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alien-the-ghost · 2 days ago

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The Emperor (Suck Club IV)

Part One: The Foe // ao3

Vampire Primo x Female Reader

Summary: Once upon a time a vampire saved your life. Now it's up to you to save him and his empire. Tags: NSFW, MDNI, 18+, reader uses a fake name sometimes, horror themes, vampire violence, violence, blood, (eventual) smut, and more tags on ao3 // 2700ish words div by @gothdaddyissues

All places have their secrets. People too. Families, friends, enemies, strangers—everyone’s got something to hide. You were no different than anyone else. For years you ran from your past and now you lived so comfortably in a lie there were times you started to believe it was real. And maybe some parts of it were real, but the truth was you couldn’t live in a fairytale forever.

The ones with vampires never had happy endings anyway.

Primo used to remind you of this. Not maliciously, just with the matter-of-fact certainty that often accompanied his statements. The arrangement couldn’t last forever no matter how well it worked between you. “Fate has her own plans, Diavolina,” he’d say while staring off into the distance. And maybe that was why your vampire was gone. Maybe you’d done or said something to remind him of the inevitable, something that drove him from away from this place. It didn’t matter that his letter said otherwise.

Calling him yours might seem arrogant, but the letter had said that too.

Over a year had passed and the pages grew softer each time you held them in your hands. Soon it would fall apart completely, but looking at the neat script, the tight loops and sheer elegance of his penmanship made it feel like he was still right there. You didn’t need to read it anymore—the words lived in your mind from the first moment you’d read it, permanently etched between synapses and ignited with each thought like a neon sign in a dive bar. Hope lived in that letter. A hope that often brought tears to your eyes if you let it burn too bright. But how could you not?

“Excuse me? Are you even listening?”

You shook your head, blinking away the tears and brought yourself back to the present. A forced smile crossed your face as the woman in front of you huffed and tutted her way toward the counter. The mayor’s wife had never been pleasant, but now that she and her husband had few extra zeros in their bank account she’d become a fucking monster. Still, you swallowed your pride and answered softly, “yes ma’am.”

“Don’t you ‘ma’am’ me,” she tsked. “Rude and entitled brat. Just look at the state of this place! It’s no wonder you have no customers with your attitude—”

“Will that be all, Mrs. Chadwell?”

“Yes,” she replied tersely, dropping a handful of items on the counter. She sighed impatiently as you rang in and bagged her purchase. “You’re lucky we even bother with your store, you know.”

You gave her another gith smile. “Thank y—”

“Once that shopping center is finished I’m never coming back,” she added quickly before grabbing her things and spinning on her heel. The objects along the window rattled violently as she slammed the heavy door behind her.

“Guess I’ll just go fuck myself,” you muttered into the empty store.

Rows and rows of untouched products in bright, dust-free packages stared back at you—a monument to your dedication and current failures. Aurea Valley had always felt a little off. While it was as quiet and boring as any other small town, a current of something no one could quite define ran beneath the layers of the mundane. Not luck, or fortune, or even fate, the energy itself was neither good nor bad—just present. That strangeness bound the inhabitants and built a beautiful community—or at least it had. Things had never been this bad before. Even the people who weren’t kind used to be somewhat courteous to each other. Now it felt like the energy that tied them all together was diminishing rapidly.

You could pinpoint the exact moment everything had changed. You hesitated to admit it to yourself, but you still knew. Those cracks in the Valley were hidden deep, but they’d revealed themselves the second Primo Emeritus left. A tired sigh left your lips as you pushed the thoughts of Primo from your mind. No amount of worrying was going to bring the vampire back. You weren’t sure anything could.

You glanced over at the clock and groaned. It was slightly too early to close the shop, but you headed for the door anyway. Outside, a rolling fog had moved in and covered the streets, hiding all signs of life save for a little fox dashing down the sidewalk. The fox certainly wouldn’t mind if you headed home before the posted hours.

As you reached for the lock the door swung open, narrowly missing you. An expensive pair of dress shoes scuffled over the threshold and a sharply dressed man stood in the doorway. You hadn’t met, but Sebastian Night had already made a name for himself in the Valley. When he first arrived, you’d written him off as nothing more than a vaguely goth nepo-baby—all flash and no substance—but it wasn’t long before he proved to be slightly more threatening. In a few short months his company managed to purchase vast amounts of property, demolished half the town, and started construction on a vanity project that was supposed to “revitalize” the area.

