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tropes-and-tales · 2 months ago

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The Enemy of My Enemy

(The Predator/Yautja x F!Reader)

CW: Violence; smut (monsterf*cking; fingering; PiV, unprotected). 18+ only.

Word Count: 9889

AN: This was originally requested by an anonymous person!

The distress call is what bring Mah’tu to Earth: a Yautja ship infested with a single xenomorph that escapes its cell to wreak havoc before the ship crashes onto the planet of the oomans. Mah’tu, in a nearby star system, is the closest to handle it.

Thank the gods he has the foresight to call for aid. A single xenomorph on a planet full of soft, weak creatures…it turns into an infestation almost immediately. Mah’tu is grateful the Yautja ship at least crashed in a small ooman settlement

Still, the small settlement is overrun quickly. Mah’tu finds himself outnumbered, outgunned, overpowered. He sees some oomans as he fights: they scurry around, they try to run. Few manage to escape before they are slaughtered. He pays them no mind. They are a weak species and only worthy prey because of their inventiveness, but these oomans are panicky and stupid with fear, and easy prey for the serpents.

He finds himself cornered in a large building. He hears the faint crackle in his comms of other Yautja as they approach Earth, but he himself is lost: he’s trapped with two of the xenomorphs, and he dispatches one easily, but the second stabs him with its barbed tail, sprays acid blood, and Mah’tu falls.

The Yautja are strong, durable. They heal quickly, and neither of these injuries would be fatal, but he feels his vision edging in black, and he knows once he’s unconscious, the serpent will kill him.

Mah’tu is a noble warrior. He was Blooded young. His bloodline is ancient, and he’s sired many Yautja that will live on beyond him, so he does not mourn his own lost life as he slips out of consciousness. At least he won’t feel the blow, though there’s little honor in that sentiment.

It surprises him, then, when he doesn’t die. When he instead wakes up, comes to, and finds a ooman—small, trembling—crouched beside him.

No, not beside him. Not exactly. The ooman is crouched between Mah’tu and the second xenomorph. It lies dead and twitching as it oozes its acidic blood from where the ooman has impaled it with a metal pole through its long skull.

The ooman is a female of the species, even smaller than the males, and Mah’tu sits up with a grumble and takes in the measure of his savior. A small thing, filthy. Stinking of fear and sweat and the rich metallic tang of ooman blood and the acrid, biting odor of serpent blood. Trembling as she turns and stares at him, her too-wide ooman eyes studying him warily.

How did something so small and cringing manage to kill a serpent, and with a piece of scrap metal, no less? Mah’tu had seen better trained, better armored Yautja fall to serpents, and yet…

He knows what it means to kill one of the kiande amedha. The Yautja revere them as the ultimate prey, and to kill one is a feat to be celebrated.

He does it with little thought: the ceremony is ingrained in him, as it is ingrained in all of his kind. To kill a kiande amedha means the ooman is Blooded by Yautja culture, so Mah’tu reaches down and drags a claw through the pooling acid blood of the serpent. Then he reaches out to the ooman, who flinches away from him, makes a whimper of fear. But he reaches out his other hand to grasp the filthy face. He holds her still and traces a small mark onto her forehead that makes her cry out at the sting of the blood as it scars her.

He marks the ooman—you—as Blooded. In Yautja culture, it means you are an adult, capable of Hunting alone. But more than that, it marks you as a full member of the clan, and given the strange circumstances of this moment—Earth, a xenomorph infestation—he marks you as his clan.

When the crackle comes through his comms that his fellow Yautja have arrived, that the military oomans of this sector have loosed a missile of some sort to level this infestation, Mah’tu again acts with little thought. This is ingrained in him too: marked as his clan now, he grabs your wrist, tugs you to the roof of the building, and narrowly escapes with you before your settlement is leveled by your government.

He realizes what he’s done once the ship is safely away from your star system. He’s marked you as Blooded, as his clan, which means you’re his responsibility now.

-----

A famous ooman once wrote that the course of true love never did run smooth. Mah’tu, without the benefit of any sort of literature course in his Yautja education, never heard the quote, but it doesn’t make it untrue.

Who would have thought the cringing little ooman would be so relentlessly furious at him, once the fact of her situation became clear to her?

Reason must flee your little skull. There is nowhere for you to go unless out of the airlock into the void of space, yet you fight him.

Or you try to.

The first night you attack him, Mah’tu is taken unawares. Why would he ever think you’d try? He’s sitting in the pilot’s seat of his ship when the sensitive appendages on his head alert him to someone behind him, but not quickly enough: there’s a dull bloom of pain in his shoulder, and it comes accompanied by you yelling some ooman word he does not understand.

He turns in his seat and appraises you. He takes in the fury on your face, as it cedes to confusion, then dejection.

From the meat of his shoulder, a small shank of metal is half-buried. He pulls it out, the pain minuscule, the cut already mending. He examines the weapon, a pathetic thing that you’ve found and tried to shape into something that could kill him.

It makes him chuckle, which sounds like a trilling to you. Then he stands, takes your arm in his paw, and drags you back to the storage area he cleaned out to house you.

“Stay,” he orders you, and he locks you in anyway. He cannot know how you bristle to be ordered about as you would order a dog.

The second time you attack him? You’ve loosened the bolts on a seat in the cockpit. You must have been at it for hours at a time, working your feet against the fastenings while you slouched beside him and stuck the fleshy part of your mouth out in a pout. Mah’tu bends in his seat to recalibrate a certain piece of equipment, and a moment later, the loosened chair smashes against his skull.

The chair breaks into several pieces. His skull doesn’t break at all.

“God fucking dammit,” you breathe out as he straightens out, stands to his full height.

He locks you in again, and as he drags you to your quarters, you try to punch him. Your little fists aim for his face, his eyes, his throat, and they glance off of him with no effect. You land a punch to his mouth and it cuts your hand. Mah’tu smells the metallic tang of your blood as he tosses you into your cell.

He thinks on it a beat later, then tosses in a med-spray so you can heal your fragile ooman skin.

-----

From there, you change your tactics. You abuse him verbally. You narrow your eyes into slits and call him all sorts of names: monster, alien, crab-faced motherfucker. Slimy fucked-up lizard.

When he’s alone in his quarters, he must look up some of the words you use. A crab, for example, is a harmless water creature on earth that oomans eat. Mah’tu cocks his head, considers it. Have oomans ever eaten a yautja before? The records are silent on the matter.

The verbal abuse is much like your physical abuse. It glances off of him. His kind have little capacity for metaphor, for simile or abstract thinking, so when you call him a “motherfucker” it does not bother him because you are wrong—he has never mated with his dam. A silly thought.

-----

Your fury never seems to lessen, but it does cool into something more refined and less ruled by passion. You finally seem to grasp that he means you no harm and that attacking him could leave you stranded in a star system your kind has never even heard of before.

You don’t try to attack him anymore, and your verbal assaults have lessened as well. You still twist your too-soft mouth around into a look that means displeasure, and Mah’tu senses that you are assessing the situation. Waiting for an opportunity to escape him.

So be it. You may be a Blooded member of his clan now (a fact he must remind himself, as your behavior often puts him in mind of a youngling, rash and stupid), but he is your elder both in age and tradition. He has followed all the protocols: he’s alerted the head of his clan, who required several confirmations that yes, you were a ooman and yes, you had killed a kiande amedha. He registers your DNA in the clan’s codex. Lists both your ooman name and the Yautja one he chooses for you (his name means “Swift Judgment,” but yours translates roughly as “Vexing Thorn”).

And though you are Blooded, as your elder, he takes up your training. Against his judgment (swift or otherwise), it is protocol, so he trains you.

Wisely, he starts by teaching you defensive moves. Why put a blade or worse, a plasmacaster, in your twitchy little paws?

If he hadn’t seen the evidence of your killing the kiande amedha, Mah’tu would doubt it now. Even accounting for the general weakness of oomans, their lack of speed or agility or flexibility, you are terrible. Your reflexes…do you even have reflexes?

Mah’tu shows you how he’ll attack you, he shows you how to counter, he comes at you at quarter-speed, and still you fail. You take his punches, his slaps, the sweeps of his leg, and you always end up on the mat in the training room of his ship.

As your elder, he tries to give you helpful advice.

“You are very slow,” he tells you. “Move faster.”

His advice is not well received. “Fuck you,” you spit from your place on the floor, wheezing as you try to catch your breath.

Mah’tu shakes his head. “No, you must train more. How will you ever join the Hunt?”

“I’m not a hunter, asshole!”

“You are Blooded.”

“I’m a goddamned dispatcher at a heating and cooling company!”

He considers this—he did not know that the oomans could control the weather or environment in this way. He will add it to the codex so that other Yautjas may investigate it. But it likely will not help you on the Hunt.

