𝐨𝐤𝐚𝐲, 𝐛𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐢

𝟸𝟼. 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜

❥ in her active era or wtv.
____

"Are you starting to have feelings for Jean?"

Ymir, Historia, Mikasa, Sasha.

All of their eyes are pinned on you, waiting quietly for a response, while your heart tears out of your body, leaving you hallow-chested. Open and raw to the point where it feels like the beams of the gleaming moon and each flicker of starlight painted on the canvas of the night sky is enough to leave your bones with irreversible third-degree burns all the way down to their marrow.

The question that just ripped out of the barrier of Sasha's teeth echoes in the depths of your mind, and each repetition of it screams louder than the last, making the most inner parts of your body react near to the point of convulsing.

Your cells have expanded, veins tenfolding in size beneath your feverish skin. Your spine, as it twists around itself, is on the verge of cracking apart, vertebrae by vertebrae. You're out of sorts in every which way.

What the hell kind of inhumane feeling is this?

You don't know exactly. It's one of those few you've never experienced before, but you know you're about to choke on every ounce of it.

"W-what?" You stammer every part of you rearranged from the outside in and back out again. "What are you talking about? Why are you asking me something like that?"

All your words, your frantic questions, ramble out a hell of a lot more defensive than you were expecting. You feel more defensive than you were expecting, too.

Your friends remain studying you, their gazes of thinned interrogation, refusing to dismount despite your silent prayer that they will. Their pupils, all expanded by curiosity, are settled so deep within the structure of your sitting body that you have to literally fight not to squirm under the intense amount of pressure you feel draped over every part of you.

At this point, scalping yourself down past your skull would feel better than this. That's how discomforting it is.

Watching you, a harsh, sudden strike rips out of the center of Ymir's throat. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up at the obnoxious sound. "I'm gonna go ahead and take that as a yes," she grinds out with an arrogant smirk, her stature held tall like she knows everything there is to know about everything.

Your heart is racing unexpectedly fast, all your nerves building. "Ymir," you rush to say before anyone else can speak and say something more ridiculous than what's already been said.

The curve of her lips won't fade, latched there with sticky certainty. "What?"

"Stop it." The rate of your heart speeds up even more. It's almost diabolical the way the stupid thing is knocking your chest senseless. "I'm not starting to have feelings for Jean," you push on to deny, trying to ignore the relentless pounding inside of your head.

You don't expect such a sour taste to coat your tongue, but there it sits on the bumpy pink base, as sour as ever.

The same exact sensation you get when people lie to you.

At that inadmissible realization, your lungs explode from the left side to the right, leaving the underside of your rib cage completely empty. No longer is there a place for air to go. But it's not like you were breathing anyway.

Is that what you're doing lying? Not just to them but to yourself?

[ ⅠⅠ ▹ play: moment - vierre cloud ]

Are there feelings there? Starting to form? Buried deeply beneath your skin? Sprouting at the center and coming to life in places that you swore would remain untouched, dead for forever, and the rest of your lifetime?

Creeping up on you like a hunter coming upon an innocent grazing deer who is drowning too far deep in the trenches of her own pathetic obliviousness to be the least bit aware?

Killed by their bloodied hands before you even can recognize their arrival, making it too late to run to seek protective shelter the way you had always planned if something like this were to happen to you again?

No. Fuck. No. You don't want that.

You don't want feelings to transpire in a body that's responsible for granting a home to a giving heart that has always cared too hard, too much, too fast, only to never once be given what it so desperately beats with in return.

Especially with everything that happened with Porco. All the bloodcurdling damage he caused you, emotionally, physically, mentally. The way all of the pain you underwent by knitting yourself to his side when you should have run free altered your brain chemistry so drastically you couldn't even recognize yourself in the mirror anymore—still can't on most days.

Making the irreversible mistake of selflessly loving someone so cruel that you are now left with nothing but the consequence of having to live trapped in an eternally scarred body full of open battle wounds, sickly created by his cruel hands, forever.

You swore off this sort of thing for all these reasons and a thousand more.

Feelings. The sense of falling. Or even just the possibility of its occurrence. You built an unassailable wall around yourself, with the aim to protect those specific parts of your heart, knowing the chance of being hurt isn't anything that you have the strength to take.

You've only ever known the world of these things to end in the cruelest, most deadly combat.

Why would you want to risk putting yourself through something like that another time? Risk the possible chance of being killed again when you've just barely started remembering what it's like to be alive?

Becoming raw and vulnerable in the world of romance has never done anything for you but leave you hanging out to dry. Barely breathing and scatterbrained, confused as to what you ever did to have to suffer in the daily feeling of being less than, all while fighting to claw your way back out of the grave your past lover dug you, desperately trying to find even a scrap of your worth you had stripped away.

But even with these fears and all these barriers you built around them to keep you safe from any kind of harm, you can't deny that you have found Jean attractive since the first day you saw him across campus while his pen relentlessly dug away onto his sketchbook rested within his lap—silent emotions he was choking on being splattered with onyx ink.

More attractive than you've ever found another person to be.

So attractive that sometimes it's all you find yourself thinking about.

You just didn't think you had to worry about anything else coming from that initial attraction or the stupid way that it's unwontedly lingered.

Were you wrong? Are you wrong?

Choking silently on these restless questions and loud thoughts, giving yourself no time to figure anything out, you focus on what's in front of you rather than all the inward hell that just broke loose.

Snapping yourself back to earth, you hone back in on your friends encompassing you.

Nothing has changed since your brain went havoc in the last ten seconds. You're still just as anxious and they all remain focused on you with pointed eyes. You can't tell if they are looking at you like this because they don't believe you or because they are waiting for you to say something else.

Either way, it's stressing the living hell out of you.

Eyes darting around, you unlatch the bones of your squeezing hands and run your perspire palms down your thighs, trying to smooth out your nerves as you feel them continue to spiral.

"Can you guys stop looking at me like that?" you ask, shooting them a harsh expression to match your tone.

Their burning gazes still don't break despite your request, causing you to restlessly shift your stature around. "I'm seriously not starting to have feelings for Jean," you say again in an effort to be more convincing, except you can't help but fear that the instability of your snipped voice actually does the complete opposite.

Clearing your throat, you push further to try and favor yourself. "Nothing will ever happen between us. He's my friend. That's it."

Your heart thumps, Liar.

"Friend?" Ymir scoffs as if you just spoke one of the most unconvincing things in the most unconvincing tone. "So you're telling me, given the chance, you wouldn't fuck Jean," she interrogates, tapping the ash off of a burning cigarette with a quick zap of her finger on the top of the thin surface.

You feel every bone in your body crack in half like the split of an eggshell that's enduring too much weight. Your brain flips itself on its bloodied side and squeezes behind your burning eyes. "No," you answer quickly through your swollen tongue.

Your heart thumps, Liar.

Sasha blinks, not seeming all that convinced. "Say he showed up to our place one night dressed as a ghost face," she begins, her eyes turning to fine lines, trapping you on the inside. "You still wouldn't fuck him? Or at least think about it?"

Your insides jolt.

Don't make me think about that. Because if I start thinking about that...

Nope. Knock it the hell off. That's enough. More than enough.

It's your stupid touch deprivation talking. Your goddamn nighttime loneliness. That's all. It has to be.

Your thrashing heart falls into the depths of your stomach as Historia tilts her head to an angle of sheer confusion, shooting Sasha a dumbfounded look. "Um..." she hesitates for moment as though she's not quite sure she wants to know, "what exactly does ghost face have to do with any of this?" she softly queries, her thin blonde eyebrows knitted together.

You freeze over.

Leaning forward into the small formed circle, Sasha cups her hand, latching it to the right side of her mouth, a dim shadow stitched onto her face. "Y/N has a ghost face kink," she whispers as though she's trying to keep it a secret from the rest of the world.

Historia's spine snaps tall. "Oh!" she voices, her unexpectedness of this turning her voice rather mousy.

Your eyes shoot round. A sudden large strike slices through your body, making it feel like you've been jabbed with a knife in the gut, the sharp blade drenched in liquid embarrassment, burning you as it spreads through every vein you have.

"Sasha!" you screech. Heat rapidly rising from you chest and painting itself onto your skin. "No way." Your head falls into your hands, feeling far too exposed to handle this with any sort of grace.

Sasha places a hand on the back of your bowed head and runs it down through your hair. "It's okay, Y/N. You know I have a thing for the guys from Call of Duty, so you don't have anything to be ashamed of. We're basically the same."

Your head shoots back up, her finger still raveled well into your hair. Your tongue jolts across the roof of your mouth, choosing to get her back for exposing you out in the open like that. "You left out your thing for Michael Myers."

Sasha gasps at your call out, eyes forming saucer-like. "That one was supposed to be a secret," she says through her teeth.

Your shoulder rolls. "So was mine."

Sasha sighs. "Well, we're even now." She look at you with soft gaze of chocolate brown, twirling a strand of her hair around her thin finger as a tempting gesture. "Think you can forgive me?"

Your eyes thin in threat, but when she bats her eyes pleadingly, you can't help but give in. You weren't ever mad at her in the first place. "Yes. You're forgiven."

"God. No wonder you two are best friends," Ymir remarks, laughter smoldering her voice. She is clearly finding entertainment in this discovery about you and the mortification that has come with it. "So is it just a ghost face you're into or masks in general that your ass goes crazy over?"

Your eyes flicker in her direction at her ask of specification, and you see Historia push her tiny boned elbow into her prying girlfriend as a warning. "Ymir! Leave her alone. Let her like what she likes."

Ymir's forehead pinches at its center. "What? I'm not saying she can't. I'm just asking a question. She's the one getting all embarrassed." Her eyes swing back to you refusing to let up. "So, which one is it?"

You shake your head harshly, wishing you could wrack your brain hard enough to forget all of this. "I'm not answering that."

"Y/N," Mikasa's voice is gentle-toned, the sound of her pulling your head back up. Her gray eyes are full of assurance, trying to help settle the ignominy she can sense that you still feel. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone has things they're into. Yours is extremely mild compared to what's out there."

She's completely calm, not at all shocked about this hidden truth of yours because she already knew. You told both of them one night while drunk off boxed wine watching Nana.

Mikasa continues, playing with her strand of black hair that's in its common fallen place directly between her two dream-like eyes. "If it makes you feel any better, I guess I can kinda see where you're coming from," she admits softly.

"You too?" Ymir's jaw comes unhinged, and then she shakes her head. "Who knew the three musketeers were a bunch of little freaks."

Sasha cracks a smile, spine pulling tall. "Proud of it."

Picking at the skin of your thumb, you sigh, "Since Sasha can't keep her mouth closed, you guys better not tell anybody about any of this, or I swear to god I will beat every single one of your asses."

Historia places a gentle hand over her heart. "You have my word," she says, but you already knew to expect that promise from her.

"Beat our asses, huh?" Ymir smirks, more intrigued by your threat than she is threatened. "Floch style?"

You blink your narrow eyes. "Worse."

She releases a snarky laugh before setting the dwindling cigarette between her lips and paints a burst of red on its tip with her deep inhale.

You shoot her a look. "I'm serious, Ymir."

The potent smoke exits her nose. "Yeah, yeah, I know. Stop stressing out, alright? If there's one thing I am, it's loyal to my friends, and somehow you witch crafted your way into being one of mine," she returns to you, resting her wrist of the hand that's holding the cigarette onto the bend of her knee she has just pulled in toward her chest. "Of course, I'm not gonna say anything to anyone, Y/N."

A sense of relief overcomes you as she pats you on your arm with a slightly rough hand. "No promises that I won't give you shit for it though."

You don't even blink. That's completely expected. Your lips purse as you swallow. "I figured."

Ymir laughs and then turns to give Sasha crap about her thing for Michael Myers.

Your anxious beating heart sighs in relief at their distraction. Your ghost face kink might have gotten exposed, but at least they got sidetracked from the topic of Jean and the source of whatever the hell your feelings are.

Thank the dear fucking universe.

"I told you this a million fucking time before, you arrogant piece of shit." You hear the harshness of Eren's voice, thick with irritation, come out from behind you rather abruptly. "Do you ever listen to anyone other than yourself?"

"I do, actually," Jean's voice appears next, causing you to turn over your shoulder with searching eyes. His tone is sharp with vexation that's always present whenever he interacts with Eren in any sort of way. "So your annoying ass must have dementia of some shit because no, you didn't," he harshly counters. "I would have remembered if you told me that."

Their sudden bickering arrival completely severs the conversation you had just been sharing with the girls while the rest of the boys linger a few paces behind them, holding much more mellow conversations of their own.

It seems the trip to Seascape Liquor was a success.

You've never been so relieved to be intruded on as you are right now, allowing no time for the topic of the feelings you haven't even been able to sort through to be brought up again.

"Dumb ass," Eren snaps.

"Fucking idiot," Jean returns.

Naturally, tuning out a majority of their pointless argument that makes no sense to those on the outskirts, you and the girls push yourself to your feet and break away from each other to meet the boys where they are slowly beginning to trickle in on the opposite side of the fire.

The weight on your heels starts to shift when a small hand is placed on your shoulder from behind you, deadbolting you in place.

Glancing over your shoulder, you witness Sasha as she pulls her chest into your left shoulder blade, nearing her mouth to your ear. "We're tabling this conversation until later," she says hushedly. "Don't think I forgot. I'm not letting you off that easily."

Immediately, you know what she's talking about. It was wishful thinking that the distraction of the source of that whole conversation would last forever.

You hold your breath, your stomach back to flipping inside out. "There's nothing to talk about," you hastily whisper, teeth stuck together by the glue of resistance.

She holds your gaze for a moment, peering into parts of you that you're not even aware that you're showing. Parts that you're not even aware exist just yet. Her hand squeezes you a little more, and it feels like she has you by the drying throat, "Oh, my love. There's a lot to talk about," she tells you barely above a whisper before releasing you.

Your molars unlatch to spew something you're unsure of, but she departs, making her way over to Niccolo before it could be made of anything. Knees locking, your ankles crack as you take a second to yourself to try and calm the burn in your veins and tight lumps in your throat.

Swiping your supple palm of your agitated hand across your forehead, you take five shallow breaths trying to settle your pulsing heart.

Inhaling the sixth, this one holding a little more girth than the others, you finally feel more centered, and your body finally grants your body its mobility back. Using it to your full advantage, you make your way over to where everyone else has gathered. The boys are still arguing about god knows what.

"Maybe you're stupid," Eren returns, scoffing.

"Maybe I should beat your ass," Jean bites back.

