His Mask (Kylo Ren X Reader/Soulmate AU)

Misleading Marks (Iwaizumi x Reader/Soulmate AU)

*GIF not mine*

Summary: Your soulmark is a wonderfully misleading pain in the tuchus. Luckily, your hunk of a soulmate makes it all worth it. 

A/N: Started off rough, but I swear the ending is better. Love me some good old soulmate aus. Enjoy!

Word count: 1803

        When your soulmark first popped up on your wrist, you adored its simplicity. It had come to you on the morning of your fifteenth birthday, and you couldn’t help but admire it the whole day. Even through school, your teachers had eventually given up on gathering your attention. You were otherwise occupied with worshiping the blatant statement on your wrist. “Hi, my name is Oikawa,” it read, and you kept rubbing your thumb over it, eventually developing a nervous habit from the act. You couldn’t help it; it was comforting. Knowing someone was out there, perfect for you. And easily detectable thanks to their words. You felt blessed.

       That mindset on your soulmark didn’t last long. Soon, you attended Karasuno High School and made new friends. Friends who had more exciting soulmarks. For example, Kiyoko had the cheesy pickup line “Do you believe in love at first sight, or should I walk by again?” inscribed on the inside of her forearm. While she found it less than satisfactory and often cursed fate for giving her a pervert for a soulmate, you thought it was rather endearing. The person meant for her seemed playful and fun, and you begin to think of your own soulmate differently. Insecurities began to run through your mind more and more every day. Even Sugawara, another friend of yours, had a cute phrase. “Do you have candles for all that cake?” Adorable. A little straightforward, but you liked it nonetheless.

       Just to be clear, you adored your friends, and you were happy they had gotten such fun soulmates. But to be honest, their marks made you jealous, and at times you would stare at your own and wonder if you were destined for simplicity like that for the rest of your life. It was, after all, your soulmate’s first words to you. But before you could judge, you wanted to meet him. Oikawa, your apparent soulmate. 

                               ~~~

       It was your third year of high school before you ever heard his name aloud. While helping Kiyoko manage a practice volleyball game at Aoba Johsai, you finally heard the name you had been waiting for for three years. 

       “Oikawa, so glad you’re back, you pain in the ass. Now come out here and set for us!” The spikey-haired ace of the opposing team demanded with admittedly attractive folded arms. 

       “You’re so mean, Iwaizumi! Can’t you take it a little easy on me? I am injured, after all,” the brunet whined. The rest of the argument faded away as you dazed off in wonder. At first, your eyes were still stuck on the ace, but you began to feel guilty and pulled them away to stare at the newcomer. At your soulmate. He was hot so was that “Iwaizumi”, tall, and playful, many traits you admired in a guy. But he just seemed… disappointing for some reason. He seemed wrong. You chalked it up to your past predictions of him being lame. After all, you couldn’t let feelings like those get in your way. You were closer than ever to meeting the man on your wrist; Kiyoko had even given you a pointed look, which you had shaken off. Meeting with him would have to wait till after the game. 

                               ~~~

       Whelp, the game had ended fairly quickly, but damn did Oikawa have an arm. It was like a rocket, and you couldn’t help but compare it to the ace’s on his own team. You know, for strength-wise comparison’s sake, totally not anything else. Totally. Anyways, after the teams thanked each other and you helped Kiyoko clean up the stray water bottles, you asked her for advice on how to talk to him. 

       “Just go do it,” she shrugged, her voice flat and matter-of-fact-like. When you had first met her, the emotionless she seemed to have irked you at first. Now that you had known her for years and become her best friend, however, you knew she cared deep down. Her tone when she spoke just never showed it, and you were finally used to it. What you were not okay with, now, was her terrible advice.

       “Seriously? That’s it, that’s all you got? ‘Just go do it’? Dude, you’re killing me here.” She sent you a withering glare at your whining and you froze at the sight. Oh right, she was friggin’ terrifying at times, too. 

       “It’s now or never, YN.” Okay, that one got to you. She was right, this could be your last chance, or your first meeting with your soulmate. Only you could decide. Flashing her a grateful smile, you rushed out a “thank you” before jogging to the other bench on the court where he was packing up equipment as well. 

