bare, flushed skin of his stomach holds all your attention and you find yourself wishing to bend down and drag your canines along the sweat-lined muscle there. 

“’s pathetic, really,” you insult, desperately trying to distract yourself from giving into the impulse. “Fuckin’ my hand when your friends could come back any minute now.”

When you shove your gun deeper to draw forth his acknowledgement, he gags. Fat tears clump at his lashline, and you rub a thumb cruelly over the sensitive head of his cock just to see if they will spill. 

“I could leave you here,” you continue conversationally. Acting as though you weren’t the one to take advantage of his predicament. “You’ll be all tied up, hard dick greetin’ sky when your pals come to save you. That is if no mountain lion nor coyote finds you first.”

“Mphff—” Bakugou's muffled voice is panicked. He means to say no—you can tell that much—and it’s gratifying how he can’t manage to speak a word around your gun. 

“I don’t think I will, though,” you drawl. In the empty desert, the slick squelching of your hand pierces the air. Heat flashes in your core. “You look much too nice under me right now to offer you up as some other beast’s meal.”

Bakugou is panting now, short and quick breaths that have condensed around the muzzle of your gun. You can see the gold metal shining. 

“You look awfully close,” you say, speeding up your hand and watching his jaw clench in response. A low, gravelly moan rings in the air. “Considerin’ I barely just put my hand on you an’ all, buck.”

“Mmn—!” Bakugou grunts, unable to do much more.

You nod pensively as though you understand him. Bakugou writhes, hips bucking up with every pass of your fist. 

“It’s a real shame that I’m goin’ to have to clean my glove after this,” you sigh, eyeing the wetness covering the leather. “Public appearance and whatnot now that I’m runnin’ with the law. Won’t have nothin’ to remember this by.”

Bakugou outright moans at that, his head thunking back onto the dirt. You scowl, squinting down at the man when you have to twist your wrist at an awkward angle to keep the gun pressed deep in his mouth. The expression doesn’t live long on your face. 

“What d’ya say to a givin’ me a little keepsake, cowboy?” you ask, the corner of your lips tugging up. 

Finally interested in hearing from Bakugou, you yank the gun free and slow your hand.  He heaves in a laboured breath. You drop the gun atop his chest as a taunt—it would be within reaching distance if his arms weren’t trapped. At his sides, his fingers twitch; fists clenching and relaxing rhythmically. 

The first thing Bakugou says to you is, predictably, an insult. 

“Callin’ me a loudmouth is rich!” he barks. “I ain’t never heard someone talk so— ah— much in my damned life, thought my whole ear would soon fall off!” 

“I know, I know,” you concede. “I really oughta find somethin’ better to do with my mouth, don’t you think?” you murmur, echoing your earlier threat. 

Bakugou presses his lips together in suspicion, but the expression unravels when you swipe a thumb over the head of his cock again and his mouth drops open in pleasure. You rub it in quick circles. He hisses, and his jaw tightens. One of his feet slips on the dirt and splays out as his hips spasm. 

There is no warning to be headed when you dip your head down. You don’t tease. And your hot breath on Bakugou’s cock is all the notice he’s allowed before you take him into your mouth. A moan punches out of the outlaw as you sink down. And pre-emptively, you place a strong hand on his hip to pin him in place. It’s a good job too—his hips kicking up immediately.

His cock is warm and heavy in your mouth; you can taste the sweat from his attempted escape and the sun that’s been beating down on him since. 

It should be unpleasant. Somehow it’s not. 

Maybe you’re sick. 

Bakugou pants into the air, words lost to the way your warm heat envelopes him as you bob your head up and down. Ever so strangely, you find yourself thinking that you’d wager your horse just to hear him hollering again. 

I’ll go to the doctor when I’m back in town, you decide; Bakugou’s cock halfway down your throat, nose buried in the thatch of hair at the base. 

“Oh— hell! You— you… Mmn— Shit—!”

Bakugou comes with a shout, loud as he appears to be in every facet.

You swallow the warm spurts of come and fight not to wince at the sensation. Gradually, his moans taper off, and you swirl your tongue to clean him before lifting your head up. You drag the back of your hand across your mouth harshly to rid yourself of the saliva that’s pooled on your chin. 

“Well then, cowboy,” you breathe heavily, breaking the silence that has fallen over you both. For a long moment you simply consider him, taking in his ruby red eyes and the matching flush crawling over his handsome face. How irritating it is, that you find him handsome. “Thank you kindly for the souvenir.”

Bakugou makes a non-committal noise, laying limp in the dirt like a crippled animal.

A faint symphony of overlapping hoots and hollers catch your attention, the sounds drifting on a breeze from the horizon. Far away, a splatter of black spots are backlit by a deep red sun dripping from the sky. 

“Clean yourself up,” you say simply, nodding towards the view. Bakugou follows your eyeline. In one clean motion you loosen the lasso and it sags around his chest. Rolling his shoulders, Bakugou drags his eyes back to yours. “Looks like them friends of yours decided to turn up.”

You swipe the gun from his chest and tuck it back in your holster. A few seconds later, you’re swinging a leg over your horse’s flank and sitting atop her saddle. As you fix your stetson, tugging the brim to your eyebrow in a force of habit, you regard how Bakugou is still splayed out on the floor. It’s difficult to ignore the arousal still brewing low in your gut at the sight. 

Bakugou doesn’t say a word, and you don’t either. 

It would be strange to say goodbye, you contemplate as you study him. We’re not friends, after all. 

Yet—when a command falls from your mouth, when your horse quickly kicks into a gallop, and when you’re riding off with the wind whipping past your cheeks—Bakugou’s sunset gaze doesn’t leave yours for a moment. You let him fade from your vision until he’s barely a smudge on the dark horizon. And then on your empty-handed journey—bar Bakugou’s gun, still tucked in the back of your jeans—back to town, your mind reminds you of one peculiar little fact: the outlaw didn’t turn back to look at his approaching friends. Not even once. 

‹‹ KINKTOBER 2025 | GENERAL MASTERLIST | READ ON AO3

i think bakugo and reader having this slight past added to the tension so well. i'm swooning over both of them LOL!!! outlaw katsuki ..... and previous outlaw turned bounty hunter reader .... scumptious. and reader is just so quick with it with the lasso!!! THE SKILLS!!!

their banter is to dieeee forrr, i love quick-witted characters hehe. AND it makes for the reveal of his hard on SOOO MPHHHH. EEEE // “Yeah,” he finally pants, “your ugly face got me hard.” // DROVE ME CRAZYYY. THE WHOLE SCENE WITH THE GUN IN HIS MOUTH DROVE ME CRAZYYYY LIKE OMGGGGG. him kicking his hips up to fuck your fist???? AHHHHHHHH

AND THIS ....

You expect him to kick up a fuss again, yet he only leans forward carefully to fit his lips around the barrel at your demand. It’s sure to taste like gunpowder, seeing as though you fired it only a matter of minutes earlier, but Bakugou doesn’t flinch. His tongue flicks into the muzzle. You groan lowly at the debauched sight of him straining to take it deeper. 

.... IS INSANEEEEE. HIM TRYING TO TAKE IT DEEPER!!!!

FINISHING HIM OFF WITH YOUR MOUTH.... HIS CUM AS A KEEPSAKE .... YOUR MIND!!! I LOVE IT

ending it with this // back to town, your mind reminds you of one peculiar little fact: the outlaw didn’t turn back to look at his approaching friends. Not even once. // made my face feel so hot. like damn TRULLYYY WHAT AN ENCOUNTER!!!!

They held hands for the first time under the very same tree Shouto was leaning against. 

He smiled, fixing her crown in the middle of the river. 

She laughed, a bit dizzy and totally enamoured, the first time he kissed her cheek. 

And the trees knew that, but they didn’t share it. Because they knew what young love looked like when it was tarnished, they knew what happened to youthful hearts when their feelings were trapped in vines of jealousy and spite. So they kept quiet, watching over the bond of two precious souls like guards: feigning ignorance towards their rulers' hearts.

OH LOOK AT THEM.

She wasn’t crying.  No.  She had dust in her eyes. 

Her wings weren’t broken. No.  They were tired. 

Her hands were not stained with blood. No. They were— they were dripping with blood. The red liquid was warm against her skin; she could smell it, the metallic scent was clouding her senses and her brain wasn’t fully capable of understanding what had happened.

She was flying towards him. Shouto was waiting for her in their usual spot near the river; their encounters were something new, but no less important, and every soul in the forest knew that. 

They knew.

So why? Why was she attacked on her way to him? 

She looked at the troll’s body sprawled on the ground a few meters away. The pool of blood underneath him was starting to grow, and so was the pain in her heart. She had never killed before because she wasn’t expected to do it inside the forest, and she hadn’t left the comfort of the woodland yet. 

Why? Why? Why? 

She heard them before she could see them. The frantic footsteps of someone coming her way were enough to alert her nervous system, but not enough to make her brain react properly. She stood there, frozen and trembling like a newborn deer, while a new threat seemed ready to get her when her soul felt so unguarded. The voice, muffled by the ringing in her ears, came in like a shock. She couldn’t see Shouto past the blood clouding her vision, but she could feel him standing next to her, confusion and concern radiating off of him like fire ready to burn the whole forest down if that meant getting inside her head at that moment.

He was so, so, worried. 

And she was so, so, hurt. In the emotional sense. In the spiritual sense. In the she’s-supposed-to-be-loved-by-everyone-and-never-hurt-by-her-people sense. 

How could this happen? How could anyone try to attack the one fairy everyone inside that forest seemed to love and respect so much? 

Shouto took her face between his hands with so much care that the rustling of the trees around them sounded like a compliment, he searched her face for injuries but didn’t find anything else besides a broken heart and the soul crushing realization that life can change in the blink of an eye. 

She could see his lips moving, she was pretty sure that she could also hear her name, but the smell of blood and the sound of bones being crushed were too strong for her brain to ignore. “I didn’t want to do it,” she whispered, looking past his shoulder. The troll’s boy was still there like a painful reminder that it was true, she had killed someone, she had drawn blood from someone she used to say hi to every morning.

But he had struck first. 

He yelled at her while running from behind, trying to cut off her wings as if they were nothing but a simple accessory, and she panicked. She didn’t mean to hit him with magic but she wasn’t really expecting to be ambushed in the comfort of her own forest. 

Her hands, always so warm and gentle, threw him against the floor while the light of her power pierced through him, splashing her with blood and staining her soul with devastation and void. 

“I didn’t want to do it,” her voice sounded hollow. The words scratched her throat like rocks on crystal, the sounds that left her mouth when reality finally caught up with her broke Shouto’s heart in a way he had only felt once before. 

LOOK HOW SWEET THEY ARE.