The stranger smiled, his teeth a little too straight and white to be natural. Mr. Night and his tailored suits already stood out against the bleak backdrop of a dying town, but the light of the old streetlamps softened the sharp lines of his face. Nearly every busybody in town had stopped to casually mention how handsome and smart he was, how he was “just looking out for the community.” Maybe he was those things and maybe he did want to save the Valley—you didn’t know or care. All you could see standing in front of you was little more than a vulgar display of material wealth, a flashy disguise men like him used to hide their true intentions.

Primo would have wrinkled his nose at such a man, in the subtle, endearing way he used to try to mask his judgements before labelling the man “gauche” in a quiet whisper.

He would’ve been right.

“I’m so sorry,” Night muttered apologetically. “Are you closing up?”

His tone was soft and light. Friendly. An uneasy feeling washed over you—a sinking in your stomach that burned like acid. Seeing him up close, something about him was off. His appearance made your skin itch under the surface, like your own bones were trying to get away.

You took a step back and gave him a tight, but polite smile in return. “Oh, the shop closes at 8.”

He glanced at the expensive watch on his wrist. He tapped once on the face before shooting you another grin as he asked, “I have a few minutes then?”

“Of course,” you replied with all the saccharine-coated customer service pleasantness you could manage. Opening the door a little wider, you made a sweeping gesture with your hand. “Come on in.”

“Thank you. I promise not to take up too much of your time,” he assured you and slipped his hands into his pockets as he crossed the threshold. He wandered less than five feet before turning back to you, the leather of his shoes creaking with the movement. “I’m glad I caught you, Miss Emeritus.”

It was a simple statement, but it set you on edge. Alarm bells and the memory of Primo’s words rang loudly in your head, preventing you from responding for a moment. Be wary of strangers, Diavolina. No Matter how friendly they might seem. Your heart skipped a beat. What if this was exactly the kind of stranger Primo had warned you about?

“Call me Gia,” you replied, offering up the rest of the false identity you’d been wearing for years. Gia Emeritus: average Aurea Valley resident.

Night licked his lips, eyes sparkling with recognition. “Gia,” he repeated sweetly, his lips curling around your borrowed name before they upturned in a smile. “It’s lovely to finally meet you, Gia. I’m—”

“I know who you are, Mr. Night.”

“Oh?” he breathed in surprise. “Forgive me, I was so sure we hadn’t met—”

“We haven’t. But it’s difficult not to notice when a man like you suddenly shows up and buys half the town,” you informed him flatly.

“Ah, well,” he laughed nervously. “Fortunately, I’m not here to discuss business.”

“May I ask what you do wish to discuss?”

He smiled sheepishly. “I—I was hoping to meet you,” he admitted. “I thought I’d stop by and introduce myself, but I can see I’ve caught you in the middle of closing. My apologies.”

“It’s…fine,” you offered in a confused tone.

“Perhaps some other time,” he added and inclined his head before he spun around. He only took a few steps before he paused and turned back toward you. “It’s funny you mention it—the town, I mean. Isn’t it your family who owns the other half?”

“Mr. Night—”

“Please, call me Sebastian.”

“Mister. Night,” you stressed slowly through clenched teeth. “Is there something I can help you find?”

He smiled too brightly, a little too sinister for all those perfect little teeth. “I believe there is, but I’m afraid we’ll have to wait for another opportunity. Have a good night, Miss Emeritus.”

The door closed with a loud click and you slid the bolt into place, double checking the handle just to be sure. A shaky breath escaped your lips as you began to pace the length of the store. Miss Emeritus. You dug your nails into your palms, pressing awful little half-moons into your skin. Miss Emeritus, the smug voice repeated.

It wasn’t that he’d said it. You’d borrowed the name a long time ago and wore it so long nothing else really suited you. You were proud of that name, proud to have been given such a name. But this man—this stranger—didn’t use your name with the same respect the rest of the Valley had. He coated it in venom and spat it out like an insult. A threat—a thinly veiled one at that.

You quickly grabbed your things and headed out to your car, breath fogging up around you as winter settled in. Trying to calm yourself, you unfolded the thick paper of the familiar letter and stared down at the words between your fingers.

Diavolina,

Time is a luxury; one I took for granted in my old age. Naively, I thought you and I might enjoy more of it. There are many things I should have told you, so much I should have said during our time together. I suppose I assumed I would have the perfect chance someday.

Fate takes as well as it gives, and the consequences of my actions are further proof that none of us can outrun what has been set for us all. Not forever anyway. I am sorry for leaving you with such a terrible burden and little explanation. This is not what I wanted for you. The cottage is yours should you want it. I only ask that you give it time to grow on you and keep it in my name.

Yours eternally,

Primo Emeritus

P.S. Please don’t look for me, diavolina. I will return to you as soon as I can. Until then—be wary of strangers no matter how friendly they seem.