"Enough," Reiner groans in frustration, "Keeping you guys from fighting again is nothing I feel like doing. I'm too drunk for your immature bullshit, so can it. Beat the shit out of each other tomorrow for all I care. Just not around me," he says sharply, stepping between them causing them to dissipate from one another.

Rolling their eyes, unable to find common ground, Eren heads for Mikasa while Jean takes you by surprise and heads for you, meeting you halfway in your approach.

You rely on your tongue to rid away any lingering thoughts of the conversation with the girls and your undeniable attraction towards him as he glows in the lowlight of the fire.

"So, what time is the fight between you and Eren tomorrow so I can be there," you say, pulling the arms of your sweatshirt over your hands as you fold your arms over your chest. "I just got paid on Friday so that mean I can start placing bets."

Stepping directly in front of you, Jean peers down. You watch as his harsh slanted gaze soften as it reflects in the short distance flames. "And who are you betting on?"

The right corner of your mouth pulls up, "Jaeger. Who else?"

A sound of irritation ruptures out of the back of Jean's throat. "I'm back for five seconds, and you're already pissing me off."

"You sound shocked," you return, looking up at him through your batting lashes, and then you tilt your head to the left, eyes tracing the flickering shadows on his face that makes his facial hair lined on his jaw appear darker. "You're still staying, right? For sparklers?"

He nods and blinks once, gaze forening. "I gave you my word, didn't I?" He tells you gently with the assurance he can tell you what you need.

You smile, your blood replaced with an overwhelming amount of peace, all the nerves your body held onto before caused by the curiosity of the young girls is no longer a viable thing that exists. For now, at least.

"Okay," you reply, heart thrashing at nearly nothing. "I just wanted to make sure." He smiles in return, resting faint on his lips like always—warming you like always.

Everyone gathers together. Cracking the new packages of sparklers open every one takes one of their own. Connie insisted on getting the bigger ones that have a longer burn duration time of almost five minutes and vouched to pay for it all since he was the one who screwed up... again.

Needless to say, no one objected.

One by one, the ends of each possessed stick are brought to life by the flame of various colored lighters. As they burn away in their hands, all of your friends begin to take off, laughing, running, and messing around.

Yours and Jean's are the last to be lit. Seeing that he has his blue lighter, you come up behind him as he tilts his wrist, meeting the flame to the end of his sparkler, adding a bright light to his tall, dark presence.

Sensing your approach, he turns over his shoulder to face you, his freshly lit stick in his left hand, while you hold yours unlit in your right.

Jean glances at your dull possession. "Need yours li-" he begins to question, but you cut him off before he can finish by snatching the sparkler that's going wild out of his hold and forcing it into yours, deciding to give him a hard time just for the hell of it.

Jean looks at you, shocked for a moment, and then he reacts. Stuffing his lighter in his front pocket, he reaches out to grab the erupting stick, wanting it to return into his possession, but fails when you unexpectedly jerk your shoulder back.

Jean's gaze narrows accusingly, his upward facing palm extending out toward you. "Give it to me, Y/N," he demands irritably as you smile up at him.

"Give you what?" You gawk teasingly, slowly twisting the thin stick between the skin of your fingertips.

"You know what," he bites, taking another large step closer to you as you take two small ones back.

His eyes are supposed to be threatening, but they're too soft to be anything other than a timeless sort of thing. You nearly have to steady yourself so you don't fall into the wild mazes of gold.

Jean is clueless as to how much tenderness they hold—the way they are basically melting into the base of his skull—but they are all too consuming for it to go unnoticed by you. You spot every inch of gentleness they offer, and it makes your thumping heart fall so soft you feel it wade inside your chest like water.

Elbow extending, he reaches out, trying to grab the sparkler away from you for yet another time. Reading the twist of his muscles, you reel your arm in a little more, the stick of flashing light now nearing your shoulder. "Work for it, Jean," you insist wittily.

"Why should I?" He grumbles his attitude is night and day when compared to your enthusiasm.

Another reach. Another fail.

You smile, walking backward, your slow paces cushioned by sand, heading away from your friends and fire, in the direction of the distant cave. "You should always work for the things that you want. Haven't you heard of that before?"

Jean follows you, making up for each step you take, not letting the distance between you and him grow too far apart. "Of course I have, but I don't think you give a damn about that," he tells you assuredly. "I think you're just trying to make my life harder like you always do."

You crane a smile, never offended by his harsh words because of how tenderly they are delivered to the hidden part of your soul that is always constantly waiting to hear his voice say something of any sort.

"Well, maybe I am," you return dauntingly.

"Yeah? And why's that?" He grumbles, most of it stuck in the back of his throat.

Noncommittally, you shrug. "Because it's fun." As your words drop off your tongue, aching your own gums with your own sweet tone, your head finds a soft-edged tilt, sight never breaking off his presence as he continues to travel after you. "Is it working? Am I making your life harder, Jean? Do you wish you never met me?"

Jean's eyes become expansive, staggered by your question even though it's built by the walls of sarcasm.

"Wish I never met you?" A hard lump constricts his airway, piercing his taut skin.

He swallows it down, but there is still a thick coating of some kind of nervous molasses wrapping around the sound of his voice, making it deeper, more raspy, and sweetly warm.

"Considering the fact you're someone who gives me hope..." he pauses. A breath. A soft one that makes you take one of your own. "I'm gonna have to say no," he finishes, shaking his head.

The bones in your feet start to ache, begging to fall still so your brain can have the full capacity to take in what he's saying, but you force your legs to continue to carry you, growing closer and closer toward the cave with each level step.

"I'm one of the people who gives you hope?" you question.

You're surprised by the claim he made. It leaks out of your lungs, heading straight for your voice, leaving the sound of you as frail as your legs suddenly feel.

Jean's no longer reaching for the sparkler that's continuing to beam wildly in your grip. His large, cut-up hands have folded into his pockets, but he's still keeping his pace up, keeping after your backward ones. "No, Y/N."

His abrupt rejection stings urticates. "Oh," you say out of a pathetic, decrepit breath, your shoulders caving forward just slightly.

The tip of Jean's tongue runs across his bottom lip, wetting it ever so slightly. Not by much, but enough to reflect as the light of the moon hits him at an angle. Soft pink damped by saliva glistening beneath the small burning inferno as it cracks off of the tip of the sparkler held between your pinched fingers.

"You didn't let me finish," he goes on to say.

Glancing over your shoulder, you double-check your surroundings. Seeing that the cave has grown much closer than you were anticipating, you keep your slow backward places in that direction. The soles of your feet are itching to reach your wanted destination whose sand holds messy sketches of stars and other elements of the universe, messily crafted by you and him, all those hours ago.

Hours you wish you could relive again.

Hours that play a part in mending you.

"Finish then," you return, as the waves of the ocean crash against the sanded land on your left.

"I will when you look at me," Jean tells you. That demand of his consumes your insides with a warm, alluring feeling, melting your cells to clumps of mush. The cracks in your bones are slowly learning what it is to be enamored by something. By someone. It aches them in a good way, in a way that you don't ever want to reach its end.

Drawn in by his demand, with no control of your own, your head swivels back to him. The tip of your nose ascends toward his existence as he eclipses you in the same way as the moon does the sun, but somehow, he does it more beautifully than the natural craftsmanship of space itself.

Small stars continue to shoot off the lively sparkler and mirror within his tender gaze as he holds it steady on you.

Keep looking at me, you want to say, keep helping me know what it feels like to be seen.

You bite your words into the buds of your tongue as Jean speaks his. "Don't put yourself in with other people when they don't exist. You're not just some name off of this long list of people who give me hope," he says, his endearing sentiment weaving between your ribs like vines that wear leaves equivalent to the breath of life as they fill the pink sordid insides of your lungs. "You're the only person in the world who does."

His words are spoken only once, but the ear-splitting sound of him echoes inside your head like the banging of a wrecking ball against copper church bells. For the first time in your life, you want to fall to your knees and surrender in silent prayer, thanking all the gods there ever were to allow your strained innocence to be reconstructed, bound together by stitches that are his selfless sentences.

Speechless is what you are. With your jaw that has fallen agape by a fraction, you have to move your tongue around behind your teeth just to remind yourself that the damn pink muscle still exists and that it has a function of its own. It's simply refusing to work with you, betraying you in the worst way.

You're nonfunctioning in front of Jean now, who has stilled his footing so he doesn't knock into you. The only reason you know that you're still human despite your loss of almost all functioning is because of every surge of emotions traveling through your heart causing it to race.

Jean continues. "Now that I told you something I never thought I would without using verity," he reaches outward, aiming for your hand that's still in possession of what's his, "give me back my sparkler."

"No," you jerk your shoulder back, your body agreeing to let you be human again, though the concept of being Jean's one and only hope is still carouselling around the pink meat of your mind, refusing to stop turning.

Jean runs a stressed hand down the long length of his face. "You know what? I take back what I said. You don't give me hope," he says to you teasingly. "You really do just make my life harder and nothing else."

Your stare draws thin, sight blurred by the closeness of your lashes. "Going back on your own word? I thought you didn't do that? And you know how much I hate liars," You give your head a shake. "See, I was thinking about giving you your sparkler back, but you ruined your chance."

Blinking your eyes slowly at him, your heels undig from the sand, and you begin to travel backward again. "Now you're really not getting it."

Disappointment causes his face to fall with the added weight of impatience. "Y/N," Jean says sharply as his paces start up after you.

"Jean," you return, matching his tone, lids still batting over your eyes that are brimming with innocence.

Holding your gaze, he sighs, exasperated. "Jesus fuck, you play with me too much. You know that?" Scowling, he reaches out for you again, but he misses your arm by only a millimeter. "What are you gonna do? Huh? Make me chase after it or something?"

Beaming gently, a mischievous flash of light flashes in your eyes, letting them speak for themselves.

Taking in your wagging expression, Jean's tongue pushes deep into the back of his bottom lip, face sour with regret for his own uttered words. "Shit, I know that look," he groans, the edges of his tone sharp with dread.

[ ⅠⅠ ▹ play: out of my league - fitz and the tantrums ]

Your head tilts to a questioning angle, playing your innocence up how you do best. "What look?"

His jaw goes slack. "The look that makes me think that I just gave you a really shitty ass idea."

"Look at you." Tipping your nose a fraction higher, you give him a sultry gaze as a smile cracks through. "Such a smart boy."

Jean gulps.

Unbuckling your knees, you zip yourself up around and take off at light speed, heading toward the cave.

"God damn it," you hear him grumble from behind you.

One of the veins pulls at your heart, which causes your head to jerk back with the fear that since his dreary attitude is so different from your upbeat one, he is no longer hastening to stay close. But the second you cast a brief eye back on him, you witness him making his way toward you at a jogging pace. Your fear is immediately canceled out with relief, levitated by an all-consuming form of adrenaline.

"Y/N," Jean calls out as his arms pump. "I swear to god."

"Want your sparkler back? Better catch up them," you retort, copying the words he used toward you when you raced down to the ocean that you spent so long dreaming of.

He shakes his head, but then you swear you see him crack a smile as the beams of the moon in the sky, which is surprisingly still clear, reflect off his rosy cheeks.

Satisfied that he's chasing after you and isn't stopping, your head snaps back around, and you put all of your focus on the trail in front of you.

Laughing lightheartedly with every strike the soles of your feet make on the coarse sand, you come up on the cave that holds a piece of the heart, a beating chamber of yours lodged somewhere in the sand between the antennae galaxies and the mess of all the child-like stars.

Instead of making your way inside, you make the choice to continue carrying yourself forward and pass the ample entrance you were swallowed whole by earlier today. Skewing sharply to the left, you come up to the outer wall of the other side of the cave, opposite where your friends are still gathered near the fire, who are too busy with sparklers and each other's company to really notice your leave. Or question it. Or care to.

At this point, you and Jean going off alone isn't anything they aren't used to.

This side of the cove is bare of all people. It barely even exists before the erosion of the earth begins to cave in. There's just a small amount of sand, the ocean, and the hill that's responsible for making this place a hidden paradise as it holds the city from above—complete seclusion at its very finest.

Bringing your energetic paces to a slowing halt, you spin at half and rest your back against the uneven, rough-hewn rock. Your chest lifts and falls rapidly as you try to catch your breath, a slight pinch within your ribs from how much you traveled and how fast.

As you attempt to gather yourself and settle your heart that's beating with abrupt adrenaline, Jean cuts the corner of the front of the cave. His focus immediately finds where you're standing with his sparkler still burning in your left hand and your unused one dangling down by your thigh in your right.

His paces are now level and slow as he saunters over to you, his arms crossing front of his chest, showing disapproval for your choice to run away after robbing him of something of his.

Your eyes flicker in the cracking light of the sparkler that has burned about halfway, soon to be coming to reach its end. His gaze darkens with each step he takes towards you, which makes your heart flip in all different directions, with the threat to come tearing out through your chest.

Peeling your spine away from the rock, you make an attempt to take off to the left and get away from him again, but you're only allowed two quick steps before you're abruptly stopped from taking any more.

"Hey." Jean's hand latches onto your right wrist since your hand is full with the unlit stick you're holding onto and pulls you towards him, forcing you to retrace the small paces you just took.

Your feet stumble slightly as he guides your weight backward, your back pressing up against the outer wall of the cave, nearly right on the mark of where you were before.

A surge of electricity shoots all throughout your arm, driven by the heat of his touch. Your eyes turn heavenward, and you watch him as he steps in front of you, his hovering existence swallowing you up like the sea.

Descending the point of his nose, he peers down at you. You watch his eyes go soft, conveying an overwhelming amount of warmth the way they always do.

You do your best not to melt. This might be the hardest it's ever been and you can't help but wonder if it's because of those questions that were awoken inside of you minutes before his arrival.

"Where do you think you're going?" He interrogates, his large hand never leaving your wrist even though he has you exactly where he wants you. His calluses are rough enough to nearly engrave your skin.

Suddenly, your throat feels painfully restricted, and your saliva is the same texture as the thickness of freshly harvested honey. It coats every square inch of your tongue. As you swallow, your taste buds become sickly sweet. So much so that you swear the roots of your teeth are on the verge of rotting through your skull.

He doesn't move an inch, nor does his imbibing gaze break its deadly hook on you. It's stuck there, immortally.

Breathing the air full of him—spearmint and vanilla, a mixture you instantly became addicted to within the suctioned walls of the Jaeger basement closet you once damned—you're forced to succumb to the precipitated nerves you're overloaded with, which causes your once pressurized lips to crack open with unanticipated nervous laughter.

Jean reels his upper body back just slightly, not expecting this kind of reaction from you. "What's funny?" his lips twitch, face screwing up. "Why are you laughing?"