He holds his hand out to you, and you glare at him for a long moment before you take it and allow him to haul you back onto your feet.

“Again,” he says. “I will attack you from the front, and you must feint and then counter by striking me low on my arm.” He pauses and adds, “I will go as slowly as I can.”

You make a growling noise in the back of your throat. “Fuck. You,” you grit out, but you change your stance as he shows you.

A second later, you’re on your back again, but at least you land a blow before Mah’tu puts you on the floor. Your weak little fist glances off his arm, but he is feeling generous and counts it as a win for you.

-----

At his next Hunt, Mah’tu judges that you are not prepared, so he leaves you behind at base camp. He’s not concerned that you’ll try to escape: if you run off, he’ll easily track you. If you try to steal the ship, you won’t get far, as you don’t know how to fly it.

“Stay here,” he orders anyway, and you do that thing with your too-close eyes where they move in their sockets. He believes it may mean you are displeased, but most of your expressions seem to mean that.

“Aye, aye, captain.”

He shakes his head, touches his hand to his chest. “No, I am Mah’tu. Not cap-tan.”

You do the thing with your eyes again. “It’s an expression. Sarcasm, in this case.”

He tilts his head, and you clarify, “a kind of joke.”

Ah. He nods, then turns back to his weapons. He inspects them one last time, then holsters them on his body. The different blades, the net-gun, the darts and spear.

“I will return victorious. You will stay here, little sain’ja.”

You scowl at the nickname but say nothing, and Mah’tu doesn’t tell you that it means “warrior.” It is a jest because you are no warrior. A kind of joke, as you’d say.

-----

It is a successful Hunt. It brings him much honor and new trophies.

You are unimpressed, but when he strings up his kills and begins to clean the skulls, you make an injured noise and dart to the edge of camp to retch. The retching goes on and on, so much so that Mah’tu pauses in his efforts to check on you.

“You are ill?” he asks. “You have eaten something poisonous, perhaps?”

“No, you fucking psycho!” You stand up, swipe the back of your hand along your mouth. “You killed those creatures just for their skulls?”

“Oomans kill for trophies as well,” he points out reasonably.

“Yeah, but we also eat the meat. Venison, turkey, whatever. Some humans, you know, use all of the animal. The skin and horns and stuff.”

Ah, a misunderstanding. It’s bound to happen. Mah’tu puts his hand on your shoulder and lowers his head to show he is sorry for not explaining better.

“Do not worry,” he tells you. “We will eat these creatures’ flesh as well.”

You blink at him, and then you turn away quickly to retch again. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding, but perhaps you are ill as well.

“I will get you a med-kit,” he tells you. “It will cure your illness quickly.”

“Dude, really?” You heave again, but your stomach seems to be empty of any contents. “Honestly, fuck you.”

-----

Living with you is never easy, but it does reach moments of ease, especially when considering how you tried to kill him at first.

He trains you, or tries to. You do get stronger, leaner. You lose some of the ooman softness you had, and through your spat-out cursing, Mah’tu learns small details of your life on earth. How, for example, your role as weather-shaman was a passive one that entailed a lot of sitting and little movement. You apparently were a leader of sorts, ordering other weather-shamans on where to go to bring heat or coolness to other oomans.

There is a limit to your abilities as a fighter, though, and you reach them quickly under his tutelage. You can block many of his attacks, and you can land a blow occasionally, but in twenty sparring sessions, you are lucky to draw his blood once.

He finds that the sparring helps to spend your general fury at him, and the time afterwards—your muscles trembling, your body fatigued and bruised—is almost pleasant. Mah’tu has always been interested in the ooman civilizations, and when he asks his questions, you usually answer them honestly.

“Who were your sire and dam?” he asks.

“My mom and dad?”

“Yes.”

“Then say ‘mom’ and ‘dad,’ you weirdo.”

This is how Mah’tu learns that word choice is important to oomans, that your species uses words to differentiate things that are essentially the same thing.

“I never knew my dad. He took off before I was born. My mom was an alcoholic. She died when I was twenty.”

“You did not know which clan sired you?”

You narrow your eyes at him. “Fuck you. I knew my dad’s name, but that was it.”

“Did you share your si…dad and mom with others?”

That, for some reason, makes your mouth turn up at the corners, your lips curved upwards. “We call those siblings. Brothers and sisters. And no, I was an only child.”

“Ah.” Mah’tu nods knowingly. “Your dad was not worthy to sire many oomans.”

And that, for some reason, makes you laugh. It doesn’t sound like a Yautja’s laughter, but it isn’t unpleasant, Mah’tu finds.

“Mom would have liked that. Not worthy. Well, the bastard never paid a cent of child support anyway.”

-----

The two of you continue like this: misunderstanding each other, clarifying what confuses the other, navigating your two separate species and cultures.

It’s not easy, but it grows easier with each passing moment. He no longer has to lock you in your room each night, as you no longer try to escape. He no longer fears your fury (not that he feared it much anyway), so he doesn’t keep such a close eye on you.

He deems you worthy of a blade. He knows you’ll likely never be trained to a level of plasmacaster, but a small blade, designed and weighted for your size and strength seems appropriate for the rare Blooded ooman.

He spends long hours in his workshop crafting it for you. His sire was a renowned weapons master, and he passed his skills onto all of his offspring. Mah’tu forges the metal, hones the edge to such a sharpness that it could split one of the hairs on your head. He carves the handle to fit your hand perfectly, and finally, he tools a fine sheath out of leather, because he worries that you’ll cut yourself sooner than you’ll cut an enemy.

On the leather sheath, he picks out the symbols for your Yautja name. His Vexing Thorn.

-----

Mah’tu learns much from you, and he adds all of it to the great shared codex of information so that other Yautja may know and learn.

Your mention of child support, for example. It is a thing that a sire must use to support his offspring—money, which is the paper goods that represents wealth. He questions you heavily on this point; Yautja honor is derived from the Hunt, but ooman honor seems to come from which of your species can acquire the most of those paper goods. It determines who may live in a fine home and who may starve, and when he explains it back to you—to make sure he understands it correctly—you stare at him, then nod.

“I mean, basically.” But then you try to explain a thing called a stock exchange, and a thing called capitalism, but when he presses certain points, you get confused too.

“I dunno, dude.” You throw your hands up, a gesture of helplessness. “I never went to college, and if I had, I wouldn’t have majored in economics.”

-----

Early on, he calibrates to the ebb and flow of your body, and the questions he asks you in regards to your biology is what makes you the most anxious. Through his bio-mask, he can see how the heat courses to your face. He can hear your heartbeat increase in cadence, but he cannot understand why you respond in such a way. A body is a body. It’s systems and rhythms are what they are.

“You are injured,” he tells you, early. He’s still locking you in at night, and you’re still scowling at him and calling him, among other things, a fucking lizard asshole.

“’m not,” you reply.

He breathes the air of the cockpit. “I smell blood.”

The heat floods your face; it shows white-hot in his mask. “Shut up.”

“If you are injured—”

“I said I’m not.”

“If you are bleeding, I can get a med-kit—”

“Fuck, dude! I’m on my period, okay?”

Mah’tu tilts his head and thinks back to the rudimentary studies he’d read about oomans. “Ah, you are menstru—”

You cut him off with another scowl, but your eyes fix on the stars in front of you outside of the cockpit. “And by the way, having one’s period in deep space is not as fun as it sounds. I bet Princess Leia never had to worry about it.”

He does not understand your ire. “Is this Princess Leia a famed statesman on your planet?” he asks, kindly as he can, but you cut him an icy glare and launch yourself out of your chair and out of the cockpit.

You manage to toss a strained “fuck you” over your shoulder before you leave, as you often do.

-----

So Mah’tu comes to understand the seasons of your body. He also comes to understand how your feel about those seasons. He does not mention when you are on your period, though he can tell. He is sure to give you more privacy, and that helps ease the strain between the two of you.

But with other things, your face does not get inflamed. When your head aches, or when you twist a joint in sparring, you are free with discussing these things with him. When you feel hunger or thirst, when you require a blade to trim away the excess hair that grows from your head. When you feel tired. You share these things with him.

The only other thing you don’t share is when you are in heat. Mah’tu can tell that too, can scent you when your heat is upon you. It runs in the same rhythm as your period does, the two part of the same cycle that seems to come every thirty or day earth days.

It happens so often, he thinks. Yauja females only have a handful of heats in their entire long lives, yet you could spawn eleven or twelve oomans in one earth year. His mind is baffled by the math of it until he checks the codex and learns that no, oomans do not spawn that much. Despite their numerous heats, they only produce roughly the same number of pups as a Yautja female would.

Mah’tu sighs and leans back in his seat once he reads that. He has so much to learn.

The next section in that part of the codex details observed ooman mating rituals, and below that, known instances of Yautja and ooman mated pairs.