Shouto’s hand found hers gently, and he led her away from the body, not caring about the blood touching his skin. He could hear the rustling of the trees, the slow murmurs of leaves talking to each other and passing around comments that would surely reach her father’s ears in a matter of seconds. 

But all of that was mere background noise.

Her cries and whimpers were more important at that moment.

He walked her to the river, the water running down to the small pond they started to frequent was comforting in a way he didn’t expect. “Take a seat,” his voice was gentle but firm while he pointed at a stone big enough for her to sit. 

“It’s not your fault,” he whispered while watching her eyes fixated on her hands. He crouched down next to her with the gentleness he started to save for her, ripping off a portion of his shirt, he soaked the cloth with water and started cleaning her skin. 

The water dripping down her fingers was cold, a stark contrast to how warm the blood was before it started to dry. He treated her with the tenderness of a boy who knew what loud voices inside your head sounded like, he knew of harsh words and deafening screams, he knew of pain and blood, but he also knew of love.

His mother’s kindness was still etched in his brain, his mismatched eyes had seen what tenderness could do to a broken soul; his brother’s temper was often calmed by Rei’s hands, and the blood would stop drenching his life until there was nothing left but a little boy crying in his mother’s arms.

But Shouto didn’t want to see her cry, he wanted to see her smile and laugh. He wanted to see her wings flutter with excitement, he wanted to chase her around the forest with faux annoyance and indifference, he wanted to hold her, he wanted to see her happy. 

“I’m not leaving you alone.” 

“Not after what I did?” 

“Especially now.”

The rustling of the trees was the only thing they could hear, but the wind started to pick up at the same time tiny figures started to make their presence known around them. Fairies. Not an army, but enough of them to make Shouto suspicious. 

He saw them transform in the blink of an eye, the shiny wings disappearing as soon as the men locked eyes with him; maybe a reflex or maybe an accusation, he wasn’t so sure at that moment. 

Shouto didn’t notice the spear in the hands of one of them until he felt the coldness against his neck, the sharp and pointy head drawing a tiny droplet of blood. The fae in front of him was clearly a guard, there were four of them forming a small wall to protect whoever was behind them. 

Probably the king. 

LOOK HOW IN LOVE THEY ARE.

“Step back.” His fairy’s voice sounded next to him louder than before, the cadence of the princess coating her words in a command that didn’t leave space for arguments. 

He saw the flicker of doubt cross the guard’s eyes before the spear disappeared in a matter of seconds. They really can camouflage anything.

“King Oberon,” the forest whispered in his ear at the same time the guards moved aside. The fae who stepped in his direction didn’t look like the image he had in his head, the lines on his face were almost invisible, the wings on his back were bigger and shinier, and the aura that surrounded him wasn’t etched with fear but with blues and green colors reflecting something much more gentle than the other king in his life. 

He was so different.

But so similar to the fairy holding his hand. 

“They told me what happened.” The trees, Shouto thought, looking around.

“I didn’t want to do it.” She repeated for the third time, her voice wobbly but somehow firm. Her hand kept holding Shouto’s as if it were a vine tying her soul together, the only familiar thing in the whole scenario of despair. 

“I know,” the king said with a gentle tone. There was no shouting, no shoving, no punches and slaps, only tenderness and understanding circling them as a father closed the distance and embraced his daughter in what could only be described as love. “You did what you had to do. You protected yourself and those around you. You might feel guilty right now, and you might feel lost for a while,” he whispered, holding her face and looking less like a ruler and more like a parent, “but remember that your life should always be more important to you. Not because you’re a princess, not because of the future, but because you exist. And you deserve to keep breathing and loving.”

The breeze around them suddenly felt warmer. 

“We will investigate and get all the answers. The healers are also on the way to look at your wings.” She startled at that, craning her head back to catch a glimpse at her broken wings for the first time since the attack. She could see scratches and cuts around the edges but she couldn’t feel her magic working to fix them. 

Shouto could see the tears in her eyes, the sadness coating her form as if happiness never existed within her. 

“Thank you for helping her,” Oberon spoke directly to him for the first time. His demeanor didn’t change, the kindness was still present and his eyes were free of judgment even when they found traces of the human king in him. “Rei did a great job.”

Those last words, so sincere and tender, felt like a blow. He took a step back in surprise when the king redirected her daughter’s attention back to Shouto. “Stay with him.”

You followed your father’s instructions without a second thought, and your eyes went back to Shouto like it was the most natural thing. The guards followed their king with ease, the human boy with a droplet of blood on his neck long forgotten, as if the words of Oberon were more than sufficient to placate whatever threat they might have sensed. 

“Come with me.” A couple of meters away, but still near the riverbed, a small tree log served as a seat. Far enough from magical ears, but close enough to still be seen. “We don’t have to talk, we can only hold hands if you want,” his words brought a small smile to her face. The shyness coating his offer was so sweet and so much like him.  

She took his hand without hesitation, intertwining their fingers and giving them a gentle squeeze. “Thank you,” her voice was carried by the wind. Small but always kind. 

Their shoulders brushed against each other while the trees watched with a calmness reserved for secrets. The birds didn’t sing and the butterflies didn’t interrupt, but they all saw it; the red thread connecting their hearts began to patiently untangle. 

Just like it did centuries before. But this time, it felt safer. 

my heart aches for our fairy :( she must’ve been so scared when she was being attacked and you can really see how the guilt is wrecking her. shouto being a pillar of support and comfort touched me so and oh my … when you brought in how he is used to hearing all these voices in his head and understands/feels for you. THE TEARS ARE FALLING!! the way you describe shouto’s inner emotions and link it back to his family trauma is haunting … yet so delicately well-written

when her father came out and treated them both with kindness…. i can just imagine how soothed our fairy felt and also how shouto is witnessing the raw worry of a parent. i feel like this is moving him in so many different ways and it’s like he’s found a community to look up to given how he was treated by his own father/king

i also LOVE and ADORE the details of the (green) sentences!!! the “oh look at them. look how sweet they are. look how in love they are.” it’s like we’re whispering with the forest ~~~ gorgeous formatting and story-telling :)

you’re enamoured. bakugou katsuki has dug a hole in your heart and made it home. that little voice in your head, the one that was always weary, telling you to be careful has been quiet. laid to rest and you think it’s a sign. he’s probably going to ask you to be his girlfriend again and you think you’re going to say yes.

very quickly you find out that voice was only dormant, not dead. you google the restaurant he sent and you panic. it’s a fancy one, one for people that are nowhere close to your tax bracket. you know katsuki isn’t but he’s normal, he’s not flashy aside from his coffee machine and maybe his porsche but you spend so much time at your apartment that you don’t think about the difference in your pockets.

expensive fine dining, michelin star restaurant definitely means you need a dress to play the part. and playing the part it is because since you don’t own anything that suits that trust fund vibe. you have to buy something.

you feel like an idiot in this tight purple dress and you feel like a fraud when katsuki loves it on you.

your katsuki stands at the front door to your apartment in a black suit with these shiny gold cufflinks and you don’t have to be rich to know that it’s expensive. it makes him look imposing, the way the fabric sits on his shoulders, how his white shirt doesn’t carry a single crease like he steamed himself down when he got out of his car. his belt is a subtle branded one, a ‘if you know you know’ brand and you don’t. but your body warms when you peek up at his face, the creases by his eyes and the glint of his gold tooth when he grins at you.

his hand reaches for your face, chunky watch at his wrist before he backs off, grabbing your hand instead.

“fuck, sorry just wanna touch you. don’t wanna mess up your face,” his kiss on your lips is light. you love a hello kiss. “you look gorgeous, doll. don’t deserve you on my arm tonight.”

you don’t feel like yourself in this dress but it fits standing beside him looking like that. you won’t mention you got it from the charity shop across the street.

“shut up,” you swat at him but he just grins, unable to look away from you, “thanks, katsuki. let’s go, don’t wanna miss the reservation.”

you think you look like a woman dynamight should be on a date with. nobody has given you odd looks when you stepped through the doors of the restaurant. the doorman didn’t frown at you when he asked for your jacket. you’re used to tap water for the table and excusing yourself to wash your hands in the bathroom. not a bottle of sealed mountain water being poured into your glass or a bowl of lemon water with a damp towel that katsuki had to tell you it’s for cleaning your hands.

you’re a fish out of water. blinking to take in the place but your eyes are still dry. 

once you’re settled in your seat, wondering who would get crushed first if the impressive diamond glass chandelier falls, your sweet katsuki nudges his knee with yours under the table. “what d’you think? i know it’s not what you’re used to but i thought it could be somethin’ different f’us?”

you hope your smile doesn’t look forced, you’re trying here, you really are. “it’s beautiful. i’m a little overwhelmed honestly.”

you laugh, awkwardly and bakugou grabs your hand. kisses your knuckles and his ruby eyes snatch your breath, “don’t be. after this we can get ice cream from that place near yours. wanna show you how fuckin’ good food can get, aside from the frozen shit you eat.”

you don’t like that comment. your throat constricts and you’re unsure if you’re overreacting. usually you’d laugh it off, he’s always telling you about healthier options but when you’re on the go and on a budget, it’s not always the easiest. it’s worse when you can’t say anything because a waitress hops over.

a pretty girl, around the same age as you and she knows exactly who katsuki is.

“hi i’m your waitress for tonight—,” she looks at you first then bakugou, then again at bakugou. she gasps, covering her mouth and then fixing her hair. her whole face blushes red and you swear you can see the cogs turning in her head, “dynamight, wow you’re my favourite hero! i’ve always wanted to meet you.”

bakugou pulls his hands out of yours, opting to rest them in his lap and lean back in his chair. you’re not thinking rationally here, it feels like he’s pulling away from you, situating himself like the bachelor pro hero he is.

he nods at her, solemn and appreciative, “thanks for the love. i’m always tryin’ my best for the country.”

she’s staring at his face, his plush pink lips that are usually found on your neck and then down his body. does he not fucking see that?

“yes, dynamight. wow! i can’t… sorry, let me take your order!”

she says only to him, body and the tablet she’s holding only facing him. 

bakugou recalls his order with finesse, not even having to look down at the menu and when the waitress remembers you’re still at the table, it’s as if you do too. limbs jump starting as you flip the menu back open and run your finger down each option to find what you originally wanted.

“i can’t find which one…,” you mumble and katsuki sits forward.

“i can come back later if you still need some time, miss. i can get dynamight’s ready.”

you feel like cursing. how the fuck would that make sense, both eating at different times?

“no, here it is!” you read it from the menu, pretty sure you’re butchering the pronunciation, “could i have the sauce on the side?”

she frowns at you, looks at your dress and your hair before meeting your eyes. “the point of that meal is that the sauce is all over.”

bakugou nods but turns to the waitress, “if it’s possible to get it on the side, we’d appreciate it.”

the waitress’s smile blooms across her face, “of course dynamight! anything for you. i’ll get those ready and be back with your drinks.”

once she grabs your menus and is off, you have to mention it.

