#☆°fox eared general

[the-stars-guide-me]

Voice Lines

VA Headcannon: Khoi Dao

Specifically like a softer, sweeter version of Albedo

First Meeting: My name is Astralon Orion, at your service. Oh! But please, call me Astra. I like that far better than Astralon.

Greeting: Hello, there. What kind of adventures will we go on today?

Parting: Ah, seems I've gotta go. But, I'll surely being seeing you soon. My mother told me once, "A goodbye isn't really a goodbye, it's always see you later."

About Self: I'm...actually not of this world. 'Born of the stars and the night sky, the fabric of space in our blood...' That's what I was told, a long time ago.

Chat, Book: Oh, this? Well, it's my favorite book- Myths and Mysteries of The Stars. I found it in the Xianzhou library, and Jing Yuan was kind enough to let me keep it. It hasn't left my side since.

Chat, Home: I used to think that I wouldn't have a home to go back to, a nice place to rest and live out my days...I think now, I can safely say that the Xianzhou Alliance is my hone.

Hobbies: Reading, going to the library...I've always been a bookworm, as Jiaoqiu would say...*chuckle* I can't help it. I want to learn all about my home. Well- my new home, that is.

Annoyances: I was...not treated well in my homeland, and it...i-it still haunts me to this day. My nightmares are frequent...and I hardly ever get a good night's rest.

Something to Share: Jing Yuan has commissioned special outfits for me on multiple occasions...*chuckle* He likes to spoil me a little...

Knowledge: I wonder what would have happened if I had woken up anywhere else. Such as some of the planet's you've visited; what then? Would I be the same, or would I...hm.

About Jing Yuan: The Dozing General...he sure likes to spoil me. Bailu has told me that he favors my company the most. It's...kinda cute, actually. He's like a big cat.

About Yanqing: I'm...not entirely sure he likes me all that much. He's tried to best me in every competition you could think of; chess, sparring, archery...I wonder why.

About Jiaoqiu: He's very...well, how could I put this- he's...sweet. Yet, also spicy- like his food. He's just...heh, I can't really describe it. Sweet and spicy, like hotpot.

About Moze: Moze has a certain charm to him...at first, I was leery of him, on instinct...but now, I've grown to like him. He's a sweetheart when you get to know him.

About Feixiao: Ah, General Feixiao? She's amazing! I've visited her many times while visiting Jiaoqiu and Moze, she's always so willing to lend an ear to me- eh? Why are you laughing...?

About Bailu: She's possibly the one I trust the most in all of the Xianzhou, even more than Jing Yuan. She was the first one to find me, and she took care of me for a week while I was...she's so kind. I owe her my life. And I intend to protect her with it.

About Dan Heng: He's an interesting guy. I haven't had the chance to meet with him too much, but there's something about him...Jing Yuan gets this look in his eyes when he sees him. It's a little strange, really.

About Blade: Ah. Well, he...I'm not sure how to feel about him. I've heard stories from Jing Yuan, and yet seeing him in the flesh...they are two very different things.

About Aventurine: He's a little...odd, but overall, not a bad guy. My only problem with him would be where he tends to be...casinos. They're very loud, the smell of alcohol and cigarettes in the air...ugh. It makes me sick thinking about it.

About Dr. Ratio: The doctor is a very kind man. He may look stoic and unapproachable, especially with his bust on, but really he's very kind. It's also nice to talk to someone like him about complex physiological problems.

About Himeko: She...she reminds me of my mother. I haven't...haven't felt so...I-I'm sorry, she's just...i-is there any chance I could see her again soon?

About Welt: His presence is very calming. I never had a father figure in my life before here, and he feels like he would be one...perhaps I should see him again soon.

About March 7th: March is very...excitable. She's like...a giddy younger sister. Oh, I don't mind! She's just a little much sometimes...I don't have any siblings, though, so maybe I'm just not used to it.

About Luka: Ah, the champion boxer of Belobog? I've meet him a few times while visiting Jarilo-VI, he's very fun! He surprised me when we first met, but I've gotten used to his loudness. I find it refreshing, really, the change of pace.

About Ahanon/Blythe: Ahanon? They're an amazing person. I've visited Jarilo-VI many times mainly to see them and Luka. Even though they're a Masked Fool, I find them so easy to be around and talk to. Oh! And have you seen their magic shows? It's amazing! I'll have to show you soon.

Added to Team with Trailblazer: Well, well! We're certainly in for an adventure today with you here.

Added to Team With Jing Yuan: General! Good to see you. Be careful now, yes?

Added to Team With Jiaoqiu: Mm, I suppose it would be too much to ask for a quick snack before we leave, Jiaoqiu?

Added to Team With Moze: You didn't surprise me this time, Moze. Maybe you're getting rusty?

Added to Team With Feixiao: Please be careful, General. I'll try and keep you from getting hurt on my watch.

Added to Team With Bailu: Bailu! Stay behind me. I'll keep you out of the line of fire.

Added to Team With Ahanon/Blythe: Ahaha, the magician appears! Don't go disappearing once the battle starts, yes?

[death-limes]

*holding your hands* I am also an enormous hazbin hotel hater, that shit is rank 🤝🤝🤝

🤝 admittedly i’d say my relationship with it is more complicated than just straight-up “hater.” there’s a part of my brain that’s kind of obsessed with it? more specifically, with its potential? the nuggets of good that ARE there, if you squint? which is part of the reason i like edits that just allow a peek at What If This Shit Was Handed To A Competent Artist. also i simp for Alastor because i have very Basic taste

like the two edits i recently posted don’t come CLOSE to the kind of changes this shit would need to actually be quality, but at the very least i just wanna try removing the Jank yknow. and half of removing the Jank is just letTING THESE POOR CHARACTERS HAVE EARS GODDAMN IT

[aidigitalfun]

[cute-ai-grannies]

Katie, completing a dare from her sister. What a cute fox she is!

[skiz-zen]

Ahri

Check out my Patreon for NSFW Versions and more 😍

[fisheito]

"Who ordered the ugliest effing skirt I've ever seen"

-kuya (1956)

[moonrxge]

thinking about feixiao's big ass ears angling around like radars when something is amiss. whats going on, what do ya hear-

[s0dium]

THAT'S A RED FLAG BABY

JJK MEN AND RED FLAGS

A/n: Yessirrrr MINORS DO NOT INTERACT

Synopsis: Jujutsu men and their red flag in a relationship or generally and how it shows through when they fuck

Characters: Gojo Satoru, Geto Suguru, Yuuta Okkatsu, Sukuna Ryomen, Choso

Warnings: Emotional abuse, narcissism, controlling behavior, dub-con, semi-public sex, spitting, fingering, rough sex, male masturbation, degrading, praise, teasing

~

Gojo Satoru- Narcissist  

Since he was a kid, Gojo has been praised and called many things

The honored one, the strongest, gifted and so on

But what people don't see is behind those beautiful sapphire eyes, is a goddamn narcissist through and through

He thinks, no he knows that he is the best, best at everything

This includes what goes on in bed.

And its not only that, the white-haired fox only cares about himself too in the sheets, abusing his unnatural stamina and using you like a cock sleeve for his own taste

At least he can be nice about it sometimes

Gojo is relentless. Its almost like your his personal cock sleeve, his dick shaping your insides and abusing your cervix despite your choked sobs and whines for him to stop, to simply slow down. He holds the back of your head with his hand, allowing you to look down at the way you two are connected; how he retracts his hips until his tip barely pokes out, admiring the slick coating his shaft before slamming back into you again.

"Ahhh~ P-please Satoru please...."

Gojo rolls his eyes and scoffs. Why were the people that surrounded him always so weak? Even you. It's a good thing you feel like heaven he could almost forgive you.

Tears stream down your face. Every time the tip of his dick rams against your cervix a powerful feeling mixed with pain and pleasure that surges through your body making you tremble and shake. You're losing your mind. Everything is so good, and, God, you can't ignore how handsome Gojo looks right now. His white hair is sticking to his sweaty forehead, and the muscles of his toned abdomen are flexing and unflexing. He is gorgeous, and, boy, he knows it. Even the way your pussy squeezes and spasms around his dick sends more bolts of electric pleasure to dance through your skim.

"Shhhh, just take it 'kay? You're doing so good for me baby." Gojo coos.

Geto Suguru -Controlling

It starts off small, a comment here and there on your choice of friends, a small criticism on where you were going to spend the evening because wouldn't you have much more fun spending it with him?

Then he's starting to pick out outfits for you. Modest but pretty ones for outside but short skimpy clothes for when you're only with him. It even gets to the point where he is controlling your finances, making you only use his credit card, and its not about the money, you can use as much as you want for all he cares. It's about the control, you being helplessly reliant on him.

And Geto has such an easy time getting away with his controlling tendencies, showering you in praises and sweet nothings about how he just wants to protect you. And the way his violet eyes gleam at you, you almost always believe him.

Don't for a second think that he's insecure because it's far from it. The raven-haired man just wants to have you all to himself, he just wants to protect you from the cruel cruel world out there.

"Didn't I tell you to ask me first if you are going to wear an outfit like that?" Geto whispers in your ear but you can barely focus on his words. The curl of his fingers inside you is just too numbing; the way it hits, prods, and massages a spot deep inside your walls that you can only dream about reaching on your own. Geto's fingers are so thick too, almost filling you up as deliciously as his dick does. Almost. "Mmm- I- I, I didn't-" You gasp for air and try to bury your face into your hands. He currently has you against a wall of some bathroom stall but that fact seemed all but lost to you right now. The pleasure was building in your core and fast. Your legs were starting to shake and a numbing electric feeling had taken course throughout your body. You didn't have to open your eyes to know that Geto was smirking.

Suddenly, Goto curls his fingers in a way that deeply presses your g-spot and the dam of pleasure that had built inside you breaks. Your jaw goes slack and your whole body trembles with electricity.

"Didn't expect for you to crack so easily" he chuckles against your ear, and you collapse into his chest. Yuta Okkatsu- Too obsessed

You would think this is a good thing right? You could never love someone too much, but it was different with Yuuta

Sure you had a crush on him, sure you touched yourself to him plenty of times (which Yuuta knew of very well) so the feelings weren't all that unreciprocated

But theres a line, there's a line that Yuta always seems to cross

From taking pictures of you to texting you constantly, christ you even found your panties in his drawer, yuta love was overwhelming.

Yuuta knows that he should wake you up, but he cant bring himself too right now. You just look so beautiful, so perfect under the soft glow of the night sky. Also, he just feels so good right now, Yuuta can barely think so much as speak. "Mmmm-mmm" he whimpers against the pillow, slowly grinding his clothed erection against your bare leg. How would you react if you knew your boyfriend was humping you while you sleep? Would you push him away? No no you're too kind for that, you would probably help him, probably pet his hair and whisper sweet nothings until he finished. Yes, if he knew for a fact that you'd help him when you wake up, what's stopping you from helping you now? Careful not to wake you up, he picks up your hand. It's so small compared to his but wraps so well around his throbbing member. He glides your thumb across his red tip to collect the precum before slowly sliding your hand up and down. The pleasure is immediate. It makes him bury his face into your neck to to press sloppy, wet, hot, and bitten kisses along your skin.

Sukuna Ryomen- Sadist

Where to start with Sukuna. Sukuna is the red flag.

Actually, even that is a complete understatement. Sukuna is straight-up cruel, rather he is a sadist through and through.

Manipulation, degrading, humiliation....although he wouldn't physically abuse you, with emotional abuse he won't hesitate.

You expect compassion, sympathy, and kindness from him? Fat chance. It is hard to see Sukuna being in any relationship at all.

Sukuna certainly doesn't love you, but he sure does love the sex though

Like any good sadist, his sexual pleasure derives from your physical or emotional suffering.

"Aw look at you, fucked you dumb did I?" Sukuna chuckles. A tattooed hand snakes between to your cunt, lightly rubbing your clit before delivering a sharp slap to the nerve.

Your eyes widen and your hips instantly buck up, unintentionally sending his dick deeper into you. The position he has you in is brutal. Both of your legs are thrown over Sukuna's shoulders and pressed against your chest, effectively folding you in half. "Open ya mouth" He orders, but you are too lost in the pleasure that is blooming in your stomach, the pleasure that is making your cunt flutter and squeeze desperately around his fat cock. "I said open." Sukuna delivers a particularly harsh thrust before stilling inside you; keeping the tip of his dick smushed against your cervix. The sudden movement snaps you out of your haze and you obediently widen your mouth letting your tongue hang out. Sukuna lets a glob of spit fall from his lips onto your awaiting tongue. You don't need to be told to swallow, you do so on habit, giving him a soft smile as you do so.

"Fuck, ya so perfect, such a good girl."

Choso- Jealous 

Choso is the type of man who keeps to himself. The type of man to blend in a group or fade into the background.

But that doesn't mean he notices things. In fact, he notices things a bit too well.

Was that your coworker who touched your shoulder? You say that he is just a friend but who should a friend be able to touch you so easily?

He won't hesitate to bring up what he notices either, he says he's not accusing you of anything, that he trusts you, but he totally is.

He hates it when people get to close to his brothers so it posits that he loathes it when it comes to his lover.

How did you get here? How did an argument turn into this?

You want to scream, you want to thrash and tell Choso that he's got it all wrong, that you didn't mean to see your guy friend when you went out to have lunch. It was just a harmless bump-in that turned into a long conversation. Thats it. But the feeling of Choso's dick filling you up, his harsh thrusts and the fucking delicious friction of the drag, Jesus, it's just- it's just so good your mind that your mind is a white sheet.

You are on all fours but you don't know how much longer you can keep the position up. Not with the way he's ramming your pussy from behind.

“You are mine," he grunts out, pumping into you, the length and level of his arousal is brutal. "Mine," he swears, and he pulls you up so your back is pressed against him and you are upright. Choso doesn’t slow his movement though, giving you full, hard thrusts, your breasts bouncing up and down from the harshness of it all.