       “H-hey, um, I’m YN,” you stammered and bit your lip bitterly at the embarrassing first words he definitely had on his body now.

       With an arrogant glint in his eyes, he smiled back charmingly at you and smoothly replied, “Nice to meet you. I’m Oikawa.” Uh oh. Those aren’t the right words. Now you have an itty bitty problem. 

       “Oh.” That’s all you could manage to sputter.

       “Oh?” he questioned cheekily, taking a step toward you. You stumbled back at his advancement while laughing nervously. Visibly confused at your reaction, Oikawa furrowed his brows while he halted himself in place a foot or two away from you. 

       Finally having enough breathing room, you shake your head to clear it. An action which you soon come to regret as you seemed to have lost your filter in the process. You question him thoughtlessly, “Do you have any siblings?” Thankfully, he doesn’t appear to take offense. Oikawa was smarter than he looked, as he caught on quickly. 

       “Not any that don’t already have soulmates,” he answered pityingly, eyes softening at the words on your wrist. 

       Swiftly, you tug your mark behind your back and wave your other hand dismissively. “That’s okay. Umm I have to go now, bye.” Without another word, you hustle out of the room and out to the bus waiting to return to Karasuno, not actually sad but more frustrated at the sympathetic eyes that trailed after you.

Stomping angrily up the bus steps, you sat down harshly in the seat next to Kiyoko, who questioned you silently. You only shook your head in response, your mouth setting into a hard line. She didn’t say anything but grabbed your hand and squeezed it comfortingly. Lips quirking up at the action, you squeeze back gratefully before shifting around in your seat and falling asleep to the bus ride’s gentle lulling.

                               ~~~

       Seeing him again made your heart pang slightly. It was the first official tournament of Karasuno’s volleyball season, the Interhigh Preliminaries. You were alone in your section of stands, and happened to be one of the few people here to support your school. But still, you couldn’t help but let your eyes wander to the other court.

There, Aoba Johsai was playing. No, they were winning, and by a landslide at that. Oikawa was smirking, but you figured that was his normal facial expression at this point. However, he wasn’t the one who had caught your attention right off the bat. It was that damn brown-haired ace again, and watching his muscles flex everywhere right before he spiked was… thrilling in a way. Your eyes pledged loyalty to his biceps, and you weren’t one to go back on your promises. At least, until you had to pee. Nature called, and you really had to pick up. 

       After doing your business and washing up, you pushed your way out of the bathroom and waved your hands around like an enthusiastic nutcase to air-dry. 

       “Damn empty paper tow-” your bitter mumbling was interrupted by a voice that was evidently more familiar to your heart than to your brain. Giving in to its demands, you subconsciously followed the sound while simultaneously eavesdropping on the conversation. 

       “Why don’t you just ask her out then, Shittykawa?”

       “You know I hate that nickname, Iwa. And plus, I’ve only talked to her once before at that practice game against my annoying prodigy.”

       “So what? You’ve asked out girls before without even knowing their names.” Their voices were getting closer, and just as you step around the corner into your hallway, you make eye contact with that panty-dropper of an ace- oh shit, where’d that come from? He looks back to his friend- is that Oikawa?- before continuing, “Just walk over to her and say,” the volleyball player halted his words before directing them at you in a mockingly shrill voice and imitating, “Hi, my name is Oikawa.” A shock flowed through your system and you tensed up at the words. Oh, hello there, not Oikawa. You knew you should respond. But even though you didn’t want to dishonor yourself and your cow, your jaw felt wired shut. Your mouth, however, got a little impatient at your lame excuse. 

       “I thought your name was Iwaizumi.” Your soulmate stopped in his tracks and stared at you in amazement. Yeah buddy, now you know how I feel.

Oikawa’s whines began to fade away along with the world around you as you gawk at the ace, but that was nothing new. You zone out all the time while staring creepily at people, it’s just that now it’s socially acceptable because he’s your soulmate.