It is the latter that makes Mah’tu lean forward, then glance over his shoulder, then lean forward more: a furtive move that would put one in mind of a teenaged human boy looking at pornography for the first time, though of course Mah’tu would not know that.

*****

Sometimes you wonder if you were in an accident that has left you in a deep coma somewhere. How else can you explain the hell that broke loose that night, your small town overrun by monsters?

And how else can you explain the monster who…what? Kidnapped you? Saved you? Because he stole you away from home, but you also saw that mushroom cloud from the porthole in his ship. Did earth even still exist? If you could escape, where would you go?

It’s easier to imagine this all as a fever dream. A coma. Some consequence of a broken brain throwing out insane story lines around monsters and aliens and space travel to worlds you couldn’t even fathom.

But then reality comes rushing back at you, usually in the form of the giant beast named Mah’tu, swiping at you or tripping you or hitting you with the dull blades of his goddamned fucking spaceship dojo.

Then you realize, arm or leg throbbing, bruise forming on your stomach, eye swelling shut or lip split: this is no coma. It’s real life.

-----

He doesn’t kill you. You learn, over time, it’s because you killed one of those disgusting black things with the giant head full of teeth. He had traced its blood onto your head, and you finger the scar sometimes when you struggle to sleep at night.

“You are Blooded,” he explains, like you know what the fuck that means. “You are a member of my clan now.”

Great. Wonderful. You finally had a found family of giant lizard aliens.

You try to explain it to him. Killing that thing was dumb luck. It was some animal instinct, flailing as it cornered you. Your hand had found the piece of metal, and the monster came at you, and you had swung in a move of self-preservation.

“Dumb luck,” you tell him.

But his beady little eyes shine at you, and he lays a heavy paw on your shoulder. “A warrior’s instinct,” he corrects you.

You snort. You, a fucking warrior. You barely passed gym class in high school, cringing during dodgeball, puking during the timed mile run.

“A mistake,” you counter.

He shakes his head. “Fate.”

-----

It’s not terrible. You’re no warrior, but your childhood with an unsteady mother left you with the ability to adapt pretty easily.

He trains you, or tries. He goes hunting for his psycho room of trophy skulls, but he doesn’t force you to eat the raw, dripping meat he harvests. He takes the time to feed you a fruit-type stew, great chunks of roasted vegetables, some kind of flatbread. You recognize the hypocrisy of it—you loved a good burger on earth—but now you’re a vegetarian by default.

He gives you your own space, a narrow storage closet that he cleans out and makes a little nest of furs. When you hurt too much or get sick, he administers some sort of alien medicine that heals you and gives you a boost of energy, like you imagine old-style Coca-Cola used to do when they made it with a little cocaine.

So you endure, and sometimes—you’ll never admit it to him, the goddamned asshole who stole you away from home—sometimes, you actually enjoy this new life. When the stress of work and debts and making rent each month and trying to save up for a new car fall away, when you are whittled down to a more essential sort of life, you find that your anxious mind calms.

You find that you sleep pretty well in that nest of soft furs, all things considered.

-----

The training, though.

The goddamned training.

He is unfailingly patient, at least. He never once gets frustrated when you fail to move the right way. In the rare off-chance you land a blow on him, his happiness is outsized, like a parent crowing when their toddler takes their first steps.

It should be humiliating, but sometimes his praise makes you smile in spite of yourself. You know he’s humoring you, but still. You’ll take your wins where you can get them.

The problem with your handful of training successes, though, is that he thinks you ready for more. He introduces weapons with dull blades. Today, you’re training with some fucking spear thing, and he raps you over and over with his own. A stinging blow across your knuckles. A stab to your belly that lands like a punch. Finally, a curt jab to your ankle that strikes you right on your ankle bone, and you hit the ground with a shriek at the pain that crackles like lightning from your foot.

“Asshole!” you wheeze. You pull yourself into a fetal position on your side, and you pull your injured foot up towards you. You flex your foot. It doesn’t seem broken, but you know it will bruise. And you know he’ll make you swallow a vial of whatever healing shit he has, and the bruise will heal within the day, and tomorrow you’ll be back here, tears leaking out of your eyes as you stare up at him.

“You were supposed to move to the left.” He tilts his head, studies you. “You stepped into my blow instead.”

“Fuck you!” You spit it out with all the venom you can muster. Sparring is as much choreography as it is strength and speed, and guess what? You’ve never danced in your life, aside from some drunken flailing at bars and wedding receptions when you were younger.

At your words, though, he tilts his head the other way, and his bright yellow eyes bore into you.

“Not now,” he replies. “Perhaps when you are in heat next.”

That immediately takes your mind from the throbbing in your ankle. You gape at him, and he stares down at you wordlessly. Did you misunderstand him? It seems a miracle he can speak at all, and English at that, but he is very literal.

“What?” you finally manage to choke out.

“If we are to mate, we should wait until you are in heat again.” He says it so matter-of-factly, and you can feel the blood flooding your face and neck.

“I don’t—”

“It will be upon you in four or five earth days.”

You uncurl yourself and sit up. “How the fuck do you know that?”

“I can smell you.”

You curl your nose in disgust. “Oh, gross. You can smell me? You sound like a fucking serial killer. Hannibal Lecter in space.” You struggle to your feet, and when he reaches out his hand to help, you bat it away.

He tilts his head again, but now there is a question in his eyes. “Is this a misunderstanding, little sain’ja? You have said numerous times you would like to mate with me.”

“The fuck I have!”

“Is that not what it means, when you say ‘fuck you’? The codex indicates that ‘fuck’ means ‘to mate.’”

You gape at him again. Then you close your eyes, pinch the bridge of your nose. You take a deep breath. He’s not wrong. You’ve said ‘fuck you’ a thousand times to him. Goddamnit.

You keep your eyes squeezed shut, and you manage to say as politely as you can, “yes, it’s a misunderstanding.”

You hear the huff he breathes out, the low growl, and then he replies, “another instance of ooman words meaning different things, then.”

“Yeah, update the codex, dude.”

“I will.” A beat, and then he adds, “this Hannibal Lecter. Is he a great warrior in your species?”

-----

The problem is, once he says it, you can’t get it out of your head.

Why do you seem more open to it as time passes? You read once that Stockholm Syndrome wasn’t real, but perhaps it is and you have some version of it. Or maybe you’re just lonely, and had been lonely before you got kidnapped by him, or saved by him, depending on the lens you took on the matter.

It’s true that you had been in a dry spell on earth. You lived in a small town with few prospects. Everyone your age was already paired up, many married with kids. You and your ex had broken up a year before the alien invasion, and you’d had no dates in the interim, no offers, no tempting moments with another person.

And anyway, your ex hadn’t been that great. It had been a relationship of convenience until you had gotten wise to the fact that life with him was not convenient at all. The sex was mediocre at best, he was always borrowing money from you, and never rinsed his toothpaste down the drain when he brushed his teeth.

He never got you anything as a gift either. Mah’tu, in comparison, crafted a custom knife for you…which isn’t exactly a necklace from Tiffany’s, but there is no other knife like yours in the known universe, either.

He’s also considerate to your temperament, your likes and dislikes. He makes sure you have food you’ll eat. He does his skull-cleaning grossness out of sight now. More than once, he’s taken a detour to a planet just to show it to you, just to watch you stand on alien soil and gape like an idiot at flora and fauna that no other human has ever seen.

The craziest thought you’ve ever thought: maybe this fucking alien is the closest thing to a healthy relationship I’ve ever had in my life.

“You’ve lost it,” you whisper in the darkness of your quarters one night. “You’ve lost your goddamned mind.”

Because you lie there for a long moment, thinking about it, and you find that you don’t need to be in heat (the word alone makes you groan in disgust) to feel the sharp knife of desire lance through your belly at the thought of him.

-----

One night, around the fire of a planet where he’s hunting, you ask him.

“Why did you save me?” You watch him as he looks up from polishing his knife. He seems to consider his answer.

“Because you are Blooded, in my clan.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t have to do that.”

He shakes his head, the dread-like things on his head moving as he does. “It is required. You killed a kiande amedha.”

“I’ve told you, that was an accident. Dumb luck.”

“Many Yautja die in the attempt to kill one.”

“But I’m no warrior. I could never kill another.”

He makes a low trill, which seems to be his version of a chuckle. “No. But you only need kill one to be Blooded.”

You look down at your hands. They are calloused now from all the training, the nails trimmed short. “So it’s just that, then? Just dumb luck that got me here?”

“Not only that, little sain’ja. You could have killed me but did not.”

“So you owe me?”

“No. There is no debt.” He pauses. “Why do you question me?”

You lift your hands in a helpless gesture. “I dunno.”

“The codex says that oomans often question their fate.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” you snort. “I just was curious. I thought maybe it was that thing, you know. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

“You think I brought you here because we mutually aided each other against the serpents?”