“You wanna cum? Good, cum."

[frostbitebakery]

“Dear Force,” he prays. Threatens. He’s arriving at the bargaining stage from left to catch it off guard. “Have I not suffered enough?”

“Mrrrrp!”

“Quiet over there, I’m trying to reach a mystical entity.”

“Myam!”

“Thanks, Ponds. Knew I could count on you.”

Sitrep. Cody’s currently trying to take a nap. It is not going well.

“Why didn’t you turn into shrimp or something easy,” he mutters, shoving the pillow up with his shoulder.

He’s had an incredibly long night in the Jedi Archives trying to help find texts that might help his batchmates turn back into the humanoid assholes they are.

“Mrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.”

“Watch the hair, Wolffe.”

Wolffe chooses to ignore him, naturally. He continues impersonating a broken speeder and kneading Cody’s head.

Bly is— “Meep!” - still stuck behind Cody’s back.

Right. Nap.

His head kind of slumps back with the sigh, the stress flowing out of his shoulders like water down a stream—

There’s a rustling. One of them jumps on the couch, it seems.

Silence.

Cody deigns to open one eye and watches as Ponds drags a Jedi robe onto the backrest before nesting in it in quick, efficient moves.

“Is that General Windu’s,” he asks as if he actually wants to know.

As an answer he gets a stuck up tail and a frankly unnecessary view of his brother’s butthole before limbs, tail, and head are tugged into the fluffy ball of fur.

Alright. Time to close his eyes again.

Crossing his arms, he wriggles around until he’s - “Meep?!” - comfortable. Wolffe is still kneading, Bly is fighting a cushion, Ponds is living Cody’s dreams by being asleep and snoring—

“If you stick your tongue into my ear again, I’ll shoot you into orbit, Fox.”

“Rrya?”

“Yeah yeah, come here, you fool.”

[the-stars-guide-me]

🔍 - Solving a murder mystery (real or fake)

@general-feixiao

"Miss Feixiao! I hate to bother you, but..."

They smile a little and hand you a small flyer, advertising a murder mystery event in Penacony.

"I wasn't sure if Jing Yuan or Jiaoqiu would be able to attend- but I'd really like to go. Would you possibly want to come with me..?"

[headspace-hotel]

I looked up some stuff about the "domestication syndrome" in animals because I read a couple times in books the idea that domesticated animals are neotenous, meaning they retain juvenile traits into adulthood. The idea being that humans have essentially created more helpless, more exploitable versions of wild animals to "dominate" and abuse nature.

I thought, "Okay, that sounds like something that couldn't be proven. How much do we even know about the juvenile brain development of, say, wild goats or boars, anyway?"

So I found this review of the literature that goes back to the fur farm fox domestication study and it's even worse than I thought: We don't even know that a 'domestication syndrome' in animals exists at all, let alone whether it is a retention of juvenile traits into adulthood.

So the fur farm fox domestication study: you may have heard of it, it claimed to have demonstrated that within a few generations, by selecting for tameness, the researchers bred "domesticated" foxes with a whole suite of traits that appear in many domesticated animals but seem unrelated to tameness, such as piebald coloration and floppy ears. The idea is that the genes for tameness and for these other traits commonly seen in domestic animals are linked, that is, an animal that inherits one is likely to inherit the other.

There's some major problems. First of all, all the foxes used in the study were from fur farms, and had already been selected for some level of docility and for coat color variation. The foxes didn't get white spots on them because they were selected for tameness, instead the pre-existing population they were selected from had those genes in it to begin with. Also, the effective population size of the foxes in the study was pretty small, meaning a small amount of genetic drift could have a big impact.

Second, there isn't very much evidence for most of the "domestication syndrome" traits in most animals. Even where the "domestication syndrome" traits can be found, they are often particular to specific breeds, and it's unclear whether they are linked to domestication as such or just the development of that specific breed.

This study only deals with a few animals, mostly small animals. It would be even more interesting to see a breakdown of even more animals (particularly more large animals). Off the top of my head, almost none of these would apply to horses, and only in specific cases would apply to cattle. Even in dogs, extreme changes in skull morphology have happened relatively recently with breeders in modern times going after extreme phenotypes.

Particular to cats: extreme skull changes and floppy ears occur as part of some "breeds" because they are specific painful genetic disorders that breeders of cats decided to perpetuate VERY recently. Scottish Folds were deliberately developed from cats that just so happened to have a disease that causes them to be in constant suffering due to their messed up joints, it's not just a variation that regularly pops up in cats to varying extents. Likewise with the smushed-face Persians. Their brains are getting squished into where their spinal cords should go because their skulls are so messed up from selective breeding for an extreme look.

What domestication means has been majorly shaken up in the past hundred years. With companion animals, breeders are in a race to make the most screwed up animal with the most extreme, striking traits possible, and with livestock animals, lots of heritage breeds with more variations have straight up gone extinct because they've been flattened into industrial monocultures to produce meat and milk as efficiently as possible, health and genetic diversity be damned.

To study domestication itself, you would have to study landrace breeds, right?

Basically there isn't one thing that domestication is

[1800titz]

ᴋɪɴᴋᴛᴏʙᴇʀ — ʟᴇᴀᴛʜᴇʀ/ᴍᴀꜱᴋ ᴋɪɴᴋ

KISS ME | Stalker!Harry x Reader, purge au

You left him with a taste of you lingering between his teeth, after the first time. With his appetite, it’s only fair he comes back for seconds.

★18+

I don't know what possesses me to write a psycho sicko every time the pumpkins start rolling out onto the doorsteps (see Hitchhikerry) but there is simply something in the air, I fear. This is ᴋɪꜱꜱ ᴍᴇ for the KINKTOBER projects.

PLEASE read the warnings, and please put yourself and your comfort first and foremost. Consume only what you’re comfortable consuming. This one is not intended to be read as a love story, and has sensitive topics, dark themes, and *dubious consent.

If you enjoy this, consider checking out my patreon masterlist, constantly being updated, with loads of exclusive content. If you would like to see the other KINKTOBER projects and join the taglist for upcoming projects, do so here.

CONTENT/WARNINGS: dubcon. stalking. sexual assault. coping with sexual assault. under negotiated kink. unsafe sex (no use of condom, no negotiation prior). manipulation. mask kink. leather kink. daddy kink. breeding kink. p-in-v. oral (m to f). general manhandling.

WC: 12.3K

As always, Harry is just a faceclaim.

Spring is bleeding out onto the tarmac. 

Gold and liserian and bluebonnet. Midnight and cherry-red massacre, seeping into the gutter grate with the sky glowing like a peachring. 

Spring is bleeding out onto the tarmac. It’s unstilted, and smells like rust, and kerosene, and Summer feels a hundred miles away. A thousand, like sunrise on the twenty-second, milliseconds seeping like sand through a clogged hourglass. Like someone wedged their sticky fingers in through the top and stuck a piece of gum to the narrowed opening.

The miasma, even days later, when waste management hordes the lily-white cadavers into semi’s and street sweepers come out to pressure wash the asphalt, burns your nose like you’re huffing acid. 

And it feels like God cupping his hands around the continent and squeezing every ugly, brutish thing out. You wonder if the blood seeping between the asphalt slates sticks to the grooves of his palms. His fingerprints, casting massacre into the pitch sky, smudging asterisms together. You’re supposed to feel the holy spirit. 

(Feel it— don’t you feel it?) 

At the back of your tongue, in every empty room, like a nebulous haze of goodwill and unconditional love. When you were a kid, you wondered why feeling God didn’t make your skin itchy. It would, right? If the body of Christ stalled at your nape, looming over your shoulder. You were raised catholic, so it still lingers and sticks to the nook of your periphery like an oilslick, no matter how hard you knuckle at your eyes. 

You wonder if it’s that same holy spirit they’re tasting in the heme when they cough, supine on the sidewalk. If it’s God’s liquid love, righteous across every capillary, with the swing of a sword. A forefinger on a trigger. 

That’s what they say, anyways. Last Tuesday the blonde lady on Fox news said it was always God in our veins on the night of the holy purge— feel God (transubstantiation like a distant, muffled folklore ringing in your ears) cleanse your soul. Fox news always starts to lean on epistemic justification in Spring, and you wonder if people believe God is scrubbing them from the inside with a bathbrush. You wonder if they really even believe in God, anyways, when it’s all just a mangled apparatus for population control. 

(But God wants them to kill the poor people, right?)

Last spring, a man broke into your apartment. 

Charcoal bulk. Tapered obsidian. Wide shoulders, wide arms, wide, herculean thighs, in all black. Slate denim. Battered leather jacket. Those massive hands, coated in pure-nightfall leather. You remember them well, because you thought they resembled the thick, sheepskin gloves your grandfather would wear out in the snow—

Nothing besides black on him, besides the cruel arsenic white of a plastic doll mask stretched over his balaclava. Like those ugly, inexpressive porcelain things you’d find stacked up in antique stores. Your gaze lingered on the delirious scripture across the forehead. Kiss me.

He slunk in while you were in the bathroom. Cracked in your front door. You discovered a crater in the shape of his kneecap, days later, when you replaced the broken locks.

You found him on your couch like a stygian king, thighs split, like he belonged in your tiny living room in all his ominous, leathery heft, and for a second, you just stalled at the threshold with your heart at the base of your throat. Eyes wide. In stagnant impasse with this absurdly nonchalant intruder. Between a beleaguered rock and a hard place. He’d cocked his head at you. Dead silent, and your hindbrain prickled with parity of a slasher film clip— the kind you’d peep over your blanket, folded up to your nose with shaking hands, after bedtime. You weren’t allowed to watch the movie, at the time. But you always remembered that scene where the indifference rolled off the killer in lapping, tidal waves before he’d strike and carve a character open. 

Something scratched at your hindbrain. Some hysterical thread, clinging to the falsehood that this was a rancid illusion. A nightmare, limned in butter-yellow off the lamp on the side table. His dirty boots kicked up on your coffee table. Inkblots in the plastic cut-outs of the eye sockets, glimmering like hungry nightfall. Because it was the purge, sure, but it wasn’t you. 

Never you. It couldn’t happen to you.

Hindsight humbles the untouchable, crooked complex you wore on your shoulders. Your head, with your chin held high, behind the glowing string-lights tucked across your blinds and the bleeding street under your balcony.

(You remember you thought God prickled at your nape that night. May God be with you— that’s what they say.)

(God was cold, and it made your skin itch. Maybe he would have been warm, and kind, and you would’ve felt the goodwill and unconditional love if you didn’t ask so many stupid questions in kidhood during bible camp. If you didn’t bury your bible into the bottom of your nightstand when you realized they were justifying their gnarled agenda with the pages.)

You felt sick—

And he told you he didn’t have any interest in killing you. A purr, muffled by layers of stitched cotton and plastic. No interest in all that. Wouldn’t wanna hurt a pretty thing like you. 

Like a sarky paradox to all the formidable space he was taking up, in all his horrifying gear. 

Kiss me.

An irony to the ichor thumb-smudge across his forehead. An irony, you thought, to God with a bathbrush, and the date, and the time, and the uncomfortable, imperfect squeeze of you into the bracket of wrong-place-wrong-time. In your own apartment.

Aren’t you gonna thank me, he hummed, on his feet now, from across the room. Stalemate. Rotten stasis. Deadlock, at his discretion, with you, shaking like a leaf under the archway. 

For protecting you? That’s what he said. 

(If you weren’t frozen in place with the leftovers you had for dinner curdling in your belly— eye to eye with a facsimile of the reaper— you would have snorted. It was just so absurdly ironic that it nearly made your ribs ache.) 

He was so big, you thought, when his shoulders climbed and his chest swelled, under the animal skin. So rigid. You wondered if he was all bulk like that, under the layers, or if the loose coat, and the gloves, and the daunting mien of a predator just made him seem that much larger. You’re not a small thing, but he made you feel as much. Like a dolly. A maquette— a perfect marionette to toss around between his hands on the perfect night, the perfect date on the calendar. 

Lotta bad men around, tonight.

The floorboard creaked under his weight. One step forward. The carpet bristled under your heel. 

Aren’t you gonna thank me for protecting you? 

(Kiss me.)

You remember how you went along. Easy. Didn’t say no.

And you could chalk it up to survival— pure, self-preservational instinct— and the gunfire looming outside your window. No. You remember the swell of panic, the riptide of adrenaline tearing you into a deluge of auto-pilot. Something seeped into the hairline fracture across the line between saving yourself— and your dignity, your pride. 

(Something ugly, and wrong, and so out of place. So warm in a room so bone-chilling.)

You thought you were broken. The two choices, unequivocally, were always fight or flight. 

(So which synapse misfired, that night, that kicked your gears into neither?)

You remember ugly things from that night. It felt like your ribs were being pried open, and he was picking you apart, pinching some raw and deep to pluck it out between leather fingers, until you were squirming in a pool of your own spilled volition. Like milk knocked over on the counter. Left to rot. Curdle.  

Because it didn’t hurt. He didn’t hurt you. 

And maybe that was worse. Because you were supposed to kick, and fight, and scream, and you— 

Didn’t. 

And maybe at first, it was a form of endurance. Survival sense— shutdown, like a generator on its last limb, preserving its own continuance. Just go along, just survive, just—

It’s easier, you think, in retrospect, to justify that. 

What’s harder is that you remember you thought you were broken because part of you, eventually, didn’t want to kick, or fight, or scream. 

(Go for the eyes— that’s what they say— and where would you go, in those inky craters, under the shadows? Like polynyas brimful of tar. You’d drown.) 

You remember the way he called himself daddy— come sit on Daddy’s cock, tell Daddy how good he feels— and you remember the visceral burgeon of disgust swelling in your belly. 

The way it made you revolted, and shuddery, and white-hot. 

Wanting. Slick. 

Because he’s not your daddy. Wasn’t. Isn’t.