Your tongue twists around itself, pulling the back of your throat.

Because I'm nervous.

And it's all because of you.

Getting a grip on yourself, you stifle the remainder of your emotions that are expressing themselves in a light-hearted manner and answer by shifting around the truth behind your reasoning to save a little bit of face. "Nothing. Just seeing you chase after a sparkler like that." Your head shakes, "I never knew someone could want something so badly."

You gotta hand it to yourself. As out of sorts as you feel standing here in the cold sand with Jean looming over you, at least your voice isn't wavering the way your cells are.

Mouth slightly ajar, Jean appraises you closely for a moment, taking in more details of your face than you've ever bargained yourself having.

"Yeah, well..." is all he says. The temples of his jaw pulse through his skin back beneath his scruff near his ears as he cuts his own words off by grinding his teeth together.

It makes yours ache just by watching the amount of pressure he is using to bite down. "Well, what?"

It turns tranquil. The kind of peaceful, quiet nightfall always tends to bring. All you can hear is the waves of Shiganshina crashing as they meet the shore, your heart erratically beating as it echoes in your ears and breathing. His breathing.

Heavy. Slow. Warm.

Not moving an inch, his eyes embark on a dance with yours, swaying in a way that makes it seem that he has all the complicated patterns painted around your pupils completely memorized. The first person to take the time to look close enough. The first to want to. T​​he first to keep wanting to.

Jean swallows so loudly you can hear it, sparks of soft yellow light splattered all in his eyes. "Maybe it's not the sparkler that I want," he whispers so quietly it's almost as though this thought was meant to stay locked within himself—you and the walls of this world being ones who were never intended to hear it.

But you do. You just aren't sure if what you heard him say is even correct due to how timidly his voice spilled over the soft walls of his lips and the overwhelming amount of doubt you feel toward what he's insinuating.

Inhaling a thin breath of ocean air that's mostly filled with the warmth of him, you try to jolt backward, but the entire length of your spine is already pressed up against the rock, leaving you nowhere to go. Being caged in by him, stranded with no other options, the blades of your shoulder fuse deeper into the rutted surface of dark earth.

"What?" You mutter, matching his quiet tone.

Jean opens his mouth. Shuts it. No words repeat. No voice. Not a breath. Nothing.

Suddenly, the sparkler you stole from him dies out, leaving nothing but a quarter of the length of what it once was and a burnt tip. The flickering light has vanished as though it was swallowed by a black hole, never to be seen again.

Only do you see him by the granted light of the shining moon and the distant stars freckling the sky like freshly bloomed baby's breath.

Slowly, he shakes his head, lips briefly folding in between his teeth before releasing. "Nothing, Bambi," he answers, the levelness of his voice returning back to normal again, no more frailness or hesitancy present.

The skin of your mouth tears apart in an effort to keep pestering him with the same question until you get a more viable answer, but when he suddenly releases his grip from around your wrist, your focus is instantaneously transitioned to how cold your limb has run at the loss of him and how swiftly it all occurs.

Eyes dropping to his traveling hand, you watch him as he takes the dead sparkler from between your pinched fingertips and plunges it into the front pocket of his black trunks so he can throw it away later. You now empty hand descends to your thigh.

You already know he's not one to litter, and you'll always appreciate him for that attribute of his. It emphasizes that he's one who cares about the small things that make all the difference.

Jean rustles inside the fabric for a moment and then pulls his hand out, which is now in possession of something different: his blue lighter.

Placidly, without saying anything, he shifts his colored possession into his right hand, freeing it up again. In a single fluid movement, he finds that same wrist of yours that he had a soft grip on before—that side of you instantly turning warm once more.

Gently, he peels your arm away from your side and guides it upward, nearing it to the side of your face, the sparkler holding upward in your soft grasp.

"You know..." His eyes wear in the realm of threatening. "You're really lucky I don't steal yours away from you like how you stole mine," he says, attention quickly darting toward the sparkler and then returning right back to you.

"Why don't you?" You question, raising a challenging brow. "It's right here in front of you."

With his other hand, he repositions the lighter in his grip so it's facing upright and flicks it on. The skin of his face explodes with waving light, burning your focus.

Carefully, he drifts his hand between the center of you and him, bringing the ignited flame over to the sparkler while he keeps his gentle hold on your wrist to make sure the position of your hold remains lifted up near your face.

"Because I saw how happy you were with the other one," he gently responds, in a blink soft cushion reappears in his gaze. "Why would I try to take something that away from you?"

Each molecule your body holds is lit up like the center of the sun seeping an overbearing amount of heat into the rest of you, leaving you unable to say anything else.

With a small tilt of his lighter of blue, the flame kisses the top of the sparkler, bringing it to life as you hold it steady. A soft hiss sounds as it burns, melting into your ears like warm wax.

Drawn in by both light and sound, your eyes stray to the right and latch onto the thin stick, consuming each spark that flies off every which way as Jean puts the lighter back where he pulled it from.

You're completely entranced, consuming the radiant embers pulsing within your caressing hand as the cascade of the constant change of light rips through the veil of darkness, adding to the illumination of the hovering moon.

[ ⅠⅠ ▹ play: sparks - coldplay | trust me on this ]

"So beautiful," Jean slowly speaks, retracting his grip on your lifted wrist. The entire right side of you turns cold at the sudden loss of his rough skin but you don't dare move.

"Isn't it?" you breathe, still taking in the zapping lights, unblinking.

It's quiet, but only for a moment, a peaceful moment. "Y/N," Jean utters softly, causing even more peace to flow into you.

You're far too consumed with the erupting sparks to peel your eyes away to look at him. However, your body acts on natural instinct, and you say his name back to him. That silly tradition shared between only you and him becoming a fierce force of habit, as thoughtless as the breaths you take thousands of a day.

"Jean," you return.

The very moment his name spills from the walls of your lips, his hand appears under your chin. Caught off guard, you inhale sharply through your teeth, feelings of tension building behind your ribs as he guides your face over to meet his.

No matter how many times he has done this, you're still not used to the feeling, how staggering it is.

Tactfully, as you burn, he tilts your head up, the top of your head caressed by the hard surface of the cold cave. With a soft blink, to try and shrink your widened gaze, you lift your eyes to meet him to see his already burning away on you.

The second his sight becomes entangled with yours, you witness his scruffed jaw sharpen to razors right at the hooks. Very slowly, very softly, he shakes his head as he downs the tension you can see fisting his throat to near death.

"Jean?" You say his name again, this time as an uncertain question, wanting to know what he's thinking. Needing to know what he's thinking before you drive yourself mad trying to guess.

Then, he speaks, barely moving his mouth. "I'm not talking about the sparkler," he tells you, voice holding at a feeble whisper again.

His tone is even smaller than before, but this time, you hear him in full. Every word. Every letter. Every fraction of a pause. All of it.

This time, your chest collapses. This time, your lungs go still. This time, your ribs fold in.

Your heart, always with a mind of its own, lifts up and away from its resting place. The swelling organ takes it upon itself to rechannel and ends up inside your skull. How it doesn't burst through by the strength and franticness of each frenzied beat, you aren't sure.

Maybe you are lucky, after all.

You keep your eyes steady on him as they squeeze in erratic pulses. "What are you talking about then?" you ask, voice tight.

Instantly, you're hit with the thought of it being you that he's talking about.

You suspend respiration. It feels ridiculous just to be standing here considering something like that. Too mythical to be able to conform to reality. You've seen what he could have, what he has had in the past.

Pieck is a prime example, and you know he has had her over and over and over again.

You aren't stupid. Or unaware. Or clueless. What you are is a girl who acutely struggles and lacks in almost every area there is when it comes to her own self worth because of how many times it has been shredded whenever it was set into the palms of your once most trusted souls.

What you are is a girl who doesn't feel worth anything, not even so much as a passing glance.

Hell. You would prefer to look directly at the sun than at a single small shard of glass that coddles your reflection because the blinding rays of the star that holds the entire solar system together would hurt a hell of a lot less than what you see when you look at yourself.

So then, knowing this, experiencing this first hand, why wouldn't it be the same for those who surround themselves with your presence? Why wouldn't you nauseate others when it happens so very often to you?

You're having a hard time adjusting to such a possibility. The possibility that there might actually be a chance that you offer peace to outside eyes when they consume you, but you're trying. Really trying.

You're doing the best you can.

Peeling the cracking shell of your inner thoughts away, you focus on Jean, who is restlessly chewing away at the side of his cheek. His weight is shifting around on his legs of tightly wound knees like he's trying to recuperate from something that holds camouflage to the naked eye.

"What's beautiful then, Jean?" You move your head to the right but by only a fraction of an inch. The hold of his hand is still tucked away under your jawline, limiting the mobility of your neck in the direction you want to. "The ocean?"

You're grasping at straws by pathetically asking about what lies in your vicinity just to try and put off the one thing you're secretly yearning to ask but also dreading to with the fear you might be wrong.

Several muscles roll across his chin, as yellow sparks continue to reflect in his stare as you try your best to hold the stick steady. "No."

Your eyes flick up to the sky above and intake speckled lights of the galaxy, somewhat visible in scattered places that aren't kissed by the embrace of floating clouds. "The stars?"

Feeling himself come unglued. Jean's slender fingers dig a little deeper into the fat of your cheeks. It feels like the indent of him is going to be fused on your skin even after death.

"No," he declines.

With every denial he makes, your heart tenfolds in its speed.

Your eyes fall from the sky and are instantly caught in the web of his, and your next guess, the only guess left to make which has been scorching the walls of your lungs to cinder, comes spiraling out. "Are you talking about me?" you whisper, debilitated.

Jean misses a breath. Two. Three. His lips split themselves apart as he tends to his flexing throat by working it.

His eyes, in the low light, flickering with something that looks like life, somehow tenderize even more than what they already are. The tip of his tongue sticks out ever so slightly as he swipes it across his bottom lip. A glimpse of pink. A glimpse of warm saliva. It makes you bite the inside of your cheek.

His adam's apple bobs. He's clearly trying to fight something off only to end up failing as drastically as a trying human can. "Yes," he answers quickly.

The word. That word, which is one of the most commonly used words in the English language, knocks all the air the earth owns straight out of you and launches into another unreachable dimension—leaving you wordless, unable to do anything but stand here between his warmth and this cold cave and exist.

You're too consumed by his answer and his steady eyes to notice that the sparker you're still holding has now died out too. You're completely clueless to the fact that the world around you has returned to dark because you can still scope out every detail of his face due to how close he is as he continues to hover over you.

Slowly, almost dreadfully, his hand parts ways with your heating face. Shifting it over, his fingertips kiss yours as he takes the dull, burnt stick from your loose grip and stuffs it in his pocket alongside the other one.

[ ⅠⅠ ▹ play: everyone adores you (quiet) - matt maltese]

Ripping his hand out of the fabric, he sets it up onto the rock next to your head, palm steadying himself. "Yes. I'm talking about you," he finishes, trying to get you to understand better since your face has run thin from the gaping hole of disbelief you have just fallen into.

Your head spins, almost bursts open.

Hanging your hand back down by your side, you touch your leg just to make sure you're still existing in the present and haven't been completely eaten alive by him as you rest so pathetically small under his towering existence.

Gently clearing out your throat, you find some relief in the center of it that's been fisting itself tirelessly raw, granting you the mobility to actually say something... something more than just the fragments which you are becoming.

"Are you..." your words get stuck. You thought you could finish. You can't.

Jean raises an eyebrow, drawn in by the start of your question and the rest of you. "Am I what, Y/N?"

Your heart is begging to break through your chest. Pleading. Crying out with the painful want to take off flying and meet his buried one across the way that he hardly ever shows.

"Are you flirting with me?" You ask softly, barely any voice left to speak with successfully.

Obnoxious. Fucking embarrassing the way your cool is slipping right out from under you. It's not supposed to be like this, not with him, of all damn people.

And yet, it keeps happening. Again. And again. And again.

It. Just. Doesn't. Ever. Fucking Stop.

And only is it getting worse. By hours, by minutes, by seconds.

Maybe this isn't just attraction after all. The way you want so badly to believe it is.

But you can't think about that right now. You're experiencing too much of everything at once to take on anything else. So you allow yourself to leap out of your running mind and fall back into him.

Jean doesn't falter, gulping you alive with his eyes of benevolent honesty that ignite flares on the backside of your tongue. Keeping his rugged palm pressed into the rock near your pounding head, he lifts his other hand and nears it to the right side of your face.

Gently, setting it upon your heated cheek with curled in fingers, and he traces the round of it with his calloused thumb, the skin of his facial structure gently kissed with moonlight. "You're just now noticing?"

All air spirals out of your lungs as space and time come collapsing in on themselves.

With nerves coating every square inch of your mouth, you bring the side of your tongue to your molars and bite, nearly wincing at the piercing sensation done by your own accord as thoughts start flooding in.

Is he somehow still high? Even after all this time that has passed since he killed that blunt you shared in the backseat, is he still floating around somewhere in a different feel-good dimension?

Or is he simply teasing you? The way you always do with him. Paying you back yet again for all the times you did something like this to him.

Is he making a remark of this sort just to see if you will squirm for his own damn satisfaction? Because if he is, he's about to succeed.

And coming to the admittance of the sorry fact that you're about to lose all your strength and come apart simply from a combination of his lingering touch and words you never thought you would hear come out of him, makes you swell with embarrassment.

"You're high," you insist, trying to convince yourself because it's the reason that makes the most sense to you. "You don't have any idea what you're saying right now."

Jean is a flirt. You know this. He does this stuff for fun. It doesn't mean anything to him. That's what he's doing here. It must be.

Unlatching your eyes from the depths of his, your head drops down and to the right, pulling away from his dancing fingers that are injecting you with something that you can't quite handle.

You have to shy away if you want a single, frail, stupid chance of staying alive.

But your effort doesn't help. Jean's large hand finds your slacking jaw again. Gripping onto the bone like before, he reignites his touch on your skin that never entirely left.

"Y/N." Slowly, gently, kindly, Jean guides your face to line with his once more. The very pits of his eyes explode, revealing to you that he's not a fan that your gaze left him at all in the first place. "I came down from that high of mine a long time ago."

Your nerves are swollen. As is your tongue. Your stomach. The very back of your throat as it threatens to close.

"Then you're drunk," you accuse, struggling for a lifeline that holds the answer as to why he would be talking to you like this right now without the use of verity, without redacting, without jabbing his relentless arrogance into you like a knife you can't pull out.