You nod. “Sure.”

Mah’tu shakes his head again, and he chuckles in his way. “No, little sain’ja. I brought you here because you are Blooded in my clan. I’ve kept you with me because I enjoy your presence.”

It’s not Shakespeare, you suppose, but it’s a sweet sentiment, in his own sort of way.

*****

There is a series of Hunts, and Mah’tu fails in one, succeeds in the others. His trophy room has much more Honor added to it, though you remain unimpressed by his prowess.

“Gross,” you say when you peek in at it.

He points to the long skull of the kiande amedha, the one he killed to become Blooded. “Had we more time, I would have beheaded yours so you could keep your trophy.”

You make a face and lift a hand to touch the scar on your forehead. “I think I have plenty to remember it, but thanks. If I ever end up back home, I’ll need to look up a plastic surgeon to handle this.”

It takes some explaining what you mean, but when Mah’tu grasps your meaning, he is outraged. You think the mark makes you unworthy. Ugly, you say.

“It marks you as worthy. A special ooman,” he spits out. “The others of your kind would be fools to not see you as such.”

Normally, you’d do that thing with your eyes, but instead you study him. Stare at him, steady and unblinking. Finally you say, “you may be the only creature who sees me that way.”

He huffs. “Then I am the only creature with eyes to see and a brain to think.”

-----

He is not sure what changes with you. Perhaps you only needed time to adapt to life with him. Oomans, he knows, are highly adaptable.

You have stopped the verbal abuse entirely. You make an earnest attempt when training, and by applying yourself, you earn the right to learn the net-gun. You earn your own bio-mask, and Mah’tu labors over it for several star cycles. You have such a tiny skull, and your eyes are so far apart. It must be custom made.

You join him on a Hunt. It is just a small one, a training to whet a new spear he has made. The prey is hardly worthy, but Mah’tu uses the opportunity to teach you how to stalk, how to move silently, how to be still and watch. You are much better at that than you are at fighting, and though you kill nothing on your first Hunt, you earn Honor for yourself by successfully stalking a herd of very jittery prey. They never once suspect you, and Mah’tu trills in pride when he sees you get close enough to reach out and touch one.

That night around the fire, he gives you much praise. You like that, he finds—you duck your head as if ashamed, but it is to hide your smile. Which means you are pleased.

“Had you been a moment quicker, you could have killed one,” he tells you. “Though it would be a small skull. Our younglings often kill them to learn their blades.”

You laugh. “Oh, fuck you. Our younglings. Yeah, yeah, I get it. This weak-ass human is less skilled than a Yautja infant.”

That phrase again. He knows what it means now, though he was greatly disappointed that it wasn’t what he thought. Still, he bristles; he sits up straighter and looks at you when you say it, and when you realize what you’ve done, you give him a sheepish look.

“Be at ease,” he says. “I know what you mean.”

Incredibly, you lower your head, and he sees no smile there. You kick your foot in the dirt, scuffing it, and you mumble, “maybe I meant it the other way.”

“Which way?”

You groan, and you place your hands over your face. He isn’t wearing his bio-mask, but he can guess that your face is inflamed.

“Don’t make me say it.” The words are muffled, and your voice is tight.

“Say what?”

“Ugh, the gross way you phrase everything. You know what I mean.”

“I do not, little sain’ja.” Though he does—it is a lie to say he does not understand. As you’d say, it’s a kind of joke. Pretending one thing when another is true. A ooman sort of jest.

“You know what I mean. Fuck’s sake, I mean mating.” You whisper the last word, make it small in your mouth, but he hears it anyway.

He wonders what changed in this respect too, but he can consider it later. “We should wait until your next heat is on you.”

That makes you squawk, a sound of outrage. “Absolutely not! I’d never survive it if I got pregnant!”

He chuckles at your horror. “There would be no risk. There are no Yautja-ooman hybrids. It is an impossible thing.”

You sag in relief. “Then why wait?”

“We cannot if you are not in heat,” he points out.

Now it is your turn to laugh at him, and then Mah’tu has another clarification to add to the codex: oomans can mate nearly any time, any place, so long as the mood is upon them.

As it turns out, the mood is upon you now, and Mah’tu is grateful that his face does not show his emotions as blatantly as yours does—otherwise, you may see how he is flustered, then aroused in equal measure.

*****

He would take you outside, you think, but you douse the fire and lead him back into the ship. For one, you don’t want this to be out in the open, where any creature could witness.

For another, you want to be as close as possible to his array of med-kits and healing sprays. God knows how this is going to work. He’s bigger than you in every way possible. It may not work at all.

He seems confused, but he lets you lead him. You, for once, hold your hand out to him. He makes a low trill, and takes it, and he follows you into the ship. You start to lead him into your quarters by habit, but he stops, tugs you towards his.

“More space,” he says.

In his quarters, he only stands and watches you. Waits for you to make a move. Which is novel, for you: you’re used to letting your partner lead, though your partner up until now has exclusively been a disappointing and generally clueless human male.

“Um.” You kick off your boots. You fiddle with the hem of your shirt, then take a breath and pull it off, as quick as you can. “How do you usually?”

That curious head tilt of his. “Usually what?”

You swear to god that he’s toying with you. His stupid face gives nothing away, but he’s not usually so dense.

“How do your kind mate?” You undo the snap on your pants, the zipper, and you push them over your hips. You kick them off, peel out of your socks, and stand in front of him in your underwear.

They mate like they do everything else: with ceremony, rules, customs, elaborate steps that either mean honor or dishonor. They mate due to some confusing clan alliance, and the mating is always towards breeding the next generation of Yautja. They don’t generally mate for pleasure, though of course it is pleasurable to mate, he explains.

“But you are not beholden to those customs,” he adds. “As you cannot add glory to our clan by breeding with me.”

“Noted.”

“Even if we could have offspring, they would be very weak.”

“I said I got it, thanks.”

While he gives his explanation, he strips too. He lays aside his greaves, his gauntlets, his weird footwear. The data pad he wears on his wrist. The fine netting of his invisibility tech. The thick belt that holds more weaponry than Batman’s setup. He leaves his loincloth-thing on, though, and stands to look at you.

He makes no move. You give him a long moment to lead, but when he only stands and watches you, you decide to lead.

You bridge the few steps between you, and this close—sans most of your clothing and most of his—the size difference has never been more stark. Hell, the difference in your damned species has never been more stark. He’s objectively ugly, you suppose. You must be just as ugly to him, but you wonder if he finds you as fascinating as you find him?

He's a greyish green at first glance, but you’ve noticed that his coloring depends on the light. Sometimes he looks more like a gem, glimmering a darker green like an emerald. Now, in the lower light of his berth, he shimmers almost iridescent.

You’ve touched him plenty in the training sessions, so you know that your first impression (cool and slimy) is incorrect. His skin is dry, warm to the touch. You reach out a tentative hand and lay it on one of his massive pectoral muscles, and when you do, he lays his own hand over yours. Engulfing it.

“How do your kind mate?” he asks, and honestly? He kinda nails the bedroom voice because he lowers his register and growls it, and the sound makes the ache between your legs grow stronger.

Who knew he had it in him?

You think on how to answer him, but he adds, “show me, little sain’ja.”

*****

It takes much of his strength to not overpower you. He can smell your arousal, sharper even than when you’re in your heat. He can hear your heartbeat growing faster, can hear your breathing getting a harsh edge to it. Mostly, though, it’s just his instinct to want to fight you, to submit you to him. To treat you like a Yautja female, really.

But you’re not Yautja. The sight of you in your thin underthings is proof of that. Your fragile skin has no variations aside from a few scars. Your fleshy mouth, your too-wide eyes, the strange lifeless hair that sprouts from your head…he should find you repellent, but when you touch him, he leans into the sensation of your hand on his chest.

He orders you to lead. He does not want to hurt you, so he puts the moment in your hands.

You pause, considering your moves. Thoughtful of what to do in order to make this work. You nod then, and remove the remainder of your clothing, and Mah’tu takes in what has been hidden from him: your breasts, despite having no younglings to nourish. The curls that cover your sex. You gesture to him, and he removes his loincloth, and your already-wide eyes go wider to the point where he fears they may fall out of your skull.

“Fuck,” you breathe out.

He nods. “Yes.”

You laugh at him, and it’s the merry version, not the frustrated kind. “We have to go slowly.”

“Yes.”

“I mean it. You have to….” You pause, and he hears the way you swallow as you study him. “You’ll basically have to not move until I, uh, get used to it. Once we…start.”

Another nod. “Yes. I understand.”

"But you can, uh, touch me. If you want. Before we start."