You knew it for what it was. A gross game. Meant to debase your conation. This scary man in his scary mask on this, scary night, in your home, here to take something for himself. A flinder of your rib— a cracked piece of bone, here to tuck it into the inside of his coat. To watch your face crease with the juxtaposing blend of repulsion and want, rolling down your spine like rainwater off a downspout, as your cunt fluttered. 

He fucked you stupid on his cock again, and again, and again, until the sun was scraping at the land with its hot fingers, and the corners of your room were white and blue. Took what he wanted, because he decided he could. 

And that’s the game. The brutal nature of humanity crumbling under the weight of anarchy, and unrestricted autonomy, even if only for a night. Bereft morals. Selfish whims.

(And you took it. Just took it. Didn’t put up a fight, not when terror started lagging behind pleasure.)

He ate your cunt, too, just the way you liked. For hours, with the plastic mask tucked up like the balaclava, to the tip of his nose. The hard edge, and the cotton, pressing into your mons when he rolled your clit with his tongue, pressed the flats of his white teeth against it. You remember that. 

His nice, clean white teeth, and his pink lips. 

He must’ve been a pretty man under all the unnerving guise.

By the time the siren screeched at seven, you were strewn on your sheets like puddy across the sidewalk. All worn, and tired, and malleable, which he seemed to like. Panting, sweaty, tacky. Covered in him. The sticky, pearlescent mimesis, like memorabilia. Your pink underwear dangling out of his pocket like a perverted token to pin up onto his wall like a poster, after. His hard, leather fingerprints, blooming across your soft love handles, where he held your bones in place (but you didn’t need him to— not when you were so willing to placate and assuage and give). The chiaroscuro made your ribs rattle when you breathed deep. 

You stared at the popcorn ceiling when his belt buckle clinked. Slotted himself back together, into unobtainable nightfall against the backdrop of daytime. 

There’s a lot of things that stuck with you from that night. He didn’t hurt you, and your skin stayed sealed, but according to everyone, a part of you maybe-died, or that’s how you should feel, anyway. So, you wondered if that gangrenous part of you was severed off, bleeding out onto the carpet. Between the floorboards, staining the ceiling of the apartment on the floor under yours. A nebula of rust red across plaster.

(You thought it was severed, because at first you didn’t feel it. Anything. Nothing. Numb. Pinpricks across your psyche like your hand when you slept on it the wrong way. Maybe he cut it loose when you weren’t looking— when your lashes fluttered, smogged in the haze of yellow string lights, when your cheek kissed the mattress, and sex.)

You remember a lot of things that make your chest feel tight, like cotton unspooling in the crevices of your lungs, and your head feel waterlogged, and your knees brittle. But you remember he told you, before he left, that he’ll see you next year. 

I’ll see you next year, sweetheart.

Like a portent. It should’ve been. In a way, it felt like a reassurance, and you hate that pulpy part of yourself. 

And what can you do? 

You’re a statistic. 

The label feels wrong. Permanent. Like a bumper sticker stamped onto your forehead with gorilla glue. You’re lucky, they tell you, after. What a close call, when you swallow preventive abortion pills and shiver at your own reflection passing in the mirror. You think, maybe, your guardian angel blinked, somnolence searing at the backs of its eyes. Because, maybe, angels sleep, too. You don’t know. They didn’t teach that in church. 

You go to therapy. The woman in the big, sable chair gives you this look. Crinkled countenance pinched in pity. How pitiful, you’re reminded, and how lucky you are to only be scratched by a freight train. You’re not smattered pulp on the railroad tracks, but in the cruel cosm, you feel like jam dripping down God’s hands. 

You ask her if it’s fucked up that it felt good. 

She tells you it’s not. 

But then, you ask if it’s fucked up that a crackled fragment of you, maybe-sort-of-in-a-way, wouldn’t mind if it happened again.  

That’s a different question. 

Because you’ve been mulling that thought over between your teeth, in the hollow gaps between mortified, pale-faced solaces, I’m sorry’s, I’m-sorry-that-happened-to-you’s. It’s been festering, and feels like a chunk of you rotting under the sun. But maybe, if someone tells you that it’s okay—

If you had to do it over— you put it that way, like emphasizing a crease in a sheet of paper, and she gives you another, long, reticent look this time, instead of a response. 

(Because, maybe, putting it that way makes the insatiable itch in your arteries more relatable. Easier to swallow. Easier to tolerate. Maybe you sound like less of a freak, with the tumult.) 

Guilt for feeling pleasure is, apparently, very common, as indicated by the PDF she emails you that night to look over. Rape Victims and the False Sense of Guilt. 

Rape. The word rape, across the screen, makes you flinch. It’s such a small word in the sea of the text, only four Lilliputian letters. Teeny-tiny. But it feels big. Like a big deal— rape, that’s a big word. It’s razor sharp when it echoes behind your skull. It’s ugly, and it ends on a blunt, hard sound. No elasticity. No give. This unyielding, little word that shatters around you in its hideous, mangled phonetics— is that what happened to you?

You’re lucky. What a close call. I’m sorry that happened to you.

Pleasure is a natural, physical reaction. A bodily reaction. That’s what it says.

You can cope with that. Comprehend that. The rest is— loaded. Like an assault rifle, in spring. You don’t know how to peel the pieces apart. You never learned how to take apart a gun.

You know what a bodily reaction is. 

But nothing explains the chimera you chase after— the fantasy, when you’re plugged around two of your own fingers, weeks, months later, chasing the phantom ache. 

Liking masks is okay, but liking masks is only okay if there’s something preliminary about them. Liking to feel small and scared is okay, but only if there’s a safety net, and safewords, and you trust the other person, and know them like the pores across the back of your hand. A stranger isn’t allowed to make you feel this way. 

But liking this— thinking about this, with your head fuzzy and your skin simmering— is wrong. Bad. 

It’s okay, but you need to heal. Something bad happened to you, and you need to sweep your pieces into the dustpan before you start to put them back together. That’s what you read between the lines. It feels accusatory.

(Only, you don’t think you could mold them into the same form, if you tried. Stick them back into their rifted crevasses, when they’re jagged and misshapen.)

The things you feel are, by all definitions— according to the internet, and everyone around you— wrong. Ugly. Sick. You shouldn’t feel anything but nausea scraping at the back of your throat, pooling briny under your tongue, when you think about that night. About him. That’s what you find in the vats of their eyes when you tell people what happened, the stricken shape of their faces. Like you’re broken. Because you are broken. 

Some part of you has a big indigo bruise stretched across it, smarting something awful. Some part of you is fractured ceramic. 

You’re a statistic. A number. A sliver on a bar graph. It feels like throwing yourself headfirst over a rock face. Into a yawning abyss. You splinter upon contact with the water, but it doesn’t ripple around you. Just lets your dissevered pieces wade and buoy.

You don’t go back to therapy after the third time, and you spend all summer burying your esoteric predilections at the back of the shelf. Let them gather dust, because they’re shattered anyways, and you don’t know how to make any sense of the smashed fragmentations. They’re so jagged, they’ll cut the soft skin on your palms up if you cup them too close.

You move when your lease ends in the summer. Not really by choice, but the decision has the weight of all those ruckled, condolatory looks. Those I’m-sorry-that-happened-to-you’s, like flour-sacks across your shoulders. Your apartment still reeks like him. It’s a phantom musk, whispering along your lungs. Cigarettes, and leather, and tangy sweat (it almost feels like it belongs— not unpleasant, like the brine across Poseidon’s abdomen). It’s uncomfortable. You long for it. You’re imagining it, you know that. 

Your new apartment is clean. It smells like bleach, and it has all different locks, and the promise spills in cobwebs behind your skull. You try not to get tangled in them.

And everything tells you it’s wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong— everything. A churning, gut feeling, when you sign the new lease, when you roll around your sheets in the middle of the night with your hand between your tacky thighs. 

You feel like you’re breaking an unspoken rule. You’re supposed to heal. This isn’t healing.

You consider booking that out-of-country trip in March. Week-long, just to stifle the premonition under the heel of your palm. The omen, that was still dripping heady, clotting the air alongside the stifling sound of the zipper closing its teeth together. Crinkling leather when he buckled his belt.

Your mom gives you a call. Tells you to come out to Maine for the weekend. You shrug the invitation off with your phone cradled between your cheek and your shoulder, and your laundry between your fingers. I’m fine, mom. I’m—

Fine. Cataclysmically. Okay. Bleeding out onto the tarmac with every step, like the incipient springtide. 

You cup a posy of daffodils between your hands with wistfulness speckling across your chest. 

You used to love spring. In kidhood, before the heavy, inordinate burden of purge-nights spanned across your shoulders, spring had the delicacy of a flower. The warmth of sunshine beading across your skin. The naivety of pastels. A callow touch of rose-tint.

You always knew living alone had its risks. In an apartment, no less, flimsy and unsheltered by security shutters and the bulwarks of a standalone. A danger, like a yellow warning sign. It’s the same precarious footing that warrants your mother’s calls back to your hometown every spring. 

(The same reason she called you last year. And you— stupid, stupid— didn’t go.)

You don’t know how to excuse yourself this year. Lack of self-preservation? Stupid, callow hope? You don’t know what you’re hoping for. 

(What you’re feeding.)

Maybe it’s the way you’ve been dusting the shattered shards on the shelf. 

Anybody else in your position would be halfway across the continent, and you’re shutting down your flower shop and turning in for the night. Pretending (that you’re pretending) you’re inviolable, like that headspace didn’t get crushed under his thumb last year. The clock ticks on the wall. 

The man who comes up to the register has a bouquet in his hand. A sprig of carmine carnations that crinkles when he lays it flat onto the countertop. He’s tall. Broad. Pretty— the first thing you think of, upon impression, mapping out the ridges of his face, the even slope of his nose, the burnt umber curl that spills over his forehead. Wordless. He stares at you. 

Just stares. Not quite boring into you, but lingering, inkpools fixed. Indescribably. Unremitting.

There’s a familiarity in his gaze. Something that weaves across you in unspooling, crepuscular cobwebs, something that prickles. And eye-contact feels like a stalemate. A competition; who will give first? Your mettle splinters in hairline fractures. 

“Is this,” your smile is flimsy. Brittle. Eyes dipping to the flowers he’s laid out. “…all for you today?” 

He smells expensive. Like amber musk, but something sticks to his scent like an afterthought. A note, in undertow. 

Smoke.

Like he washed his hands, brushed his teeth, but couldn’t kick the odor off his clothes, lingering in the stitches.  

Emotions dredge up from the pit of your psyche like his presence is the metal head of a shovel. Cold leather. A hot touch. Things you’ve left numb for too long, oozing, electric, alive. Your fingers flex on the stems, and the plastic clicks under your hand when you stare down at it. You can’t look. 

“Mm.”

You feel flayed. Raw. Like you’re going to come apart into tatters in the middle of the store. In front of a customer. You cast your gaze up. He isn’t looking at you anymore. Hands buried in his pockets, eyes listing across the melange of flower assortments you’ve got on display behind the counter. And you feel—

Embarrassed. Silly. Your cheeks heat, your heart thundering at your throat. It’s silly. 

“Oh,” you breathe as you roll the bouquet between your hands. Key in the numerical series to the system, “I like these. They’re very pretty. …Looks like today, it’s going to be… twenty-six.”

For a moment, he doesn’t say anything. Nothing at all, doesn’t make any motion towards procuring a payment method, and that nagging sense of worry spirals between your brows when you cast your inkpools up to find him staring again. Under your hands. There’s a judder to them. You watch his hand reach into the front-pocket of his jeans, and cull a cashfold. He licks his fingers before he separates the cash, and hands it to you. 

Your fingers brush. You swallow. 

You hand his change over with your fingers twitching. 

“Happy purge,” he tells you. Suddenly.

Your smile wobbles. Creases. Curls back up into a proxy of a cheery mien you have the resolve to upkeep. “Happy purge.”

His fingertips drum across the counter. “And may our souls be cleansed.”

It sounds droll. Wry. Like he’s making a mockery of every piece of propaganda the news channel paints across your screen, a week-long affair in snippets before commencement. You swallow. 

“Up for anything tonight?”

The question shouldn’t nick between your ribs. Scrape into the soft place— you’ll get loads of customers that ask. That participate, affluent folk. Young people, with grease smeared across their smiles when they tell you that they’re excited to exercise their God-given right. 

You shake your head. “No— no. I don’t… partake.”

The silence that congeals between you is suffocating. Heavy. You feel your poise withering. Shrinking back into you, under the weight of his gaze. It’s an eerie stagnancy, and you feel like you’re sinking to the depths. 

“You’re,” you tell him, trying to smile, but it doesn’t meet your eyes this time, “…all set.”

His eyes roam. Openly. Lash across you in bounds, slow, detail-oriented. It’s odd. Makes you feel strange. Finally, they fix on your face. No doubt, creased with discomfort. 

“Stay safe tonight,” he tells you, before he turns, bouquet in hand. 

“Right. You— stay safe,” you rock forward on your heels. The bell over the door jingles. 

You’re broken, but you’re not stupid. You twist the locks when you get home. Double-check every window. Turn off every light that you aren’t using. 

The announcement comes across the TV when you’re in the shower, and by the time you come out, the emergency broadcast has morphed off into a rerun of Friends. You don’t know what to do with yourself. Tuck your knees to your chest and stare at the clock? Roll into the fetal position and pray? 

May God be with you. 

The gunfire outside begins during the credits. You can’t stomach the harrowing scream that seeps across from the street below, so you plug your ears with your headphones, and you blast music until you feel like your ears are bleeding. Hole up in your bedroom.

You can’t discern the feeling that clots in your chest when you come out to your living room, eventually, to find him on your couch. In eerie stillness. Terror? Relief? 

He notices you. Swells when he breathes, all heft, just like you remember. The burgeon of fear that prickles at your nape, making your hair stand on end, you find, clots beside something you’re unable to dissect. For a long second, the both of you just breathe. Observe. 

