Chapter 70

Requested – Katseyelover188

You find it at 2:14 in the morning, thumb scrolling autoplay through Twitter with the lazy rhythm of someone who can’t sleep and can’t be bothered to try. Dani is warm against your back, arm thrown over your waist, breath even and damp against your nape. The room is dark but for the blue glow of your phone, and for a moment, you don’t understand what you’re seeing – just motion, just two figures, just the familiar slope of a shoulder that makes your stomach drop before your brain catches up.

Then you hear your own laugh.

It’s breathless, surprised, the sound you make when Dani catches you off-guard with a kiss in public – the one that starts a protest and melts into permission. In the video you’re pressed against the brick wall outside that all-night diner in downtown L.A, the one with the neon sign that buzzes pink and green. Dani’s hands are framing your jaw, thumbs brushing your cheekbones, and she’s kissing you like the world ended three blocks ago and she’s only just now mourning it. Your fingers are twisted in the front of her jacket, pulling her closer, and your head tilts back against the brick, and-

You sit up so fast the room spins.

“Y/N?” Dani mumbles, voice thick with sleep, arm sliding off your waist. “What’s-“

You can’t speak. Your thumb hovers over the screen, shaking, and the video loops again. Your laugh, her mouth, the way your leg slides between hers like you’re trying to climb inside her right there on the street. The angle is from across the road, shaky phone footage, zoomed in enough to catch the desperation in how you grip her, how she makes that small sound in her throat that you’ve only ever heard in bed.

Thirty-seven seconds. Someone stood there and filmed thirty-seven seconds of your private hunger and fed it to the internet.

“Dani.” Your voice cracks. “Dani, look.”

She pushes up on one elbow, hair wild, blinking at your screen. You watch her face cycle through confusion, recognition, horror – watch her mouth fall open, watch her snatch the phone from your hand with a tremor you feel in the mattress beneath you.

“No,” she whispers. “No, no, no-“

The video loops again. Your voice small and wrecked: “Dani, someone’s gonna see-“

And hers, confident and wrecked right back: “Let them.”

In the footage, she kisses you harder, like a challenge, like a promise. You remember that night now with perfect clarity: 3am, drunk on beer and each other, walking back from the diner where you’d shared one plate of pancakes and she’d licked the syrup from your lip with zero subtly. You’d turned a corner and she’d pushed you against the wall, hands everywhere, and you’d laughed that laugh, and-

And someone watched.

“How many views?” Dani’s voice is flat, mechanical.

You don’t want to look. You look. “Four hundred thousand. Posted six hours ago.”

She makes a sound like she’s been punched. The phone drops to the duvet between you, screen still glowing, still looping your private grief and joy for strangers to consume. You watch yourself kiss her one more time before your thumb finally finds the power button and kills the light.

The dark is worse.

“Who-” you start, and stop, because your voice is shaking too hard. “Who would-“

“I don’t know.” Dani’s hands are over her face, elbows on her knees, shoulders hunched like she’s trying to fold herself into nothing. “I don’t know Y/N, I don’t-“

The door bursts open without knocking.

Lara fills the frame in oversized pyjamas, phone clutched in one hand, face pale under her sleep-mussed bun. “Are you aware of what’s circulating Twitter right now? Because I’m getting notifications like someone dies and-” She stops. Looks from Dani’s hand to your frozen posture to the dead phone between you. “Oh. You know.”

“Four hundred thousand views,” you say, your voice sounding like someone else’s, distant and strange.

Lara steps in, closes the door softly behind her. “Megan’s already reporting accounts. The original poster’s suspended but it’s- it’s everywhere. Screenshots, reposts, reaction videos.” She hesitates, shifting from foot to foot. “You need a statement. Management’s blowing up my phone.”

Dani’s hands drop. Her face is blank in a way that scares you – shut down, distant, the same expression she wears before stepping on stage when she’s terrified. “A statement.”

“Or we ghost,” Lara says. “Delete anything, go dark, let it burn out.”

“No.” Dani’s voice is sudden, sharp, alive. She looks at you , and something in her eyes ignites – protective, furious, sure. “No, I’m not hiding. I’m not letting them make this dirty when it wasn’t.”