He lies down on his furs when you tell him to, and you approach him carefully. You cast a wary eye on him as you kneel beside him, then shuffle closer. He takes a hand and chances to touch one of your curves, the one from the dip in your waist to the swell of your hip, and you like that. He can smell the way your arousal blooms, so he continues touching you. Slowly. Carefully. He leads you to lie down beside him, and he touches all the parts of you he never has touched in your training sessions.

Each place is a revelation.

Your breasts are soft, malleable, yet they are tipped with firm nipples. He molds his hands around the shape of them, which makes you moan, but when he skates a blunt nail carefully over each nipple, one and then the other, you part your lips and swear at him.

“Fuck’s sake,” you say, and your voice is tight, like you’re pained.

“Did I hurt you?”

“No. God, no.” Another hard swallow. “That’s…that’s good. You can do that again.”

So he does.

Oomans, he finds, perhaps like their pleasure with a little pain, or even just the threat of it. He is gentle with you, careful of his strength and his claws, but your arousal grows sharp when he draws a nail over your tender skin or when he wraps one hand around your neck to hold you still from your wriggling.

His exploration leads him lower, to the source of your arousal. He slides a gentle finger between your legs, feels how hot you are, how wet you are, how the slick seeps out of you in anticipation for the joining with him.

All the same…

“Your sex is very small,” he mutters. He drags the pad of one finger through your folds and finds your entrance. He tests it, pushes it into you, and it goes fine with how wet you are, but a lone finger is nothing compared to his cock. Still, when he breeches your entrance with his digit, he hears the breathy way you whisper his name. Better, he feels how your sex twitches against him. Like it seeks to draw him in deeper.

So he adds a second finger, which makes you curse, but it is much the same. The same twitching from the smooth muscles of your sex. A fresh pulse of wetness coats his fingers, and he pushes them in, draws them out, mimics mating in this way. Spreads his fingers inside you, to stretch you in preparation.

“God,” you whisper. “Please, don’t stop. Keep…keep doing that, okay?”

He nods. He’s an eager pupil, and you can teach him this. A moment later he feels it: your tiny hand, fumbling for his cock. Circling your slender fingers around his girth. You have little strength but it’s enough to give him pleasure, and he wonders how much is due to your grip and how much is due to the fact that it’s you, his Vexing Thorn, gripping him there.

“This gives you pleasure?” he asks.

“Yes.” You hiss it, draw the word out. With your other hand, you reach down yourself and show him another part of you, a firm little bud also slick with your arousal, just above your entrance. “If you, you know, touch that carefully. Rub it? Carefully. It will be…ah, fuck, yes. Like that. Just like that.”

As he works his hand, he feels you relaxing. Loosening. You are still very small, but it seems more likely that you can take him now, so he keeps going, and you writhe against him, stroke him as you whine out all sorts of words he’ll have to study later.

You reach some point where you deem yourself ready, and you push his hand away. You take your own hand from him, and he grumbles in disappointment, but then you are on him, on top of him, pushing him back, and he lets you.

“Are you okay with this?” you ask. You straddle him, and he feels the hot slick of you pressed against the length of him. “I mean, I don’t know the politics of this. Is this even consensual?”

“Explain your question more.”

You sigh, but you also slide against him, your lower body moving back and forth in small motions as your hands brace on his stomach. He feels how you’re coating him in your arousal, and the mechanics of it make sense. If your sex is slick and his is as well, it will make the mating easier—

“I mean, we never reviewed consensual sex with other species in high school sex ed.”

“I do not understand.” He grips the fat of your ass, you’re so soft there, and he urges your movements. There is pleasure even in this, and he feels himself growing harder underneath you.

“Am I…fuck, I don’t know how to say it without just saying it. Is this what you want? Am I coercing you for sex?”

He chuckles under you, trills deep and long. “Little sain’ja, how could you coerce me? You are so weak.”

You pout, the fleshy lower lip of yours stuck out and wet. “Asshole.”

“I could throw you off me in an instant. I could be on top of you before you could even blink.”

That makes a fresh beat of arousal pulse out of you, coating him more. He notes it. Perhaps you would find pleasure underneath him, just as he is enjoying being underneath you.

“Okay, yeah. Good. So we’re good, then.”

“This is what I want,” he clarifies to your question. “You can feel how I strain to seat myself in you.”

“Well, then.” You gaze at him a beat longer, but you shift, reach your hand down. You grasp him at the root of his cock, and you lift yourself up enough to slot the flared head of him against your entrance.

“I mean it. Please don’t move at all until I tell you. This is…” You trail off, and your pink tongue darts out to lick your lips. “This is a lot.”

He nods. “I will not move until you order me to.”

At that, you begin to lower yourself onto him.

It goes so slow. It must, despite your arousal. You are so small, and he is large, but your anatomy is such that it can take far more than he thought. But it must go slow, so your sex can adapt to him. Wonderful, adaptable oomans: your sex twitches and grabs at his cock as you work yourself onto him, but he enters you bit by bit, and you breathe deep and mumble curses, but you also groan at what you’re feeling, and it sounds like a pleasurable noise to him.

But you take him to the root, in time. In time, you sit flush on him, no space between where he ends and you begin, and Mah’tu has never felt a mating like this in his long life.

“Fuck, I can feel you in my throat,” you whine, and you wriggle at where you sit on him. It sends him a fraction deeper, and he can feel the end of his cock nestled against some inner part of you, though he assumes it is your womb and not your throat. But he also assumes it is one of those things where you say a word and it means something else, but he doesn’t ask for clarification because he needs all of his strength to lie still and wait for your command to move.

It doesn’t come just yet. You sit on him, the back of your thighs flush with his hips. You don’t move much; you move and resettle, you wince and then move, and your tense face cedes to one of panting pleasure. Little by little, you start to move: lifting yourself off of him a fraction, lower yourself back down. Your arousal keeps it as easy as it can be, and in moving, he feels your sex relax more, molding itself to the shape of him.

“Is this okay for you?” you whisper, and he nods his head. He keeps his grip on your ass but only as a place to touch you, not to harry you along. How can he describe what he’s feeling? He has no tricky words like you do, and he fears his blunt speech may anger you.

If he could say what he’s feeling, it would simply be this: that you’re his mate, and now that he’s felt this once, you’ll be his mate for life. He would not give you to another, nor allow another to touch you, and if you wanted to return to earth, he’d go with you and find a way to live amongst the other weak, tricky oomans.

Eventually, you begin to move in earnest. Riding him in a steady rhythm: raising off of him until only the broad crown of his cock is nestled in you, then sinking back onto him. Over and over, in this way, your constant phrase of ‘fuck you’ is realized, and Mah’tu growls at this new way of mating.

“You can…you can move,” you finally tell him. “But slowly, slow….ah, fuck!”

You don’t finish the thought because he moves. Not as you expected, probably, but Mah’tu is a quick study. He shifts one hand from where it kneads at the softness of your ass, and he draws the pad of his finger at where the small nub peeks out at the apex of your sex. He rubs it carefully, mindful of his claw, and it makes your hips jerk against him.

“Yes, don’t stop. Jesus, you’re….keep doing that. Just that.” The pace you’re riding him picks up in speed, and it makes your breasts bounce, drawing his gaze for a moment before it snaps back to where he disappears into the confines of your body.

“I’m close,” you tell him a moment later.

“Close to me?” he guesses.

You laugh, breathless. “Close to coming.”

“Coming where?”

Another laugh, and your rhythm falters for a moment. You reach out and steady your hand on his chest, and your face is perfectly relaxed, radiant in happiness, and Mah’tu thinks that even if you are ugly with your ooman features, he finds you beautiful. Perfect.

“Close to…my pleasure,” you clarify, and you resume the quick pace of fucking him, riding him, drawing him into your body.

“Ah.” He strokes the hot, swollen bud above where he slides into you, and he considers himself. His own pleasure has been close for a while now, his seed close to bursting. “I am close too, then, little sain’ja.”

“You can….come….with me.” You’re panting now, pushing out your words in time to each time you reseat yourself. A sheen of sweat glistens along your skin, making you look almost part Yautja in the low light. “If you…want. Want to…feel you.”

He nods. “I will do as you ask.”

Another breathless laugh, but then you say no more, and he can only observe your body for any clues. Ooman pleasure is blatant, he finds, because your sex gets wetter, and then you moan loudly. Then your entire body seizes in a way, trembles and shakes above him, but your sex tightens against him like a fist, and it’s easy for his pleasure to break as well. He feels it in a way he never has before, like a great wave carrying him towards you, and he spills inside you with a roar that must shake the walls of his ship.

-----

With Yautja mating, once it is complete, the two part. If they meet again, it is only incidental, a consequence of sharing younglings.

So it is strange, how you nestle against him after you both reach your pleasure. He remains nestled inside you, a snug fit that keeps his seed confined in your body—but you lean your upper body down onto him, nuzzle your face against his broad chest, and just lie there.