His olive orbs are captivating, but not enough to distract you from the awkward silence that begins to ensue. It was painfully quiet, and after a while you tried to escape his eyes and look away only for your eyes to stop at his broad chest, disappointingly covered in an open white and turquoise jacket. Sadly, his jersey resided underneath. You know, lately I’ve heard that going around shirtless is all the rage nowadays. Wanna be more trendy? Hey, maybe next time you could say that out loud. Soulmates were supposed to love each other implicitly, so he might actually listen, right? You're halted in your mental rambling when Iwaizumi begins to chuckle, causing a wrinkle in his shirt. That wouldn’t be a problem if he just took it off. Suddenly, you have to dropkick yourself out of your daze when he begins to speak, figuring you should probably start learning how to listen to others now that you found your “other half.” 

       “Sorry you almost thought you were stuck with Shittykawa here for a second.” He gestures to that one guy standing next to him while glancing down at your soulmark. Without another thought, you begin to smile widely at him, reveling in the mischievous twinkle in his catlike eyes while savoring the lovable grin on his face. Fate, you sneaky bastard. You win this round.

I just started a writing blog, your pieces were a big inspiration for me to start writing. I just published my first piece. I love your writing and I hope you keep doing it! :)

Oh wow, that’s awesome!! I’m glad I could give you the push you wanted to start writing (and thank you for the kind words😊)!! I remember that just starting out is one of the hardest things to do, so it’s awesome that you’ve taken that first step🥳🥳

Good luck and remember to have fun💜💜

Can you put me on the tag list for any bnha posts? I need to know when I can get my 20cc's of man candy if you know what i'm saying *wiggle wiggle*

me: posts anything bnha

this sweetheart:

Not even kidding, I can relate. I need my fill of bnha babes too from time to time. I just... 🤧 never thought someone would want the man candy I put out😭 it’s like picking an old butterscotch instead of a snickers😖

Honestly tho, thank you so much! I’m glad ur enjoying my writings, and I’ll definitely tag u on anything bnha I post so u can get ur fill🥰

Can i be tagged in Reborn please? ♥️

Of course my friend🙏I got u💜

Bokuto, looking at conditioner in the store: “Apply generously”? Interesting.

Bokuto, in the shower two hours later: HERE YOU GO HAIR. YOU DESERVE ALL THE CONDITIONER IN THE WORLD BECAUSE I LOVE YOU

Bokuto: TAKE SOME MORE, BECAUSE YOU DESERVE IT

Bokuto: I WOULD GIVE YOU THE WHOLE BOTTLE IF YOU WANTED IT

It would be interesting to see Osamu try to turn his life back around, come to terms with Atsumu's death and be his own person again. BUT!!! Please don't feel pressured to write a part 2 if you don't feel like it/don't want too 🥺 I was just genuinely curious if a part 2 was possible so I sent an ask. You're already giving us so much amazing content and I don't want you to burn yourself out and do any request that you don't like 🥺❣

Thank you, your words mean a lot more than you know🙏 And I’m thankful I’m surrounded by such kind people like you on here💜💜

I’ll definitely consider making a part 2 for Lapse in Judgement, as I’m also kind of interested in where I could take Osamu’s character without Atsumu by his side. The idea has definitely been noted :)

I just read the guppy love (shouto) oh my it was just so cute sfsedfergdidridtjr anyways are you planning to make a continuation? *silently egging author-chan to qwq* anyways your writing is phenomenal as always!! Please take care of your health and stay safe ily uwu)/❤❤✨

Akfjfjidkd I’m so glad you like that one🥰 definitely one of my favorites and though I don’t exactly have any ideas for a sequel, it’s definitely near the top of my lists for fics I need to write a part 2 for!

I’m so happy you like my writing🥺🥺 and u stay safe too💖💜

“Can I sit on you(r face)?” (Haikyuu!! Fake Texts)

(Middle Blocker Version) Part 2

A/N: Part two cuz apparently you can only put so many damn pics in one post🙄 Enjoy! (Side note: Suna’s was just Kuroo’s reject, but I didn’t wanna exclude him from the group😤 nobody frickin’ told me the dude only had like a minute of screen time tho?!)