He breaks the silence. 

“…Come tell Daddy hello.”

Daddy. Daddy— the titular moniker makes you bristle, startling you out of your stupor like whiplash. What are you doing? What are you doing?

You stall by the bathroom door. This game of cat and mouse is precarious. You’ll lose— that fact is brassbound. Undeniable. You don’t know what you were expecting. Why you stayed. You’ve got the short end of the stick, always. And still, you contemplate, lingering with your hand on the doorknob. The stagnancy in biding your time feels like staring at a snake coiling beside your feet. Waiting for it to lash forward. 

You take a slow step forward. Another. He doesn’t make any moves towards you, doesn’t give any indication that he’s keen to sit up. Content with the view of your dread snowballing. Mushrooming. Hands resting across his lap, his tree-trunk thighs split apart. 

Waiting. Watching. 

You don’t expect it when he sits up, grunting, to wrap his hand across your forearm. Lug you forward, into the alcove between his thighs. The brush of leather across your bare skin makes chills erupt across your skin. Manhandling you, like puddy between his hands. You’re supposed to fight, you’re supposed to kick, you’re supposed to—

Scream. You exhale when he twists you and forces you to sit on his knee. You’re stupid. What you’re chasing isn’t healthy.

You think he’s going to ask why you moved. Silly girl. Didn’t think I’d find you?

He doesn’t. 

“Been a good girl?” he drawls, instead, chest swelling in your periphery. It feels mocking, despite the casualness of his tone— unsanded around the edges. The irony of the position has your teeth set, like you’re a child on Santa’s lap, and not a grown woman on his. A petrifying— 

Half-stranger. Almost.

The revelation is uncanny to the way you’re searing under your skin. And there’s a thin line, you think, between coercion, and the way your heart batters a little faster, the way you clench your fingers together to avoid squeezing your thighs.

You don’t say anything. It’s rhetoric, because he isn't finished. He cups your knee under his palm, the dark leather, and says, “Kept your pussy to yourself, mm?”

Not your hands. Not your hands. 

Your pussy. 

The undiluted vulgarity trickles down your nape, makes you flinch, and you fist your hands a little harder, until the crescents dig into your palms. It’s still just as nonchalant, even-toned. But it’s crude, and it makes your face hot. 

Like he owns that. Like you belong to him, in some way.

(And maybe, in some way, some part of you does. That piece of your rib he still has tucked into his pocket from last spring.)

Your heart is in your throat. You turn your cheek. Away. Just enough, but the hand that was on your knee presses against the side of your face. Two fingers, gloved, that pry your attention back onto him. It’s almost effortless. Feels like he’s using hardly any strength at all, has your chin snapping back, and the weight of two fingers, against that groove under your cheekbone, has an ache radiating up into your temple. He’s feeling the ridges of your teeth through your soft flesh. Wrenching his fingertips into the hollow rift between the two rows, and your breath ebs your lungs in soft pants, free falling the gap between your lips. The slick, gummy inside of your cheek twinges under the pressure.

You stare back, and—

You don’t know what you find. What you’re looking for. There’s a hunger in the plastic cut outs, glimmering in the tenebrose, like a predator shimmering in the distance of the thicket. One that’s spent all winter hibernating.

He digs his fingers in a little harder. Makes your head tilt with an ease that makes your head spin. The sound that leaks out of you is embarrassing. So unlike you. So small, and vulnerable, and raw. 

It reminds you of feeling like you were being carved open, like you were having those pieces pulled out of you. Those fragments that you’ve buried deep behind your ribs, all yours. Delicate chattels between his fingers like a thread that he’ll tug to unspool you to the core.

His thumb grazes the corner of your mouth. Your lower lip. Rests there, all leather. It smells like charred tobacco. Tar. 

“Yes,” you breathe. Appease. The word comes out tangled with a frantic note, an exhale, and sounds garbled off your liquified, molasses-heavy tongue. 

Maintaining eye contact is difficult. Intense. Feels like wading a knee-deep morass with how treacly it makes your head feel, but it’s impossible to look away. With the angle he has your head, you feel snared into an unspoken standoff. Feels like you’re caught in a springe he’s laid out. You, with your rabbiting heart, and your ankle caught in a noose. And him—

Those deep-seated inkpools glimmer from the underbrush. 

“Is that right?”

It’s like a car crash, you think, stuck in limbo. A beatific maelstrom of metal scraping on metal. The beautiful, horrifying view, in the split-second of collision. Time in stasis. Slow motion.

You can’t look away.

He stops pressing to rap the pads against your cheekbone, instead, and the thump that echoes in your skull almost sounds hollow. Loud in your ears. The pang lingers in your jaw, like a dull ache, across your upper teeth, the inside of your cheek. 

There’s a split second there, where that bilious feeling slinks into your stomach and coils up, stretching between your lungs. That sick you find, buried under the galvanized cobwebs spooling your sense of self-preservation, like a haze of little, electric gossamers across your synapses. The incipience of a wave of nausea, softly lapping, at the thought that all of this, everything, is premeditated, and the gnarled root of it all sinks so much deeper than you’d ever expect. 

That he’ll know— knows— that you brought another man home last fall. 

It was stupid. A one off, scraped off a bar stool on a Saturday night after one too many whiskey sours, and the sex wasn’t even any good. You don’t remember it. 

But your head feels syrupy. You don’t know what’s worse: this burgeoning fear that you’ve disappointed him with— what? Free will? Autonomy? 

Or the slick ooze of the bone-juddering revelation that settles; he’s probably been watching you. Keeping tabs. 

(How else did he know where you moved? How to pin you under the pad of his thumb with such startling ease? You’re a thumbtack on a paper map, and a petrified part of you wonders if he’s got it— a chart of your whereabouts, your existence snared into a creased sheet— dangling next to the panties from last spring.)

If he knows about your liaison, he doesn’t indicate it. Opting to, instead, graze the shape of your lips with his thumb again, and push in to scrape the flats of your teeth with the leather. It’s gross. Feels strange— leather against the smooth inside of your lips, and when you breathe around it, you feel like you’re spinning out, headfirst, hurtling toward the ground. Something you don’t want to acknowledge rolls over, white-hot, in the pit of your tummy. 

“That’s good,” he settles on, and palms your breast so abruptly that it makes your lungs squeeze. Your throat clicks when you swallow. 

It feels so mechanical. Calculating. Collected. Nonchalantly purposeful— nothing gradual, no build up— like he’s here to reap and take, intent on what he’s looking for. But it’s all a startling, unnatural paradox, considering you were left so overly-satiated last spring, that you almost felt like a mindless shell of yourself. Entirely sapped. The enigma left your head clogged up and heavy for days. Weeks. Months. Your lashes flutter, dusting unfitting bliss across your cheeks like the speckling heat. Like pleasure is bulky, and rounded, and doesn’t fit into the jagged slot your anticipation has chiseled. 

He squeezes the doughy flesh in his hand, and scuffs your pebbling nipple with a side-swipe of his thumb. Then, the other. Long, thick fingers spanning, and coasting across your diaphragm, climbing your waist, the chiseled, swelling rungs of your ribcage, cupping under one of your tits again. He only stops at the soft sound that crawls out of your windpipe. Eyes flickering at the reedy, wanton whine that gushes through the seal of your teeth. The self-awareness makes you wither into yourself. Shrinking. Ecstasy feels like an agrestal parasite, mushrooming between your nerves. Budding in that slope under your navel.

(Wrong, wrong, wrong— a broken mechanism, misfiring. Grinding. Your eroded mettle squealing under the pressure.)

You can hear him breathing. He sounds like an animal. A panting beast. Feral. Untamed, wild, huffs stifled by ribbed cotton and matte plastic. He notches a nipple between his thumb and forefinger, and pinches it. Tugs. A gust of your desperate breath escapes through that barren dearth between your teeth when he palms you by the front of your neck and pushes you against the back of the couch. 

It’s sloppy. Clumsy, an awkward angle from where you were on his lap— your limbs flail before you topple, and it requires more core strength on your part than you anticipate to sink back, but it isn’t violent. Aggressive. The coarse denim on his thigh abrades your naked skin when he twists to hover over you. Cushion denting under the weight of his knee. Your neck cranes back as he pins you to the back of the couch by the column of your throat. Head tipped back, nearly dangling over, neck straining. He looms over you.

Just—

Staring. Staring. You stare back and wonder if he feels your pulse hammering with the layer of the leather barricade between skin kissing skin. Like this, the mask is limned in shadows from the slant, and the crepuscular orifices under the plastic are even harder to make out. Harder to gauge. You want to gauge. You want to see—

You won’t have the upper hand. You know that, but prying for the threadbare margin of a hint, a motive, a reaction, feels like digging your fingers in for a last-ditch lifeline. 

His eyes are half-mast. Dark lashes spanned over the glint in pitch, mounted in white. You can’t see what he’s thinking. Can’t—

He reels forward, back hunched, leather jacket crinkling, and you feel the plastic mask tucked to your cheekbone. Your temple. Your hair. He reeks like santalum. Petrichor— the first rain spilling onto the pavement, scrubbing the bloodshed off into the grates— and the overwhelming scent of leather that clots in your nose. His mask scrapes your ear. He sniffs.

And you think, a little hysterically, that he’s smelling you. The recognition prickles in your skull, and climbs up your nape in a shiver. And it feels so— 

Animalistic. Primal. Indelicate. Like any sense of decorum flaking off and shedding like desquamate feathers, and it makes you feel so small. A frisson rides the ledges of your spine. Something shudders across his shoulders. Rattles them— you clock it in your periphery, stunned into subservience with your fingers twisting into the couch cushion. 

He sighs. Hums. Like he’s vibrating over you, buzzing, and the thought has that skein across your lungs tightening. The sound that seeps out of him is brassy. Low. Hungry. And the likeness that scrapes at your hindbrain, through the plume of reluctance and crushing desire, nearly makes you feel delirious— it almost sounds like a dog whining. Like he’s been holding himself back, and your scent is too much, chips an integral shard out of his flinty resolve. 

You don’t know why, but it makes you squirm. Makes your chest roll under him, hips shifting. Your eyes oscillate. Stutter from the ceiling fan to the corner of the room, because he’s smelling you and sounds like he’s falling apart. 

Your throat jumps under his hand. He drums his fingertip under your jaw, and it feels like the tick of a clock. He reels back. Slowly. Tipped over you, huffing with his head cocked. Almost panting. This harrowing monster, quivering in his skin, in all his heft, like he wants to eat you alive. Swallow you whole. His eyes slip. The feather-dust of his lashes kisses the pink-rimmed seam of his lower lashline, and he takes a deep breath, intumescent across the breadth of his shoulders. 

You swallow again, your throat still under his hand. The heel of his palm glued to your trachea. Your jaw arched back, under the press of his fingers. His eyes list. Stall across the apex of your denuded thighs, and the brief blip of pressure across your jaw, your throat, the fleeting restriction on your airway when he levels his weight and resituates, has your irises lolling and tainted gossamers stretching in sticky netting behind your skull. His freehand skates your abdomen. Prods your diaphragm, leather fingers grazing your belly button, the hem of your sleep shirt. Rucking it up. 

The boundary between arm-twisting and downright craving is negligible. It’s a foundation, under you— a poor excuse of a half-wall— crackled in fissures. When your hips hitch at the way he circles your navel, in a way, it feels like crumbled free will. Your own autonomy worn down and corroded by the chemistry spuming your veins (you tell yourself it’s artificial. A lethal injection of dopamine and melanocortin), because it feels like the hunger is pried out of you. Pulled out, tangled on his crooking fingertips. 

(And what do you have to say for yourself, when you need him like you need to eat.)

Your hips cant when he strokes his fingers over your waistband, across the sensitive, soft stretch of skin over your mons. You can still hear him breathing over the bloodrush, like spindrift, across the little, vibrating bones, deep in your ear. He sniffs, gaze pinned to the shape of your quivering thighs (juddering knees, swelling tummy)—

He knocks your legs apart with his thigh, until the plush of them spills around the shape of him. All broad, all muscle, all denim against your smooth skin, and he wrenches one of your thighs up with his fingers under your knee. Presses you back by the shin, with your sole planted on the couch cushion, and—

Like this, he has the perfect view. The perfect shape of your cunt, through your panties. They’re white this year. So unassuming, just a plain bikini-cut in ivory, but you wonder if he’s weighing the way they’ll look beside the other pair, like a sordid tchotchke. 

His eyes linger on it. You can’t see his inkpools, but they feel molten. Heady. Predatorial, and the shockwave riding the slanting arches of your ribcage makes it harder to take in a full breath. Lagoons spilling heat. They surge the soft shapes of your body like lavascapes, melting across your skin. 

You’re wet. You know that— feel the damp heat like you feel the want droning across your bones, lacing your muscles. And the sloppy, saturated shape of your dribbling pussy, behind the thin veil of a gusset, is no exception. You curl your toes. Dig them into the couch cushion. The carpet. Dangling onto the fragility of your self-possession (unraveling), and then he probes, with the tip of his index, right where your clit sits. A meager tap.

Your arousal is a tangible wad in your gut, and he plays with it between his fingers.

Desperation climbs to the base of your throat at an alarming rate. Echoes in your jugular as a thrum when his eyes sway between your face and the shape of your cunt. The shape of it under the entirety of his palm, swallowing you whole, between your legs, when he pastes his hand there. And he can’t feel the way it’s soaking, can’t feel how slick you are, but you wonder if the sheer heat leaches through the layers. 

If he can feel how hot and wanting you are, through the glove. 

He purrs like he can. Trails two fingers along the splitting fjord, your puffy lips. His thumb crooks into one end of your gusset just to let it snap back and watch the shiver roll up through your shoulders, huffing around a thick, rumbly noise that sounds amused. Drenched in humiliating mirth. A crater forms around his knee cap when he presses it onto the cushion. Between your split legs, thigh pressed flush to your cunt. Tight. 