"You know I have to drive tonight. I'm leaving in less than an hour," Jean calmly shakes his head. "I haven't had a single drop to drink."

Your head is spinning you out of your own mind. "So, what exactly does that mean?'

He pauses for the fleet of a second. "It means that I know exactly what I'm saying to you right now."

He takes a small step closer, closing in on the space that's barely there in the first place. The front of your bodies are almost touching, his warmth and smell impaling twice as much. In your throat. Gut. Heart.

"Y/N, I–" he begins as he releases a breath he's been holding.

But then, suddenly, he's cruelly cut off, keeping him from finishing whatever it was he was going to say.

Or do.

A loud explosion erupts from a distance, followed by bright flashing red lights that ricochet off the bare structure of the night sky looming behind Jean's backside. The vivid pulsating flares line his stature that's possessively hanging over you, with cracks of blinding color and sudden shadows.

Yours and Jean's attention both shift away from each other as light and sound continue, brightening up the side of the world you were starting to forget was even a thing that existed.

Jean takes a glance over his shoulder while your focus pulls skyward to witness the very start of fireworks you were told about earlier being set off from afar. Various colors, sizes, and shapes, adding life to the earth dressed up in nightfall.

Drawn in, Jean shifts his body around. Stepping to your left, he pivots on his heels and rests his spine on the solidified rock next to you. With the sudden distance between you and him, you'd expect it to become easier to breathe, but it doesn't.

As he settles comfortably beside you, the back of his dangling hand meets yours exactly how it did on the inside of this same cave, minutes before the talk of stars, the drawings of distant galaxies, and the teaching of life.

Keeping your attention drawn to the bursting fireworks, your fingers dance upon the valleys of each other but never completely latch. The innocent interaction feels just as inundating and as healing as before.

Those two things never weaning or lacking when with him.

"Looks like the Mavs won," Jean says, matching the angle of your upward tilted head as it bends deeply against the stone.

"Is that who you wanted?" You question, your focus unable to break away from the colorful explosions going off one after another, partnered by bellowing sounds rippling against the vastness of the sky.

"Yeah." In your peripheral, you see him nod, his hair of carmel ash dragging against the hard surface in the repeated movement. "Hoping they'll win the entire series."

You know how rare it is for him to bring up baseball of any sort. You're happy this is the second time today that he's done so, even if other occurrences are only very brief.

"Go, Mavs, then," you quietly reply, not knowing much about the major league teams, having never paid that much attention, but knowing that you want to back whatever he does.

Jean's head snaps to you, and yours to him. Eyes interwoven, he smiles down at you and your words of support, and you return the same curl of your lips pulled up by the expression of happiness written on his face.

The continuous booms and crackles going off in the distance pull your focus away from him and back onto the sky above. Tilting your head up, your eyes soften in awe as you watch each explosion as it lingers on the canvas of deep blue for a quick moment of time before dwindling back into nothing just to be replaced with another vibrant stroke of sudden color again.

Each symphony of luminescence and how they harmonize with each other while also being a resonant boom, loud and beautiful enough to stand on its own, is all you want to consume for the rest of eternity.

That is... until you feel Jean's eyes singeing the side of your face, and that instantly becomes all that you can focus on.

Incapable of shrugging off the sensation, you rip your consuming sight away from the popping fireworks and crane your neck to the left in his direction. Realizing the sturdiness of his gaze as it holds onto you, you quickly come to terms with the fact that he never once turned back to watch the outlying show of oscillating lights at all.

Jean has been looking at you the entire time.

Your chest constricts as you pull the back of your hand away from his, unable to bare the heat of both his skin and gaze. "You're missing the fireworks," you state, ignoring the offset of nerves this realization has made you feel and how it's traveling through every part of you at rapid speed.

A beat, eyes never blinking. "No, I'm not," Jean tries to deny, but the pulsing around his eyes makes it clear that he knows he's already been caught.

"Yes, you are." you return, your gaze growing thin with accusations. "You're staring at me instead of watching them."

He holds still. Quiet. Far too quiet for the Jean you know.

Sighing, you push yourself away from the rock you're resting upon and step in front of him. The fireworks show still at its peak behind you, flashing Jean's unreadable face with streaks of pink, blue, green, red, and yellow as you square your shoulders with his.

"Why are you staring at me?" you ask sharply.

You swear, even amidst your ears popping with the sound of celebratory detonations occurring behind your elongated spine, you hear his breath hitch behind the gates of his teeth as they grind.

Your deeply set eyes jump across his face, able to notice a rosy hue draped across the rounds of cheeks and the very tip of his nose—the distant pulsating flashes enunciating his constricted jaw.

"Careful, Y/N," Jean warns, sending you a stern expression that tightens his skin and draws his stare as thin as blades sharp enough to split you open down the center.

With your lips faintly diverged as an effort to help you breathe better, you remain gaping up at him with those doe eyes that gave you a new identity and put you on the map of this place that holds all the dreams you could never quite let go of.

"What?" you push out.

A muscle rolls over in his jaw, slacking it completely, making it seem as though you are doing everything possible to spite him, and he can't handle much more of it.

"I said be careful," he warns again, sharper this time. A vast amount of tension is building itself inside the base of his body as he pushes his backside deeper into the cave's stone.

The sight of him burns like the sun and heals like the moon. The combination of both being present at once makes your knees lock. "I'm tired of you warning me." You state, with innocent, level blinks. "Especially when I'm not doing anything,"

A pause, his eyes flicking down to your lips still parted, "It's not about what you're doing," Another pause, eyes fixing back onto yours, the center of them now blazing, "but about what I want to do. "

Your stomach flips inside out, stays that way, and twists.

Folding your arms across your barely breathing chest, you take a step closer as the fireworks continue to paint a story of hope and celebrations above you, lighting up all the dark edges of his face. The hue of his eyes and the light within them flicker with ever-changing intervals.

Your tongue pushes into the roof of your mouth, then forcibly flattens. "What do you wanna do?"

Gritted teeth, shifting gums, Jean shakes his head.

Noticing his fist clenching by his side as if grabbing onto invisible resistance to not allow himself to reach out and grab you, you take another step closer. "Do you wanna touch me again, Jean?" you softly question, head tilted. "Is that it?"

He's quiet for yet another time, throat pulsing, fingernails digging even deeper into the rough skin of his palm. His mouth falls agape for only a second before he clamps it back shut, teeth knocking in the process of it all.

Breaking his gaze on you, he turns his head to the right and lets it descend, eyes straight to the sand, biting his tongue again.

You're now standing as close to him as he was when he was the one boxing you in. You almost lost yourself then; you need to earn yourself back for your own damn good.

You need to get a grip of some sort, so you choose, amidst your palpable heartbeat, to get a grip on him.

Arms unfolding, your right hand floats to his fallen face, and you place your palm near beneath his ticked chin lined with scruff. The instant Jean feels your touch, a shallow breath is sucked in between his teeth.

Uno fucking reverso.

Fingers hooking gently under the bone of his jaw, you guide his fallen face back up from the sand and over to yours.

"It's okay." You breathe for steadiness of your own, eyes meeting once again in yet another soulful stare. "You can touch me," you gracefully whisper as you remain caressing the tense structure of his face, feeling it run warm against the skin of your palm at a rapid rate.

Jean swallows coarsely, and curses something you can't quite make out under his breath.

Before you can even register, he takes charge by disengaging your hand from his face and grabbing you near the bones of your hips.

Rapidly, giving you no time to react, he spins you to the right, which makes you gasp at the unexpectedness of it all.

Careful yet possessive, he guides you backward, your twisted spine becoming one with the large rock where you were before. He's gentle with this action, but it still somehow feels as though you just got all the wind knocked out of you. It strains your ribs like no other.

Jean steps himself in front of you, catching his weight before he collides with you by bracing his arm near your head. His left hand is still located at your hip, now fisting at your sweatshirt.

He's caging you in like before but it feels more possessive this time.

He is heavy breathing, and you'd be full of shit if you said you weren't too.

Releasing his grip on the fabric of your thick clothing, he moves his hand, and your breathing goes missing in the rapid building of unshakable anticipation.

Very tenderly, he places it on the side of your face and strokes his thumb across your cheek. Briefly, your eyes flutter shut as you soak in the feeling of his touch and how it burns you the same way that the sun burns mercury.

Then, he moves his hand to the top of your head and runs his slender fingers down through your hair, velvety and full of care. Every inch of your tongue turns sweet with an experience driven by a sort of rare, untainted pureness you've never really had the honor of experiencing before.

Not like this, at least.

You continue to feel his traveling fingers as you hear the cracks of the fireworks going off again. And again. And again. This whole experience is something you can't quite describe.

But it's safe here, that much you know.

And it's good. Very good. Almost fictional. 

Then you hear him speak, and the warmness that seeps out with it assures you that this is indeed your reality.

He is here and so are you.

[ ⅠⅠ ▹ play: the beach - the neighborhood | trust me, once again. actually, just trust me throughout this entire chapter tbh ]

"Open your eyes and look at me, Bambi," Jean whispers. The soft command exits his throat and paints itself across the skin of your face like paint to canvas, making your gut squeeze. "Wanna see you."

Putting primary focus on the function of your eyes, before you lose yourself completely to this moment you feel too tainted to be experiencing, you crack your draped lids back open.

"There you go," he mutters in subtle praise. Gaze intertwining, your gut squeezes even more.

You're being so controlled by him right now you can't even think for yourself, and you can't find it in yourself to mind it.

Lips splitting, Jean stares down into you as you look up at him. He barely blinks, taking in the flashes of lights the fireworks are casting into the rounds of your irises like some kind of captivating spell.

You've always felt worthless, but right now, being held in his stare with all these strobes of brightness occurring relentlessly behind him, it's one of those rare times when you feel like you are worth something–something you once were. Something that you never thought you would fully be again.

Alive. And happy to be.

Happy to be with him.

Fuck. What the fuck.

What. The. Fuck.

Were the girls right after all? Ymir and her stupid mouth? Sasha with her soul peering eyes? Were they in the right to ask you those things? For pushing you to answer?

Are you genuinely starting to fall for this man? For Jean Kirstein? The one you keep tirelessly calling friend?

You figured your heart was safe with the indestructible walls you built around yourself, not to let something like this happen to you again after being so traumatized by those you split you open and stole all the things that made you human straight out from under you and left you alone barely breathing, weakly fighting to regenerate all of what they took.

To stay guarded from the world of feelings is what you planned. All this time, you thought it was working. Wholeheartedly, you believed that you were doing well in holding strong and steady. That you were goddamn fucking impenetrable the way you spent the last year fighting to be.

Well. You aren't too sure about any of that now.

Desperate to seem as though your head is on and that it's on straight, you make the sudden choice to try and take back a little bit of charge that he took back into his possession when he spun you and fused you with this rocky wall.

Taking his hand from out of its entanglement in your hair, you guide it back towards your face. Flattening his warm palm against your cheek, you slowly guide it down, making him trace it the way he was before the fireworks started and shattered the slow building moment.

Closely, Jean watches, taking all of you in as you lead his fingertips around, mapping out different areas of your facial structure: cheek, jawline, nose, whatever anatomy is available for him to caress.

Leading him to the very top of your chin, you lead his hand slightly up. Gaining control over his thumb, you place it on your bottom lip at the corner and slowly pull it across, making him feel it in a way you probably shouldn't, but in a way you also can't help but want to—intrusive thoughts getting the very best of you.

You don't know what's gotten into you, but you're too wrapped up in this moment and in him to care.

Jean's consolidated throat hitches a breath as he feels the cushion of your lip push into the pad of his finger, causing his mouth to fall agape. The tip of his tongue, hidden inside, scarcely comes forward, out of hiding. His eyes of golden brown look completely depleted with how a rough, rugged part of him has come into contact with such a sensitive, soft part of you.

Your heart rate increases, watching something that you've never seen fill his unblinking eyes. At least not to this degree. Almost as though he wants to feel the heat of you against him in some way. In any way. In not so innocent ways.

That thought lights you to ravenous flames, burning you at the stake.

Subtly, wanting to see what he'll do, you give him full mobility over his thumb back while still caressing the back of his scarred hand.

To your surprise, he doesn't freeze or attempt to take it away. Instead, the pad of it finds your lip again, and he traces it all on his own with no lead of your hand, only his sinful choice and the lack of want to stop it.

"Damn mouth," he heavily mumbles out under his breath.

The mouth you constantly antagonize him with. The mouth he says he hates. The mouth he can't ever seem to ever stop talking about.

Somehow, in some godsent way, under his scorching hand, you find the strength to mutter, "You like touching me, don't you, Jean?"

Through his cracked open mouth, a very soft, very subtle whimper escapes from the back of Jean's throat at your ask, his entire body going rigged in front of yours.

The unexpected sound escalating his supple lips makes your lower gut knot around itself so fiercely you almost fold in half.

Oh. You were teasing him before, but no. You can see it now.

He likes this. He really likes this.

Forcefully, with every muscle in his arm flexing, he tears his hand away from your face and descends it to his side. The ripples of color continue to cascade themselves onto the sky as he adds a slight curve to his spine and rests his forehead on top of yours, trying to keep himself centered; the inner axis of him all sorts of fucked up, much like your own.

"Jesus fuck," Jean deeply groans, squeezing his eyes tightly shut. His temples pulse through his skin as his flattened hand forms into a tight, bone-crunching fist on the rock near where your head is deeply resting, offering the support you need to remain standing. "I'm trying to be good for you, Y/N. I'm trying so hard."

Your breathing is officially missing. You don't care. He's keeping you alive in his own way, in a way you never, in a million years, planned for him too. Yet, here he is, doing just that. And you can't tell if that's a good thing or bad.

"What if I don't need you to be?" you mutter, a faint nervous quiver wrapped around the sound of you that you couldn't have fought off even if you had the strength to try.

Jean peels his eyes back, and he takes you in again. "What do you need me to be then?" He whispers back, almost timid, not daring to remove the bone of his skull away from yours. Melding them together for a little bit longer.

The answer to his question comes to you as easy breathing, if not more so. "I just need you to be Jean." Your voice is small, but your words are confident.

That's all you've ever needed him to be. All you ever will need him to be. Himself, scarred and all.

At your response, his spine stills as his broadened chest freezes over and doesn't make a comeback.

His right descends from the cave. Lifting his head up and away from yours, he takes a very small step back as if forcing an inch of space will put out the fire that had been ignited between you and him, burning you both to ash as you stand at the shoulder of the flooding sea.

Your gaze flickers under the light of the fireworks as you watch him. His jaw keeps ticking. His cheeks are running sunken. Eyes trembling. Fists clenching. Unclenching. Clenching. Unclenching.