“i don’t like her.”

bakugou gapes at you, that confused boyish stare that makes you feel like you’re being irrational.

“hah? why?” you’re grateful he puts his elbows on the table. you know that’s a thing rich people say is impolite.

you scoff, crossing your arms across your chest, “she was only facing you, forgot i was even at the table… she looked at me weirdly and was all over you. only listened to you when i asked for a change to my food.”

bakugou laughs softly, like you’re a baby doing something that’s cute but would be embarrassing if they were an adult. yanking off their sock or burping in public. “she was just a fan, baby. i’m sure you just misread her look.”

you do what you swear you wouldn’t do with men, you let it go and believe what he’s saying. that voice at the back of your head is louder than ever before. you don’t belong here. you’re an idiot to think somehow you match the people surrounding you. with their wrists full of bracelets that cost your undergraduate degree, masters and phd combined. he loves the attention from women, he’s just a man after all.

you sit up straight in your chair, “yeah, maybe.”

then he grins at you, “so tell me what else you found in my office that day?”

the food is amazing, so good you find it irritating. probably would have been better if the sauce was poured over like the waitress said. a woman with massive emerald earrings walks by the table, compliments your dress and your first thought is that she’s laughing at you, an elaborate story builds in your head that she was the one that donated it to the charity shop you bought it from.

“sorry ladies, we’re tryna eat here so i’m not takin’ photos right now.”

you haven’t been able to get through a conversation without getting interrupted by the waitress refilling your drinks the second it’s half empty or a child nervously walking over asking bakugou to sign his napkin. you turn around and see the boy’s parents egging him on, waving at katsuki. as cute as it is, you just want to talk to him. 

but these two women, probably born with a silver spoon in their mouths and four forks on the table, are giving your boy— katsuki, bedroom eyes. a—fucking—gain.

they pout at him, “dynamight! oh well. you’re much bigger in person,” one says.

“is this your girlfriend?” she waves at you and you smile, trying to eat your meal like you’ve been here before.

“no but—,” you feel like he’s just stabbed you in the chest and twisted it. there’s a few more words exchanged after that but you can barely focus. obviously he said no, he’s not your boyfriend, you both have confirmed that all the time. but it’s always felt like a thing you say, not him. 

you feel like crying and you can’t justify why. everything has just been too much, the zipper of your dress is poking you in the back and you don’t like the wine bakugou chose for the table. you prefer your mixers, juice and liquor or the cheap wine your friends buy for the purpose of getting drunk. not to pair the fruity tones to your specific meal.

when bakugou asks if you still want to get ice cream, once you’re buckled in his car, you say you don’t feel too good.

“shit, d’you think it’s the food?” he asks you, squeezing your thigh before pulling out of the parking space.

“no i’ve got a headache, not sure where it’s come from,” you lie, facing the window. “would be best if i go home.”

bakugou notices the lack of we there. his plan was to ask you to be his girlfriend whilst you’re eating ice cream. the little local family owned shop near your apartment that you always drag him to because for some reason it closes late into the early morning. you’ve had many sugary kisses outside that shop, in the rickety blue seats as you force him to try a new flavour every time. 

“okay, baby,” he knows there’s something up with you, “we can watch a movie in bed, if you wanna? order in dessert.”

you hum, barely a response and bakugou racks his mind to find where this all started. he could tell you were nervous at the beginning which makes sense considering you’re not used to restaurants like that. you’re more mini skirt and little top than fancy long designer dresses, he knows this, but he thought the change would be fun. 

“you sure you’re okay? just the headache?” 

you force yourself to meet his eyes. you give a small smile, not linking your fingers with his like you usually do, “yes, katsuki. that’s all.”

bakugou’s completely sure he’s absolutely fucked it. the car ride home was practically silent, only replying back in short sentences, no witty comments from you like usual and you didn’t even make a joke about how hard he tried tonight. no usual comment about rich people have no taste or a laugh at the couple across from you who ordered everything on the menu for the sake of it.

he’s out of his suit now, in one of his t-shirts and basketball shorts in your bedroom as you wipe off your makeup. your hair is out of the style you had it in earlier and he knows it’s cheesy to say but he prefers you like this. even out of the tight dress and just in an oversized tee like usual.

he still wants to ask you to be his but currently, he feels exactly like the last time he mentioned it to you. outside of your world, here but not exactly welcomed. at least visibly, there’s signs of him around the room. his heroes weekly cover is on display on your magazine rack, the first one, in front of all the ones he purposely left in your apartment. it’s the one you took from his office and put there yourself. he had to travel back home to japan a few weeks ago and he brought you back a load of things but you keep the postcards he got you out on display. one is a drawing of a cat that you have framed and another is a line up of traditional japanese houses that you have standing up on your bookshelf. his favourite addition to your room is the photo booth strip of you both on your desk. you haven’t decided where to put it and he’s waiting.

there’s visible differences, which is exactly what he wanted but still, he’s not let inside your head.

you’re quieter since your roommate is sleeping next door, “i’m going to change in the bathroom. brush my teeth and wash up.”

bakugou fucking hates this.

he yanks you to him as he sits on your bed, grabbing your hand so you fall into his chest. 

“katsuki! my clothes—,”

your expensive second hand dress is pressed against his clean white t-shirt and bakugou tucks his chin in your breasts to look up at you.

“talk to me, baby,” he whines at you, “let me in. tell me you hated the place. too many fuckin’ forks on the table. it was a shit date. i’m sorry for the people that came to the table. explain why you didn’t like the waitress. somethin’.”

you look familiar, his yn with your bare face and your jewellery all taken off. once this dress is off, maybe he’ll get you back completely.

you sigh, you don’t know where to start but you register the pain and frustration in his ruby pupils. you would much rather roll in bed with him, have him kiss your thighs to sleep and wake up beside him in the morning.

but you’re partly annoyed at him and you hate to say it but for the first time ever, bakugou reminded you of your ex.

the dismissing your feelings, the comment about the food, choosing somewhere he likes instead of considering you and the women. allowing the flirting, the comments, him saying that you weren’t his girlfriend. which you’re not but…

“i’ll wash up and we can talk.”

bakugou grunts to himself, smacks his lips against each other in disappointment, “didn’t even say it wasn’t a shit date.”

you pull away from him, sighing, “hold on, i’ll be five minutes.”

if tonight couldn’t get any worse, your phone buzzes on the sink as you brush your teeth. you’ve shimmied out of your dress, even kicked it for good measure once it landed on the floor and pulled on your pjs. cotton shorts and one of katsuki’s t-shirts he’s left at yours.

you assume it’s a funny relatable video your friend has sent but the caption beside the notification feels as if you’re being strangled.

@/friend: Post from @/heronewsnow

@/friend: girl wtf is ur man doing

@/friend: i’m gonna murder him for you

you spit out the toothpaste, wiping your face of anything left over and take a breath. you’ve been in this situation before with your last boyfriend. you swore you would never be in it again but how the universe loves to laugh in your face. 

you tap the notification, your phone going straight to the post that your friend sent.

DYNAMIGHT SEEN WITH PINKY ON HIS TRIP HOME. TWO HEROES TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT?

the loud bold text from this hero news page is paired with a photo of them at a restaurant, much like the one he took you to today but across the world. bakugou is in his gorgeous black suit, while this hero, pinky, looks beautiful. she doesn’t look like she’s playing a part in her teal dress, she looks as if she belongs. she’s got her hand over his on the table as he laughs and her smile looks like it’s worth thousands.

you gulp, turning off your phone and placing it face down on the sink. you refuse to look at yourself in the mirror, you can already imagine the word idiot painted on your forehead.

you’ve been cheated on twice. go figure. if it even counts considering he’s not yours.

you walk back into your bedroom exhausted, finding katsuki under your covers reading the blurb of a book you left on your bedside table.

“you took ages in there,” he opens the duvet so you can slip in, “c’mon i wanna cuddle.”

you want to cry. you want to scream into your pillow and write off dating for the end of time. this is why you shouldn’t have let yourself get close to this man. tomorrow you’re throwing out his magazine covers, the new hand painted bowls he got you and you’re going to get your tool kit to take apart the advertisement at your nearest bus stop where dynamight is pictured half naked telling you to buy new underwear.

you really want to wrap yourself in his arms and have the night you were supposed to have together.

“you have to leave.”

“hah?” he blurts, though he doesn’t move, “the date wasn’t that fuckin’ bad was it?”

“i’m serious, katsuki. leave!” you screech, clenching your fists. the tears that have been dying to fall all evening finally do.

you spin away from him, taking deep breaths and wiping your eyes. you can’t let him see you cry. bakugou pounces up from your bed and he risks it all by placing his hands on your waist, your back to his chest.

“what the fuck is goin’ on with you?” he mumbles, leaning his cheek against your head. “why’re you cryin’? the date was shit, yeah? then talk to me.”

he went back to japan on a work trip, he told you he was on a work trip but he was on a date with a woman. another pro hero who looks perfect with him and fits his life, the girlfriend he’s supposed to have. 

the warmth of his chest is a comfort you need to learn to hate.

you step away from him, taking a deep breath. you decide to face him once you’re sure no tears will fall and his face breaks your heart. his fingers are twitching to touch you, but since you won’t let him, he anxiously rakes them through his hair.

your voice is scratching your throat, dry and raw, “i didn’t like the restaurant, i felt uncomfortable. the waitress was flirting with you, so were those women that wanted photos with you. i never got to finish a sentence we had so many distractions. i felt like an idiot, a child playing dress up in a world that wasn’t made for me. y-you told those girls i wasn’t your girlfriend and… and i know i’m not but it felt like shit.”

then you half laugh, it’s an awkward one, “the food was good though. better than my shitty frozen food.”

you sigh, rubbing your eyes and you’re not even finished.

“baby, yn, i just wanted to try somethin’ new for us, that was my bad. shoulda kept it to what we know,” he tries, “and i guess they were flirtin’ but i didn't do i back?”

you shake your head, “that’s not the point. i don’t want to be on a date and witness that. you should have shut them down from the beginning.”

“they’re fans, i can’t shut down every fan—,”

“but you can.”

“yn, c’mon now.” bakugou grits his teeth, “i’m sorry about that and i didn’t mean to sound like a dick when i was talkin’ about food.”

“you think i’m being sensitive? dramatic?” you offer because you rather just have the words out before he can throw them at you later.

“fuck no, today was a lot. everythin’ combined, it makes sense that what i said sounded like that.” he frowns, so understanding it annoys you more. 

you sigh obnoxiously and bakugou feels his blood boil. he knows when he’s fucked up but what was wrong with what he said? “what?! is that the wrong thing to say?”

“no it’s not!” you throw your hands up in the air.