“Dani-” you start, but she’s already moving, grabbing her own phone from the nightstand, thumb flying across the screen.

“What are you doing?”

“Weverse,” she says, not looking up. “I’m posting. Now. Before they spin it.”

You reach for her wrist, gentle but firm. “You don’t have to-“

“I want to.” She finally looks at you, and her eyes are wet but steady, burning with that particular Dani-fire that carried her through auditions and debut and every hard thing before you. “They took something that was ours. I’m taking it back.”

She types. You watch her thumbs move, watch her jaw set, watch Lara hover in the periphery with her own phone ready to screenshot, to shield, to witness.

Dani reads aloud as she writes, voice gaining strength with every word:

“To everyone seeing the video circulating, yes, it’s me. It’s us. I won’t apologise for loving someone, and I won’t let strangers make that love feel shameful. The person in that video with me is the best thing in my life. What you’re watching was private, stolen and shared without consent. But what’s in it? That’s real. That’s mine. That’s home.”

And another

“And to Y/N, I love you. I don’t regret a single second. Not the kiss, not the moment, not the years before or the years after. Let them look. Let them talk. I’m keeping you.”

She looks up at you, thumb hovering over post. “Okay?”

Your throat is so tight you can barely nod. “Okay.”

She hits it. The room holds its breath.

For a long moment nothing happens. Then Lara’s phone buzzes. Then yours, buried somewhere in the sheets, starts vibrating like a trapped insect. Dabi’s screen explodes with notifications – comments, shares, hearts, the digital roar of a world that suddenly has opinions about your heartbeat.

She turns her phone face-down. Pulls you back down with her, until you’re both lying flat on your backs, staring at the ceiling, hands finding each other in the space between your bodies.

“Scared?” she asks, quiet.

“Yes.” You squeeze her fingers, feel her squeeze back. “You?”

“Terrified.” She turns her head on the pillow, looks at you in the dark. “But not of them. Of losing you to this. Of you looking at me different because strangers saw-“

“Never.” You roll toward her, fitting yourself against her side, leg thrown over hers, face tucked into her neck where her pulse beats rabbit-fast. “Never, Dani. They didn’t see anything real. They saw pixels. They didn’t see the diner before, or the walk after, or the way you sang off-key in the Uber. They didn’t see us.”

Her hand comes up, strokes your hair with a tremor she’s trying to hide. “They’re still looking though. Commenting. Judging.”

“Let them.” You echo her own words back, soft against her skin. “We have better things to do.”

She laughs, wet and broken and somewhat fond. “Like what?”

“Like this.” You pull the blanket up, cocooning you both, blocking out the blue glow of Lara’s phone still buzzing from the chair where she abandoned it. You press closer, until you can feel every point of contact – her hip, her shoulder, her hand still stroking your hair. “Like being here. Like waiting for morning. Like remembering that video ends and we don’t.”

She breathes out, long and shaky, and you breathe in, and somewhere in the exchange you both settle – edges softening, pulses slowing, the panic not gone but companioned, shared, halved.

“They’re gonna write articles,” she murmurs, half-asleep already, exhaustion crashing through adrenaline.

“Let them.”

“They’re gonna speculate about our future, our past, our-“

“Let them.” You kiss her collarbone, the hollow of her throat, the corner of her jaw. “We know the truth. We know what happened before that wall and after. They got thirty-seven seconds. We got everything else.”

She turns her head, finding your mouth in the dark – soft, almost like a promise. “I meant it,” she whispers. “Every word. I don’t regret you. Not for a second.”

“I know.” You tuck her face into your neck, feeling her eyelashes flutter closed against your skin. “I don’t either. Now go to sleep superstar. The internet will still be there in the morning.”

She huffs, half-laugh, half-sob, and sinks into you 0 muscle by muscle, breath by breath, until she’s heavy and warm and yours once again, despite everything.

Outside, the world spins on – screens glowing, comments flying, strangers debating the shape of your love like they have any right to it. But in Dani’s head, in the dark, in the quiet after the storm, there is only this – her heartbeat against your chest, her hand in your hair, her breath evening out into sleep.

———-

Acc imagine this tho…

A request I’ve had for a whileeee now. So here’s the long awaited 🙂