He's trying to hold on to something invisible to the eye. Resistance. Self control. His goddamn dignity.

You inhale the air through your nose and teeth. It's thick and warm and sweet. And it's all because of him. "Are you nervous right now?" The throbbing question, which reflects exactly what you are, slips across your tongue, inflaming the muscle as you chew on the tip, awaiting for his answer.

Jean takes a few seconds, gulping, hard, loud.

Your heart thrashes around inside of you with each quiet moment that passes, hard, loud.

Emitting a weary breath through his lips that have chapped the corners with anxiousness and silent debate, carries over through the small distance between you and him and ghosts a brief dance across your face, but the haunting of it lingers against your cells and refuses to depart.

You smell vanilla. You smell spearmint. You smell him. All of him.

If you inhale any more of it, your lungs will fulminate. You do it anyway, and you do it desperately.

"Y-yeah," Jean admits and immediately, his teeth grit at the hate of his stammer.

He tries to start over, but not much changes. "Yes." They grit again even harder as if he's trying to bite through them completely and stop his robust agitation from flooding out, but it's already far too late for that.

He knows that, so he keeps pushing through because he's left with no other choice. "I'm nervous."

Your heart has exploded into pieces. A million tiny ones are now living inside of you, feeling each beat in each cell as it pushes into your bones, forcing them to capitulate.

Taking a thready breath, you touch your tongue to your bottom lip just briefly to remind yourself of your senses and that this isn't some sort of really long dream you can't wake up from.

"I thought that never happened to you," you mutter, reflecting on the things he's told you in the past. "Why are you nervous?"

No beats of quiet pass by this time. "You," Jean responds, clipped.

Your heart swells inside of your aching throat, straining it so much your teeth begin to hurt all the way up to the top of your head.

Standing still, in a bit of shock, you watch his enticing eyes change, going from soft to round, as though he's astonished by himself for continuing to speak admittances so raw.

You're astonished too. Consuming his answer tastes like you are eating the meat of his heart with maddened hunger down to the core that holds all the tenderness he pretends is nothing but a folkloric myth he never believed in until he started believing in you.

"I make you nervous?" you unevenly question, the sound of your erratic heartbeat mixed with the explosion of reckless fireworks making it impossible for you to know just how soft or how harsh you have spoken. You don't even realize the small crack that appeared within the last word.

Jean studies for you for a second. Blinks once. Drawing a breath, he chooses to keep going on. It seems he accidentally opened the floodgates and can't fill the dam in enough time.

"Y/N. You make me so damn nervous." he huffs the rest of his answer out in a single frail exhale that smells like spearmint and feels like the vastness of the galaxy and the comfort of a home at the same time—two of your most sought after dreams coexisting in the being of one. "And it overwhelms me to the point that sometimes, I need to remind myself how to breathe."

Your mouth, very faintly, falls open with unexpectedness toward all of what he's admitting to.

Seeing your shock and hearing his own words boomerang back to him, embarrassment flushes him from a fainted pink to a bright cherry red. The drastic change of tint is heavily emphasized beneath the explosions of continuous fireworks that sound like nothing compared to what he just admitted to.

Emptying his lungs all at once, his gaze breaks away from yours and falls down the length of your face, landing on your parted lips.

His breath falters. Ends. It doesn't come back.

"God damn it," Jean sputters. "I need..." he begins but fails to finish.

Attempting to get your hayward thoughts to cease, you snap the hinges of your jaw back shut and suck in a sharp breath. 

With full lungs, you finally get the pulp of your teeth to separate from each other that were beginning to stick together as if by glue. "What?" you whisper, mouth aching with uncertainty. "What do you need?"

He lets your question hang in the sultry air for a handful of seconds. "I need more self-control. That's what I need," he eventually enunciates.

His tone is felt in your blood cells, ricocheting off the calcium walls of your bones like a pinball machine trying to find an escape route with no true way out. "I need more self-control before I do something I'm not supposed to do," he finishes a bit shaky.

Feeling like you're about to slip from yourself, from the world, you push your spine deeper into the firm rock.

With effort, you swallow. It's difficult. Harsh. You try to speak. You can't.

Choking on your own tongue, you watch him as he diligently works away at his throat, veins coming forward as knots present themselves on the outskirts. "I don't trust myself when I'm around you," he admits. His voice is wavering. His body is, too. "I haven't since the second you told me your name in Jaeger's kitchen at his party."

He shakes his head like it hurts, as though his neck is about to break. "Every second that we spend together, Y/N, any time I'm in the same damn room as you, I have to watch myself. Every goddamn move I make. Scared shitless about what I might do."

What he might do?

Forehead faintly lined, your breaths come and go from the earth in short, sharp bursts, matching the pounding of your reckless heart, which is acting as nothing but a grenade in your chest just waiting to explode and transform you into nothing but a sea of red mist of what once was.

It's quiet as he teeters his weight on his feet, clearly at battle with himself.

The silence between you and him is full of unfaltering gazes woven into each other, robust ambivalence, the loud pops of colorful explosions ricocheting off the sky, and the painful pounding of your heart and brain as they wrack themselves crazy.

You're scrapping for enough words to make just the simplest of sentences to fill in the emptiness of this heavy air. Unable to take his silence. Unable to take your nerves.

Eventually, you do. "What exactly are you scared you might do?" you whisper as steadily as you can, for your tongue is tied at the back of your throat.

Staring into his erratic eyes, Jean pauses as if internally debating something that he seems to have been warring tirelessly with for quite some time–far longer than anything you'll ever know.

Locking his knees, his jaw goes tight. Goes loose. Goes tight. Goes loose. Eating an invisible nothing.

The anticipation of your hanging question and his lack of response makes your the bones of your cheeks throb and your stomach coil. Every muscle there is in your body is flexing so intensely you wonder how long until they all burst open.

It's becoming painful not being able to tell exactly where his mind is at while yours is so damn full of him.

You want nothing more than to scream out from the tension building between you two due to all your questions and all his lack of answers.

Suppressing the urge to do so, as it bubbles around in your chest, you bite the inside of your cheek, trying to relocate the ache, but only does it add to what's already present inside of you.

Finally, Jean shakes his head, refusing to answer.

You want to peel your skin off standing in this moment of dubiety while being so close to him. Smelling his existence. Sensing his existence. Hearing his existence.

Unable to take his lack of answer, your arm, with a pounding mind of its own, jolts forward. Reaching out, you grab the wrist of his right hand that's still busy pulsing.

His whole body jolts as a reaction. His gaze yanks free of you and drops. Pushing his lips into each other, turning them white, he takes in the way your skin wraps his, the rest of his large frame constricting in front of you.

Every swelling lobe of your brain is full of him, of possibilities, of unshakeable tension. "J," you whisper, using what you can of your tongue as it palpitates.

That pulls his attention. All his attention. Lifting his head back up, his eyes deadlock on you, the base of them shuddering like fallen leaves of golden autumn as they search your soul as yours turn to the softest melting doe. "Talk to me." you squeeze his wrist a little tighter, "Please."

It's weak. It's short. It's hardly anything at all. But it's more than enough because within a second, Jean's knees almost give, and his jaw snaps in complete half.

"Oh, fuck me." Jean grinds out under his heavy breath, and your heart jolts at the whip of frustration that just snapped around his corded neck and is now seeping out of every inch of him, leaking onto the cold grains of this sandy beach.

Unable to stop himself the way he's been fighting so hard to, no longer having it in him to care about the strength he's so obviously losing his grip on, he takes that same step forward that he just took back, nearing himself to you once more.

This causes you to release the hold you had wrapped around him, your hand gluing itself back to your thigh that has become blanketed with chills.

Jean's overly confident, uncaring demeanor he always dresses himself in with an effort to keep people out, sheds off his shoulders like a thick winter coat, exposing his bones that are wrapped in a sheer fabric messily blotched with bloody desperation as he places both his hands on your shoulders, thumbs pushing lightly into your collar bones.

"You wanna know what I'm afraid I might do?" He asks, jaw completely locked, and you witness his gaze practically turn pleading as it searches the deepest depths of yours. As though he is pathetically hoping for you to confirm his question because if you do, he can use it as an excuse to go through with this.

Whatever this even is.

The thought you had earlier when the sun was still up comes rushing back to you. Was it real? Is there a chance that Jean actually does want to kiss you? Is he standing here, in front of you on this cold beach of your vastest dreams, fearing for his life that he actually just might?

The strapping build of these inner questions brand the roof of your mouth bloody, and it tastes like a mixture of tooth aching iron and all the sour nerves that have suddenly invaded every inch of your body.

Unable to speak, too overwhelmed by everything happening, the fireworks, his words, him, you nod, and you nod slowly.

Chewing at his crimson cheek as if trying to eat his fears and nervousness, Jean slowly edges himself toward you, descending his head.

Your heart skips a beat at the change of angle. At the change of being so near to him.

Yes. Jean had been close to you like this before, multiple time for that matter. But, it has never anything felt like this. Something different is floating around, altering everything you thought you once knew about yourself. About him. About the world around you.

The anticipation of what he might or might not do makes your bones pulse. Every floating cell your body holds home to is flexing as you brace yourself the best you can against the outer wall of the cave you're slowly dissolving into.

Three spiral green fireworks set off in the sky behind his backside, your close sight of him exploding in a sizzling bright color, and that's when he moves in a way you could have never been prepared for.

"This," Jean says as he kisses the center of your forehead.

Taking you by complete surprise, all your breathing stops.

"And this," he says as he kisses your right cheek.

All your bones crack.

In an immediate daze by the warmth of his mouth and by his coarse scruff that gently scratches you with every movement he makes, your eyes flutter shut.

"And this," he says as he kisses your other cheek.

All your cells turn to steel.

"And this," he says as he kisses the very tip of your nose.

All your skin melts away.

Slowly, nearing the world of cautiousness, Jean removes his hands from the curves of your shoulder. Floating both of them up, he cups your heated face ever so gently.

His large, rough palms are caressing your cheeks, the bones of his curved fingers placed over your ears, the pads of his fingertips curl in and brush onto your scalp as he tilts your head up toward him.

Slowly, at the feeling of your mobility being guided by him, you peel your lids back, and your eyes fall directly into the inescapable world that he holds inside his burning ones.

[ ⅠⅠ ▹ kiss the girl - tommee proffit, fleurie]

He looks at you with his face softening, chest caving in, and every ounce of your breathing stills when you see the complete adoration resting inside the webs of his irises that you were too blind to see in their full rawness before.

He swallows a lump in his throat, the base of it thickened with all the things he can't say but looks as though he's wanting to. Dying to.

Jean appears to have gone shy before you, and you didn't even think that was possible for a boy like him. So arrogant. So confident. So full of himself. So unafraid.

But he is. He's shy. The shyest you've ever seen someone be. His cheeks are salmon pink. His hands are a little shaky. His eyes are gentle. His presence, though a little weakened by the same nerves you're about to choke on, is completely warm.

Slowly, he maneuvers his thumbs and places them directly on the very rounds of your cheekbones.

Glancing down, taking in whatever your peripheral allows, you watch him in blurry sight as he gently begins to trace you there, with the rough pads of his large fingers, back and forth and back again. The skin of your face he's so carefully caressing, is skyrocketing in temperature with the heavy unison of both your unsteady breaths.

You're sure he can feel it, the heat of you. You're too wrapped up in this moment to care the way you normally would.

Lifting your sight back up, as he continues to trace you there, stare burned on you, a yellow flash of light in the distant sky ricochets through the valleys of the world, burning your eyes, of light, of him, and all the nerves one could possibly embody.

His shallow breaths dance across your face as he declines himself even lower, closer to you, still timid. Spearmint and vanilla devour you at once.

Spearmint, vanilla–kiss me.

Two fireworks set off.

Spearmint. Kiss.

Three fireworks.

Vanilla. Me.

Five.

Kiss. Me.

A whole storm of sizzling lights explode, lighting both your skin tones bright red.

Eyes locked in like a promise neither of you would ever dare break, your airway narrows as he tilts his forehead down and rests it upon yours.

The very tips of your noses come into a soft, tender meeting.

Gently, still stroking your cheeks, carving invisible messages into your skin with his callouses, Jean brushes his nose against yours with a very small movement of his head, and suddenly, all because of an action that holds so much innocence and sensitivity, you're hanging on for dear life.

All of your veins endure a sudden shell shock that feels equivalent to the loud explosions occurring endlessly in the sky.

You always have a lot to say, but you can't find a single word right now. You can't move. Breathe. You can't do a thing but simply exist in the warm palm of his hands that you wish you could have been lucky enough to have known sooner.

At this point in time, in this shared space, which has run havoc with the unbearable building of anticipation, the unrelenting adrenaline of the unknown, and your inescapable soul splitting want to find out—which you have bitten into your tongue one too many times—all make you feel
as though you have never been touched by the hand of another human before in your lifetime.

And if you didn't know any better, you would think Jean has never touched by another either. As though you have somehow, in an instant, rewritten the past and earned both your innocence back, which you carelessly stripped yourselves of for different reasons, and have become each other's firsts.

At least, that's what it feels like as he holds you here with shaky hands of scars and warmth as you both fight not to tremble from what seems like nearly nothing but feels like nearly everything.

To you, anyway.

Taking all of it in, you can feel something being awoken inside of you. Something evergreen. Ever changing. Something that's cracking your skull clean open, breaking you all the way down just to build you back up again. Making up for all the ways you were once broken and turning them into something better than anything you could have ever imagined.

As thready air escapes him, Jean slowly lifts his forehead off of yours. Moving his mouth down slightly more, he hovers directly over your lips, which are slightly parted in nervous suspense to match his, keeping them only a hairsbreadth apart.

Almost agonizingly, though you're not sure it's on purpose, he holds himself there, right where he is. Not an inch of movement. Not a single twitch.
The build up of wait is enough to kill you dead.

Aching to feel such a hot, sacred part of him engulfing such a sacred part of you, you are over taken with this almost unfightable urge to close the small gap forced between.

Heels digging deeper into the cool sand, you hook your fingers into the front pockets of his black trunks and resist the nauseating desire by stiffening your resolve against the outside of this cave, latching onto the one frail string of strength you have left before it can vanish like all the rest you were once in proud possession of.

If Jean actually wants this, if he wants to kiss you the way he's making it like he does, he's going to have to be the one to move first. Prove to you that it's not all in your head the way you've been restlessly trying to make yourself believe.

That's the one and only way your lips will ever meet again. You want it, need it, to be done by him.

Show me. Prove it. Kiss me.