“then what?” he presses and bakugou has to because he never presses you. “you never talk to me. i’m always walkin’ on fuckin’ eggshells tryin’ to figure out if i’m comin’ or goin’ with you. you decide you like me one day and the next you want me to fuck off. i’m sorry i wanted to impress you with an expensive restaurant. yes, i should have dealt with all the fans differently. i should have been more aware of how you’re feelin’ but you don’t tell me shit.”

his chest heaves, out of breath and now he’s started he can’t stop. “you’re… you’re willin’ to drag me along knowing how much you have me wrapped around your finger. i’ve been down from the first week i met you but i was careful not to be too much so i don’t scare you. it’s been months, fuckin’ months and you still won’t tell me why you won’t let me in. why you don’t want me the same way i want you.”

he’s careful not to shout, so his words keep wobbling in pitch. “i haven’t done anythin’ wrong but i’m payin’ for your exes goddamn mistakes!”

you don’t want to see where he’s coming from, face your own mistakes in your relationship with him. you know he’s right but today proved you guys wouldn’t even work together. it feels like oxygen is slowly leaving the room, your chest heaves while bakugou grits his teeth at you. you handle accusations the only way you know how, you throw one back to him.

“well i guess you don’t have to deal with me anymore.”

“what?”

he didn’t rant for you to walk away from him, he doesn’t want to leave you. 

“your trip back home, going on dates with heroes. you both look good together,” you scoff, “even when you take precautions, even though you’re not my boyfriend, it still feels like being cheated on.”

you step away from him, wiping your eyes before tears can fall. your heart beats against your chest like a drum and you just want him out of your space. you want to be curled up in his arms. you wish that you were a clean slate meeting him for the first time, perhaps the version of you that didn’t get your heartbroken but now you come to any lover after with precaution and warning.

“the fuck are you on about? what date?” bakugou spits, not bothering to keep his voice down for your roommate.

he towers over you and despite his burning annoyance at how terrible the day has become, he can’t help but feel bad. especially at how you’re unable to meet his eyes, how you hug around your body and clutch your phone tightly.

you’re tapping your foot like you’re too busy for this conversation but it’s just a nervous tick, “the hero accounts are talking about you going on a date with another hero back in japan. i’m not mad, we aren’t together.”

it’s true, you’re not mad. you’re devastated. your tiny whisper, “please leave, katsuki.” is a physical punch in his stomach.

“i didn’t go on a date. i met up with a friend, mina right? that’s who you’re talkin’ about?”

your breaths come out as little hiccups and he knows for a fact you hate that he’s perceiving you like this. you’re distraught, refusing to let him see a tear slip and whilst telling him to leave, you still want to hear what he has to say.

“pinky. that pink hero,” you reply quietly.

“baby, yn, listen,” he notices your jaw clench at the name but you glance up at him. your eyes are blood shot, sending him daggers.

“she’s my friend from school. we grew up together. we had a hero event, the one i texted you about and then we went out to eat after. it wasn’t no fuckin’ date,” bakugou keeps his voice levelled, risking it all by lifting his palm to your cheek.

you lean into it like a kitten, “then why is her hand over yours in the picture?”

you’re embarrassingly wailing at him, lips in a sad pout and you swore to yourself months ago you wouldn’t end up like this again in front of a man. how the mighty have fallen.

bakugou coos you gently, so tender when he brushes a tear from you cheek, “what picture, baby?”

he’s shocked when you unlock your phone and the picture you’re talking about is the first one on the screen. along with the stupid headline and yes, her hand over his.

bakugou grunts, then sighs.

you’re a firecracker, quick to pull his hand off your cheek but he’s faster yanking you into his chest so you can’t escape.

“let me go, you dick,” but you barely fight, resting your face between his pectorals as he sits his hand on your waist.

“i was talkin’ to her about you. how you don’t want me back and i’m obsessed. she laughed and felt bad for me so she was just comfortin’ me.” he says it slowly, speaking at your bookshelf. 

your room is coated in silence. about five seconds worth, before you look up at him from where he’s got you squashed.

“how am i supposed to believe you?”

bakugou rolls his eyes, running his pointer finger in circles on your lower back, “that’s all up to you, babe. have i ever lied to you? i’ve only ever been honest with you.”

the words fall out of your mouth before you can even register them.

with your cheek pressed against his chest, your arms wrapped around his waist and your eyes closed, you say it so fast it’s barely coherent. “my last boyfriend cheated on me while i was dating him. the whole time. i liked him for about a year before we made it official and he cheated. practically everyday.”

finally, an explanation, bakugou thinks. but it’s not as satisfying as he hoped it would be. he demands the burning rage to simmer, he’s not here to be angry for you, you’ve done enough of that over the years. he kisses your temple and sits down in your bed. he pulls you onto his lap and you’re grateful that you don’t have to maintain eye contact. 

“how’d you find out?”

you sigh, wiping your nose with his t-shirt, “i knew for a fact for two weeks but still continued seeing him. i saw texts on his phone, then i got dms from girls asking if i was his girlfriend because he was with them last night.”

he can’t help it, “i wanna murder him.”

“same,” you laugh wetly, running your finger down a vein in his forearm, “i still haven’t let it go, i still hate him.”

“so that’s why you’re so careful with me gettin’ close to you.”

“that’s why you’re paying for my exes mistakes,” you try to joke and bakugou throws his head back in a huff.

“i didn’t mean that, i was just—,”

“i’m sorry.” you blurt, pressing your thumb into the thick muscle in bakugou’s arm, “i know i’ve been difficult and you’ve always come back.”

bakugou doesn’t know how to accept your apology, without the niggling knowledge that you’ve been aware of how much pain you’ve caused him. he holds you tight against him, hand holding your thighs to him and his other around your back.

he takes a shaky breath. when he looks up, directly forward he notices a photo booth strip of you and him, the same one on your table. he forgot that you picked up two while he took just one. turns out you did find a home for the photo. the solo photo booth strip you had attached to your fairy lights above your wardrobe now is replaced with you and him.

the first includes his grumpy face frowning at the camera while you grin with a peace sign.

the second he’s somewhat happier, his arm around your shoulders, smirking at the camera while you knock your head with his.

the third is when you put your hand on his jaw so he faces you and you kissed him. your eyes are closed while he looks at you surprised for initiating.

the fourth and last is just you both smiling at each other, his hand over yours on his cheek.

bakugou knows now, finally featured all over your room, a part of your life, what he must do.

“i was going to ask you to be my girlfriend again today,” he sniffs, staring at the strip, “while we ate ice cream at the little place ‘round the corner.”

you half laugh, wiping your face with the bottom of your tshirt, “i thought as much.”

“would you have said yes?” he tests and he doesn’t mean for his grip on you to get tighter but he’s preparing for the slow burn through his body at the rejection.

“i…,” you breathe softly, “i think so? i want you to be my boyfriend but today was all over the place and it made me question things.”

bakugou’s already nodding before you finish your sentence. he picks you off his lap and stands up, running a large palm over his face.

“what? what’s wrong?” you blubber and for someone who was just begging him to leave, the pendulum has swung on the opposite side. telling him your demons, why you’re so hard to love is supposed to make him stay, kiss you to sleep and live happily ever after.

“i’m gonna go home,” bakugou says and you’ve never seen the pro hero defeated. not in his career, on those clips on the news or when he comes to you after a villain brawl. but now, you can tell. he’s reached his limit with you.

his eyes droop with tiredness, physically and mentally. there’s a crease between his eyebrows because of his constant frown tonight and he’s no longer fidgeting with his hands. once they’re off his face, he stuffs them in his pockets and looks away from you.

“but… but i want you to stay now,” and you don’t want to cry again but you can feel it, fuck you can feel the burn of your throat with every word.

“you’re still not sure about me. one date couldn’t have been enough to completely change your mind about me. i’ve been sure for months about you, with every-fuckin’-thing you’ve thrown at me,” he grunts, chewing his bottom lip. forcefully rubbing his forehead like his mind will soften after. nothing works, “i’m gonna go.”

he opens your wardrobe, pulling out the suit he wore earlier, perfectly hung up with a black cloak over it. then he grabs his phone off your bedside table.

panic takes over you, your breathing stuttering, your thoughts jumping to the extremes, your hands clutching anything for purchase. you sit up on your knees. “are we over? are you breaking up with me?”

that makes him pause. he feels like punching himself in the throat for making you sound how he imagined your ex boyfriend made you. katsuki doesn’t want to lose you, that’s the last thing he wants to do here but it might be necessary now.

“we’re over,” he mutters yet loud enough for you both to hear.

you freeze, slumping down onto your ass, “no… but i don’t want to be over.”

“you don’t know what you want yn. some days you want me, others you don’t. some days you’re okay with pretending i don’t exist and others you’re all over me,” bakugou looks at you, sunken into your mattress, tears pouring down your cheeks. “it’s not fuckin’ fair.”

“please don’t go,” you tremble. pleading for a man, you’d rather die than admit you’ve ever done this but bakugou katsuki is different. he’s always been different. that’s what scared you.

“i’ll come back to pick up my other stuff. but i’m leavin’ for now.” he nods at you. he’s surprised at how calm he feels, as if he’s finally making a decision with his best interests in mind. he’s taking the wheel here, for the first time he’s in control of where your relationship is heading. even if it’s in the burning fire. “goodbye, yn.”

“i’m not saying bye to you,” you wipe your eyes with the back of your hands. “i don’t want you to go.”

katsuki knows he shouldn’t, but he does anyway. he steps over to you, cups the back of your head with his hand and kisses the top. 