-x-

Fog settled into the low spaces of the Valley, covering the empty streets with a ghostly mist. The sharp snap of cold trailed closely behind, much too cold for this time of year. By morning the ground would be coated in a layer of frost that hides the traces of his careful footsteps, but Primo sank deeper into the shadows. The streetlamps, weathered and long overdue for replacement, burned a dim orange glow into the hazy atmosphere as the heavy air pressed against him like stones across his chest.

He crouched in the underbrush. Watching. Waiting. For what, he wasn’t quite sure. A sign, a signal, something more substantial than this feeling gnawing on his bones. It had been a long time since he’d felt something like this—felt like he was standing at the precipice of ruin. It wasn’t something he ever wanted to feel again.

A short distance away a fox skirted the tree line, cautiously sniffing the air. It moved away quickly, not daring to enter the woods. It darted over the road leaving only the sour scent of fear that stung the vampire’s nostrils. It wasn’t just the fox. Everything—the town, the woods, and the old abandoned highway that ran between seemed to be covered in an unfamiliar stench. A disgusting, acrid odor of despair and decay had overtaken the entire Valley.

Something was coming. Or worse, it was already here. It hardly mattered. There wasn’t a soul on this earth that could keep him from protecting you. This place could be headed straight for the Pit and he’d still let himself be damned a third time to save you. Maybe that was love. Or maybe he was just an old fool. He’d been alive long enough now not to know or care anymore. He’d been powerless in the face of time for centuries, stuck watching and endless ebb and flow. He’d seen more cities than he could name crumble only to be rebuilt and destroyed again. Unstoppable. Perpetual. No matter how long he lived, the cycle of creation and destruction carried on. All things pass; all things reborn.

A snake swallowing its own tail.

Perhaps he was the ouroboros stuck in an infinite loop, doomed to repeat his mistakes along the way. He wasn’t called back to this place because fate was kind. There was a price—there always was—but paying with his own suffering wasn’t enough this time.

The vampire stood; his eyes narrowed as he focused on the window of your little shop. If he could see you just once…Satanas, how he missed you. Your laugh. Your smile. Maybe he was nothing more than a desperate man after all these years, longing to bask in your presence once more. It was foolish, but he wished it all the same.

His breath caught in his throat as a break in the fog finally revealed your beautiful face. And you smiled—not at him, of course—but at the man in the dark suit seeking entrance to your shop. Some younger man he didn’t recognize was on the receiving end of your warm welcome. Perhaps you’d taken a lover in his absence, found someone who could give you the things he could not. Then again, maybe this was just the insane paranoia of a man who’d lived too long already, urged by fate’s unending desperation to taunt him.

Primo felt sick the second he heard it, that little tell-tale skip of your heartbeat. He wasn’t in the habit of eavesdropping on your conversations—you’d be furious if you knew—but he slowed his breath and turned every bit of his attention toward you.

“Call me Gia.”

His chest tightened. It was a name you’d used hundreds of times over the years, but it wasn’t really yours. The two of you had buried your real name beneath the cottage long ago and left your past interred next to his own terrible secrets. The man repeated your name, but Primo had heard enough. He kept watch long enough to see the man exit the shop. A few moments later you emerged, pulse quick but steady, as you climbed into that old car of his.

The wind carried a high, horrid sound through the trees, an incorporeal laughter that cut through his soul. He doubled over, body wracked with indescribable pain. He wished she would leave him be, to just sit back and let things unfold as they would. But fate wasn’t finished with him yet. His connection to you shouldn’t have been so strong. He hadn’t marked you; he would never dream of such a thing. But he could feel it all, each hair on the back of his neck down to the nerves in his teeth, every cell in his body screaming as something followed you.

more stuff by me // please please let me know if i missed your name on the tag list or if you would like to be added.

#ohhh my what a first chapter #i am so excited for their story and what you have in store :)#love this series <3 #papa emeritus i x reader

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alien-the-ghost · 5 days ago

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espresso stains // secondo

1k words, non-descript f!oc/third person reader (you can read this as my oc manon or just insert yourself/whoever), some self-esteem issues, reassurances, established relationship, mildly suggestive, 18+ MDNI

─── ⛧ ✦ ⛧ ───

The espresso cup clinks gently as he sets it down on the matching saucer – ceramics irrevocably stained by years of use, adorned only by one clean brown line just below the rim, right where his mouth rested a moment ago. He sighs, weary after a full meal, licking the remains of coffee from his lips. An easy-going smile, a hand on her shoulder, kneading until the tension melts underneath his fingertips. Her own cup is empty, the tiny handle still trapped between two fingers, and he has to peel her hand away from it to fold it into his large palm.