“Gonna be a good girl,” he murmurs, face dangling over yours, and the words sound masticated. Starved. “—and let me eat that slutty cunt?”

There’s a fine line, you remind yourself, between being forced, and whatever the— you don’t want to admit it, won’t admit it, stuff it down— rapacious froth inside of you means.

He splits your lips with his fingers. Pries them apart like a butterfly to pin up and frame.  

Mental snapshots to encase on a shelf, mounted beside your underwear and a pushpin map with your face smattered in uneven, sawtooth cut-outs. All raw, and sloppy, and wet. Gushing down to the cleft of your ass— he can see everything, and his eyes rove like he’s mapping every bit of you to memory, your underwear balled and tucked into the pocket of his coat. Drinking in every delicate detail, your pebbled clit twitching under his thumb scuffing, and it’s so—

Humiliating. 

Embarrassing— shame clots in that interstice between your battering heart and your ribs, that soft spot it’s been dribbling into since he perched you on his lap like a little girl begging for a present. You screw your eyes, cup the heels of your palms over them. You can’t look— can’t—

He moans again. Gives you a heady hum, nearly as slick with want as you are between your thighs. Only, his is oil to your honey. Motor fluid to your syrup— a slippery smear of grease to sap. Rotten. Thick and coal-dark, like tar. Something gritty that catches like sand between his teeth when you try to close your knees. It’s a faulty maneuver, with your feet pried apart on his elbows, and you can only latch your knees, and—

It’s the wrong thing to do. 

A slipshod attempt to preserve your dignity, but what’s the use, when it’s porous enough for him to spew the virulent pollutant of longing for him? Noxious. Infectious. Enough to mill your pride from the inside into a powdered dust. Instead, he pries the folds of your cunt apart with one hand, on two fingers— an index and a thumb— and slaps the back of your thigh with the other. 

Your thighs quake. Plush flesh shaking upon impact, the searing heat wave that robs you of your ephemeral resistance— rolling the thought that this is gross, not what you want— and scorches it through to the core, until all that’s left for you to face is the overwhelming desire.

“Eyes on me,” he grunts. Dour. Unrelenting, until you peer through the spaces in your fingers like you’re watching a nightmare unfold, and let him wrest your knees back apart. “Yeah,” he tells you, hardly over the feather-light weight of a whisper, despite the way it feels like it’s crushing your skull from the inside when it swims your ears. “Just like that. On me, pretty girl.”

You can’t look away, so you chew on your fingers instead. Tuck them between your teeth, toes curling into the cushions. Your sleep shirt is in a discarded puddle of fabric on the floor, beside him. There’s something so uncomfortably potent in nakedness when he hasn’t even discarded his gloves. 

He won’t.

But an element of intrigue gets dredged up into the mist of your yearning when he sticks the pad of his thumb under the plastic chin of the mask to pry it to the bridge of his nose. Speckling the nebula, that clouds you, like stardust. Worse, yet, when he pries the balaclava to the same, angular slope, to show his bare chin, his full, pink mouth, his cupid’s bow. 

His nice, clean white teeth. 

His tongue, slinking out to smear across his lips. Like this, the cut outs aren’t over his eyes, and the pools of hunger are shrouded behind the plasticated layer. He feels with his fingers. Spreads your pussy apart, grazes his thumb pad across your throbbing clit, slick with your own sticky wetness, and you watch him purse his lips before a tacky, wet glob lands across your hood. Drool, dripping down, coagulating at your drenched hole. 

You shudder. Can’t look away— it’s—

Gross. It’s wet, and it’s rancid, and the feeling of it being smeared across your cunt, the feeling of a finger prodding at your rim, uselessly clenching at the air, makes your face crease. Brows pinching. 

(So why, then, do you feel so dizzy from the spiraling wave of your own lust fizzing across your veins?) 

You mewl. He tucks his fingers into his mouth. The same ones that have been smudging the amalgam of your slick and his own saliva, still tucked in that leather glove, and the sound he makes at the taste— pure hedonism, dripping around the plug of his own fingers— has your thighs hinging apart wider. Straining. 

It sounds so— shattered. So desperate. Frenzied. A sound like that, out of him, feels so unco that it nearly wrenches your head back. He groans around his fingers, sloppy, and grunts when he takes them out to feel for your hole, tease a breach with the middle digit, not quite bursting the threshold— 

And God, when he eats, it’s like he’s a man starved. Famished. All animal between your thighs, suckling on your clit, dragging his tongue across your hole, like it’s pure sustenance and he hasn’t eaten in weeks. Slurping around you, bullying your clit between his teeth like he wants to chew you up to spit you out. Rinse and repeat. 

He drags his tongue across you, so obscenely, seam to hood, like he wants you to see. Wants you to watch— wants you to know that you’ve got this horrifying brute on his knees between your legs, kissing on your cunt. Wants that ugly revelation to stick to the inside of your skull like knotgrass spilling across your bones— a twisted thought you’ll never be able to tame out of fruition. You let this happen; let him take. 

(And worse yet, you liked it.)

“Sloppy, little pussy,” he grunts, the words muzzled against your sopping cunt, spilling against his mouth, dripping. Sticking in strings to his lower lip, the corner of his mouth— and he crooks his finger. Notches it against your rim. 

It feels wrong. Strange. Leather against your cunt, instead of skin, when he prods and—

Pops the tip in. Stretches your gummy walls to the first, gloved knuckle. The soft, wet heat of you pulsing around him like a heartbeat is lost on the leather, the barrier between your skin, but he’ll make up for it. He’ll make up for it, he’ll—

“God,” you mewl when he crooks the finger and stuffs it to the hilt, stroking the wet squeeze of your walls enveloping it. 

The brutal ugliness in the concept of this man prying you open, stretching you taut when he wedges his ring finger in beside the first, with a glove on, douses you in shame. Has a white-hot heat spewing, geyser-like, at your underbelly. 

The sounds, though, the wet-squelch of those leather-coated fingers fucking into you, spilling slick and shoving it back in, makes your eyes screw. Has a heat nipping at the apples of your cheeks the way it nips at your cunt when he grinds harsh circles around your clit. It’s too much. Nearly too much when he nicks the razor-sharp mantel of your nerve-endings and hones there upon the horrid, wheezing sound you make, the way your leg flexes out beside his head in jarred reflex. Like he’s punishing it. You. For congealing up in his teeth like an insatiable sweet-tooth he’ll never scrape off his enamel. 

You cry out. Knock the heel of your palm into his forehead. Into the edge of that eerie mask, the kiss me, unsmudged, but he’s unperturbed. Unruffled. Unyielding, the same way the brutal crash of pleasure spooling tight behind your navel, your burning, flexed core. 

He catches your wrists in his hand. Like two limbs of a lamb, ensnared. The most perfect, decadent feast to carry out on a charcuterie board, and the sound he makes against your cunt nearly sounds inhuman. Like a rabid, territorial animal at its mealtime, mouthing off at a hand that tries to intrude. Encroach. Take. The vibrations make your head spin. Dizzy— you’re so dizzy, and you don’t recognize that you’ve been holding your breath until the shuddery cry that tears its way out of your mouth is silent. A hiss of a breath that melts into a long, wet gasp. 

He tucks your hands to your tummy, and takes. And takes, and takes. It belongs to him, right? The garbled slur that slips through the negligible gaps between your teeth sounds fucked stupid, and he hasn’t even split you apart on his cock. 

Your fingers twitch, pressed to your mons. Try to reach— to pry— hips canting back, forward, away, into. Against his slippery chin, and his tongue, and his unrelenting mouth. 

And oh, how you unravel, under his jaw, like you belong there. Under his hands, and the tip of his nose tucked to your mons, and the flats of his teeth, grazing—

He doubles down when he feels the pop— the release— your pretty, little cunt fluttering around his fingers, sucking them back in on every twist out, like a vice.

It starts on a long, wilting mewl. A desperate note that laces across your vocal cords and seeps out, not by your own volition, and ends on a gasp. The cord snaps. Too taut. Too much. The ripples of the aftershocks, lapping at your core, red-hot, sloppy, and spent, and overly sensitive, crescendo into a horrible ache when he suckles over your clit. Draws a searing stripe across your nerve endings with the tip, stifling groans into your puffy sex. 

You squeak. Tremble, toes tensing. Flexing. Hips arching back, trying to scoot away. Off. 

“I— came,” you bluster, but it sounds hoarse. Distant, in the thundering thrum of your vertiginous headrush. “I—“ you try again, hips canting, and he swipes out with his tongue, catches something raw and smarting on the fleshy edge. 

You jolt. Spine twisting, distorting pleas between your teeth you’re swishing them across your gums. You wriggle your foot, wheedling it under the space where his mouth is flush with your cunt. “I— please—“

He wrenches your foot back into place so aggressively that all you can do is make a pitiful, helpless squeak. Lashes fluttering, writhing, gnawing into your lower lip when he rolls his tongue across your pulsing clit. The sound that rumbles across your core rattles you down to the marrow. It feels like he wants to chew you to the bone. 

And when he pops off, finally— finally— panting like he’s had his fill, sucking at one of your lips until it’s tender and kiss-bruised— satiated this quenchless thirst that riles in the apertures of his skeleton, humming in his musculature— you breathe. Just breathe. Catch it— snag it. A soft repose in recompense for the throb in your guts, between your legs. Crystalline beads hover, sprouted from the corners of your eyes, streaking across your lash line. Your gaze is lachrymal. Pools of an unspooled bliss, mottled overwhelming, shimmery and red-rimmed. 

And the breath you’ve been catching—

Is forced out from between your lips when his hand lurches. Pins you, supine, to the couch, fingers spanning your nape. Heel of his palm at your jugular. The abruptness of the motion has your heart lurching to your throat. It nearly kisses the shape of his hand.

(But you suppose, if that cracked bit of your rib belongs to him, then maybe a sliver of your lung does, too.)

Somewhere between the dazed stupor of you, panting like you’ve run a marathon, and laying you out on the couch, he’s fixed the mask back on. The balaclava. And the crass, dirty thought that his chin is still slick under the cotton, making it sodden, and hot, and tacky to his skin, seeps across you and cakes like cement. 

He stares down at you through the cut-outs. Your heart is a hummingbird behind the rungs, trying to break free, and you feel it in your pulse, where his thumb strokes. You wonder if he can feel it. You’re still in that balmy, soggy headspace with your muscles pliable, your head heavy. A pastiche of heaven in a come-down, roping its way across your bones and smogging your hypervigilance. 

You’re less unnerved to be stared down at like that— like you’re a meal for him to chew apart between his teeth, like he’s contemplating every possible scenario and picking through to find the prettiest position to put you in, how to grind out the prettiest sounds— with your head feeling like it’s liquified.

Your lashes flutter. You trace the seams on the ceiling, where it’s been repaired for water damage. Maybe someone bled out on the floor above, you think. 

But the warmth of the evanescent fog doesn’t curb the note of nervousness that paints its way into your respiration— like bleeding watercolor— when you hear his hands on his belt buckle. See the way he hovers over you, so large, and indomitable, eyes potent and intoxicant. Hungry. 

(He’s sated his appetite enough to hold him over, bar him from tearing you apart, but he’s still hungry.)

“Think it’s about time you start to give back, sweetheart,” he tells you. Dripping ichor-thick with want. Like blood melded with syrup. 

Even with apprehension dancing across your mind, you want him to fuck you. You want him to stretch you fucking dumb around his cock, just the way you remember he did—

But his next words make that reluctance buzz a little louder in your hindbrain. Alarms. The blood-curdling croon of the siren.

“What do you think, mm?” he mulls aloud, tracing the pad of his finger across one of your pebbled nipples, then the smooth, unmarred skin of your tummy, pausing over your belly button. “Should Daddy make you a mommy this time? Make it stick?”

Your gasp sticks to your throat. Tangles between your tonsils. Your nostrils flare when you try to take a deep breath as indemnification, and you blink up at him, you find nothing but firm resolve in those voids. Abysmal, and unrelenting. 

“I— can’t… have a baby,” you croak, a touch incredulous, but you sound alien in your own ears. Like you’re drowning. 

He cocks his head, tipped down at you, with that ugly, ivory mask. “Sure you can. That’s what you’re built for, isn’t it?”

And the degradation, being stripped down to the metal cogs, the tender technicalities of your biology, makes your cheeks blister. It’s demeaning. You hate it. Hate him, you hate him— something molten rolls in your underbelly. 

(Something hot lingers between your thighs.)

You feel your legs dipping when under the weight of his crowding closer, between your split thighs. Bent at the knee, feet planted. The couch creaks. And when the coarse brush of denim kisses your naked skin, you feel the heat from it like a furnace. 

“No,” you tell him, eyes carved into narrowed slits, and the demand in your own voice makes your bones tremble when you hear. You suck in a breath. 

He blinks. Something flickers, congeals, in his eyes, almost like you’ve stunned him with your gall. Your unrestrained defiance. And there’s something uncomfortably stifling in his gaze, searing down at you, when he tips his head. Almost like he’s contemplating your response. Rolling it between his fingers. His thumb draws a feather-light line over your mons, across the stretch of skin where your womb is buried under the soft layers of muscle and fatty tissue. 

“How do you think,” he kisses his teeth behind the layers— a muffled sound, but one you pick up on with your heartbeat in your ears, “it works out if I take you now, and they find you later? Keep you all to myself. Cancels out, doesn’t it?”

The indirect threat, framed as a hypothetical happenstance, makes something curdle in your blood like sour milk. The bile rolls in the pit of your tummy, and you feel your throat squeeze. Your exhale is a weak hiss. A wheeze, because you feel like the breath has been knocked out of you, alongside the foolish temerity.

The finger that’d traced a line across morphs into a hand, and he presses the breadth of it to your underbelly. Big. All leather, broad, your belly button peeking from the wedge between his digits. 