“bye,” he mumbles into your scalp, “you’ll always know where i am.”

back in his greyscale apartment. lacking life, lacking you.

with that bakugou leaves you alone in your bed and only when your front door clicks shut do you fall back onto your pillows. loud wails unleash out of your body and like you always do for each other, your roommate knocks on your door.

comments and reblogs are appreciated. I delete comments asking for the next part.

i feel like my heart was chipping away because you can really see the class dynamics here, and how uncomfortable and anxious reader was getting. that, along with reader's insecurities and how bakugo doesn't see where she's coming from. i think you pinned down every anxious thought so perfectly: noticing how the waitress was really dismissive and rude, thinking that the woman was making fun of her dress after complimenting, feeling like everything is so expensive and unfamiliar and just wanting to go home

the frozen food comment had me LIVIDDDDD. i know he didn't mean it like that but i fear i would've taken it the same way as well 😭

everything from there just hurt... LOL cause yes i do think bakugo has been really patient at the expense of him and deserves not to be strung along ... but also reader just confided something very vulnerable with him 😭 i thought it was going to be okay like they're comforting each other and going to talk it out and stuff but then he asked that question of whether we would've said yes ...

that whole scene was a movie, bkg looking at the photo strips and asking the question, then declaring that he was going to leave. brokeee my hearttttttt. makes me even sadder bc earlier reader said that she would've said yes if he was going to ask tn. i think the whole conversation just made me think that if they do end up together somehow someway in the future, alot of reassurance would be needed. that, or they just don't end up with each other ... 😭😭😭😭

greyscale

love this intro to their story and love love love bakugo's pov in this. him studying your space and noticing all the little trinkets... kicked my feet at "greyscale" mention. like truly what a perfect title to portray the vibes from the very start!! that reader brings all these different colors and aspects he's never known to his grey life!!!

their banter is so intriguing and omg the // “what? why’re you looking at me like that?” “looking like i did something wrong.” // JAKSHFKJAH LIKEEE I GET HERRR... I GET THE DEFENSIVENESS... I GETTT ITT and i know its so frustrating for bakugo looool GOSHHH this chapter hooked me in so hard!!!!!

vday

the yearning in this one hehehe. he is incredibly down bad for reader who is so nonchalant EEK. and this part: // You: excited to see you. he doesn’t get much from you, like you’re precious with the words you choose for him to hear. but he takes those four and holds it close to his heart. // GAHHHH MY HEART

burnout

what an interesting chapter to see how they deal when the other one is upset!!! i feel like we get more into a glimpse of why bakugo may be drawn to reader bc she can be direct in her own way!! i like that she tries her best to be there for him even tho it confuses the hell out of him lmaoooo. her jealousy spike was also very interesting to see here as well!!

OK but it was in this chapter where what i mentioned about your writing -- with the seamless details of their characters -- really touched me here!! something about this // “work’s been shit.” he grunts, staring straight forward at your old fireplace that’s surrounded by candles you and your friends have collected. there’s also a pile of books beside it that he’s going to move later. fire hazard. // LIKE ITS SO HARD TO EXPLAIN WHY I LOVE THIS PARAGRAPH SO MUCH BUT

the way you understand and portray his general character of being observant and careful. that "he's going to move it later" bc "fire hazard"... a simple sentence that speaks volumes in my eyes ..... it's very straight to the point without fluff, which is just so like him !!!

-360

what a flirty and fun chapter !!! hehe i loved seeing his possessive side and they're so sexy together without trying to be LOL

ugh and the fact that he says he'll drop off reader's friends too??? SWOONING

lunchbreak

VERY SEXY. VERY FUN. the idea of lounging around in his apartment while he is off at work. then coming to you when he gets the chance. OUGHHHHH. THE SMUT WAS DELICIOUSSSS

snooping

i think out of all the chapters, this might've been my favorite one. mainly because after all we've seen with bakugo's yearning and desperation, it feels like such a treat to see reader become so curious and interested about bakugo himself!! studying his space like he did hers... it brings me back to the first chapter where he's intaking all these aspects of her life, and she's doing the same here!!!!

love how the chapter is titled snooping but clearly she is very open and doesn't care that he knows that she's snooping LOL. i adore that energy honestly. nothing to hide!!! and bakugo must be so happy to see that she's interested in general LOL!!

oh when she finds the photo of her TT UGHHH MY HEART HE IS JUST SO IN LOVEEEE. and the ending scene of bakugo finding you asleep on his sofa in his blanket and the cover on the table .... so boyfren girlfren

i love the mix of angst and smut KEKE!! thank you for writing this luna!!!! THIS IS SO WONDERFUL

“what?” he grunts, eyes darting away from his phone to sweep over your face.

another beat of silence passes between you, ad-libbed by the wail of the wind and its horrible friend, the rain.

you don’t look up and you don’t budge from your place either —  curled up against the sweltering heat of katsuki’s chest, cheek pressed into his pec while your gaze sits on the tv playing a random show neither of you care for. the position is intimate, at least that’s what bakugou deems it to be, as for two people who claim to be just friends, but it’s normal for you both— for you on days where your mood matches the weather, and sometimes not. 

for years, you’ve tread a careful line. your friends think you should be dating and the two of you laugh it off with shoulders that jug up and down — you call katsuki a brother and push him away, square in the chest but in an instant you’d melt in his arms as soon as he called you baby. you’ve always been the blonde’s baby, his girl, his favourite. every room you find yourselves in, his glimmering ruby eyes always find themselves on you, instantly and his hand sits a little too low at the small of your back in a way that almost seems possessive. you belong to him, everybody around you knows that. kirishima wasn’t allowed to kiss you when dared during a game of ‘ring of fire’ and kaminari got the silent testament for an entire week after driving you home from a party. 

there was an unspoken rule fuelled by unspoken feelings — you were untouchable to anyone that wasn’t him. like an invisible claim laid across your skin, a branding of some sorts, only he was allowed to take care of you. to kiss the crown of your head like it’d erase all the bad feelings swirling around in it. to make a home out of your own, katsuki’s shirts in your draws and spare hero suits in the back of your wardrobe because you never have the heart to send him back to his apartment after he comes over to keep you company. 

what exists within the space the two of you occupy could be considered something a little more than friendship, but always treated as less. the blonde has a brave soul, he’s hardly ever scared but his heart is weak around you. races like it’s going to burst and he’s going to bleed out between your fingertips. you’re not fully katsuki’s — your eyes often wander and your heart strays alongside them, he knows you’ll slip away every time, find your way into the arms of someone new. someone that doesn’t know you the way he does. treat you the way he would. 

your lashes flutter against the black fabric of katsuki’s shirt like angel kisses and he holds his breath— waiting for you to speak. “baby…” he murmurs, all soft and coaxing. syllables caught on the edge of the familiar rasp to his voice, the one that makes your limbs feel warm and eyes droop like they’re heavy. it’s comforting, a tool used to pry you open like a fork to a stubborn tin can. 

“i wish someone loved me,” you repeat, shy and unmoving still. it’s never been hard to be honest with katsuki, but every time you feel like this — a lost cause destined to be alone, it feels more difficult. you’re sure you come across as a broken record, a song on a radio everyone’s itching to turn off — but katsuki always plays your tune loud. he listens when it counts. that’s why he’s your best friend. “everyone we know is in love or has experienced it. i want to be loved that way, i want things to work out at least once.” you explain in a dreary tone, despite the cuddles and warmth bakugou had given to you when found you sobbing in the cold rain. 

shindou, your last fling, had dumped you over text today. heartbreak had always brought you back to katsuki. 

you always come back to bakugou whenever your heart’s been torn in two and you need something familiar to bring you back from evil thoughts and insecurities. he hates that— that you run into his arms as if you haven’t just been in another’s and what katsuki hates even more is himself for letting you do that. letting you use him to soothe the parts of your soul that crave to be cared for when he’s standing right there. you treat yourself like you’re unlovable but the man adores you more than anything he’s ever known.

there isn’t a thing katsuki bakugou wouldn’t do for you— to keep you smiling, to keep you safe and sound. he’d rip stars and the moon from the sky for you. live and breathe air, die for you but you’re blinded, oblivious to him and how much he loves you. the very feeling makes him burn from the inside out, it’s so bad that he can feel his organs flake with every breath that he takes. withering into ash. the angst, the pain of watching you suffer within yourself decaying bakugou’s lungs, the very pair that breathes his love for you. 

“the fuck are you on about?” he curses without meaning to, his voice carrying the faintest tone of hurt as he shifts underneath you on the couch.  bakugou’s phone is tucked away now, vermillion eyes focused on reading you while his arm on your waist loosens. 

you tut, hiding your own hurt with a laugh as if what you say doesn’t matter to him. “of course you wouldn’t get it, the great katsuki bakugou doesn’t deal with things as tender as love,” you’re not trying to be mean, take a jab where he’s sensitive and the sleeve covering his heart slips, revealing it just a little. you just… have no idea. no clue about the depth of adoration he holds for you. it’s more than the love you hold for a dear friend, it’s the kind of love that sits like a glass paperweight on your chest — heavy and unbearably beautiful, dangerous in the sense that it’ll send shards of unforgiving glass piercing through one of the vital organs you need to stay alive.

katsuki shies away from love because it burns like the sun on a blastingly hot day — burning at the shield he calls his thick skin, until it's scarred and uneven, worn down by missed opportunities to protect himself. tell you how he really feels.

so he does know about all the troubles of love. he really does. 

maybe even more so than you. 

it hurts, worse than a paper cut more than a stab wound because bakugou’s been in love with you for so long he can hardly remember how he felt about you before. back when you were teenagers and all that adrenaline in his veins, that survival instinct, kept him from thinking clearly. he didn’t know what it was back then, but he sure as hell knows that it was love now. he can’t remember anything aside from wanting to drown in you, doesn’t know what it was like to be around you before he knew the tune of your laugh off by heart and how many crinkles you had under your eyes when you smile and how you like your tea in the morning. he remembered stupid things like how you hate to eat broccoli florets and the name of your first cat that ran away when you were small. 

the details everyone forgets or skips over during the rush of first dates and talking stages love ingrained on katsuki’s heart like an internal tattoo he doesn’t remember getting.

“you dunno know what you’re talkin’ about.” bakugou grunts, hot and low, doing his best to hide the hurt that he feels right alongside you. 

your head lifts from his plush chest, eyes narrowed at your friend, and even though they’re puffy and lined with red you still manage to glare at him. he never snaps at you, even when you’re mopey and annoying — his words never cut you like they’ve done just now, usually wrapped in silk and cushioned by care. “actually katsuki,” you huff back at him, making the blonde roll his own eyes. “i think i would, considering it’s my own love life.” 

“the love life where you can’t seem to find anyone who loves you, huh?” 

the words slip out like sand through fingers before katsuki can stop them. sarcastic, mean in tone, spoken in a manner that he knows will hurt your feelings. his entire body tenses, winced like he’s the one about to be struck by a weapon or a heavy fist — leaving behind an open wound sure to scar. 

a beat passes, you speak but it’s quiet. not angry and loud, but quiet and on the defence. “what’s that supposed to mean?” 

“i just… ‘m just repeating what i heard,” the blonde shrugs vaguely — averting the heat from your stare. he doesn’t mean to rub salt into a cut that’s clearly still fresh, make it sting or cause you any pain. but katsuki’s been sitting here bleeding out beside you for goodness knows how long, you’ve no idea how it feels. to watch you prance about with someone else, much like pouring pure acid onto his very exposed heart. “you act like no one cares about you.”