You're barely functioning as you wait in bone-cracking longing for him to complete the final step, close the final inch. Whatever shaky inhales you can will yourself to take are full of him and only him.

Seeming as though he's not able to breathe much either, Jean licks his slightly parted lips wet with the very tip of his tongue in his own anticipation, making your jaw loosen marginally more at the feeling of the short distance heat escaping him and migrating over to you.

Your chest cracks apart, your anxious heart surpassing its peak.

Searching your eyes, almost as though he is silently asking if any of this is okay, his rough palms deepen slightly more into your cheeks, bracing himself as your fingers curl harder onto the fabric of his trunks, bracing yourself, too.

Yes, Jean. This... this is okay.

Do something. Alleviate it from me. I can't take it anymore.

This wait is becoming far too much to bear.

Stop waiting.

[ ⅠⅠ ▹ play: stop waiting - cigarettes after sex ]

Don't leave me out of breath, out of my mind, choking on my own wonders with a racing heart again.

Stop waiting.

Stop. Waiting.

Jean's brown eyes then pinch tightly shut in resistance, trying to will himself to hold back, as though he is about to lose himself to a sin he can't help but commit.

Three fireworks detonate at once. One green, one blue, one yellow, lighting your two close bodies up with bright color as the loud sound ricochets inside your pounding ears.

Shakily, he draw in a lungful of air, thick with tension, through his nose as all of what he could make of his own resolve slips right out from under him.

"And this," Jean whispers beneath the lit-up veil of blue that separates you from the rest of the galaxy above.

And suddenly, as strobes of yellow lights shoot off into the sky, acting as a second sun, his warm lips, full of more desperate hunger than you've ever seen come from another human soul, come crashing down onto yours.

The strong tether of resistance tied around his half beating heart comes undone, causing yours to unravel, too.

You inhale sharply through your nose at the impact of your mouths finally meeting.

The very instant you feel him, taste him, consume him, your knees lock on themselves so harshly they nearly bend backward and snap in half.

Almost selfishly, he steals every ounce of oxygen straight out of your lungs as if it's a source of medicine—his only source of medicine—he's been in dire need of for his entire life. Leaving you boxed in, melting, unable to do anything but surrender every ounce of your existence to the blooding shifting kiss, losing yourself into this moment completely.

Into him completely.

All that waiting, that constant, agonizing internal battle of 'will he or won't he,' 'do I want this or don't I,' has finally reached its relentless end. That space between you and him has officially closed.

For the two of you have collided like a pair of drifting galaxies.

Spearmint, vanilla. Jean Kirstien has kissed you.

And you are never going to be the same again.

Breath hitching as your cells come to life, your eyes slightly roll before fluttering shut in an intense rush of pleasure being coaxed into every part of you by the perfect puzzling of two warm mouths. Two warm mouths that have been long awaiting in suffering silence to know each other once again in a way as vulnerable and as captivating as this.

You find every bone you are made of sighing with utter, pacifying relief as every inch of your body succumbs to this desperate, heavy-breathing attachment where the meeting of two lips feels like the meeting of two souls who have given up in a stupid, self-created, wretched fight, no longer able to outrun the other.

Together, finally, they live on common ground.

The distant, lively fireworks show, still being set off upon the canvas of the star-speckled sky, continues to add life into this world while Jean begins to add life into you.

The latch of his warm, soft pink lips is gentle, yet starving. Neither of you dare to move even a fraction of an inch from where you have settled into each other upon this sanded beach of all your granted dreams.

Your close bodies simply hold there, letting the desperate embrace that your lips are locked into communicate in a way that all other essences of humanity would pathetically fail.

It needs to be this. It has to be this.

Long awaited intimacy.

Overwhelmed by all the unknown sensations given to you by his closeness, his warmth, his merciful hold, your closed eyes pinch shut so tightly they burn as you desperately move your hands and grip the bottom of his shirt right at his lower abdomen, bracing every ounce of the fierce impact that has jerked your body to life.

You can feel it everywhere, all at once, as it rearranges you from the outside in.

And that's when you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that you will remember this moment shared with Jean Kirstein forever.

Not just in this universe but in all the rest, too. Whatever ones are out there for you to live within, as a piece of nature, as another messy human, as a celestial being of a completely different undiscovered galaxy. It makes no true difference.

Because no matter what or who you might be in all the future lifetimes to come, your spirit–now being held by him–will never be able to forget what it feels like to have him pushed up against you, caressing your face like you are a piece of porcelain so rare, so precious. Noses full of hot air made up of nothing but each other's scent, bending to conform to the structure of each other's faces like a perfect mold.

The perfect mold.

For this gentle interaction of you and him is writing itself directly into the white marrow of your bones with a type of immutable glowing ink as valued as gold that you will carry with you no matter where you might go. What you might go through. Who you might meet. Who you might become.

There's no escaping the depths of something like this, and it has only just begun.

The dance of the fireworks create brightly lit halos above your and Jean's heads, reflecting off the waves of the ocean to your right, as he remains kissing you with warm, unmoving lips like he has all the time in the world and wants to spend every ticking moment of that time doing just this.

It's so different from what you experienced in that closet with him as a result of a stupid game of kiss or bitch. But it is just as addictive. If not more.

This gentle kiss you're receiving from him is full of respect. Sweet. Kind. It is a rare type of experience that makes you feel cared for more than lusted after or used.

It makes you feel like being you, existing exactly as you are, is simply good enough.

And that is something that you have never know  before.

The way Jean's supple lips embrace yours is full of a rare, tenderized gentleness you didn't think he carried an inch inside of him when you met him back then. He has unknowingly proven that initial assumption of yours wrong time and time again. But more so now than ever before.

As Jean continues to breathe himself into you, soft mouth still frozen upon yours while yours remain latched in the same way directly under his, the pads of his large fingers twitch at the base of your scalp like he is in the middle of experiencing something vigorous occur deep inside of him and is trying to wrap his mind around it all.

Every inhale, and every exhale occurring through his nose are all shallow and shaky as they knick your skin, setting your entire face to ravenous flames. His large, well defined body is wound tightly by knots of some sort of resistance as you feel his muscles flex beneath your fists, still wringing the hell out of his shirt near his hidden v-line.

Patiently, as you stand embraced by him in a way you never thought you would be again, you wait for him to push deeper, but he doesn't.

You don't know for sure, but it almost seems as though he is forcing his body to hold back, scared to move. Uncertain of himself. Nervous, just as he confessed that you cause him to be.

The combination of the deepening of his palms against your cheeks and the sudden stillness of his breath make it feel like he is terrified of tainting you with his own existence just by simply making the choice of going through this.

For daring to desire it.

For wanting you in this moment the same way that you can't help but want him.

Mind spinning wildly, you just can't figure out exactly why or what is causing his hesitation, but you can physically feel it straining his bones as if holding back it is an extremely difficult task for him to try and accomplish.

If he is scared, you're not sure exactly what it might be because of. If it's the vulnerability of all of this. Of the true tenderness that comes from such an intimate action when it's driven only by adoration dripped in the essence of longing and not just solely by lust and dark minded intentions, which you don't think is something he hasn't experienced a lot of before.

Or if it's the uncertainty that you might end up pulling away, rejecting him at any given second. Or if he's nervous that he will take it too far if you do allow it to continue.

You aren't certain what exactly it is, if it is one of those things or a whole weightful combination, but you do know there is something there, acting as a barrier, wedging itself between your soul and his. Forcing him to hold back from completely surrendering in a way you're almost certain he never has surrendered to another person before.

But god, do you want him to surrender. And god, do you want it to go on.

You want him to know this. Need him to know this.

Need him to know that he isn't damaging you at all by allowing himself to have you in such a way.

Need him to know that all he's doing as he brushes his lips so innocently against yours, as gentle as the spreaded wings of angels, is healing you in a way you didn't even realize you needed to be healed until he wrapped himself into like this.

With your heart tilting toward him, spinning ravenously on its axis, your shaky hands crawl up from his lower, tense stomach. You can feel every indent of his abs as they flex beneath your traveling touch before your fingertips land on his heaving chest, which is just as tense.

Immediately, capturing the heat his body is radiating in the center of your palms, you enfold his black shirt into your fists and tug him even closer, a silent way to let him know that holding back isn't anything that he has to do. That it is actually the exact opposite of what you want him to do.

"More," you susurrate against his warm and inviting mouth, able to feel his entire chest cave in as you seize the living hell out of the fabric dressed over it.

Jean hiccups, sputtering pathetically at the electrification of your touch and the gratifying pull that has come with it. He inhales sharply through his nose allowing for the abrupt action to occur, the front of his weakened body completely colliding with yours, no longer leaving any space for the smallest lick of air to glide through.

Bones now collapsed fully into each other, you can feel his heart beating, racing... even faster than the ridiculous rhythm of yours.

At your nearly muted ask of desire you just fed against him, like a meal he has been craving for more than half his life, there's a sudden snap around Jean's throat. A deepened crack of something pathetically desperate that he's barely able to catch at the last split of a millisecond.

And then, with your bodies fusing even deeper into each other, you feel him relax against you, allowing for his mind to finally let go of all his uncertainty and become full of nothing but you.

All those nerves that made it hard for him to move just moments before are immediately replaced with a voracious longing you didn't know existed within the human race.

That's all Jean needed. Your consent.

Your consent to keep this going. Your consent for him to stay where he is and push himself further so he can truly know the world of your existence.

The verbal knowledge that you are matching his buried want. That you want him close. That you want him latched to you in ways you swore up and down from the moon to Mars that you never would.

But at this point, being wrapped in the skin of a body as electrified as this, filled to the brim with liquifying bones and bursting atoms, who the hell are you even kidding?

In this moment, his closeless is not a silly want. In this moment, it is a complete and utter need, and it is eroding inside of you, starving for whatever sanity you have left, which is skim, coming close to none.

Yes, Jean. This is okay. I promise.

And now, he seems to understand what you cannot say.

Jean's large hands of unjust scars, blistering heat, and endless callouses move from the sides of your face back through your hair and completely get lost deep inside.

The strands coil around his thick fingers as the tips of them hook on tightly to the curve of your skull, forcing your tilted chin to pull slightly forward and meet him just a bit more.

Getting a better grip on you, Jean deepens the kiss. And he deepens it passionately, causing you to fist his shirt even tighter, wrinkling it in all its nice places, as fierce cracks of lightening ignite all your bones.

Exhaling all the air he was nervously holding directly into you, his soft, damp lips unfreeze, and you can taste the sweet relief.

Tenderly, they begin to move, and following his somewhat more confident lead, you match them in perfect unison. Latching, unlatching, just to latch all over again, even with more longing than before each and every time they crash with death-defying waves of desperation with currents strong enough to drown you.

By the second, the breathing of you and him becomes heavier as you steal any air there is straight out of each other's lungs and refuse to give it back. Heaving hard. Fast. As erratic and out of sorts as your two hearts as they conjoin together with each thump they make against your shaking chests.

He's in the lead, as his rough scruff runs your skin raw, moving his hands around in the strands of your hair tangling it all up. His head realigns with each interaction, higher, lower, left to right, embarking on a restless pattern of covert thirst that you match perfectly like the concept of each other is all that you've ever known.

Going from your top lip, bottom lip, and the very center; not missing a single fraction of space. Every inch of your mouth knows what his kiss feels like—every inch of your mouth craving to know more.

Jean chooses to keep his soft tongue locked away behind his teeth, you're assuming out of the respect, as his lips swollen with passion continue to trail all across yours.

Even without any involvement of the pink muscle, the flavor of him keeps on intensifying, as does the beat of your capricious heart. The unified experience of both occurring simultaneously causes your mouth to water at this saccharine moment.

Your entire being, braced by this rock at your back and by him at your front, starts to spin even faster than it ever has before. You're coming to be completely out of your mind, and you bear the loss of all your sanity because you're simply enjoying this experience with Jean too much.

You can only hope that he is too.

There are no hiccups or oddness to be found in the ropes of continuous, deep-pressed kissing you've become so lost in with him. No misreading of placements or awkward bumps of teeth. Only two pairs of distended lips inflamed with desire that seem to know each other all too well for only doing this only one time before when you were merely strangers, and the only common ground you stood on was Banana Fish.

Your bodies, embedding into each other like molten lava, are both completely rigid as your hands cling to each other's shaky structure and your mouths cling to each other's addictive warmth, puzzling together for a perfect fit.

It doesn't take long before you find yourself dying for air. You may be on the very brink of asphyxiation but you've never felt so damn alive.

You can feel your lungs screaming against your ribs to be full of something other than him. And as much as you don't want it, you know you need it because you're only seconds away from being blue in the face.

The need for the same exact thing must be happening to Jean because, in unison, as if your desperate minds have become conjoined just like everything else the two of you are made of, your lips slowly pull away from the knowledge of each other. The glossy, succulent skin of them stays stubbornly connected up until the very last second, as if they don't want to let go.

Two pairs of hands go frozen, yours on his chest, his in your hair that's now in complete knots all thanks to him. Neither of you dares to open your eyes, far too lost in this moment you've both been prolonging for far too long.

Keeping your noses and foreheads connected, you stand in this smoldering heat as one, feeding yourselves the salty air your bodies have been aching for in volatile, pulsing breaths.

Jean is gasping. You are, too. The fireworks continue on with their lively show. You can see subtle flashes of color changing proof behind the back of your eyelids but all you hear is him as he keeps his lips dangling in front of yours like bait.

"F-fuck, Y/N." Jean curses tacitly as he attempts to fill his dying lung, breakage all along his unsteady whispered tone.

At the sound of your name nearly being moaned, a storm of butterflies pour into your stomach, tying every inch of it to undoable knots.

Slowly, shyness coming to find him again, he brings his parted lips slightly forward and starts to brush them gently against yours. From top to bottom. Then, bottom to top. But never do they latch. They just remain slightly cracked open, timidly moving this tender part of him against you, feeling the left over saliva you painted onto each other as it blends together.

"Wanna,' he mumbles weakly against you. You feel the word more than you hear it.

Your neck is braided with overwhelming anticipation that you haven't lost an ounce of since all of this started; you have to work it in order to get anything out of it. And still, even when you do get the strength, it sounds pathetically small. More breath than anything else. "Wanna what?"

Jean gulps, trying to push down his pent up emotions of hunger but finds no success.

"Wanna kiss you again," he tightly confesses, intense strain to his voice like he knows he shouldn't but can't help the desire anyways. Sin. After sin. After sin.

He's completely overtaken by this moment right now. So are you. Neither thinking clearly, only seeming to be able to think of each other.