He sighs, and takes the hand away. Works it back over his belt buckle, until the tails are free-standing, bifurcated, and his fingers work over his zipper. It’s a huff that swells his shoulders, and you’re reminded just how big he is, over you. How massive. How staunch to his ideas— you wouldn’t stand a chance. 

“But maybe,” his head bows to watch where he’s working, and his tone is thoughtful. Menacing. Saturated with condescension, the same way you’re drenched with the remnants of your gushing slick, between your thighs. He meets your eye. “They wouldn’t look at all. Awful lotta people go missin’ altogether, tonight.”

You blink. Squirm. Thoughts of you, swollen and pregnant with his baby— chain-linked to his wrist, to a dreary, foreign bedroom like a dog to a doghouse in a backyard— makes you vitriolic. Angry. 

Horrified. 

(So why, then, does it make your head fuzzy? Kindles crackle at your underbelly, where he pressed his enormous palm.)

“No— no. I’ll be. You can—“ you shake your head. Try again. Placate. This is a gun, broken china on a back shelf. You can’t dissect it for what it means. Your ribcage shakes. “You can do— anything. Please.”

You imagine he’s sneering at you from behind the mask. Under the balaclava, lips crooked, when he tucks a thumb into his waistband and frees his cock. One hand squeezing at the root, stroking up. The motion has a slimy glob of precum blurting from the tip. It’s thick in his fist. Heavy. Mushroomed ridges vivid pink, long, fat. A little lopsided, skewed slightly to the left in his hold, arching towards you. 

He didn’t make you suck it last time, but you wonder if he will, tonight. Gag the bold subversion out with the subtle flex of his hips, your insolence— you, stupid, little thing, telling him no— with his cockhead spewing against the gummy wall at the back of your throat. 

The view makes you dizzy. Like you’re staring up to the summit of a mountainside with him looming over you. The peak that crawls over you, so tall, and makes you feel so insignificant. 

Those liquid gemstones have shed across your temples, but you don’t recognize it until his thumb swipes at the corner of your eye. A pillow-soft caress. It’s almost tender. Almost. Deliriously, you watch him smudge the same thumb, brandished in your tear, along his cockhead. The wet thumbprint coagulates with the slick there, weeping from his slit. 

“‘Course I can,” he tells you. 

There’s no gentleness in the way he manhandles you, then. Wrangling you, by the scruff of your neck, into a hover across his lap. Positioning you how he sees fit, with him seated back on the couch, and you dangling over his cock, angled up in the seal of his palm. Your knees split across either side of his lap. 

“But mum and dad,” he grunts, and when his cockhead prods against your seam, you gasp, flinching up. “should stick together. Don’t you think?” 

He drags it forward, smudging it against your spent core, and it catches on your clit, the overstimulated nerve endings there, enough to make you shiver. It wracks up your spine. 

There’s nothing romantic about the way he holds you. He doesn’t cradle you close with this sense of softhearted adoration— despite your vulnerability— only pulling you close by the nape when his slick cockhead slaps your clit, your mons, with a wet smack. You gnaw into your lower lip, muscles clenching. Seeking. He smears the tip back to your pulsating rim. 

“What’s’a’matter?” he coos, probably at the rucks between your brows, creasing across your forehead. Your eyes flicker up. “You don’t wanna be my sweet, little wife?”

(You do, you do— you—)

“Oh—“ 

The press of his tip wrenching you open, taut around him, knocks your head back. Makes your shoulders rigid, spine arching over him, and his chuckle to the gasp that clots in your trachea is dark. Rich. It fizzles into a husking growl, though, when he presses down on the tops of your thighs and sinks you over him. Against him. Stretching the wet, sopping heat around him that throbs like a heartbeat with every tight breath you take, every inch lower. Your knuckles scrabble. Notch into his leather jacket, crinkling, burrowing, balling. 

“There you go,” he hisses. Groans. You’re not looking, but you know he is. Feel the molten pools of his gaze fixed where he’s feeding his cock, unwavering. He nearly sounds awed— splintering apart— when he tells you, “Such a pretty pussy. Look at this slutty, little cunt. Swallowing me right up.”

It’s raw. Bare— skin on skin— as close as you can get, and the pang that smarts at your rim permeates all the way up to your head, until that too, feels plugged. Foggy. 

It’s too much. Too—

He flexes his hips up sharply when you stall, just enough to wedge in to the hilt, and it wrests a high sound of surprise out of you. Nearly pained. Liked a kicked animal. It snags on something deep with the motion, something you haven’t been able to reach with your own measly fingers, and you mewl. 

He gruffs a slur behind the mask, tethers it with a groan, a breath that sounds caught in his mouth, but you can’t make out what it is. Not over the thrum in your ears. The assault on your senses, the unstilted stretch that feels like it’s prying you apart. Splitting you down the middle. Your thighs tremble. A sting. A dull throb that spills in your underbelly, lapping at your sex in sweltering, warm waves. Your clit twitches. 

There is something so cataclysmic in the way he hollows you out. Carves himself deep, scoring you in a way that’ll leave you begging for a piece of him, after, when you’re empty. A piece of his rib in return. It’s wrong— you shouldn’t want this man, crave him like you crave sanctum and stability. Your frenzied desperation, panting over him, seated to the throbbing root, feels chock-full of a festering longing you’ve been burrowing down since last spring. Spilling over. It sprouts— and spring, you think, bitterly, is all about revival. Rebirth. Flowering— the yearning you’ve been hiding behind your teeth germinates across your shuddering shoulders. 

He makes you ride him. Grunting, spitting how he wants you to bounce on his cock like the good girl you are. Soft, sloppy, half-hearted grinds you can manage over him, until he takes over, hitched on a huff that sounds nearly exasperated, and ruts up into you with the leverage of his feet on the carpet. 

He fucks you like he’s sedulous to make good on his words. Hard, fast, bludgeoning your rationale until it feels like you need the tang of cigarettes and santalum in every wheezing breath you take, writhing over the shape of him. His thumbs on your nipples. His fingers under the weight of your bouncing tits. 

Every pummel up into you feels like it kisses the seal of your womb. Feels like it’s battering a little closer to fruitions, to threats, and omens, and promises. 

And you like it. Love it. Can’t get away, can’t get enough, pawing at his chest, and then his collarbones, and then his chin, fingers knocking the border of the plastic mask. Kiss me— you think it’s cruel. So cruel, that you can’t kiss him. Can’t make out the shape of his bared teeth, the glint of them with his lips snarling. You want to lick across them. Bite. Taste blood for doing this to you. For making you feel this way. You want to tear him apart. Catch his tongue against your incisors. 

The thought is a distant chimera. A daydream you can’t chase, snared in a limbo— just take, take, take. But over the crests of your cheekbones, your dewy gaze watches him. Watches him, the way he’s watched you. Unrelenting. It’s hazy at the borders. Your sight flecked with wetness, shuddering, like a camera in hands that can’t stay still, but you’re unremitting. 

“Spit on me,” he growls. It’s an abrupt request— command, brimful of authority. Perverse. Then again, when you don’t oblige, it spills as a rasping grunt, “Spit on me.”

It wheedles into your threadbare sense of logic, registers. Your brows weave. Pinch, face creasing when he delivers a sharp plunge up, into you, tip to root. It’s gross. Disgusting. Lecherous. You think about your saliva blooming across his face, the way his heavy balls will throb. 

You want to spit on him. You want to bite him, claw at him, hit him— you pucker your lips. 

It lands as a tacky glob stretching across the bridge of the nose on the mask. Seeping into the inner-corner of the eye cut-out. Glistening, slick. The sight is revolting. Nasty. Your lips curl down, your brows crinkle—

He groans. It’s loud. Suffocated on desire, hunger, want, akin to the noise he made sniffing at your hair like a monstrous hound. A fucking creep. 

One of his hands leaves your chest, his thumb wriggles under the plastic white mask. It gets discarded, tossed off onto the couch. 

The view of him in, only in a balaclava, is new. 

No less unnerving, but it’s different, and it makes your inhale tangle in your throat. Something clicks in your lungs. You hover over him, with his neck craned up at you, and his eyes are green. Two pools of epidote, eroding under the swell of his pupils. Hornblende inkblots. A long, winding wild forest. You could get lost in it. 

(And pitifully, part of you already has. Melting apart like gum under the sun, between his stupid, thick fingers.)

“Fuck. Again. Give me another,” he tells you. It rumbles, but it sounds like a plea. You feel it vibrating in his chest, under your fingers, first, then watch the divot of the balaclava wavering into his mouth when he takes in a breath between his teeth. The way the cotton is stretched, tucked, across the bridge of his nose. 

You spit where he breathes. Where he’s huffing with every brutal thrust of his hips. It speckles the ribbed cotton with shimmer, then melts into the black where his lips lay. You can’t see how it saturates the mask, but you watch the way it affects him. Watch him unravel— the way he breathes through his nose, long, deep, lashes fluttering and dusting along his cheeks as his irises loll, and you’re faced with the view of their pure ivory frames. The pink rim across his lower lash line. 

He hammers into you, mercilessly, with his leather fingertips against your clit. It’s too much. Too harsh. Pleasure and pain coagulate into a lagoon that sloshes your head, pulses between your thighs, under his incessant fingers. 

And when he comes apart, under you, you nearly tip over the precipice at the experience alone. He makes a ragged sound, a groan, hips stuttering, and spurts ribbon after ribbon of his cum against the spongy walls flexing around him. Into you. Against the seal of your womb— oh, God— you burrow your hot face into his shoulder, hips canting, and bite at the leather. 

“Fuck,” he slurs. Heaves— and you feel him melting under you. Thawing. 

Your spine ripples. The molten heat of his cum, sticking to you, plugged up by his throbbing cock, makes you feel feverish. Aching. Charred all over, from the inside. You take a deep breathe and taste his musk at the back of your throat. Lingering along your tongue.

It’s almost comforting. But the reminder of who this man is, and what he does (has done to you, is doing), crawls along the serenity of your haze like a poisonous treacle. You muster the strength in your core to rock up onto your knees, make to clamber off. 

“Okay,” you breathe, “Okay—“

The thought of repose is a bittersweet mirage, though, sparkling in the distance, when he nudges his hips back up from beneath you. 

It knocks into something that makes your lungs seize. You feel his tacky spend coated across the undersides of your ass cheeks, spilling against the inside of your thighs. Pooling in the thicket of dark, wiry hair that nests around the root of his cock, dusting his balls. He grunts, and when he jostles you over his lap again, you have to catch your balance with your hands against his pecs. 

His eyes are shimmery when you blink up at them. Expressive enough for you to clock the derisive mirth that curdles, in shavings, along the chrysoberyl flecks in the tumultuous seas, when he hums. “You didn’t think I was done, did you?”   

He’s not done. Not for a good, long while. But you suppose, that a year of self-denial, precipitous self-restraint, is bound to spill over, eventually.

(It’s just too bad for you that you ended up in the path of the hurricane, front and center.)

He fucks you again over the arm of the couch, with your ribs smushed to the ledge and your knees on the cushion. Arms behind your back, head dangling, tits aching with the press of his weight, every drag against the fabric. Fingers in your mouth, straining the corners wide, riding the grooves of your clamped, slick teeth. Pawing at your ass, squeezing the flesh, prying your cheeks apart humiliatingly wide.

He makes you cum again. And again, until you’re sobbing. Legs hitched over his shoulders, chin twisted, gnawing into your own shoulder to stifle your mewls. 

“Tell me your name,” you slur under him. With his chin over tucked your shoulder, his hum ripples across your eardrum like a humid gust. Rolls between your shoulder blades. 

“Tell me your name,” you beg, again, mottled with frenzied desperation that climbs your throat. You know those eyes. You know that face— the one that lies underneath. The misty contours of it scratch across your skull in the smog of a memory. You know—

Your lower lip wobbles when he cups over your sternum, takes your breast in a doughy handful, squeezing around it, drowning you in every wet squelch, every slap of his hips against your ass. 

“Daddy.”

When you wake up, he’s not there. Ephemeral. The night nearly feels temporal, if not for the slick between your thighs, dewy at your cunt, where your seam is still aching. Crusting along the insides of your thighs. 

You feel like every bone is out of place. Like everything needs to crackle and slot back. Worn, tired, when you kick your feet over the edge of the mattress and stand. It pangs between your legs, first. And then across your chest. 

Your underwear is gone. You know you won’t find it. 

When you check the clock it’s midday. Late, too late to even be considered sleeping in. You’ve wasted the twenty-second off into somnolence. There’s still a haze across your head. This balmy, misty thing that keeps you sluggish. Tired. You’d chalk it up to oversleeping, but. 

It’s short-lived. Hollowed by the vacancy. Something stirs in the back of your head— you should probably send a life signal out to your family. Let them know you’re not splattered across the sidewalk, somewhere, or worse yet—

You think about his words. Keeping you all to himself. The thought makes your shoulders shudder. 

On the way to the bathroom, you find carmine carnations in your kitchen. Mounted in a vase that belongs to you, plucked out of the cabinet over your fridge. Beautiful, beautiful carnations.

kinktober masterlist here. | general masterlist here. | patreon here.

TAGLIST: @aprlmuse @babegoals @cinnamonone @flubblubbb @ivegotthecinema

@bxtchboy69 @iloveharrystyles04 @littlenatilda @witch-rry @watermelonsugarslut

[trendywaifus]

you smack feixiao’s hand away from your cup of wine, casting your woman a quick glare before going back to talking to jing yuan. she pouts, resting her cheek against her palm, elbow propped up on her knee as she lazily tunes into the conversation about daily life between you and jingyuan.