“i know that people do just… not in the way that i want. they… it’s always platonic. it’s always friendly. never anything more than… on the cusp of something. i—” you fire back, voice wobbling with the threat of tears, but then you close up. shut down. there’s no point explaining to someone who doesn’t know what it’s like to be unnoticed. to be the one who doesn’t get flirted with or called pretty by strangers or even looked at as someone who deserves long term. there’s been too many times and instances where you’ve grown hopeful, been almost certain that this time you’d be chosen… it’s embarrassing. to be the only one never kissed, or liked or longed for. pressing your lips into a thin line, you hum. “you know sometimes, katsuki, you can be such an asshole. you don’t always have to say something.”  

you shift away from bakugou’s line of vision, hiding your hot face though he feels your bottom lip tremble against his chest some more. “fuck, damn it. you know that’s not what i meant—” the blonde scrambles to fix his mistake, because if there’s anything worse than seeing you cry it’s being the reason for you to cry. he’s seen it happen time and time again, over too many people to count and he’ll be damned if he makes it onto that list. “c’mon, baby. you know that.” 

you tilt your head up now, borderline snotty and puffy eyed. “then why’d you say it? you know i wasn’t trying to take a jab at our friendship. the way i love you is different to how someone loves their partner,” you say carefully, trying to express that you really truly appreciate every time he’s extended comfort or welcomed you home without a word after getting your heart broken. “i know i’m enough, it doesn’t feel like it though.” 

those are loaded questions and statements and you don’t even realise it. katsuki has his reasoning, he’s a man who’s learned to choose his words carefully, consider the weight behind them every single time. so what did he mean this time? the truth lies heavy metal on his tongue, everything he’s held back from you now hanging over the very edge. anything could set you off and bakugou feels like he’s walking on landmines. if you really knew what he meant, your friendship, everything you’d ever had would be blonde to smithereens within seconds.

“nothin’,” he says, sweeping his emotions under the rug like it really is nothing. like what he has to say doesn’t mean anything. “it’s nothing. you’re right. it’s different.  didn’t mean to upset you.” 

and it’s so annoying, how quick he is to shut you out as though you can’t read him plain as day and haven’t torn yourself to pieces in front of him before. over the years, you’ve gone familiar with the twitch in his brows or the purse in his lips, the way he frowns when he’s thinking too deeply or blinks twice before being unabashedly honest. you know kacchan, read the secrets between every micro expression on his face and yet.. something is always missing. “katsuki.”  you snap, voice strained and scraggly with cold. “i know you, i can tell by the look on your face. you wanna tell me i’m being dumb, stupid for being so hung up on this guy...” you reach upwards, paws sinking into his cheeks as you angle his head down to look at you. “if you have something to say to me, then you should just say it.” 

the blonde shrugs you off, yet his warm palms keep you steady on his lap. “come off it, alright?” his tone is rough, slightly aggressive in the way that a dog barks without its bite. he’d never direct any true anger towards you, not really, so it’s more like a tender warning that gets you not to push too far. 

“tell me.” 

“no.” 

“katsuki,” you prod and pry. “just tell me.” 

“nah.” he presses his lips into a thin line, dodging your intense and investigative stare.

“tell me—”

“fuck, i’m fucking in love with you, okay?” the chord that tethers all rationality to his soul finally snaps and in an instant, the atmosphere changes. the room, heavy with the weight of your tears and angst is suddenly blasted with heat — raw and unfiltered, the kind that’s coloured with oranges and bright reds, the kind that’s so hot your blood has no choice but to burn with emotion. you’re surprised, heart beating fast though katsuki’s pulse rate might even be one for medical concern. “and i hate how it makes me feel. like i wanna crawl out of my own fuckin’ skin and die every time you give your heart away to someone else. someone who’s not me.” you feel his own heart thump quickly beneath the weight of your palms pressed against his chest — missing his warmth as katsuki shifts to sit up, taking his sweaty hands through his unruly blonde locks as though he’s trying to scrape the thought of you, loving you, from his mind. 

“i have loved you. me. i have when ‘no one’ else has!”

katsuki quivers, you’ve never seen him shake like that. overcome and not angry but… aching. like you’ve inflicted some kind of wound on him. he’s right there beside you in that moment, bleeding crimson onto your hands because in this battle of love, you’re not the only person who’s been terribly hurt. katsuki hurts too, you come to realise. “time after time, it’s some fuck who doesn’t deserve you and i hate how ‘m always here waiting for you to want me, to look at me,” he’s looking everywhere but you, as if the expression of confusion carved into your features will send him over the edge. he flinches away from any contact you try to make, shrinking back to his end of the couch. you can’t remember the last time katsuki bakugou looked… small. “but, fuck, i hate myself more for taking it. listening to it. letting you come over to talk about other guys even though you’re breakin’ my heart.”

word vomit rises up like actual bile on his tongue, grossly splayed out between you both in shades of green jealously and squeamish grey for his pain. it’s ugly and raw, bitter one might even say… but katsuki’s confession is true. “you say that no one loves you, but god damn it,” he pauses, the words tight and knotted in his throat “i do. i love you, so much and it’s killin’ me. can’t you see?”

“katsuki i…” you sit up now — spine straight, crowded at your own end of the couch away from the warmth bakugou provides. your skin crawls without him nearby to soothe you… but everything that he’s said. it terrifies you. “i know everything about you so how come… how come i didn’t know about this?”

scoffing to himself, katsuki brings his knees to his chest — folding his arms over them so he can hide his face between barricades of muscle. it’s almost endearing, how childlike and shy he’s become after pouring his heart out to you. “how could you?” comes his whisper, low and gravelly as though his ranting has rubbed his throat raw. “i sat back ‘n watched you fall in love with people for years. how could i think i had a chance.”

“then why now? why say anything at all now? is it because… you feel sorry for me?” casting your mind's eye back to previous relationships or situationships, you know now that they were never the right guys. never good ones or people who cared for your tender heart. they offered you no kindness in the way that katsuki did, pressing kisses to your wounds and sweet words as bandaids to your broken heart. you’ve been a mess, been desperate for love that you’d missed what you could have had… and yet. it’s hard to believe that katsuki would even want you, truly, after watching what a mess love made of you. he simply let you drown, rather than reach out and pull you to the surface. it could be another simple lie, a string of soft praises to get you to feel better. “you don’t have to pretend—”

you hug yourself closer, making yourself small opposite him too.

a look of incredulous offence flashes across dynamight’s features — hot, bubbling under the skin until he’s flushed. “why the fuck would i —? shit, you don’t get it do you?” katsuki murmurs, casting his carmine gaze your way — burning, desire and love and any other adoring emotion swirling between the brownish flecks that dot his eyes. “i want you. i love you. every time you stumble into the arms of someone else that ain’t me…. it damn near kills me, alright? can’t stand it any longer.”

“but why… why me? i’m not…” you’re damaged and you’re broken. used, never kept, only toyed with. how could he want someone like you when you’ve only ever shown hom the parts of you that are a mess. tears and shattered pieces like a glass vase thrown to the floor and splintered. you’ve got nothing to offer since your glass is half empty — your light and your life sipped away from strangers wanting nothing more than a pass at your body rather than a crack at your heart.

“why wouldn’t it be you?” katsuki quips before you can even dare finish the thought. “i’ve seen you at your lowest and you’ve seen me at mine. i’ve never cared if its been ugly, never once turned you away. you know that. i stay because even now, when you’re fucking heartbroken i still want you. i’d do over every moment in my life if it meant being here beside you, friend or more.”

a rough palm reaches your way, all war-torn and scared and only intent on holding you close. your skin prickles at the first contact, a hand on your thigh not meant to mean anything sexual — just a warm buzz that’s almost comforting. the tension in your body melts, your shoulders ease just a touch and the earnestness seeping through katsuki’s pores seeps through the barrier of your flesh. 

“‘m not asking for you to love me back. not yet. not if you can’t.” he admits, his voice the colour of sunken roses, dark red petals that flake between your fingertips. delicate. precious. something to be preserved. “i’m just askin’ for you to see me waitin’, to not look the other way when i hold my heart out to you.” 

you don’t move, you don’t flinch. your heart beat stops and you also stop breathing. but you feel it, the missing piece to the puzzle that connects all four chambers. katsuki, loving you clearly. “i don’t know if i deserve you, though…”

“you do. you deserve everything.” he doesn’t snap, simply presses into you firmly. as if he can push his honesty into your being and let it wrap around you like a warm hug. katsuki’s eyes flash with truth that sits pretty amongst the ruby in them, his heart bursts out from his open sleeve, he could never ever lie to you. “i’ve loved you when no one else has. even yourself. i’ll keep loving you until you do. i always will.”

“do you promise?” 

it’s not a grand confession, a sudden admittance of feelings that were always lingering and always there. you’ve been hurt before, and he needs to give you time. katsuki reaches for your shoulder — pulling you into him, his head atop yours in an awkward display of affection, arms wrapping around you as the pair of you crouch on the couch. he squeezes you close. just once to check that you’re really here, in this with him.

bakugou’s quick to speak. desperate. earnest. his voice stays low, shaded with dark and burnt oranges and colours that burn away the frayed edges of your soul. make you feel uniform again. “have i ever broken one?”

“no.” you murmur gently, wistfully. “let’s make another?” 

“what will it be?” the blonde asks, drawing back only just to let his longing gaze flicker over his face. to see it in your face, the answer you’re going to give him.

the one he’s always wanted. one he yearned and dreamed so achingly for.

“you promise to let me be the one who loves you, when i’m finally done learning how to love myself back.” 

in a wordless response — bakugou holds out his pinkie, a small dainty skill contrasting against the sharp slope of his features. you link it with your own, strong and firm. 

“deal?” he says.

you smile gracefully in return, your expression reminiscent of a sun ray bursting from between dark clouds whilst the rain settles outside. “deal.”

end. reblogs and comments are always appreciated! just liking doesn't do anything. so leave a comment to motivate this writer if you'd like to see more!!

first, the way you set the scene is so beautiful. so beautiful and sorrowful. starting with such a heartbreaking line // “i wish there was at least one person who loved me.” // TT and the poetic imagery with the rain. it immediately wraps us into this intimate yet somber mood between katsuki and reader. and to me, this line especially ... // ice cold water drools down the panes like they’ve taken the shape of the skyline’s tears // ..... just wonderful.

oh katsuki ... this little song and dance you two do --// there was an unspoken rule fuelled by unspoken feelings — you were untouchable to anyone that wasn’t him. // knowing that they're just friends right now makes this so... OUGHHH. the unspoken claim. everyone knowing that you two hold a special place in each other's hearts. the YEARNNN. the way you depict KATSUKI's YEARNNN. my heart is breaking like he is so in love and reader is sniping him at every turn rn

okay but that brings me to reader thoughh :( my heart goes out to her because insecurities can be such an evil thing. it's hard to notice how loved we are when we feel so alone. this conversation between her and katsuki is very raw and tense and vulnerable and .,,, in the end, they are both individuals who are hurt and just trying to do their best *Sniffs*

the confession sceeeeene TT oh he loves you so very much. always wants what's best for you and wants to show/give you the love that you deserve. // “i’ve loved you when no one else has. even yourself. i’ll keep loving you until you do. i always will.” // !!!!! TEARS IN MY EYES

and for him to still respect your boundaries after confessing... to be clear with his heart but also patient and not forcing expectations on you.... Man of the Year. like that is Him.

i think the ending was indeed a very comforting one. i love how it focuses on how loving yourself and treating yourself kindly should always come first

"here," you say, reaching out your hand to block the wind. he gives you a grateful smile and flicks the lighter again; the flame blooms into the night air and the end of the cigarette catches. as he inhales, the end of the cigarette burns. smoke furls around his face. you move your hand.