Kuroo, Aone, Tendou

soulmate AU prompts

- the voice you hear your thoughts in is your soulmate’s but you don’t know who they are until you hear them speak for the first time

- your soulmate’s initials are imprinted in your skin of your hand at birth and the letters burn more intensely as the day you meet them grows closer

- you’ve only ever seen your soulmate in your dreams but you can never remember what they look like, the imaginary life you have with them picks up wherever it leaves off when you fall asleep again. but the dreams stop after you meet them, but you have no way of know who they are because you still can’t remember their face

- your soulmate’s hair color is the color of your eyes. the color of your eyes also changes to match the color of their hair if they dye it

- you think you have a sleepwalking problem but it’s really just the universe trying to bring you to your soulmate when your mind is disengaged

- you’ve been sketching your soulmate’s face since you were old enough to pick up a pencil, the drawings become more realistic through the years as the day you meet comes near

- you’re born with a band of your soulmate’s skin color tattooed in your skin

- all of your dreams are your soulmate’s most significant memories from that given day

Look Me in the Eyes (Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw x Reader)

*GIF not mine*

Summary: During naval training, your jet crashed and burned, taking your memories with it. But the lieutenant who saved you seems to know you better than he lets on. The only issue is that he refuses to tell you his name.

A/N: pfft half yall don’t read this anyway so imma just say rooster’s hot, oreosmama out *drops mic*

Word count: 3345

It’s not the pervading scent of antiseptic and boredom that has carved its way into your skin, nestling deep into the creases of your brow and your sneering upper lip—

It’s his unflinching gaze.

The lieutenant hovering over you, with a spoonful of green, gelatinous “dinner” posed over your lips, mumbles, “Open the hatch, the F-18 needs to land.” 

He’s a staunchly built man ornamented in the same naval jacket he’d been wearing when you first came-to in the hospital room, his lofty shoulders embellished in unfamiliar patches. Over the last two days, most of which have consisted of him lording himself over you or sitting back in the chair beside your bed, his five o’clock shadow has thickened, and the wrinkles underneath his teasing eyes darkened a shade.

The F-18 bumps against your sneer, and he chortles to himself. 

You know why you’re here. 

Well, sort of.

You know that it must’ve hurt. Like a falling-unconscious-due-to-pain kind of hurt. Black and blue splotches paint your temple and upper left cheek, and each time you force a smile, it aches. The rest of your body looks the same. In the first shower you’d been allowed, you twisted and turned as much as your burning abdomen could handle and had come to the conclusion that you were glad you didn’t remember much of what had happened.

The only real issue was that you didn’t remember much of anything. 

The story you had been told was haphazardly crafted, not unlike if a toddler had drawn a house with crayons and passed it to you, insisting it looked exactly like the one you lived in. 

It goes something like this: you were flying your jet when the engine stalled, and when you ejected, your head smacked against the windshield. You were lucky—you were unconscious when you had crumpled in on yourself, snapping five of your ribs like pencils, and when you’d landed on the ground, face in the dirt—you were so, so lucky. 

But the lieutenant says differently. 

When he found you, you were awake. You were echoing his name into the stagnant desert air, screaming and sobbing in ways that still keep him up at night. 

You know because he sleeps with folded arms on the edge of your mattress, and he rattles the metal skeleton each time he flinches. And the times when he thinks you’re too buried in exhaustion and slumber, his hand finds yours, fingertips light as air against your skin.

These are the only times the lieutenant bares that part of himself to you. 

In the mornings, when you can look him in the eyes and see the guilt buried underneath, he winces a smile onto his lips and asks if you remember anything yet. 

You don't.

And he winces again. “Back to the drawing board, huh?”

The lieutenant is a nice-enough man when he wants to be. The only issue is that he doesn’t seem to want to be. 

“Tell me your name,” you snipe, dangling over the precipice of flinging Jell-O across the room. 

This is a game he never wants to play, despite how often he wins. He has the whole naval base’s hospital staff refer to him as Sir or Lieutenant-no-last-name, and each time you ask, he’ll give you the same response.

“You know my name.” 

You don't. He’s a complete stranger. He can hold you hand and feed you Jell-O and help you hobble to the bathroom; he can brush the hair from your sweat-crusted face in the mornings and, on some rare occasions where he thinks he’s woken up before you, he’ll graze a feather-soft kiss on your bruised temple.

And you still haven't got a clue. 