You feel his bottom lip brush your top one. You try not to shudder beneath him as you gently, almost into his gliding lips, say, "Yeah?"

Jean's uneven words spews right out. "God yeah." His top lip now brushes against your bottom one, hot breath of spearmint ghosting your split apart mouth, spreading outward to your cheeks, setting them ablaze.

Keeping your eyes sealed shut, you tuck your chin slightly in toward you, parting your lips from his brushing ones. They now rest a millimeter apart, his skull still liquifying into yours as it continues to obnoxiously pound your ears, threatening deafness.

[ ⅠⅠ ▹ play: the feels - labrinth ]

You hear him groan in frustration over his complete separation from you, done by your own accord, the low sound of it transforming your bending bones to rubber.

Your mouth is burning to know him again, but you're also completely absorbed with your want to know how badly he actually wants this. If it's as bad as you do.

As your knees, bearing all your unsteady weight, refuse to unlock you breathe out, "Say please." Your pulse is pounding in your veins. 

Even amidst the explosions of fireworks snapping like angry whips against the curved world, you can hear Jean's pulse pounding too. "P-please," he then whimpers, body twitching in a storm of desperation he can't keep under control.

That plea. His plea. Proof of his want. That does it.

You still haven't gotten your breathing back. Neither has he. Not even close. But you don't have a damn to give.

Wanting more of him, needing more of him, and not being able to wait anymore for it, you take matters into your own hands.

Hastily, with an aggressive haze of desire clouding your mind, you grab him by the reins of his shirt. Scabbing knuckles curving into his strained abs, you yank him forward, back into you, bridging the small gap, ridding away of the inch of earth set between.

Again, as the fireworks detonate from above, you are one.

Jean releases a heavy exhale through his nose with needed relief at the feeling of instant hot friction caused by your lips meeting all over.

Immediately, as though desperate, he starts to pick the pace back up right where you both dreadfully left off to breathe. His confidence with you grows again while his shyness dissipates more and more with each perfect hook your mouth makes against his.

Jean takes the power of the lead right back, but his tongue still doesn't try to slip into your mouth. It remains hidden, unfed to you, as his hands part from your hair and hook around you, finding the very small of your back, forcing the very bottom of your tailbone to peel from the wall of the cave and push deeper into the lower part of him.

Hot tension builds there immediately, making it that much harder to stand steady on the uneven floor of Amesfell Cove.

Every so often, Jean reels his mouth back for only the flash of two second intervals just to feel the warm, dampness of him crash against yours, as though he's getting to experience it all again for the first time.

As your mouths continue to desperately smack together between endless heavy, unsteady breaths, his hands slowly begin to unravel from your spin and creep their way to your hair again. With each interaction, and every reintroduction of your throbbing lips, a thunderous strike hits the very center of your core, making you feel as though you are levitating up in space every time he feeds more breath into you.

Needing more stability as you feel your body on the verge of cracking apart like a brittle wish bone, your hands unleash from his stomach and curl around him.

You start grabbing away at his back, muscles contracted there too. Beneath your pressed palms, you can feel his deep scattered scars through the threadings of his shirt.

Remembering that the whole map of his backside is full of them, your heart is immediately knifed at. You wonder if he will pull your hands away from their location or if he will simply break from you entirely.

He doesn't do either. He only presses his working lips and hardened body deeper into you.

As your fingertip trail up his stretched spine, you suddenly, you feel his tongue lapse your bottom lip, testing the waters to see if you're willing to let him in.

You waste no time. Sighing into him, you unhinge your already loose jaw even more and open, giving him free access to scope you out however he so pleases.

Jean's warm tongue passes through your lips that are on fire from him working himself into their wet canvas, and enters into your agape, waiting mouth. Instantly, at the consuming feeling of his entrance, you are hit by a jolt of lightning that pierces your entire body.

A damn chemical reaction.

Grabbing slightly harder at his back, you feel as through you've been turned upside down, finally able to taste the full flavor of spearmint and vanilla spread all across your thirsting pallet.

The second he consumes you, soft tongue meeting yours, Jean's body naturally reacts by fisting your hair just slightly, right at the scalp. The rounds of his cut knuckles bending against your skull as he tugs at the strands he's gathered, causing a very faint, unanticipated whimper to escape from within you and land straight in him.

The sound of the bursting fireworks cancels out a majority of the sound that eluded you. Jean, however, can feel, hear it, taste it. He catches every drop of it on his swollen tongue as it glides against yours making him nearly shake.

Swallowing the sounded pleasure whole, Jean lowly groans against you. It sounds desperate, tasting like the good kind of pathetic as it enters into the warmth of your mouth and it drips down your closing throat.

A deep sound of messy satisfaction he can't help but make because all his strength he would use to try and fight it off has been completely stolen by you.

But as soon as what had just escaped from him echoes back into his head, unable to choke it back like he did before, he painfully pulls away from you.

It all happens quickly, as though letting himself into your mouth like that and the staggering enjoyment that came from it snapped him out of his world of you and back into reality—the reality of hesitance and second guessing.

There's an almost unbearable ache to your lips, missing him, the moment they detach for another time.

Even though he pulled away from the kiss, he's not able to fully move away from you. He keeps his forehead against you, resting his body into your forefront as your hips that you just pressed up into him fall back down against the wall of the cave.

The world is frozen. So are you. So is he. Stuck against each other. Stuck in time. Stuck.

Heart clawing your chest with threat to escape, chest rising and falling rapidly, you peek open your right eye just slightly to see that Jean's are still wired shut. The skin on the outer corners of them are tightly pinched like he's putting all his concentration on trying to get a grip, the rest of his face coming to endure that same strain. A herculean kind of effort.

His cheeks and nose are covered in complete flush. His skin is hot to the touch. Hot to just be in the same vicinity. His lips are red, completely swollen, and glossy—the end result of allowing himself to have too much of you at once.

His mouth hangs agape only a fraction of an inch apart from yours. His tongue that you tasted all of only just briefly, is slightly moving around inside behind his teeth, as he pathetically tries to catch his breath just like you are attempting to do. Both of you seem to be failing at this effort, just like you were before.

"G-god. Sh-shit." Jean's voice falters, nearly missing, eyes still screwed shut with heavily forced tension. "I shouldn't have–" his words fall off. Not all of him is back yet from those moments of chaos just shared.

You're still lost in it, too, and might be forever. "Shouldn't have?" You can barely get your words out.

Very harshly, you swallow, trying to make your voice stronger, but it doesn't work. He has taken your strength by the ounces, and all of it is seeping right between his thick fingers, just as you had feared it would hours ago. "Shouldn't have what?" you ask, finally able to push the rest out.

Jean's scalding forehead falls deeper into yours. With the combination of sultry air and the heavy breathing coming from both parties, you're convinced the pink matter of your two minds is going to melt, blending into each other as one. Interlinked forever.

"I shouldn't have done that," he mutters, tracing your cheeks with his thumbs while his forefingers remain lost inside the entanglement of your hair.

He sounds frustrated at himself and the choice he made to swallow your breaths as if you were his only source of oxygen and he had been suffocating, near death, for a very long time.

Is he regretting this?

That brief thought alone pierces all eight chambers of your whipping heart with an overwhelming amount of hurt and you feel tale over every heightened nerve of your body.

Of course he does. Why wouldn't he?

The saliva you have gathered on your tongue, which is still mixed with his, turns thick. You open your other eye, looking at him fully now. "Then why did you?" you breathe, the heart of yours still unsteady, the chambers of it all rearranged.

Was it a spur of the moment action? A mistake? Your head is pounded with these reckless thoughts as though it's not spinning enough.

Jean peels his eyes back at the sound of your weakly asked question. They're erratic as they bind with yours, the whites of them clouded with something you can't make out.

Hands still lost inside your hair, he pulls his right one forward, and his thumb that was just against your cheek finds your mouth. His adam's apple bobs in his taut throat as he begins to trace your bottom lip, that's still throbbing with the lingering sensation of him.

"Why?" his voice nearly cracks.

You nod against him, slow, scared to move.

"Because I wanted to," Jean admits, voice full of gravel and nerves.

Relief washes over you at his admittance as the feeling of being desired walks up the latter of your spin and feeds itself to your brain, ebbing it just a fraction.

"For how long?" you whisper, all air, no voice.

His molars grits, you hear the roots of them crack. Speaking through them, he slowly guides your bottom lip down, revealing the pink inside of your mouth that's gated in with the bottom row of your teeth. His gaze drops to watch the movement done by his own control.

"Too long," he admits, followed by curses under his breath that sound a lot like nonsense to your muddled brain.

Your heart is in your stomach. And your stomach in your chest.

Jean's shaking eyes take in the wet, sensitive part of you that he just revealed to himself. "Jesus fuck, Y/N," he heaves out as he pushes the tip of his thumb past your cracked teeth and feeds a piece of himself to the very tip of your tongue.

The taste of his rough skin is sweet... just as you would have guessed be would be.

Feeling all of your warmth, all of your softness, he take a sharp hit of air. He keeps his finger there inside of you for two split seconds before painfully forcing it out, his jaw going slack.

Able to brace a glance, he looks back up at you, eyes of light brown enduring a complete, vigorous eruption. "You fuck me up," he pushes free from his lungs you tangled together by your feverish requited kisses.

You're breathless. You can barely speak. You try anyway, saying the single word that has just been carved into the very base of your heart. Bleeding. Squeezing. Beating. "Jean."

At the sound of his name spilling from your lips that were just all over his, he gets all his mobility back that he once had before all of this occurred.

"God, Y/N. Please." Pulling his hands off of you, he rips himself away. Entire body reacting as if is the most agonizing, gut-shredding thing he has had to force himself to do.

Unsettled, he begins to pace a few steps away as if he might lose his mind, lost his soul, all to you. "Please don't say my name like that."

Please? That one word he hates to have on his stubborn tongue used by him not once but twice? And not while overtaken by the power of uncontainable passion?

The shell of your chest squeezes tightly around itself, everything inside you crumbling to dirt at the sound of his unsteady pleads. A city of nerves being built upon your aching bones, weighing you down. "Are you begging me?" you question.

Jean runs a harsh hand of frustration down his face and then transfers it back and tears it through his sloppy mullet.

The ongoing fireworks add random bright flashes to his existence, making him dark one second and overly bright the next. You're overstimulated. "Yes," he speaks through gnashed teeth. "I'm begging you."

Your vision pulses around the edges.

"I thought..." You need a short break. The spinelessness of your voice is painful. You're pathetically losing yourself to this man. This man you swore to yourself and all your friends that you never would, not just when you met him but no more than a damn hour ago.

God, you're slipping. And you're slipping bad. Unable to get yourself back from all of what just happened. Jesus fuck.

"I thought you didn't do that," you finally churn out of your throat as it aches with a constant, overbearing want to be even more full of him. "I thought you didn't beg."

"I didn't. I don't." Jean's head moves in frantic, hard shakes. "But I am now," he hurriedly admits, fists clenching and unclenching as they hang down at his sides, grabbing the ocean air, searching for that invisible something again.

"I'm begging you, Y/N." A seldom crack in his tone, lungs still breathless. "Don't say my name like that. Don't make me stand here and have to listen to the way you sound when you speak it."

"Why not?" you ask, stomach coiled, unable to be anything but ingrained into this cave Jean kneaded your soul into with the use of his mouth and his hands.

"Because when you look at me like that, when you say my name the way you do, you become fucking impossible for me to resist. You already saw what happened. What I just did..." he continues to stir restlessly.

Jean's right palm runs down the course of his face again, but this time it's followed by his left. Shaky hands trying to find his sanity just to come up empty. "... You saw the way I couldn't stop," he finally finishes, all spoken under his breath, but you're still able to hear it.

There are too many fireworks in the sky going off at once. Your eyes are starting to burn as they explode with all your inward emotions. Explode with the changing sight of him as he restlessly paces. It's becoming a little overwhelming now.

You're dizzy. "Why do you want to resist me so badly?" You ask, afraid to know the answer but having no strength in you to resist the flood of the question.

"Because," Jean pauses. Takes a breath. Exhales. "I told you once I don't want to ruin a girl like you. I still mean every word of that."

Your jaw aches over the fact he even thinks something like that couldn't be true. "You're not ruining me," you insist.

He never did. He never could. He never will.

He chews on his teeth, nearly biting all the way through. "Y/N." His throat is thickened, chest breaking apart under the weight of the resistance he's forcing himself to embark in.

"Jean," you say again. "You're not ruining me," you emphasize your words more to try and get him to understand just how much you mean it. How much you will always mean it.

He pauses or a second, his eyes turning glossy like he wants nothing more than to believe you.

But then he blinks, wiping that expression free from his expanded pupils.

Eating his cheek, he shakes his head, completely rejecting what you're trying to argue by veering off the topic completely and refusing to acknowledging it anymore.

"I just..." Jean grabs the base of his neck and runs a shaky hand down the length. "I shouldn't have done that," he repeats as though trying to convince himself.  "I told myself after what happened in the closet that I wouldn't ever let it happen again."

Your soul transforms into a puddle of fear and floods your aching feet, "so you regret this."

[ ⅠⅠ ▹ play: die for you - the weeknd ]

The world stops turning at your strained ask. His hand drop. His paces freeze and he looks at you with his entire heart in his eyes, the core of it cracked wide open. They're so soft they almost hurt to look at.

"No, Y/N," he answers like he can't reject your assumption quick enough or firm enough. "God, no. Fuck. How could I ever regret something like that?" he shakes his head again just as hard as before.

Your heart moves your mouth before your mind can stop it. "Then kiss me again." you tell him, words flying out of your lungs that are still filled to the brim with all of what he breathed into you. "One more time."

You shouldn't want for it but you do.

Three bright pink fireworks in the shape of messy hearts explode.

"Y/N. Don't you get it?" Jean's jaw locks a little too tightly as his broad chest falls apart, fragment by fragment. "You're a goddamn walking angel. You don't need to get wrapped up with someone like me anymore than you already are just by being in my life."

Your soul is shaking, your ankles nearly bending.

He frustratedly rubs the back of his neck hard enough to peel off his own skin. "And because of that, I'm supposed to be good for you. I want to be good for you. That was a promise I made to myself from the beginning. But, You're. Fucking. Killing. Me. I look at you and I just..." he exhales, completely exasperated. "I lose it."

With a pounding heart and melted brain, you go against his one strained wish to not say his name again. You can't help it. His identity is coursing through your veins. Existing inside of you. Outside of you. Here. There. Everywhere. "Jean."

"Don't," Jean warns, grabbing his chest,
gripping for the lifeline of resistance he's about to lose.