"not usually." his eyes widen when he realizes you're answering his earlier question.

"oh, i'm sorry! i can move over there–"

"i said not usually," you interject, grabbing his sleeve before he tries to leave again. "besides, you can smoke, it's fine."

he looks a little sheepish. still, he takes another drag from the cigarette, letting the smoke fill his lungs before he exhales with a little sigh, aiming away from your face. "i know it's a bad habit."

standing there in his white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, you wonder if he's cold. when he shifts his hand to drag the cig, the network of scars lining his skin catch in the light of the streetlamp and the neon of the bar signs. he looks sexy like this – the subtly guilty look on his face is doing something to you.

"you don't really seem like the type..."–hesitantly–"i wouldn't... i probably wouldn't have you pegged for a smoker, if you'd asked me."

"oh! i'm not a smoker," he says confidently. then takes another hit. "just someone who smokes sometimes."

"ahhh, so we're splitting hairs, then?"

he laughs, a real one that shakes his shoulders and makes him cough at the end. "hmm..." he muses. "you've got me there, i guess. but i meant–well, i guess it really is splitting hairs–but i meant that i don't smoke first thing in the morning, or even every day. just sometimes after a long day. or when i'm out like this."

you crack a smile. "so even a goody-two shoes like you has a little edge, huh?"

you're teasing, baiting. it feels exciting, getting a glimpse into his inner world like this. izuku has always been a little hard to pin down. you think you know someone, and then you find out that on nights like tonight, they like to smoke cigarettes outside of dingy bars after work.

this feeling is addictive. you want to know more. what makes him tick?watching the blush creep up his neck at your words is more satisfying than you thought it would be.

what else could you say to fluster him? probably anything – if there's one thing you know about izuku, it's that he flusters easily.

"oh, i don't know about edge..." he laughs nervously. before, the cigarette looked so natural between his fingers, but now he holds it like it might explode. you get the feeling he isn't used to being analyzed like this, more used to the inverse.

"mm, i don't know!" you sing. "there's more to izuku midoriya than meets the eye, huh?"

"of course there is."

he sounds older when he says it, like someone who's lived several lifetimes. he drags the cigarette. then cracks a smile.

"don't–ah–would you mind keeping it between us? it's not a big deal or anything, but i think that aizawa–"

you lean your shoulder against the wall of the bar and pat his chest. "your secret is safe with me, midoriya."

"um, thank yo–"

"can i have a hit?"

he eyes you carefully. "i thought you said you didn't smoke?" the comment earns him an eye roll.

"i said usually. but hey"–you pluck the cigarette from between his fingers and hold it to your mouth–"when in rome, right?"

"well, you shouldn't just because..." he trails off, watching closely as you put the cigarette between your lips and take a small hit. your eyes are locked on his. when you exhale, it's in his direction with a smirk. he shakes his head a little in amusement, but doesn't wave the cloud away.

he looks pretty through the smoke. the light's filtered through the haze and it washes his features in a pleasant glow. you feel so good when he looks at you.

you're a little dizzy, but the good kind. hard to tell if it's because of the nicotine or because of him. the cigarette dangles haphazardly between your fingers and you gaze at it for a second before handing it over.

"thanks."

"sure..." he murmurs, leaning against the wall to mimic your posture. he's close. really close. is that on purpose, or did he misjudge where on the wall he should lean?

down the street, an argument breaks out into the evening, but it sounds far enough away to be harmless enough. he still turns his head to check the scene, but he doesn't pull away from the wall, and when he registers it's nothing he looks right back at your face. you're not so chilled now that he's in your space. there's an invisible shield between you and the rest of the world – behind it you two are hidden from perception. everyone who walks by ignores you, and you ignore them.

"so..." he starts, teasing. "you've got a little edge too, then?"

"haha, very funny."

"i am funny sometimes!"

even though you're grinning, you say, "i'll believe it when i see it."

the cigarette burns in his hand, half forgotten between you. his knee nudges against yours, and you let it. someone changes the music inside the bar to an old jazz song, and it floods the air. another addition to the soundtrack of this moment. the music warms you up even further. the chill in the air has been forgotten now, and the street seems to be washed in a dreamy glow.

"you're funny," he says. and after a beat, "and pretty."

your head tips against the wall. he's still staring, swallowing hard when your lips curve into your most winning, genuine smile. you sure know how to tug at izuku's heartstrings. he's close enough now that you can see the separation between his eyelashes and count the freckles on his cheeks.

something so sexy about a man who shrinks down to look you in the eye.

he makes the kind of eye contact that seems to strip you down, not just sexually, but intimately. when he stares at you like this it makes your mouth dry. almost too much, but you can't look away.

he drags the cigarette again. then his eyes flick to your lips again. "do you, uh... do you want another hit? before i put it out."

"yeah." you make absolutely no move to reach for the cigarette, instead crossing your arms over your chest.

"okay..."

his next move is slow, methodical, but solid. like he's already thought about it and is finally giving in to the desire. one of his hands comes up to steady your face, grasping at your jaw so gently. the other brings the cigarette up to your lips. he briefly brushes his thumb over them before holding the cigarette in a position that allows you to lean forward ever so slightly and suck in the last hit. it's burned down significantly, giving him little room to hold it. your pout brushes against his fingers again when you wrap your lips around the end. and still he stares. and still you stare back.

finally, he breaks the the silence. "good?" you nod and he pulls the hand with the cigarette back, puts it out by pinching the cherry off the end. he slips the butt into his pocket, to be thrown away inside. the hand on your jaw stays firmly in it's place. he swallows thickly again.

"can i kiss you?"

you press into him now, hands coming up to clasp around his neck. the hand that held the cigarette finds your waist instantly.

"i'm afraid i'll taste like cigarettes," you whisper, a surreptitious edge to your tone. you play with a strand of hair at the base of his neck and nudge his nose with your own.

"that's okay," he whispers back. you can smell the smoke on his breath, and the scent of his shampoo and the musk of the day. your lips are less than a breath away, so close you can practically taste him already. "so will i."

"I am the queen, and what I say goes!" she pointed to you and Katsuki. "Sissy will be the princess and you will be our royal guard, Katsu!"

You chuckle. "Isn't the older sister supposed to be queen?"

She does her best impression of a royal laugh, projecting her voice theatrically. "Not in my land! It's my kingdom and if you don't like it, I'll send you to the brig!"

"You're confusin' pirates 'n princesses again,” Katsuki taunts playfully.

She stomps her foot on the slide. “Silence in my kingdom! Izu will be my knight!”

Katsuki pouts. “Hey! Why don’t I get to be the knight?!’

“Cause I say so! You’re the royal guard cause you’re tough. Izu is the knight because he’s brave!”

You can’t help but let out a loud ‘hah!’ at her comment. Your sister never failed to push Katsuki in the cutest ways. He probably was thankful to be an only child whenever you guys would go home for the day.

Katsuki huffs at her declaration, taking the challenge with stride. “Fine! I’ll show you who’s tough and be the best dang guard in the whole world.”

“Do I get a cool set of armor, queen?” Izuku asks, bouncing up and down at the bottom of the slide.

“Of course! Only the best armor and ponies for my royal kingdom.”

She sits and pushes herself down the metal slide, rocketing off the edge past Izuku and barreling toward Katsuki. She trucks into him at full force — but, being small, that force isn’t much for him to withstand.

“What the heck was that for?!” he yells while catching her before she hits the wood chips.

“A test of your toughness, Katsu! And you passed! You’re deserving of a spot in my kingdom,” she giggles, mashing his cheeks together with her tiny palms. He protests her closeness and tries to fight her off, setting her feet back on the ground while she’s wiggling in his hold. Watching the two of them act like siblings themselves always made you feel so warm and fuzzy inside, knowing your two closest friends also adored your sister as much as you did.

You meander over to grab her from him. “Alright, I think you made your point, queen. Your guard and knight have other duties to get to.”

She waves goodbye to the boys over her shoulder as the two of you stroll home for dinner. She gleefully remarks how cool they are and that she can’t wait to marry them someday.

You can’t help but giggle at the thought. “Both of them? Wow, all to yourself, huh?”

She pouts and whips her head upward. “No, sissy! We both get one!”

”Oh yeah? Because you’re the queen of the kingdom, you get to pick?”

“That’s right! They’ll have to fight to see who gets to pick you!”

You roll your eyes, shaking your head at the thought. You’re only ten years old, the thought of boys fighting over you was hilarious.

”Promise not to tell Izu, but I think Katsu would win that fight,” she whispers, tugging on your hand to get you to lean over closer to her face. “He’s taller and faster!”

The thought of marrying Katsuki flashes in your mind. You have zero clue what that even looks like, but you imagine him bringing you flowers on the playground or giving you a bite of his ice cream. A blush creeps over your cheeks and nose at the thought. Your sister catches your reaction and gasps dramatically.

“You like Katsu?!” she exclaims.

You shush her. “No! Don’t go yelling that!”

That’s a big fat lie. You liked him a lot, he was your favorite person, but you’re kids.

It’s just a harmless crush.

───

An Enchanted Afternoon: Elementary School

A week later, the four of you returned to the playground after school. Snacks from your pantry in hand, the bunch of you sit on the swing set to eat. Your sister seemed extremely eager today, more so than usual. Once you all finished eating, she demanded your attention.

"Gather 'round! Your queen summons you," she declares, arms raised above her head. You and the boys huddle around her.

"Katsu, go fetch flowers!" she orders as she points to a nearby patch of grass. "Zuzu, clear out the sandbox of any villagers."

There wasn't anyone else here today, so that job was easily done. Izuku doesn't say anything and smiles as he heads over to the sandbox as ordered. Katsuki is confused, nose scrunched and arms crossed.

"Why do I need to get flowers?" he asks, tapping his foot in the wood chips.

"Do you dare defy your queen?!" she shouts, grinning wickedly. He obliges, sauntering over to the grass to find a few spare daisies.

"What's all this for?" you ask, genuinely curious to her plans. She doesn’t answer you as she grabs you by the wrist, dragging you over to the sandbox.

A few minutes later, Katsuki comes back with a handful of daisies, picked and pruned clean of any dirt and weeds. Izuku stands on the edge of the sandbox patiently.

”Perfect! Katsu, Sissy, please approach your queen.”