It is very strange. But it is not unpleasant. A beat after you settle, he places a hand on your back to hold you firmer against him. Your skin is warm and soft under his palm, and he strokes you softly.

“I did not hurt you?” he asks after a long while of lying like this.

“Only in the best way.” Your mouth is near his skin, and he can feel your warm breath against him.

“Explain your meaning.”

“I’ll definitely be aching in the morning.” You pause, seem to think on it. “But it’s a good ache. Like…the ache of training really hard.”

Mah’tu chuckles, and he drags the blunt tips of his claws along the skin of your back, which makes you squirm against him. The motion makes his cock, only half-hard now, twitch back to life.

“You are much better at mating than training,” he tells you.

“Asshole.” You turn your head against him, and he feels the blunt edge of your teeth. You are biting him, but there is no pain. The sensation—your wet mouth on him—makes his cock twitch harder, make the blood pool there to make him grow harder.

You can feel it. You breathe against the wet spot you’ve put on his chest, but then he feels you move—a deliberate rocking, very carefully.

He has many questions he’d like to ask you—other ways your kind mate, for example—but he saves them for later because the mood is upon you again, just as the mood is upon him. And anyway, in the course of your second mating, some of his questions are answered by showing, and Mah’tu is an eager pupil.

#kinktober2024 #clear the inbox 2024 #tropes and tales #the predator #the predator x reader #the predator imagine #yautja #yautja x reader #yautja imagine #the predator series

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tropes-and-tales · 2 months ago

Text

Fall from Grace

(Captain John Price x F!Reader)

CW: Slight angst. Inexperienced (but not virgin) reader. Smut (oral, f!receiving; PiV, unprotected). 18+ only.

Word Count: 7324

AN: This was requested by an anonymous person!

It’s part of Captain Price’s job to know his soldiers. He has their dossiers memorized, of course, but he also learns them intimately through their work together. How could he not? War reveals the true core of a person, their real character, but the mundane moments add color. The long helicopter rides, the long plane rides. The long stretches of time sitting, waiting for intel, waiting for orders.

It's boring. His soldiers talk to fill the quiet and pass the time. They joke and tease each other, discuss football matches and rugby scores. Sometimes, when it’s dark outside, in the quiet hours before dawn, they talk in low voices and share secrets, fears, worries.

Captain Price overhears much of it.

He overhears Gaz talk about his girl back in London, how terrified he is to lose her. How he worries that he’ll never be good enough for her.

He overhears Ghost’s low rumble as he talks about his family and the loss of them. How losing his brother Tommy and his nephew Joseph broke some part of him that will never heal.

He overhears Soap—convivial Soap—talk about his passel of siblings and how they’ve all married and found careers and started to have children. How he feels left behind, out of sync with his own family. How he doesn’t want to go home on leave, sometimes, because he feels so out of step with where he came from.

What Captain Price overhears from you is less deep for a long while. You’re a cipher. He has the bare facts of your dossier, but when it’s the small hours of the night and everyone is restless, you don’t open up the way the men do. You rarely let your guard down.

It shouldn’t affect Price, but it does. Is it a benign sort of misogyny that makes him want to protect you more than he does Gaz or Ghost or Soap? Or is it the fact that he sees how hard you try, how you keep your walls up even when everyone else is sharing their darkest secrets? Is it because he worries that you think he’s judging you, that when you catch him watching you, you see judgement there?

So for a long while, Price overhears little from you. He hears inconsequential things. Music you like, your favorite brand of beer. A memory from your childhood that makes the guys laugh.

But there is a night where it changes.

The 141 is on a plane back to base. The latest mission was a success, a new terrorist group quashed before it could get off the ground. Price sits in the back of the plane and gets a head start on his paperwork while you and the guys sit around a four-seat table and play a no-stakes game of poker for little chits of torn notebook paper.

Everyone has leave coming up, so the evening’s talk is brighter. There’s more laughter, more gentle shoving and ribbing as Gaz throws down winning cards and sweeps the pile of chits in front of him.

And when the chatter turns to sex, Captain Price bites the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. He’s reminded that these soldiers, his men, are little more than boys sometimes.

It starts with Gaz waxing poetic about his girl, and Soap makes it bawdy by saying Gaz will spend his leave horizontal and return to base dehydrated and exhausted. Gaz chucks him on the shoulder but Price can see the pleased grin on the man’s face: of course he’s going to spend a lot of his leave in bed with his girl.

Then it shifts to Soap and his handful of reliable hook-ups. He says he has a bevy of women, all Scottish and feisty, and that earns him a chuck from you, a hard little punch to his bicep and you tell him to behave himself.

“Ach, don’t be jealous, hen,” Soap whines, rubbing his arm. “I could clear some room in the schedule for ye if ye want to join me in Inverness.”

“That’s a lot of travel for, what? Two minutes of disappointment?”

Soap lays his palm over his heart, mimes being wounded, and he says something in reply but Price misses it because Gaz and Ghost are laughing too loudly.

And that’s how Price learns about you. The flight turns into rapid-fire questions, talk, and rejoinders about sex. You mostly stay silent, but you take little zings—mostly at Soap—but each time Price glances over at you, your face has a taut quality that he’s only seen on the battlefield.

Interesting.

If he thought it’d be something for him to mull over later, he’s wrong. Halfway through the flight, Gaz brings up the topic of favorite positions, and when Soap asks you what your favorite position is, you snort and say, “on my right side, curled up with my pillow, alone. Asleep. White noise machine set on ‘rainstorm.’”

That makes Price laugh, but he covers it smoothly with a cough, keeps his head bent over his paperwork.

But the guys are like sharks, and your sarcastic non-answer is like chum in the water. And you’re good—smart, resilient—but you’re also their captive audience, and they wear you down.

An hour into their three-on-one interrogation, the truth comes out: you are fairly inexperienced at sex.

“Virgin?” asks Gaz.

“No.”

“How many times—” starts Soap, but you cut him with a glare that even he won’t challenge.

“Were you assaulted?” Ghost asks in his soft rumble, and that makes you go soft too, your glare shifting from Soap to gazing at the hulking man in his skull mask.

“No, Si.” Your voice is low, and Price watches as you lay a gentle hand on Ghost’s forearm. “I’m lucky. Never that.”

Ghost pats your hand with his own. “Just saying, love. If you were, and you knew the guy’s name, I’d make him a grease stain before the week is out.”

(And this is part of why being a captain is such a burden: the quiet little exchange between you and Ghost makes a hot flare of love burn in his chest, how the two of you are like a brother and sister to each other. The purest form of found family.)

But then Soap breaks the moment. “Just not into it then?”

You shrug. “Guess not.”

“Why?” Gaz asks it, and he sounds genuinely curious.

Another shrug. “It’s hard to have a relationship in our line of work.”

“Ah,” Soap says. He leans back in his seat, crosses his arms over his chest. “Makes sense now. You need to be in love with someone before you’ll sleep with ‘em.”

“Not necessarily.” You reach out and gather the playing cards, the poker game long abandoned. Price watches from under the brim of his hat as you fiddle with the cards, stacking them up, squaring the edges, shuffling them idly.

“Then what?” Soap prods, and you sigh.

“I dunno. It’s just…a lot of work, you know? You gotta vet a guy even if he’s a one-night stand, and you have to play it cool but not too cool, and you have to be friendly but not too friendly. You have to shower and shave and smell nice but not put on too much perfume, and you have to dress just right and wear uncomfortable lingerie and pinching shoes. I did all that shit when I was in my twenties, and the handful of times I finally got a guy on the line and reeled him in? It wasn’t worth the effort. All that work and stress for what? A few minutes of nothing. A few minutes of bad kissing where the guy slobbers on me worse than a Saint Bernard, awful beer breath too. And while he’s jamming his tongue down my throat, he’s groping me like someone drowning and grabbing at a life preserver. Then what? Then the main event, and all that effort is a waste because he doesn’t notice the nice lingerie at all, he doesn’t notice that I smell nice and shaved and moisturized because he’s lying on top of me like some paradoxical corpse slash jackhammer because he’s weirdly positioned and barely touching me, not looking at me, just dead eyes fixed off into space, but he’s also, what, thrusting for half a minute before he’s done? And then it’s ‘thanks, love, great shag,’ and he’s rolling off of me, getting dressed again and out the door, and the entire affair took less time than it takes to bake a frozen pizza. I mean, what’s the point?”

A deadly silence falls over the group. The only sound is the thrum of the plane’s engines, and you look up from where you’re fiddling with the cards to find everyone staring at you. Your eyes dart over to where Price is staring at you too, and you make a face and duck your head.

“Jesus, hen,” Soap breathes out.

“I’m sorry,” Gaz adds.

You chuckle weakly. “For what?”

“On behalf of men, I guess?”

Ghost, at least…sweet Ghost and his brotherly love for you…he pats your hand and says quietly, “well, you always smell nice, love, and I always notice.”