A flood of too many emotions at once nips your skin crazy. Your tongue knows him too well now not to keep saying it. "Jean."

A hand tears through Jean's mullet, strands the messiest you've ever seen them. All the control he was pretending to have the reins pulled so tightly on comes crumbling off the saddle of his thrashing heart.

"Oh, Jesus fuck," he mutters sharply under what little breath he has left. "One more."

Inhale, exhale. "Damn it."

Inhale, exhale. "Just."

Inhale, exhale. "One more time."

Your entire body sighs at his words. 

Yes. Just one more time.

Snapping in complete half, Jean comes rushing back to you.

Before you can speak, breathe, or remember what it's like to be human, his hands find you again, one gripping onto your hip, the other finding the side of your face. He places his thumb on your burning cheek while his forefingers get stuck in the strands of your hair, once again.

Moving with ravenous hunger, Jean's supple lips, still somewhat damp from what your mouths created together, come crashing back down onto yours like they've been missing you since the moment they left.

And your head, full of him, spins into complete oblivion.

The flavor, his flavor, is all over you, for one more time. The flavor that never left. Sweet. Addicting. So much. Too much. Not enough at all. You want more. Need more. And that's exactly what he gives you.

More.

The kiss you share this time around is a lifetime more aggressive. More pathetically passionate. More sloppy. More desperate.

This time, Jean doesn't hold back, not by an inch. This time, Jean fully comes undone. This time, Jean surrenders.

That gentleness he mouthed into you seconds ago is now replaced with sheer, uncontainable yearning, and it is finally all being released at once.

It's maddened now—all of it. You by him. Him by you. Both by this kiss that feels like it is worth enough to make the entire world explode.

In no more than an instant, you're drowning. But you can't seem to care because you're drowning in him.

Ignited with a fervent passion that has been burning for too long, his swollen tongue brushes against the bottom of your lip, which is still tingling from all the interaction it's endured, not shyly asking for permission to enter this time, but begging for it feverishly.

Without any resistance, you open your mouth and allow him back in. Effortlessly, your tongue is met with his, and your knees lock at the intense flavor of him as he coaxes it into you. The flavor you already have memorized.

The combination of spearmint and vanilla blankets every waking inch of you. It waters your mouth and spills down your throat, leaking itself  into your lungs. You've never consumed anything like this before.

Remember me, it breathes, filling in the gaping cracks of your soul. Remember me. Remember me. Remember me.

As if you could ever forget.

Full of Jean, time stops, the world fades, and your soul splits open like the shred of a veil between heaven and hell.

You have found heaven, so it seems.

It feels as though the fireworks amidst their grand finale that are wildly erupting above your conjoined bodies have fallen from the sky and landed inside you.

Now, there they live, allowing you to experience them all in the rawest form possible, the truest form something could ever have the ability to be. They explode against the surface of your cells and course through your veins, replacing them with endless bursting starlight that will never die out.

Jean's breathing goes more stagnant as he pulls you closer by desperately tugging at your hip, fisting at the fabric for some sort of needed stability, his other still held against your cheek, pulling your face even deeper into his own.

His tongue scopes out every inch of yours, writing his name there with his saliva as though with possession, and your eyes squeeze themselves shut at the heavy rush your head and heart are enduring in some sort of angelic unison.

No longer wanting to just have his hands in two simple places, they start to move everywhere. Your shoulders, your hips, your back, your arms. Anywhere he can grab, he grabs, and he grabs in a way that makes you feel like he is tethering his existence to the swollen heart of you, and bringing him back to life.

The deeper he pushes his tongue into you, the more heavy he breathing becomes, and the more his warm palms get to know you.

Knowing you while you know him.

Your traveling hands, that have latched around the back of his neck, pull up, and they feather themselves in his soft mullet. You begin to run your fingers through the strands, bracing yourself as he continues to drink you down.  

Renavigating his grip while still working himself deeply into your mouth, he bring his hot hands to the top of your tilted head. Desperately, he runs his frantic touch down your hair to your shoulders before hooking his fingers around the back of your neck.

The air of the world has risen to the same temperature as hell, all because of you and him and your inability to stop. The deeper, the more intense, each kiss gets, the more you pant. The more he does, too.

As Jean's tongue continues to aggressively swirl in your mouth against yours, he rounds his thumbs to the front side of your throat and pushes down ever so slightly at the center of your windpipe, subtly choking you as if testing the waters of what you're into and what you're not.

Little does he fucking know.

A small gasp escapes from you under the pressure of his hands and tongue, and he catches it inside of his mouth, which causes his breathing and body to go even more rigid.

Feeling him smile slyly against your lips with the satisfaction of what just sweetly pulled out of you into him, a graveled groan escapes from him, and you eat every ounce of the deep sound. Both of you feeding each other things words couldn't ever express in its full need.

Then, he retracts his tongue and very lightly, he sinks his teeth into your bottom lip as he pushes his thigh up and into the center of your lower core between your cracked apart thighs.

You know you probably shouldn't let him. It's getting to be too heated. Too much. Too fast. You also know you don't care enough to stop it.

That familiar sensation of your lower stomach twisting around itself that you experienced when he was on top of you in the back of Reiner's truck, mixed with the hold he has around your closing throat, causes you to gasp deeply into him.

Feeling overwhelmed in the most addictive way, you grab two fists fulls of his hair, and pull by their roots.

Jean groans into your mouth, words of gruff pleasure lodged into your airway. "F-fuck."

Now you know what he likes too.

And maybe he likes it too much because next thing you know, your lips unlatch. Erratic breathing, his forehead melds to yours. "Y/N," he disengages his hands from around a place they probably shouldn't have been, his thigh moving,
releasing you of all its intense pressure.

Your head is spinning out of control, your emotions braiding themselves around each other. The sound of your name being said by him forces your eyes to open and meet his. The fireworks just like your kiss have reached their end. Darkness ensures but, because of his closeness, you can still scope out all of him.

"Hmm?" you mutter out, unraveling your hands from his mullet that is far more messy than what it was five minutes ago and trail them down his flexing back.

He swallows loudly, gaze in a deadlock, chest rising and falling in a rapid yet heavy manner identical to yours. Breathing through this experience together. In unison. As one.

There's a thin string of saliva hooked between you and him. Slowly, he moves his hand under your chin and brings his thumb toward the evidence that shows for the way his mouth devoured yours.

"We gotta stop," he says, tone deep in the trenches of pleading, as he places the pad of his thumb against your swollen lips, and he slowly swipes it downward, breaking away the piece
of saliva binding you two. "We gotta stop before I won't be able to."

You know he's right. You can feel it too. Licking your lips, you nod against him, jaw pulsing, as you glue your hands by your side, resisting the urge to touch his body again. "Yeah. Okay." you breathe. "Okay. We'll stop."

He nods against you now. Then it goes silent, as you both try to get your resolve back, both pairs of eyes closing at this weak effort.

"So you really can't resist me, huh?" You tease under your breath, hoping some of your typical banter will help put the swarming storm inside of you to rest. That's what you need right now. It's all too much.

He lets out a rush of nervous laughter, seeming slight banter is what he needs too. "Believe me now?"

Your thudding heart isn't slowing but you're doing your best to pretend it has. "I mean your tongue was down my throat so it's kinda hard not to," you softly return.

And his chest breaks out in nervous laughter against you once more. "Well, if I remember correctly, yours was down mine too."

The butterflies that never left begin to swim around again, not even the banter is helping.

You stay pressed up against each other unmoving for you don't know how long until you're stuck with the stomach-hurting realization that he's supposed to be going back home to his parents tonight.

He has stayed well past sparklers. That was the agreement made with innocence. Look at you now.

It's late. If he's going to go, he needs to go. You know how long of a drive he has ahead of him you don't want him to get there any later than what he already is. 

You take a deep reluctant breath, dreading the words you can feel your tongue are working to say next. "Don't you need to go soon?" you ask, with a surge of dread knifing your spine.

Jean's eyes fall shut, trying to stay in the moment of heat and passion you weren't expecting to be so savage. Feeling around for your hands, he finds them hanging heavily near your thighs and envelopes his palms into yours.

He sighs, regretfully. "Yeah," he tells you gently. "I already stayed later than I told myself I would."

Letting him tuck himself away inside the spaces between your fingers, you nod against him once more, knowing it's true and hating it.

But despite his words, he doesn't move. He remains here with you in this space of lingering heat, fingers still coiled together at your thighs like a pair of springs that could never be untangled.

Staying like this for a little longer, neither of you fairing to want to tear free, you are imbibed with the want to ask what all of this means, but the truth is, you don't even know.

Though you are curious and confused, a discussion like that would probably be better for a different day when your mind isn't melted away and is actually clear enough to think. And a couple of days by yourself will definitely help that.

So you choose to store that question away until you can figure all this out because right now, what's going on inside of you is just a scary mess, and it's horribly overwhelming.

Well over thirty seconds pass. It feels like one. You rip off the bandaid and open your eyes, "I thought you needed to go," you whisper, almost into him, mouths held apart just barely.

Jean takes a moment. Breathes. "I do."

Fighting not to fold, you squeeze his hands with encouragement despite the piercing words slicing at your throat to ask him to call off his trip back home and stay. But you know that would be selfish. He needs to do this. Going back to his hometown. Seeing his parents. Zofia. It will do him some good.

"Then go," you gently try to hearten, ignoring the ping of dread you feel knifing your chest that's still gasping.

"I can't," he mutters.

You blink, eyebrows digging. "You can't?"

He squeezes your hands back as his eyes burst open. Land directly in yours. They don't want to go anywhere else.

His forehead moves against yours as he gives his head a dreaded shake. "I—" he stammers. "I don't want to, but..." his words fall incomplete.

You know where this is going, though. You can see it wading in his gaze. "But you need to," you mutter, a mixture of both a statement and a question, not too sure of anything except for the feeling of some kind of electrical charge he left behind on your swelling lips.

Jean's nodding against you now, heated skin rubbing yours, blending the cells together with messy entanglement.

Your jaw locks, preparing for his words, but you hating them when they come out of his mouth anyways.

"Yeah," he answers, his voice spilling a tad bit deeper than what it normally rests at. "I need to. If I don't go now, I never will."

Unlock. Exhale. "Okay." Swallowing thickly, you nod, still tasting every ounce of the spearmint within your mouth as if his tongue is still warring with yours. "I'll walk you to your car," you softly offer. "I have to get my bag anyway."

His eyes fold, sealing them up tightly with dread. He moves his jaw around and then lets out a sigh, "Okay," he finally says. Forcing his draped lids back open, he wills himself to unstick his taut skin from yours and takes two steps back.

In an instant, you're freezing. In an instant, you want to pull him back, become warm again, become latched as one again. You can't. You don't. You allow him to be his own person.

Brushing your perspiring palms against your thighs, you inhale a breath of stability to try and cease your head that's still spinning.

You stay where you are for a moment, still a little bit frozen, not temperature wise, but with an aggressive swarm of things you don't have the strength or time to think about right now.

When you feel centered enough you unlock your knees. You're about to take a step forward when you realize Jean is retracing his steps, and places himself back in front of you. "Hang on."

Your eyebrows knit as one. "What?"

"Your hair's a mess," he informs, looking down at you.

"Wonder why," you breathe.

Jean's lips twitch, fighting a guilty smile, knowing that it's all because of him. "You don't want to make them any more suspicious than they are already going to be when we go back over there, do you?"

God. Shit. Them.

You sort of forgot about the rest of the world.

Pushing your tongue into the roof of your mouth, you shake your head slowly, the screws in your neck wound tight, limiting the mobility of your muscles.

"Thought so." Lifting his right hand, Jean draws it near your face. Anticipating the arrival of his warm touch finding you again, you hold your breath in wait.

Gently, his fingers find the top of your head. Your heart clenches, feeling a small bursh occur when he starts to tidy the stands of your hair that grew to be tousled due to every desperate pull and heated grab that he couldn't seem to control.

Peering up through your lashes, you study his disheveled mullet, ashy strands thrown every which way. "Your hair's a mess too."

Jean blinks slowly, just once, still working his hand into your strands, burning you scalp in a way he is utterly clueless of. "Wonder why," he very quickly returns.

You bite back a smile. He's not the only one guilty of making things messy.

Reeling his hand back into himself, he goes to lift it to his hair, planning to rake his fingers back through the chaos to get it back into order again, but you catch his wrist mid way.

He inhales at your latch, making you inhale too.

"No." You guide his arm down to his ribs. "Let me."

And he does. No fight or resistance. Just full acceptance of your help.

You feel him looking at you as your eyes remain lifted, traveling as you comb your fingers all through his soft mullet, organizing it to get rid of as much evidence as you can.

There's a small strand that has come forward, hanging down at the very center of his forehead. You push it up and tuck back into its correct place, gluing it there with a swipe of your palm.

Leaving his hair behind, you notice that his face is still flushed. The color of it could be seen for a mile away. If you want a shot of making it out alive when you return to your friends, you need to try to do away with it.

Though it doesn't feel like it, due to the load of heat still circulating around inside of you, the skin of your hands are icy cold. You use that to your advantage to try and cool him down.

Folding your fingers in, you lift both your hand to his face and use the outside of them to help lessen the heat his sweltering cheeks. You knew his skin was hot, but you didn't fully realize just how much until right now.

Jean's eyes fall shut at your touch, fire and ice. "Your cheeks and nose get red a lot," you softly voice.

He fidgets. When he speaks, you can feel his warm breath ghost the bones of your wrists. "Yeah," he admits, seeming a little embarrassed. "Ever since I was little."

You hum, the backside fingers still tucked into the fat of his cheeks, feeling them cool down against your skin. "Oh, I thought it was because of me," you tease, barely above a whisper.

Jean blinks his eyes open and his jaw flexes at the hooks. Surveying you, he matches your soft tone. "You don't help."

A surge of butterflies explode in your stomach, stripping you of your ability to respond.

Fifteen seconds pass, and the majority of the brightened color of him has faded. There's still a faint tint, but you get a feeling this is the best it's going to get. "There. Better." Your hands fall away, arms back into your sides. "Ready now?"

He examines you one more time, making sure the order of you is better than it was. "Yeah. Ready," he says, clearly forcing himself.

You breathe in need of preparation and stability, "Okay."

Jean breathes for the exact same reasons, too. "Okay. Let's go," he says, running his fingers through your hair one more time, not because it needs any fixing but simply just because.

- 25,855 words

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!!!!!! no more edging? who would have thought we'd ever see the day? don't worry, i'm screaming too. until next time - aim <3