“ i heard that yanqing and yunli has been getting along lately. is that true, jing’? “ you inquire, idly tapping a finger against the wooden surface of the low table. jing yuan chuckles, taking a sip of his wine.“ they’re getting there. it seems like their little “battles” are a form of kiddy dates. “ you let out a soft laugh, barely aware of feixiao’s hand sneakily reaching for your cup. noticing his fellow equal in title’s antics, the white, long-haired man shakes his head disapprovingly. she press a finger to her smirking lips as she slowly slides your cup towards her and—

“ you know i can see your hand from the corner of my eye, you sneaky vixen! “ you instinctively grabbed her fox ear and pulled at it.

she yelps, “ ow, ow! dearrestt, i was just kiddding—ouch! “

“ yeah right! what did i tell you about trying to drink liquor you know you can’t handle? this poor man told me you downed a whole thing of wine, destroyed his gazebo a few days ago, and passed out drunk! “

“ heh–ouch! i got a little carried away and i was thirsty—ouuuch! i was just visiting and wanted a—ouch, ouch, ouch!”

“ a visitor but not. a. guest! “ you hissed. jing yuan turns his head and stifles back a bellowing laugh at the comical sight of the merlin’s claw of the xianzhou yaoqing getting scolded by her lover. you finally let go of feixiao’s sore ear and sighed exasperatedly. “ you should of stayed with jiaoqiu at the tea house. there’s a reason why the loufu doesn’t sell alcohol when— “

feixiao stubbornly cuts you off, “ nonsense! to hell with it! “

she swiftly swipes your cup, brings it to her lips, and downs the strong, rich content. you and jing yuan’s jaw drop in astonishment as she gulps everything down.

“ fei—y-you didn’t— “

“ and i did! seee, mymostamazingbelovedmate?” she drunkenly slurs, slamming the cup back on the table. “ i can handle a little cup of wine jusst fine! your most fantastic lover can handle it! “ feixiao’s bright ocean eyes are already half-lidded and dazed as she clumsily stands up, nearly falling backwards trying to maintain her balance.

“ that’s not—feixiao! sit your stupid ass back down before you fall and hit your head! “

“ you should listen to your spouse. we wouldn’t want the lacking general to get a knot on her head after getting defeated by a mere cup of wine, hm? “ jing yuan advises casually before clearing his throat. he takes a long sip of his wine. you pinch the bridge of your nose because of his mocking comment.

“ haahhhh? “ feixiao glared angrily at the man before raising her foot, and slammed her heel down on the table, sending it flying in the air. did this man just purposely provoke feixiao? you can’t even call him petty at this point because she was the one who destroyed his property the last time he saw her.

“ let’s take this outside, jing yuan! just because my dear lover is here. . .doesn’t mean. . .i won’t. . “ feixiao trails off sleepily, losing her footing and falls sideways. luckily, her head lands safely on your lap, body stretched out perfectly on the tatami mat. you sighed in great relief, stroking her head as she sleeps soundly. “ you knew she’d do this which is why you made that comment earlier, huh? “

jing yuan simply smiles at you, the smug look evident in his golden hues.

“ not exactly. but i’ll say this, i forgive but i don’t forget. “

you roll your eyes at him.

[yandere-daydreams]

Fox Hybrid!Childe, who arrives at the sanctuary where you volunteer in the dead of winter. He's brought in by a group of hunters who found him in a decade-old bear trap on the verge of freezing to death. He's aggressive at first, still rattled from such a close call, but comes around quickly after a warm bath, a visit with your on-call vet, and of course, something to fill his stomach.

Fox Hybrid!Childe, who can't be released back into the wild while he's still in recovery or left alone overnight, not when he's so eager to play fight with the other hybrids. He gets along well enough with all the volunteers, but he's constantly trying to get your attention, either sulking as you tend to another hybrid or drinking in your generously-given affection. You're clearly his favorite, so you're the one to take him home. He's ecstatic about the change in scenery, to say the least.

Fox Hybrid!Childe, who takes to being a housepet like a fish takes to water. You try to make up for the lack of stimulation with a never-ending supply of thrifted toys and as many walks as his injured leg will allow, but he prefers to spend most of his time curled up at your feet or trailing after you, ginger ears perked-up and blur eyes wide and bright. He's surprisingly good at household chores for a wild animal. By the end of the first week, he's cooking and cleaning on his own, and when you insist that he's your guest, that you don't want him to get too domesticated, he just laughs and tells you that he likes it, that he's used to hunting for his siblings. Since you won't let him bring the birds and rabbits he catches past the front door, this is how he's decided to provide for you.

Fox Hybrid!Childe, who destroys your apartment the first time you leave him alone for more than an hour. It makes sense, even if you can't say you've ever seen another hybrid react so violently to being separated from their handler. Foxes are social animals, and he hasn't been on his own since he was brought to your sanctuary, since the day he stumbled into a trap he couldn't understand or struggle his way out of. Still, when you come home to find all his toys gutted and all of your furniture overturned, you can't say you're thrilled. Childe spends the rest of the day buried in your sheets, pouting until you finally give in and forgive him. Childe goes wherever you go, after that.

Fox Hybrid!Childe, who suddenly seems a lot less friendly than he did, when you first took him in. You try to write it off as him being overly protective of his temporary skulk, but it's a little hard to tell that to your male friends when he bares his teeth and snaps at their hands. In public, he refuses to leave your side, his tail constantly thrashing and his ears pressed flush to his scalp. He'll still smile, laugh, promise he doesn't get jealous that easily, but it's difficult to take his word for it when he holds your hand so tightly.

Fox Hybrid!Childe, who's been scenting you in your sleep for weeks, nuzzling into the crook of your neck and gripping at any flesh he can reach and humping your thighs until he inevitably climaxes and has to clean his cum off of your skin with his tongue. He makes a point of 'accidentally' staining anything he doesn't want you wearing in front of anyone but him, letting you think he's too vulnerable to his animalistic urges to not mark your favorite top with his cum, that his separation anxiety is just too severe for you to shower without him, let alone close the door when you change.

Fox Hybrid!Childe, whose leg has been fine for months. You're too much of a bleeding heart not to buy it when he puts on a half-hearted limp, and while he hates having to lie to his future mate, he hates being away from you more. It's not a permanent arrangement, either - he'll be able to tell you the truth when you're fully bonded, when you're heavy with his pups and coming undone on his knot every night, every minute he can get with you.

Fox Hybrid!Childe, who's not going to let anyone take him away from his precious mate now <3

[aeonstale]

JIAOQIU DRABBLE

summary. herbalist reader x jiaoqiu tw. fem!reader, cursing, some pov changes, art by hoki11. (the lack of jiaoqiu fic is criminal), not proof read.

"What got you so happy, JIAOQIU?" The lacking general question her retainer. He seemed happier than usual, his smile seeming more genuine.

Said foxian tilt his head in faux confusion at his boss' question, "Mmh? Do I now?"

"Yes. And it's unnerving since your cooking. Don't tell me you added more spice?" The shadow guard frown at the thought. He only saw his colleague smile this widely when he tricked the food.

Jiaoqiu gasped. Clasping his heart, he put on a hurt face while sighing dramatically, "How could you! And here I thought we were friends. You truly wound me Moze..."

"Cut it out." Moze deadpanned while Feixiao could only laugh.

Well, the two of them were right. Jiaoqiu was indeed happier than usual, he thank the sweet lady he met earlier this evening. He ponders when he should meet her again. Perhaps he should bring along a gift or two.

JIAOQIU wanders along the streets of the Luofu in search of a herbs-selling shop nearby. He has been wandering for a few system hours now. Yet none sold the plant he so desperately need. He sighed in defeat, deciding to retreat for now. Maybe he would find it some other time.

That was how it should've gone.

Until his eyes caught onto a discreet shop. 'Herbs & Help'. It seemed like he missed out on one shop, Jiaoqiu was sceptical. He had been searching for awhile, leaving with more disappointment one after the other. But he suppose one more wouldn't hurt him.

Opening the door, the scent of herbs and spices welcomed him. His ears twitched at the sounds coming from the backdoor. Murmurs and curses could be faintly heard. He stopped at the counter filled with bags each containing different herbs. Jiaoqiu looked at the shelf presented in front of him, searching for the herb he needs.

"Fucking aeons, the back gets messier the more I go back to it—" the voice stops as the sight of the healer settles into the shop owner's mind. "Oh..Oh! Hello! Welcome, um, I'm y/n, how can I help you today?"

The woman looked dishevelled. Leaves sticking to her hair, dirt smeared her cheeks and her outfit. Nonetheless, Jiaoqiu smiles at the lady. "Hello, I'm looking for a herb—Goldenseal? I was wondering if you had any in stocks." Jiaoqiu waited for the expected 'No, sorry' or 'we ran out'.

"Oh! Goldenseal? I think I have some left in stock let me see." the young lady perked up at the familiar name, nodding at the gentleman before going back into the mess that is the storing room.

To say the foxian healer was surprised would be an understatement. To think a barely noticeable shop was the end of his endless search was a welcomed surprised.

The fox hummed as he looked around. The shop seemed well kept. The herbs looking to be of high quality, he was right to stop by.

Just as he was inspecting the plants, a loud crash echoed from the back.

A moment pass before Jiaoqiu asks, "Is everything alright back there? Do you need help?" More crashes were heard —with the young man wincing at every sound— before the lady comes back.

"Sorry. it's a bit of a mess back there. Here is your herb Mister, er.."

"JIAOQIU." the doctor smiled.

You blinked at the man. 'Jiaoqiu...' you noticed it before, but the man was very attractive. Embarrassment crept up your neck as you recalled the state you were in. Quickly and discreetly (though you failed at the second part.), you tried to tidy yourself up. If the man noticed, he didn't say a word about it.

"Right, Mister JIAOQIU. Here are your herbs, I added extra as an apology for the disastrous meeting." you nervously chuckled. Jiaoqiu chuckled in response, you were cute.

"Won't it be bad for your business? Giving out freebies just because of a first meeting?" he tilted his head, awaiting your answer.

Not if it's for a pretty man like you.

"Why thank you." his tail was wagging slightly, his ears twitching slightly.

Your eyes widen as the realization struck you. "I said that out loud, didn't I?" The nod from the foxian was all you needed to start digging up a hole to crawl into. You melted into the floor, heat rushing to your cheeks, you only let your eyes peeking out from below the counter. "The herbs will be 3000 credits please."

Jiaoqiu was amused at your state. You were honestly so adorable. With your soft voice and your eyes looking anywhere but his. He was interested in you. (Or well your reactions.)

He put down the credits, leaning over the counter so he was towering you in your crouched position. "Thank you for the herbs, you really saved me." He opened his eyes to stare at your own, the both of you shared a moment before he winked and stood tall once again,

"See you around, cutie." And with that he left (Though the wagging of his tail told you he left in a content state.).

"Fuck his voice was hot."

While you were melting behind the counter, JIAOQIU was already looking forward to the next time he'll visit your shop.

EXTRA ;

"So will you tell us why you were so happy earlier?" Feixiao questioned once more. Her curiosity wouldn't be sated until she learns the true reason for her retainer's giddiness. The foxian could only hum, his hands expectedly prepping the ingredients for the hot pot, a smile seemingly forever etched in his face. "Well for one, I found the herb I've been looking for," ("The ones you looked all over the Luofu and Yaoqing for?" Moze inquired. He received a nod in return.) "and I may have met a cutie who saved me the hassle of searching all over again." Moze and Feixiao exchanged glances. Seemed like their healer was infatuated with someone. If the still wagging tail was any more of an obvious sign

©—jingyuqn. do not repost, translate or copy my work. 2024.

[dernier-mystere]

! SPOILER WARNING FOR 2.5 UPDATE! READ WITH CAUTION ! summary: the yaoqing trio returns back to the yaoqing, though things are a little different, being an alchemist in the alchemy commission, you receive the instructions and diagnosis from the cauldron master of the luofu, lingsha, about jiaoqiu's condition and what needs to be prepared for him and his treatment plan. despite being someone who worked a few times with the healer, you find yourself assigning treatments to him for once, despite his stubbornness and negligence when it came to his own health. pairing: jiaoqiu x alchemist!foxian!reader (afab) warnings: slight gore, injury descriptions word count: 3.4k a/n: how are we feeling jiaoqiu fans? a mess? :,) me too <3 so we need some comfort yes <3 the idea is based on an idea oc that was an alchemist and as the xianzhou yaoqing is mostly foxians, it makes sense right? hope you enjoy it <3 sorry for the medicinal rambling too! sorry if this may seem ooc, I feel so rusty with writing these days... ^^; I plan to write some proper fluff, I apologise this isn't lovey dovey, if anyone has suggestions please send them please support me by following or sharing! it's much appreciated! <3 twitter/x: @derniermystere ao3: Dernier_Mystere

The diagnosis was almost painful to read, you knew the trio was reckless, and a part of you thought it would be the Merlin’s Claw that would come back with the injuries, not Jiaoqiu. Even Moze who lingered in the shadow of the General had his incident report of injuries, most of the events that had occurred on the Luofu remained on the hush, so unfortunately, it left you and numerous other healers in great distress when the commission received the outpatient details and care instructions for the pink-haired foxian. Toxins in the wounds have caused surrounding flesh to decay and atrophy… acute shock from severe blood loss…? Disturbed blood circulation from Tumbledust results in disturbed blood circulation, massive internal bleeding, neurological atrophy and optic neuropathy, leading to… blindness. These were just a few lines written in his injury reports, you felt your eyelids flicker in concern at the words, each description made your lips crease further into a frown, your heart wavering as you could only imagine the pain he would’ve struggled with in that short period, not only ingesting a lethal amount of Tumbleweed but also baring the injuries sustained by the Borisin Warhead, Hoolay. Not to mention there were found traces of Lupotoxin still present in his bloodstream, in short, he danced on the thin line between life and death, a second too late, and he would have died an agonising death.