-----

Price doesn’t do anything.

Leave starts and you disappear, off to someplace on your list of places to visit. Who knows with you? You love the world, all parts of it, so it’s just as likely that you’re in a jungle in Costa Rica as you would be in Tokyo.

Leave ends and the team reassembles. There’s a mission in the mountains of a country teetering into civil war. There’s a mission for intel. There’s an extraction mission. There’s a mission to take down a warlord in a lithium-rich country, and there’s a close call there. A bullet grazes you, cuts a burning line along your hip, and seeing you bloodstained and limping pulls Price up short.

He shouldn’t care the way he does. He cares about all of his soldiers, loves everyone, but he’d be lying if you weren’t different. The love he holds for the men is paternal: Soap and Ghost and Gaz are the sons he never had.

You? His love for you is more complicated. There’s a whiff of paternalism, a protectiveness that he knows you’d chafe at if you knew. There’s admiration, of course. But there’s also a deep vein of romantic love that threads between you and Price, and if you don’t know it, it’s only because Price has a good poker face and hides his feelings so well.

By the time you’re shot, everyone has earned another leave. Ghost, Gaz, and Soap all disappear for a month. Price could go to his empty house in the countryside, but he usually just stays on base anyway.

You?

The night before leave starts, there’s a knock on his office door, and when he calls out, you poke your head in.

“Have a moment, sir?”

He nods, gestures at the chair in front of his desk, and he winces internally at how you limp a bit, your stitches obviously pulling. You settle in your seat and he nods at you to start.

“I thought I might stay here for leave,” you say. “I’m not really in any shape to travel, and I’d be close to medical if anything goes bad with my wound.”

He says nothing, so you add, with less certainty, “would that be alright, sir?”

Price clears his throat. “Of course.”

Of course it’s okay that you stay on base for leave. With him. With few other people around.

-----

But he does nothing during your month together. How could he? He’s your superior. It would be wildly inappropriate to knock on your door some evening and confess his feelings for you.

One small concession: he orders you to call him ‘John’ while you’re on leave. No Captain, no ‘sir.’ He wants you at ease, relaxed, healing. You still wake up early, he notices. You train on a modified program as you heal. You keep your room painfully neat, hospital corners on your bed, boots polished and tucked in your foot locker.

But you do relax. You go off base and have a pint alone in a pub, come back slightly looser with your smiles. His name rolls easier off your tongue when you have some alcohol in you.

You lie on the couch in the rec room and read giant novels. You doze off to tennis on the television, and Price aches as he watches you sleep. You look so young this way; the years and stress slough off of you in slumber.

There is one night he cajoles you into joining him out for dinner off base. There’s a steakhouse nearby, and Price is craving a steak and a whiskey and a good cigar, and he’s craving your company. You agree, and the weeks on leave have softened you towards him. Maybe you see him as John now and not just Captain Price, and the conversation over steak flows so evenly that any casual observer might think it a date between an established couple.

But he does nothing more. Not this time.

-----

Leave ends. Another mission. Another. Intel-gathering, coup-ending. They intercept a dirty bomb for sale in a Morocco marketplace. They break up a human trafficking ring. They support Kor-tac in a mission.

Another leave. You’re healed now, but when Gaz asks where you’re going, you shrug and say nowhere.

“I didn’t plan anything,” you admit, and Price watches you on the sly. You explain that New York City was next on your list of places, but you are tired of cities, tired of the crush of people and always wondering where the next threat was. You tell Gaz, as Price eavesdrops, that you really just wanted a quiet month in the country but hadn’t the time to research anywhere or book anything—

He has to wait for Gaz to leave, which gives him a moment to despair that it’s a bad idea. It’s a terrible idea, the worst idea, but even with a moment to stop himself, Price can’t stop himself. He pulls you aside once you’re alone and the words tumble out of his mouth before he can stop them.

“I have a place in the Lake District,” he says. “Quiet, in Rosgill. I’m going myself, but it’s a big place for just me. Too big, really. You could join, if you want.”

It’s a terrible idea, the worst idea, but it must mean something that you only think on it for a beat before you smile at him and accept his offer with your genuine thanks.

-----

On the trip to his home, he explains it to you, and he hates how he sounds like an estate agent selling you on the charms of the place.

“It’s an old seventeenth century blacksmith forge that’s been converted into a home. Quiet. One side overlooks the eastern fells.”

He explains how he bought it when he was young with the windfall of his father’s modest estate when the old man died from a heart attack.

He doesn’t explain that it had been his dream as a young man to share it with someone, and as that dream had steadily died off, so too has the planned renovations. The place is half-restored—mostly the house proper—but his plans for the outbuildings and grounds have been abandoned. He had planned a copse of trees, a raised garden bed for vegetables and herbs, a small greenhouse. What was the point of sinking money into a place that never saw any use?

You laugh quietly, then say that you don’t even have a home, that you have a small storage unit in Reading for the handful of things you can’t bear to give up.

“I appreciate your hospitality, Captain,” you say.

He tuts, reminds you to call him by his first name. “There’s no Captain Price in Rosgill. Just John.”

-----

It takes less than a week to fall into a comfortable domestic rhythm with you. John wonders at it: he had a girlfriend in his late twenties who had moved in for a year, and the two of them never reached even a fraction of the ease you and he reach within days.

It doesn’t mean it’s not torture. The house has two bathrooms and a WC, but you end up sharing a bathroom because it’s the only one on the second floor, situated between both of your bedrooms. It’s torture to shower after you, when everything is damp and faintly scented with your soap. It’s torture to see your toiletry bag sitting on the edge of the sink, and of course he snoops. Takes in the tube of lip balm, your brand of toothpaste, a bottle of paracetamol. He sees a little ornate glass bottle of perfume, and he uncaps it, smells it. It makes him remember the conversation on the plane, your rant about your disappointing experiences with sex, all the effort you put in to look nice and smell nice.

Which makes the rest torture too. You calling him John. You stretched out on a chaise in the conservatory that overlooks the fells. You making him a simple, hearty dinner—who knew you could cook?—then calling him to table, your name in his mouth, your hands passing him a plate with chicken and roasted vegetables, your smile as he pours you another glass of wine. You passing him in the hallway at night in your sleepwear, the soft-looking pajama pants and oversized t-shirt that strains around your breasts. You meeting his eye, smiling at him, saying “g’night, John.”

Then the torture of your bedroom door clicking shut behind you, with John on the other side of it.

-----

It’s the meteor shower that changes it. The Perseids, and John’s home has a big conservatory with a wall of windows that overlooks the night sky. He mentions them to you that morning, suggests it might be nice to stay up and watch them together, maybe open a bottle of Lagavulin to mark the occasion.

It’s also Soap that changes it. You and John make dinner together—just a spag bol—and your phone chimes as you’re sitting to eat. You swipe at the lock screen, read the message, and snort.

“Soap,” you say, and you hold up the screen to John even though he can’t read the tiny print. “Says he had a cancellation with one of his standby ladies and can work me into his rotation if I can get to Inverness in an hour.”

John chuckles, shakes his head. “Want me to put him on KP duty when we get back?”

“A few extra laps on his runs wouldn’t hurt. Wearing full kit, for the weight.”

The thread of conversation could die off, but it’s an opening, and John takes it. He clears his throat, spins a forkful of spaghetti on his plate, then offers, “I’m sorry you’ve had such a rough go of it. Romantically, I mean.”

You shrug. “It’s fine.”

“For what it’s worth, I’ve not had the easiest time of it lately.”

It earns him another snort, and you cock an eyebrow at him, pull an incredulous face. “I don’t buy it.”

He’s not lying. His twenties, he was a wolf on the prowl. Broke plenty of hearts, had his own broken in turn. He had a few girlfriends, one who moved in for a bit, then moved out after a terrific row, never to return. He always had the fixed idea that he’d meet someone by his mid-thirties, take an early retirement by his mid-forties, and have a family waiting for him by then.

But as his mid-thirties receded, he found the prospect of dating a bleak affair. Some women were too young, too immature. The generational differences in sex and love were too steep to overcome. Some wanted a sugar daddy. Some wanted to be taken care of with no care extending back in his direction. Other women were older, closer to his age, but saddled with ex-husbands, children bitter from divorce, a cynicism that John couldn’t overcome.

He doesn’t tell you any of that. Instead, he volleys it back at you, retorts with a gentle smile that he doesn’t buy that you hadn’t had a single satisfying experience in your life.

You sigh, shrug again. “Ah, well. I guess I can’t blame the men entirely. Who’s to say I wasn’t the problem? Maybe I’m a terrible kisser.”

“Doubtful.”

“Just outrageous amounts of tongue.”

John laughs, and you grin at him, add, “garlic breath, too. Got too bitey halfway through a make-out session. Made the guy bleed. Now he has a scar on his lip and he tells all the blokes down at the pub about the crazy girl he took out once who bit him.”