Because whoever the lieutenant is, the tight grip he has on your heart is completely foreign to you. It’s a grip that says you and him aren’t just something definable—you were a we in this life; the pair of you have formed a way of living in tandem, your own intrinsic tango to which nobody else knows the steps. It’s not just like or a passing fancy. It’s not just hot static running through veins. 

This is fully fledged; this is oxygen now. The rise and fall of your chest is the rise and fall of his. The absence of it must be suffocating. 

So you don't know why he doesn’t like this game. He makes a question-answer into a back-and-forth, and then he winds and winds you up until you’re ready to snap. 

It’s not fair. God, it’s not fair. You deserve to know his name. Doesn’t he know it’s not just a tickle in the back of your mind anymore? If he was the one whose name you were screaming, didn’t you deserve to know what it was?

“Why do you keep doing this?” 

You watch his lips purse, the color bleeding out of them and into pink patches on his neck and cheeks. The spoon rattles against the tray, and the glob of green wavers in its curve. He refuses to hold your gaze like always. Self-inflicted torment disguises itself as burnt-sienna irises. The life you’ve forgotten is bowing his shoulders, and your crash, no matter the fact that he saved you, is eating away at him. 

Then the lieutenant smiles, in the fractured way—the way someone might laugh at a funeral. 

“Because knowing my name wouldn’t help you. You never called me by it, anyway.”

This, oh God—this is the closest you’ve ever gotten, and you’re still wading in the darkness. A name you’d never even call him by, what a wonder that does to your psyche. 

A name was a start; it was a first impression. There was a lot in a name. 

So you’d never called him by his name… so what?

So what, only lovers knew each other by more than a name? So what, he never called you by yours? So what, you didn’t want to ever call him by his name, never felt the urge, but felt it was rather proper considering you didn’t know what to call him at all?

He keeps you doggy-paddling for it.

The hospital room is polluted with silence for the rest of the night. Slowly, you finish the Jell-O as he sits back in his chair, watching, yet not quite seeing you. You missed when his staring felt like a buzzing fly. Now it’s a thunderstorm hanging over you, foggy and dampened, and you’re struck every few seconds with a shiver. 

He doesn’t reach out for your hand when you pretend you’ve fallen asleep. Twenty minutes past lights out, he stands and heads into the bathroom, slowly creaking the door closed and locking it before the shower faucet turns on and stays on for a long, long time. 

Where his hand should be is where he laid his jacket, one sewn patch erroneously rough against your palm. With another glance at the light underneath the bathroom door, you haul the leather jacket up into your lap, tracing the ridges and folds. You trails your fingertips along the jacket, searching for… something. Anything. 

Cold metal, a zipper slips underneath your fingers, and you sit up straighter despite the outcry of pain in your ribs. 

A pocket, and inside is a small plastic card—his ID. 

That, and a small, velvet box. 

No…

No, you won’t open it. 

No, no, because he shouldn’t even have that here. 

Why—dear God—why did he have that here?

It’s not for you. That’s for sure. You don’t even want to open it. No.

It’s not yours. It’s not yours to have, especially since he hasn’t offered it to you, and it’s not yours to wear, and it’s not yours to look at, to watch, iridescent, crystal devotion reflecting the moonlight from the room’s lone window. 

But when you lift the cover and curse the stars that the man whose name you don’t even know knows you so well, knows how beautiful it is in your eyes, and even worse, how well it fits on your finger, you know it’s yours. 

Well, not yours. 

It’s hers. The one before the crash’s. 

That’s her ring on your finger, and that’s her lieutenant grieving in the bathroom. 

This is her life, not yours. All you own anymore is the absence pulsing in your chest. 

You own the spasms in your veins, the brief and lasting panic of who am I, really?, the deficiency of life and past and love; the frail hold on this reality, on that man, on this ring. 

The rest is not yours, so you should let it go. 

Then, ideally, you should be able to float away, free from these junctions to a girl you don’t know. The man who loves her loves your face. He loves your body, and your voice, and each of the words falling from your lips, perhaps in the wrong order, yes, but he’ll rearrange them in his mind so that it matches hers.

Ideally. 

Ideally, it’s not this drowning feeling, a weight like a hand pressing hard against your chest, shoving you deeper and deeper under the current. She’s the one who breathes, not you. You don’t need to breathe. You’re an accident in this world. 