As you sat in the cool room of your examination office, the rhythmic ticker a counterpoint to the steady hum of the medical equipment in the room still trying to convince yourself how Jiaoqiu remained in such good spirits, and oddly with a good appetite despite his situation… his calmness and sly exterior made you fear the worse, after all, he hid a lot of his emotions, using his fox-like smile as a mask to pretend all was fine, even if inside he could have been begging for a semblance of hope. Your e/c gaze flickered up to the Foxian who hummed softly, sitting on the examination table with a Gaiwan* in his hands, as he curiously took in a whiff of the scent of the tea, swirling it occasionally in his hand as he tried to depict what herbs were in it. “Not much to say honestly, I feel quite fine besides the fact, I have been told not to eat spicy food… it’s truly a torturous treatment,” his voice was calm, yet the mention of not being allowed to eat his favourite food made him click his tongue, one of his long ears flicking in annoyance, “But, other than that, I am quite alright,” 

Your eyes squinted as you observed him talking to the pot plant in the corner of your examination room while you were seated on the other side of him, yet… you felt your insides soften that, he was still adjusting to his new condition after all. “Master Jiaoqiu, you know ingesting amounts of spicy food will only increase inflammation of your wounds.” You spoke softly, choosing not to comment further that he was talking to the plant rather than yourself. Jiaoqiu’s ears flicked in your direction rapidly, as he quickly adjusted himself to face the direction your voice came from, acting as if he knew the whole time you were seated there, it made you softly giggle in amusement as you slowly lit a stick of Dreambranch Incense in the office, in hopes of providing calmness to the mind during his routine follow up examination.  

“You always say you’re quite alright to avoid unnecessary long appointments, who dropped you off today? Was it the Merlin’s Claw or Moze?” You teased, prepping the small station beside him with all the necessary tools and treatment needs. Jiaoqiu’s tail flicked in annoyance as he crossed his arms, followed by a tiny pout on his lips, “I will have you know, no one dropped me off, Thank you.” His tone was almost childish and petty, “I came as instructed by the Cauldron Master of the Luofu, nothing more than a routine check-up.” He clarified, yet the creases in his brows seemed to convince you further that someone made him actually arrive at his scheduled appointment. “For a healer, Master Jiaoqiu… you should always look after yourself before treating others.” You commented, your fluffy tail swaying behind you in amusement as you spoke, enjoying the small amount of petty banter with the Foxian healer who had left the field a while ago now. Being a long-life species, a mere few years seemed to fly by in the blink of an eye, but when one formed friendships or any kind of relationship when they left or moved on, it felt as if they had left for centuries, this was no different to Jiaoqiu. His sassy nature and his usual greeting with a cunning smile were oddly something you missed, but deep down, you knew the losses on the battlefield tore and ate away at his heart, leaving nothing but emptiness, a path of Nihility to creep in. Some days, you found yourself sitting on the stairs of the commission, looking at the fake night sky of the Yaoqing, wondering if your research and treatments meant really nothing in the end. Countless patients slipped between your fingers like sand, no matter how hard you tried to grab the delicate granules, it would still slip through. The many nights where you prayed to Lan or any aeon to hear your pleas and silent begs to help a young patient that was slowly succumbing to the effects of Mara, the way their limbs twisted un-naturally, root-like appendages growing from his body like a deformity as they slowly lost their mind day-by-day, yet none of them cast their gaze on you or your pleads… they always replied in a numbing silence. You felt his pain… you sympathised with his feelings for those who were lost in battle… You could treat a thousand patients, but what was the point if they returned to the battlefield and lost their lives in the end… was their sacrifice in vain? These were the many questions that went through your mind on a daily, and something you assumed most alchemists thought. 

Your eyes fluttered closed as you shook your head to dismiss the darkening thoughts, you forced yourself to read over the letter submitted by Lingsha. As written in his treatment plan, you were to clean his wounds with Pathovore bugs, before applying liberal amounts of medication and dress them up firmly. As well as take a deeper examination of his blindness and relay any suggestions to her for possible treatments of his blindness. “Well, I know you want this to be done quickly, so I will start with the treatment of the wounds, Master Jiaoqiu, then if possible, I would like to examine your eyes…?” You asked hesitantly, your h/c ears pinning back against your head as you cautiously asked him, you honestly didn’t know why you were nervous, it was your job… but he had only recently just lost his vision, was it a touchy subject? Or maybe would flat-out refuse and say it was nothing.  

Jiaoqiu simply remained silent as he continued to hold on to the delicate clay cup, he gave the tea one last sip before he gently pressed the edge of his hand along the surface of the table to confirm he could safely place his cup upon it, “Why are you concerned, Y/N? it’s your job after all. Do what you need. For once, I am simply the patient, and you’re my healer now, are you not?” He spoke up, turning to face in your direction, though you could hear the slight hesitation laced in the last few syllables of his words but you slowly nodded in reply, not that he could see it. 

The initial examination was rather simple, you had to look over his wounds, the deep lacerations on his chest, the state of his collarbone, checking him for any signs of Lycanthropic symptoms which came in the forms of excessive hair growth, elongation of the canine teeth, hostility (namely to Foxians) and a heightened increase of Lupitoxin which are evident in a blood rage. Further examination of his red blood cell, Platelets and the protein count in his plasma, to gauge how well his blood would coagulate over time, while the effects of consuming Tumbledust has significantly lowered the count, he was slowly making progress as there were some improvements. While it wasn’t much, it was better than none… 

“So far, you seem to be on the road of recovering… slow, but I am sure we can get there eventually, there has been a minimal increase in your plasma counts, and platelets, but not much to say you can return to handling sharp objects… I am hoping you’re not, Master Jiaoqiu, and you have no signs of Lycanthropy so that rules out any further conclusion of you becoming a borisin.” You explained, all while scribbling on his patient forms that would be sent back to Cauldron master Lingsha, and further approval by Head Alchemist on the Yaoqing, Yingyue. “With this, I would like you to be placed on a higher dose of anti-inflammatories, to help reduce the swelling in your wounds. That, or need I remind you that you are not to ingest spicy foods, Master Jiaoqiu.” You slowly raised a brow at him as he turned to you, pulling out his fan that was underneath his alchemy commission uniform that he had removed so you could treat his injuries. He delicately fanned himself a few times, before hiding his lips behind the coloured feathers. 

“I would never betray the doctors’ words, no knives or spicy food here. Are you insinuating that your patient ingested spicy foods? Y/N you wound me… I would never,” He stated with a cunning smile pulling at his lips behind that fan, his tail swaying behind him as he took in the results of his examination. “But is it really my fault that Moze had hotpot, I couldn’t turn down such a request, even Feixiao was there.” He soon added, nodding his head innocently as his ears twitched in your direction. 

“So you did have Spicy food, is that what you're telling me?” You pressed, raising a brow as he kept fanning himself, concealing his smile. 

“I never said that, I just said that Moze might have offered it to me. But as such a good patient, I never touched a drop. I instead had to sit and watch my so-called friends enjoy a hotpot in front of me, it was quite cruel, really…” His fluffy ears drooped down, as he dramatically acted as if it had taken a toll on him that he couldn’t have some. Your expression fell into a deadpanned glare as he kept innocently fanning himself, humming all innocently, you knew that this sly foxian had made the hotpot himself and threw the blame at Moze to get off any kind of lecture. You feigned a sigh in defeat as you allowed him to win at his little game, “Alright, whatever the patient says… but know your slight increase of white blood cells, and redness on your laceration tells me otherwise,” You simply pointed out as you began working on removing the now loosened bandages around his shoulders and chest, you had seen your fair share of injuries and wounds, but the deep claw marks along his chest with lingering parts of decaying flesh seemed to leave a deep pang in your heart… reading about his injuries were bad enough, but seeing them in person was just as bad. 

The audacity he had as he simply hummed in reply and with a nonchalant shrug, “I have no idea what you’re insinuating here, doctor,” He added, placing his fan down to reveal that sly fox-like grin, as he lifted his head proudly, more so that you could work on his wounds better. But upon sensing your concern with his wounds, Jiaoqiu slowly fell into silence as he turned away, “This is nothing. I can handle this, there is no need to look at me with… pity.” 

You felt an all-familiar annoyance stir inside you as if small flicking flames lapped at the insides of your chest as your movements slowed down, “It isn’t pity… it was concern Jiaoqiu when the incident reports were handed to us, it was worrying… especially when there was no news or context from the Luofu. I knew something was covered up, and it involved Hoolay, something for sure went wrong… it may not be my place to ask what happened, but… You shouldn’t bare yourself to a wolf's fangs… and ingest Tumbleweed… even if you had a plan.” you whispered, gripping the bundle of bandages in your hands that you had removed, “You could have died, then what-” 

“I would have died fulfilled and content, Y/N.” He cut her off, a heavy sigh ruminating from his chest as he still refused to face you entirely, his brow furrowing in annoyance as he refused to accept your concern for him. 

“Would you really say that?” You pressed, your shoulders slouching as you continued to remove the last of the bandages to fully observe the wound in its entirety. Yet unlike before, you weren’t phased, instead, your heart simply felt like it was crumbling at his words. However, Jiaoqiu remained silent when you pressed him, his ears folding back a tad, it was a sign that you were right in some way. Despite the deafening silence, you continued to work on him, applying the Pathovore Bugs onto the rotting parts of his wounds, all while she delicately ran her scalpel over the unhealthy flesh to promote excess skin growth. Jiaoqiu grunted softly, leaning back onto his arms as he tried to push himself through the uncomfortable sensation, he didn’t want to be seen as weak or vulnerable, even though he was the one knocking on death's door. Yet his stubbornness to admit anything or the fact that for once he required treatment was unyielding, even when he was in pain. 

The silence continued to hover between them, once playful banter turned to a darkened cloud of tension, but, Jiaoqiu managed to face Y/N once more, parting his lips as he tried to find the words to say something, “Why do you care so much. Don’t they say laying your life out on the path of the hunt is a blessing…?” He managed to whisper out, his voice almost weak and one could even say vulnerable. Y/N glanced up, but unlike the look of annoyance or a frown, she offered him a compassionate gaze, “We are both healers, different kinds sure, but in the end, we are here to help those in need. I know you have lost many patients, as have I… I may not have been through or seen what you have on the Front Lines… but we share the same burdens of what we do is the right thing…” Your voice was soft, yet anyone could hear the way your words seemed to break through the ragged breaths you took in as you tried to formulate each word with sincerity, “But… we… no, you shouldn’t allow yourself to go through such measures… General Feixiao is already strong on her own, and your patient can only go as far as they can if their healer is also healthy, I have seen too many people die over nothing to claim they did so in the name of The Hunt… but it felt like they were throwing themselves away.” 

You gently removed the bugs, placing them in a glass beaker as you kept talking, “As I said… I don’t know what happened on the Luofu… but I know, you shouldn’t have risked yourself at such a high stake. There is always an alternative, another way to do things, picking the dangerous path isn’t always the right way.” You whispered, head now falling downwards as your ears drooped once more. You had seen so many soldiers come back from the battlefields injured and proclaiming proudly that if they died, they did so for The Aeon Lan, but, it more so felt like they were throwing themselves at the denizens of Abundance without another thought of a better strategy. Y/N slowly bit on her bottom lip as she continued with the treatment by applying liberal amounts of the ointment onto his wounds, before securely wrapping them up in bandages. 

During the quiet moment as Y/N worked, Jiaoqiu found himself sighing once more, shaking his head as his expression softened slightly to that of contentment. “You might have been right, I could have found another way… but I made it, did I not?” He replied in a lighter tone, even if you swatted his side with the flick of your fluffy tail, “You’re just as reckless as the Merlin’s Claw, she is rubbing off on you. You know… there would be a lot of people upset if you had died… I am sure even Moze would be upset in his way… you may have been fulfilled as you say, but what about the others that care for you?” you added, making sure that each one of his wounds was fully covered, before you soon sat back in your chair, your mind also wanted to add ‘what about me?’ yet, you didn’t. The Foxian offered you a sad smile, as he turned to the direction of the pot plant, “You’re not wrong, Y/N.” He reluctantly whispered, his voice holding a sense of vulnerability yet again, each word spoken like a prayer, with an ear twitch he turned back to you, this time with a more genuine smile.

“I am sure you would have been deeply hurt. To think during your training you said you hated me and my spicy food you could smell from a mile away…” His demeanour shifted to his usual self, sly and jabbing, which seemed to stir you up, evident as your tail swished around in annoyance as you finished up with his wounds, giving him the space he needed to change back into his clothes. “Stop being snarky… you seriously need to take better care of yourself.” You huffed as you turned to clean your instruments, all while he resumed fanning his delicate face once more, his soft pink hair flowing with each motion of his fan as he continued that same mocking smile. “I know. I can’t promise anything.” He hummed, for once he spoke truthfully, “But, I will do my best, I have no guarantees.” 

“That's all I wanted to hear, Jiaoqiu.” Your shoulders eased up and relaxed at his words, her heart feeling ever so lighter. 

“You know, you dropped the formalities halfway, this is quite intimate, Y/N, I am almost flattered, after many years and now you call me by my name and not Master Jiaoqiu,” As usual he tried his best to get under your skin, still calmly fanning himself. He expected you to retaliate or shoot back another snarky comment, yet you did something that surprised him… You gently hugged him, wrapping your arms around his lower torso to avoid touching his wound, as much as he wanted to open his eyes in surprise, the Foxian instead felt his expression melt into a soft fondness, one that wasn’t all that often seen. “You were that worried?” He finally admitted, moving one of his hands to delicately brush against your back soothingly. 

“Just promise me you will be more careful next time,” you whispered faintly, near one of his long ears that twitched at your words, his tail swaying side-to-side. 

“I can’t guarantee anything… but, if I get hugged like this, I might consider it.” He purred, still fanning the two of you with his fan, blissfully unaware of the edge of the fan catching a lit with the sizzling of fire lapping at the tips. Jiaoqiu quickly moved the fan to stop the fire from continuing with a silent huff of annoyance, “Maybe we could even go for some hotpot sometime?” 

You wanted to say he wasn’t allowed spicy food, but you were content from his words, you simply hoped that one day, he would take your words to heart, if not for your own sake, but maybe for those that were close to him…