"You know you don't always have to go out of your way to cook for me," she says.

"I am not going out of my way," he states.

Quiet, then, the rhythmic press of his thumb, gazes caught, that soft shimmer in his eyes when she relaxes under his touch.

"Does it make you uncomfortable?" he asks.

"What?"

"To be taken care of."

His readings of her have become so precise that she thinks it must be written all over her face, how she doesn't feel like she deserves this level of attention, him standing in the kitchen for hours to feed her, running her baths, massaging her tense muscles, comforting her anxieties. It makes her want to cry, makes her feel like a child, that ever-present longing, a hunger for love that was never sated when she was small, and now that he offers her such care it is like she doesn't know how what to do with it.

"Not uncomfortable just–" She sits with the feeling, locates the core of it. "Unworthy."

He doesn't disagree but his brows pull together, the barest hint of tension giving him away. She chews on this reveal, though she has a suspicion that it is nothing new to him. It is hard to explain, how you can long for something so desperately and still find it impossible to accept.

"I find pleasure in it," he says after a while, still looking at her, still kneading. "Cooking for you, buying you things you would never buy for yourself, making sure you eat, rest, sleep."

He lifts her hand, pulling her towards him, and she follows willingly into his lap where he wanted her all along. His hands map out the shape of her, nose dragging up her shoulder, her neck, following the trail of her perfume with a soft hum.

"I find pleasure in taking care of you," he says, now so close, lips ghosting over her jaw.

"But– why?"

"Why?" he mirrors the questions. "Why does anyone? Because it is human, because we are made to care."

"Why me, then?"

Her hands find purchase on his shoulders just in time for him to lean back and away from her, searching her gaze. It displeases him, she knows this, when she speaks ill of herself, implicit– or explicitly.

"Because you are for me," he replies, as if that says it all. The long answer lies somewhere behind his eyes, the longing, that rare softness. For me, he says, meaning that she needs him, that for some reason he needs her too, that she has a deficiency and he has a surplus, that he too is lacking things only she can provide, that they are balancing the scales when they are together.

It scares her sometimes, to think that she is just a project to him, that one day the scales stop being even. The what ifs and what happens whens and the idea that he'll complete his mission and move on to someone who needs him more. He provides, it's what he does, he soothes and guides and teaches and brings relief to tensions that have been decades in the making. Would it be an illusion to think that he'll settle at last?

"No," he says, startling her awake just as her mind wraps around the question.

"No what?"

"You are in your head." His finger taps against her temple before his whole hand comes to splay out against the side of her head, a cocoon to trap her, so effective that the moment begins to feel real again. "I want you here with me, my dove."

"I suppose I am overthinking," she admits.

"As is your habit," he quips. "Always you slip somewhere else and I have to guess where it is, how to get you back."

She'd asked him once, after being intimate, after he'd admitted that he'd struggled to feel fulfilled in the past, who takes care of you, Secondo? And he'd been so sad at the question, but then he'd said, you do, perhaps you are the only one who does. It had been hard to imagine, then, that a man like him, so independant, so stoic and strong, could truly have need of her. But he had been genuine, perhaps the most genuine she'd ever seen him.

"I want to take care of you too," she states.

His lips curve. It's not much of a confession by any means, something she'd said in the past when he'd been so generous that she'd felt so very limited in her means to reciprocate. But somehow it weighs heavier tonight. He's a man so set in his ways, so used to being by himself in the moments when it matters, the stain of years of use, cracked ceramics glued together by spite, repressed pain of a lifetime yellowing the bottom of the cup like rings of old coffee. He doesn't have to pour it himself anymore, and perhaps it's enough that he knows.

"Will you accept me now?" he asks. "Let me take care of you in the way I've been wanting to all night?"

She nods, just so, and his hands dip low again, dragging her hips forward until they're pressed together. They share a sweet moan before their mouths come searching the other's taste, coffee and amarettini, the wine he picked for dinner. It's unhurried, slow and sensual, the type of kiss that doesn't immediately lead anywhere but bridges that gap between wanting and having, between need and relief.

Secondo's chair scrapes against hard wooden floor when he picks her up, carries her to the sofa where he'll have her for an hour or so, indulging in those very kisses, drawing them out before he thinks to take his time with her in bed throughout the night. Two empty cups on the table, a candle slowly burning out. He's not going out of his way, he said, and she knows he's right where he wants to be.

─── ⛧ ✦ ⛧ ───

this is another little ficlet that i took from what will hopefully be a full fic at some point but that i think works on its own as well. thank you for indulging me <3

#this hit hard in the best way possible #their relationship is so <33 #thank you for sharing this #a wonderful snippet

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