The I.D. slips from your grasp and falls to the floor. 

You’ve read it. You saw the name, the rank, the naval symbol. In the dim moonlight and the single glowing strip underneath the bathroom door, his not-really-a-smile smiles up at you from the vinyl floor. 

And now you see it, chrome duct tape peeling off the jagged stitches of a patch, the one over his heart. Another of his games: his missing call sign. 

It… fits him. Strangely enough. 

Is this what you called him?

The hospital room floods with a subdued yellow light carried out by the steam of the lieutenant’s shower. He emerges with a towel wrapped around his lower body, a sheen of wet on his cheeks you’re not certain was caused by the shower. 

Like you, this is his third shower in this room, but unlike him, he’s not wearing a smirk when he exits, bare feet padding along the cold tiles. He doesn’t spare you a glance while he pilfers through his black duffle bag, the one seated on the only other guest chair in the room—the one that never moves. 

Maybe it was a good thing he didn’t look, because you hadn’t thought to take off the ring. It was a plan as half-baked as when you’d first decided to put it on. Some barbaric, frenzied part of you, the same one that had slipped it on and hugged it close to your heart, refused to yank it off. It was another you—not her nor you, but a new one that had fallen in love with him, Rooster, without memory or qualms, the one that had no issue with him lingering in every corner of your mind; no, in fact, she preferred it.

You don’t listen to her when the lieutenant pivots back to face you, a fresh pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and the rest sourced from the duffel bag in tow, one fist curled into his towel at his waist. His eyes land on yours, and your fingers slicken with the sweat of your palms, tremble like the thumps beneath your ribcage. 

At the worst moment possible, you notice, in the hazy yellow light of 10:07 PM, that Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw’s eyes are achingly akin to whiskey. It’s the dark, thick kind that coats your tongue and hits you five seconds after you sip it like a freight train; heady, terribly intoxicating, and in large doses, coaxes out the worst side of yourself at an even worse moment. 

The ring clinks against the bed’s metal framework before shuddering against the tile floor, and his eyes leave yours to watch it rattle. The skin of your left ring finger burns from the swift twisting and tugging you’d employed in a state of tipsy panic—your plan had been to slip the ring unnoticed beneath his leather jacket, the same place you’d stuffed the velvet box. 

A breath tears itself out of the lieutenant’s chest. Tan skin rises and falls once, and his grip goes white-knuckle on his towel. 

Then he pads back toward the bathroom without a word and disappears behind the slammed door. Somehow, in some terrible way, it is even harder to breathe with him not in the room after that. 

But he bursts through the door a second later, completely negligent of the violent pacing of your heart, donned in clothes wrinkled and stretched in odd places from frantic dressing. He covers the distance with three long strides and slackens back into the plastic hospital chair, the heavy creases under his eyes never having looked so deep-seated. 

You see it now. The damage this whole experience has done to him. He’s been hollowed out, rigorously gutted to the point that one last revelation might finally crack him in half and let the despair pour out. 

You’re afraid to tell him all that you don’t know. That even though you had slid that ring on and off your finger, you still don’t know him. But, God, you want to tell him that you love him, despite knowing it won’t be enough. It’s not even enough to you, and it’s all that you have. 

Usually, he wears this sheen layer of tenderness over his face; it slips off every night when you close your eyes, and he smooths it back on in the mornings in the mirror. Some days he layers it on so thick you never even notice the grief hidden underneath. 

It must have gotten too heavy to bear. 

The silence hangs just as heavy. He runs both hands down his face, pressing hard enough that his skin emerges pink, and folds his hands, knocking them against his lips. Veins in his eyes grow redder by the second, and your heart begins a slow crawl up your throat at the watery levels of his eyelines, waiting to spill. The ring sits on the floor untouched. 

“Do you,” he faltered, clearing his throat. “Do you… remember anything?”

He’s looking at you so intensely that your skin is searing. Shame washes over you, grasping your shoulders and burying you deeply into its chest. You want to cry. 

“Nothing.”

The lieutenant stares at you a second longer, stretching it out until you’re trembling. Then he looks away, down, before reaching and retrieving the ring from the ground. He observes it for just a second, the way it glimmers in night’s imperfect lighting, and his eyes squeeze shut.

Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw, you’ve learned, will draw things out until the perfect moment has come. He will wait until the ache swells and culminates, with a tolerance so inexhaustible you wonder if, in all your time loving him, you ever bothered to wait up. He’s noticed how the darkness has swallowed both of you wholly, and only now does he offer reprieve. 

Bradley tells you your name.

And he tells you that he’s been in love with you since the first second he saw you. 

He tells you that he can’t bear the thought of losing all that you’d had, and that his world had been crumbling apart before his own goddamned eyes ever since your jet’s engine had sputtered and died. He tells you that he’s so, so fucking sorry he couldn’t save you, sorry that your life ever got entangled so messily with his in the first place, and even more sorry that he’s so useless to help you find your way back, that you can’t seem to find your way back to him. 

And when you began to cry, he bolted up from his seat and held you, whispering apologies into your hair, and you cried a little harder, because you had found your way back to him, but he wouldn’t ever care, because it wasn’t the same path you’d taken before. 

You cry because it hurts to hold him, and even more because it hurts him to hold you. You want all of the I-love-yous he’s ever said to be for you, and you want that damned ring too. 

You want that goddamn ring on your finger right now because he’d promised you that it would be yours. That first moment he’d ever seen you, stumbling drunk in a crowded Hard Deck and spilling his beer half on his Hawaiian shirt, half on yours, that he’d make up for it by putting a spendy ring on your little finger right there, despite not actually knowing where right there was. The only one I’ll ever buy, he’d hiccuped, it’ll be yours, darlin’. 

“Rooster,” you croaked into his chest. “Roo.”

A provoked sob tore from your throat, your arms and ribs aching from how tightly you clung to him, even after he froze. You surfaced from the curve of his shoulder, hands sliding past his sides, over his thrumming chest, and up to cradle his damp jawline before drawing his face down to yours. He mumbled your name, whiskey eyes potent as ever, and you smothered the rest of his question against your lips. 

You couldn’t tell who was crying anymore. Your cheeks’ dampness was his, just the same as his lips pressed against yours so harshly, so numbingly you couldn’t quite tell where yours ended and his began. It must have been somewhere close to where his tongue met yours, making up for lost time as he fought hard and fiercely for everything he’d been starved of for three, going on four, unbearable days. His hands left their leverage against the bed and latched onto your hips, rough fingertips familiarly caressing the soft slopes of your sides, and when you offered an airy moan to him, he accepted eagerly with a tightening grip. 

You separated from him with a small cry, ribs twinging. Bradley pulled away in horror, and his dilated pupils struggled to sober up to join. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, larger hands now grappling at yours and trying to remove your grasp. “You need—ice, I’ll go get you some ice–”

“Roo, no,” you mumbled, refusing to let go of him. 

He paused, and his body shivered under your touch. The familiarity of his name from your mouth seemed as comforting to him as it was to you. His lips twitched and curled, and he breathed a small sigh. The hard lines of his face grew tender as he slid his hands down to your wrists, turning and pressing a kiss to each palm. 

His heart jumped and throbbed against your fingertips, and you had no doubt he could feel the same from yours. The heat of his damp cheeks had grown infinitely warmer under your touch, and for all the nights you’d spent with just a grasp on his hand, the change was more and more welcome. 

“Don’t leave me again,” he pleaded against the skin of your palm, voice thick and bittersweet, like honey seeping through your ears. “I don’t think I can handle that again.”

He steeled himself against your mattress with one hand when you tugged his forehead down against yours, lips just whispering against one another. You smiled. 

“Was it all the Jell-O that did you in, or…?”

“Yeah, actually,” he nodded, tongue pressed against his cheek. “It was. I hope you know we’re never having Jell-O in our house ever again.”

“Not even lime?”

“Especially lime.”

You huffed, “Fine.” You pulled away, despite how desperate Bradley was to follow you. He let you fall back against the pillows with your hand still in his grasp, and he settled onto the edge of the mattress, letting his spare hand find home in the pliant skin of your thigh. Your eyes rose to the ceiling. “But it’ll cost you.”

Soft lips brushed the back of your left hand before cold metal slipped around your finger. “One of these?”

“Exactly.”

Bradley hummed. “Gladly.”