You play along and stand in front of her with Katsuki. It’s amusing how small she is in comparison to the two of you, easily shadowing over her figure.

“With my knight as witness, I give the blessing to the princess and royal guard to be married forever!” she exclaims, waving her hands around to mimic casting a magic spell.

You're pretty sure she got that line from a princess movie, but that doesn't make the sentiment any less adorable. You begin to chuckle to yourself, smiling ear to ear before turning toward Katsuki. You're expecting him to be disgusted, repulsed by something so sickly sweet, but are shocked to see him standing with the flowers outstretched in your direction. He's biting his bottom lip and avoiding eye contact by staring directly at your feet.

"H-here," he whispers meekly, pushing the flowers into your hands. You've never seen him so shy before — that's usually Izuku's demeanor. His unexpected affection makes your little heart flutter in your chest.

"Thank you 'Suki," is all you can muster up the courage to say, your mind running blank on the right thing to say. It's just an imaginary scenario. It's not real, not like you're actually marrying him. Katsuki exhales, turning his back to you to hide his strawberry colored cheeks.

"Now you're together forever!" you sister raves, dancing on her tip toes with satisfaction.

Maybe that was the moment she bound you two together with some unknown magical force, or it was a mere coincidence. The sappy part of your young brain believed in fairytales and chose to believe she was weaving your golden string to him, binding you two for life.

───

Leftovers: Middle School

”Yo, brats! Come eat already so I can get the hell outta here,” Katsuki called from your doorway. He’d come by with leftovers from his mom for you and your sister, since your own mom was working later that day. The two of you were still…friends? You weren’t sure. Being in seventh grade and all, he started acting like you weren’t cool enough for him. He did the same to Izuku, starting to ditch the two of you for other kids in class to hang out with at lunch or walk home with. Did it hurt your feelings? Absolutely. But you didn’t own him, he was allowed to have other friends, even if it did suck to see him less outside of class.

“Coming!” you called back, skipping down the hallway with your sister in tow. She happily ran into the entryway, hugging Katsuki by the waist. She was taller now, but still much smaller than him as a fourth grader.

“Hiya Katsu!” she beamed up at him, rubbing her face against his uniform jacket.

He grunted, uncomfortable with her sudden affection and poking her in the forehead to release her grip. “Let go, squirt!”

He turned his attention to you as your sister finally let go of him. “Here, take these. I gotta get to practice.”

”Thank you! Tell your mom we said hi.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

You hand the containers to your sister as she wanders off to the table. Before Katsuki opens the door, you tap him on the shoulder.

“Hey, are you alright?”

He scoffs at your question. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You just seem distant lately. Wanna come by sometime for a movie marathon?” you ask, tilting your head and giving him a warm smile.

“We’re not kids anymore. Got better stuff to do.”

Ouch, that stung. Your smile fades away as you reply. “Well…I know. I just miss hanging out with you.”

“You have Deku an’ that other group of bitches you hang out with, ya don’t need me.” His harsh comment has notes of jealousy intertwined in his words. He goes to put his hand on the door again before you take a step forward to stop him.

“Kat, they’re not a replacement for you. You’ve got your own friends now too since you’re on the soccer team. You’re saying we can’t hang out 'cause we have different friends?”

He glares at you before pushing past you and pulling on the front door.

“Hey!” your sister shouts from the dining area. “Katsu, that’s not nice. My royal guard doesn't act like that!” She’s always thought of Katsuki as a guard since your elementary school playground days.

“Cut the shit! We’re not kids anymore!” Katsuki rebuttals with a growl of frustration.

He makes eye contact with you. “We’ve grown apart, end of fuckin’ story. Get over it.”

He slams your front door closed and leaves you standing in the entryway, your eyes stinging from the urge to cry. You feel a small gust of wind rush by as your sister is sprinting to the door, throwing it open and running outside without shoes on.

“Hey!” She calls after Katsuki again. “Get your butt back here, Katsu!”

He turns on his heel. “Hah?!”

She stomps on the ground, fists balled at her sides. “Apologize to her!”

Katsuki cackles, a little too manically. “For what, brat?”

“You’re being a mean jerk to her! She doesn’t deserve to be yelled at like that. Friends are friends forever, idiot!” she yells, her cheeks puffed and eyebrows scrunched together.

You can’t help but stifle a laugh at her calling Katsuki an idiot and turn your head to hide your amusement.

”That’s not who you are, Katsu. That’s not how you treat your princess!”

He pinches the bridge of his nose and screws his eyes shut in annoyance, exhaling dramatically. He locks his gaze on you, storming back up to the doorway. He roughly ruffles your sister’s hair as he passes by her as a pseudo apology. Katsuki sucks the air through his teeth and shoves his fists in his pockets as he stops in front of you.

“Look, m'sorry for yellin’, okay?” he sighs, kicking a foot against the pavement. “I'll come over Saturday, we’ll have that movie day ya wanted.”

"You don't need to if you feel forced to hang out with me." Your eyes shift to your feet to avoid looking at his reaction.

" S'fine. I'll be here at noon, don't pick anything lame."

With that, he turns to leave for a second time in silence. You watch him disappear around the corner and can't help but feel like a burden for asking him to make time for you. As if reading your mind, your sister shakes you out of the negative train of thought while walking back to the house.

“Don’t worry about him, he’s just being a dumb boy. That’s what my teacher says when boys are mean for no reason.” She grins a toothy smile up at you and grabs your hand. “Come on! Foods getting cold!”

Katsuki rounded the corner and waited to be out of sight before palming his face in anger. He had no idea why he said those things to you. None of it was true, especially that you’d grown apart. If anything, he was jealous of your friends and missed seeing you all the time. But he couldn’t bring himself to say so, like always. Ever since middle school started, he’d harbored some unknown rage inside of him that lashed out every chance it could. He hated it and didn’t know what to do to stop it — hence trying out for the soccer team, looking for an outlet for the pent up emotions in his body. Katsuki secretly hoped you wouldn’t end up despising him for it.

Even after all this time, he still thinks of you whenever he sees a patch of daisies. Maybe one day he’d be brave enough to tell you about it.

───

Running Late: High School

The front door to your home opens as Katsuki slips inside, kicking his loafers off by the door. Your younger sister peeks over the kitchen counter while spreading jam over her toast and nods in his direction.

"Hey Katsu, pretty sure she's still asleep upstairs," she calls, rolling her eyes. "I tried to get her up three times, maybe you'll have better luck."

It was hard to believe that she was already in her freshmen year of high school — shit, it’s crazy that you and Katsuki were seniors. The age of playground days and summer adventures went by in the blink of an eye.

He makes his way to the kitchen island, leaning over to mess up her hair. Some things never change. "Thanks, bean. I'll get her ass movin’."

“Stooop! You’ll mess it up!” She whines as she pulls away, fixing a few stray pieces of her fluffy mane.

“Ya look fine, don’t sweat it,” he compliments while heading for the staircase. He makes his way to your bedroom on the second floor. The door is surprisingly cracked open. He taps on the doorframe to grab your attention.

“Come in,” you call, lying on your bed facing the wall above the covers while scrolling on your phone. You presume it’s your sister until a soft kiss is planted on your cheek.

“Mornin’ sweets,” Katsuki whispers, rubbing your shoulder to turn you to face him. He sits on the edge of your bed beside you. “You wanna be late for our last first day of high school?”

You shift to sit up and drop your phone to your bed, reaching to cradle his face in your hands.

“No, I just wanted to steal a few kisses first,” you mumble as your lips quietly meet his. Katsuki places one hand on your cheek while the other lightly grazes your back. After a few moments, the two of you part with a soft smack. You stand and straighten up your uniform skirt, flattening a few of the panels to work out any stray creases.

“Do I look okay?” You ask, spinning around for Katsuki and showing off your uniform.

“Y’always look good,” he sighs, standing to his feet. “Let’s get movin’ before bean suspects somethin’.”

You hadn’t told your sister about your relationship with Katsuki. Sure, you guys had been friends since you were children and he’s always around…how would she know the difference?

The two of you patter down the hallway and skip down the stairs to the kitchen. Your sister is waiting for the two of you, arms crossed and tapping one foot impatiently.

“Finally! Get your damn shoes on,” she orders while pushing you toward the door. She does a double take at Katsuki while you’re putting on your shoes, raising an eyebrow at him. “Katsu…are you wearing lipgloss?”

Oops.

Katsuki’s searching for something to say as his face glows scarlet. He puts a hand on the back of his neck and turns away, grumbling while attempting to hide his embarrassment.

“Oh come on, you two," your sister huffs. "I knew you guys started dating months ago. You think I didn’t notice?”

You spin around to face her, cheeks puffed and eyebrows scrunched. “You never said anything?!”

She laughs, walking up to Katsuki and placing a hand on his shoulder.

“If you ever hurt her, Katsuki, I’ll knock your lights out. I know where you sleep,” she threatens, grinning mischievously. Katsuki pulls her into a headlock, ruffling her hair a second time.

“Deal, but I plan on stayin’ alive.” He lets her go, chuckling as he smooths out the pieces of hair he messed with. Seeing the two of them get along never fails to make your heart swell with joy. Katsuki has always treated her like his own sister — one that he could easily give back at the end of every day, anyways.

She turns with a pout and her hands in the air.

“You both have my blessing, you should know that. I didn’t marry you two in a sandbox for nothing!”

───

Today Was A Fairytale: Current Day

“It’s an honor to be doing this for a second time. You’re in luck, my vocabulary has grown exponentially since our sandbox days.”

There’s a wave of laughter through the crowd at your sister’s lighthearted joke. You can’t help but smile as Katsuki’s fingers dance across the back of your hand to regather your attention.

God, he looks so damn handsome in that tux. His usual wild hair is slicked back and tamed — an extremely rare sight. Carmine eyes stare back at you, full of devotion and excitement for this next chapter in your little fairytale.

“By the power vested in me, and these people as my witness, I pronounce you two as king and queen of the kingdom!”

Friends and family alike cheer and whistle as you and Katsuki intertwine, kissing each other for the first time as husband and wife. He spins you around and dips you low, kissing the tip of your nose playfully.

“I love you,” he mouths, a silent profession of adoratio, reserved just for you.

The two of you strut down the aisle to the dance floor in the reception hall, the DJ already queuing the first dance song. Katsuki gently tugs you by the waist, pulling you closer to him as he begins to sway side to side when the music begins to fill the room. You rest your head against his chest and get lost in the moment.

Right now, the world belongs to the two of you. Every worry, struggle and hardship is stripped away from your lives to give you the peace you deserve.

There’s one thought that lingers in your mind as you catch a glimpse of your teary-eyed sister watching you from the corner of the dance floor, latched onto Izuku’s arm for support.

She tied that golden string with an unbreakable knot.

thanks for reading! :)