John puts down his fork and takes a drink of wine. He smiles around the rim of his glass. “None of that can be true.”

“Didn’t know how to move during sex, so I elbowed him hard and broke his nose. Touched him in a weird spot in an attempt to be sexy and creeped him out.”

He laughs again. “What’s considered a weird spot?”

“Maybe I, I dunno…rubbed his elbows in a seductive way. Touched him between his toes in the hopes of turning him on. Maybe no one ever told me that that there’s no erogenous zone in the space between toes.”

His laughter grows at the mental image you’re painting; tears creep out of the corners of his eyes. “That’s how I know you’re lying,” he manages to reply. “Because most men would find any type of touch from a woman sexy.”

You cock an eyebrow at that and take a sip of your own wine. “Duly noted, John. If I ever make a move on you, I’m coming for your toes.”

“Prepare to be awestruck then, sweetness: I have feet like a fucking hobbit.”

Your first response is to laugh at him, but he notes the way you take in the pet name, the little shine you get in your eyes. The conversation dies off, shifts to other topics, but the rest of dinner holds a charge in the air, and both of you can feel it.

-----

After you share clean-up duties in the kitchen, you make your way to the conservatory. It’s just a fancy word for ‘living room,’ but it holds no television: just a bookcase, a fireplace, and a few chaise lounges and couches for taking in the view. John used to envision lazy weekends in here with a family: a wife and kids, maybe, settled around a board game. A dog curled up by the fire.

He also used to envision something like this: sharing an intimate moment with a woman here. His ex hated the house, hated how remote it was. She liked London and the bustle of cities, but you are a better fit. You settle on the chaise, curl up on your side like a cat, and you sip at the cut-glass tumbler of whiskey when he hands it to you. John settles on the floor right near you, and the two of you chat while you wait for the meteor shower to start.

You don’t talk about much of consequence. It’s a rambling conversation, tinged by the alcohol but not impaired by it. The evening holds a dreamy quality, like it’s not quite real, like if John raises his voice above a low rumble he might pop the ambiance like a soap bubble.

When the first streak of white shoots across the sky, you both fall silent. John turns away from you and faces the windows, and you both watch quietly. Once in a while you sigh, a pleased little exhale, and the spell deepens. Weaves of magic seem to tighten around the two of you with each brilliant falling star.

John leans his head back and rests it against the chaise, but he bumps into some part of you. He mutters a sorry, and you whisper back no worries, but a beat later he feels your hand on the top of his head. Tentative. Shy. A question in the touch, and he answers it by leaning into you more. You push your fingers into his hair, and he honest-to-god has to bite his fucking tongue at the moan that threatens to tear out of his throat at the feeling of you touching him.

He turns his head and finds you watching him, not the meteor shower. He knows he cannot go a single step further without putting it all out in the open, addressing it immediately.

“You know I’m your commanding officer,” he says softly. “Not here, but when we get back. And I’m not stupid. I know some part of you still thinks of me as your captain even here, just like some part of me still thinks of you as my charge.”

You nod. Say nothing. Look at him expectantly.

“What I mean is, this leave will end and we’ll have to go back. We have to be able to compartmentalize it. And I need to know that you want this completely free and clear. That there’s no part of you that feels you have to do this, because I know there’s a power imbalance, but…” He trails off, doesn’t want to admit it out loud.

“But what, John?” you prod, and he takes a breath, finally says it.

“I know there’s a power imbalance here, and I know I should be strong enough—should be your captain, I mean—and stop this before it starts. But I can’t. I don’t want to.”

You don’t laugh at him, and you don’t pout at his words. You nod seriously. You say you understand, that it’s complicated. You promise that you will try to compartmentalize it.

“It’s just me and you right now,” you say, softly. “Just two people. Not boss and employee or captain and soldier. I don’t feel pressured or feel any power imbalance. And John? I don’t want you to stop it before it starts. Truly.”

This must be what falling from grace feels like. Some small part of John despairs at this breach of trust, even if you assure him it isn’t so: he’s your captain, he’s worked so hard to always keep clear lines between him and his soldiers. He needs to be able to send people he cares about, people he loves, into situations where death is more likely than staying alive. He needs to be able to leaf through your dossier and not blink at the section where you’ve listed out your final wishes in the event of death. He needs to be able to leave you behind if it threatens the mission or the 141, and he’s always been able to do that before but the moment you lean forward and kiss him—your hand cupping the curve of his face, drawing him to you eagerly—he knows he’ll never be able to do any of that again.

He's failed as a commander, and a small part of him despairs, but the larger part rejoices at the feeling of your lips on his, your hands on him. His eyes shut, and you both completely forget the meteor shower as you fall from grace together.

-----

You make out in stages: the eagerness cedes to a near-shyness, then melts into a level of comfort as you get used to each other. John knows now that you oversold your inability to kiss—you’re eager, then you’re shy, but you’re pretty damned good at it after all, and if those other assholes you’ve slept with didn’t think so, then that’s on them.

He eventually makes his way up to the chaise to sit beside you, and then he guides you into his lap. He has you straddle him, and when his palm gently grasps your cheek to lead you back to kiss him, he feels how flushed you are under his hand.

“You okay?”

You nod against his hold. “Yes,” you reply, but you perch yourself back in his lap, closer to his knees, and he can feel how you’re holding your weight off of him.

“We can take this slow. There’s no rush. We can stop here.”

“I know.” A beat, and you add, “I’m good, John, really.”

“Then c’mere, love. Settle in.”

When you don’t move, he puts his hands on your hips and draws you down and in, pulls the delicious weight of you right where he wants you most. Right on top of him. His growing erection presses against your clothed core, and your breasts brush against his chest. He slides one hand around to your ass and grips the swell of you, kneads at your flesh, but the other hand slides up to cup the nape of your neck. To hold you steady as he kisses you more forcefully.

John tries to strike the perfect balance between gentle and still leading you. He presses his tongue against the seam of your mouth, urges you to open yourself to him, and you obey. He licks against your mouth, tastes the smoky peat of the whiskey on you, and the sensation of his tongue against yours makes you rock in his lap. He feels the pressure of you brushing against his cock, and it draws dual moans from each of you.

He breaks the kiss, catches his breath. “Sweetness, what do you want? What do you like?” He wants to make you moan like that again and again, wants you to breathe out his name or scream it or both. He wants your eyes to shine up at him like they did at dinner when he used that sweet nickname on you the first time.

You shake your head. “I don’t know.”

He knows what it must take for you to admit that. He remembers your rant on the plane, the disappointment in your past dealings with lovers. It makes his chest ache at how lonely you must have been, how separate you must have felt from others.

He loosens his hold on your neck. He slides his palm around to cup your face, and he brushes his thumb over the curve of your cheek.

“Then how about we find out together?”

You answer him by turning your head into his palm and kissing him there, a sweet gesture, and that ache in his chest blooms stronger.

-----

It’s awkward at first, and John can’t figure out why.

He manages to get you out of your shirt and shorts, manages to unhook your bra and strip himself until you’re both nearly naked and stretched out together over the chaise. You let him lead, but you aren’t exactly eager. You are passive to an almost uncomfortable degree, and there’s something off—

“Is this okay?” he murmurs against your skin. You’re so warm under his lips, soft, and he is going so slowly, but you’re hardly moving and you’re saying even less. Your earlier touches—your hand in his hair, cupping his face—have disappeared entirely.

Yet when he asks his question, you whisper back that it’s wonderful.

It takes another moment before he realizes part of what’s wrong: you’re holding your breath. You’re barely breathing, and once he locks in on that, everything else falls into place. You’re not precisely rigid underneath him, but you’re tense, your muscles taut to the point of trembling. And your hands lie by your side. Not touching him at all.

He pauses, then makes his way back up to where your face is. In the faint light from the windows, he can make out a tension in your expression too. Something else too. Not dread, maybe, but maybe a lighter version of that. Trepidation.

John kisses you lightly on your mouth. “How are you doing, sweetness?”

“Good.” You smile at him, but it doesn’t reach your eyes. “Great, really.”

“You sure?”

You nod.

He brushes his lips over your cheekbone, to the edge of your jaw near your ear. “Not nervous at all?”

“Maybe a little.”

You’re hedging. Lightly lying to him. Your nervousness fills the room like the incoming tide, and John susses it out gently, teases it from you bit by bit. It’s not difficult to guess the source of your nerves.

“Thinking about past encounters, maybe?”

You huff softly near his ear. “Hard not to.” You hesitate, then add, “it was always so bad.”

“And you think you were the reason it was so bad?”

Another huff, and your voice is tinged with embarrassment. “I’m the constant factor each time, John.”

It occurs to him that you’ve likely missed all of the experimenting that many people get when they are younger. All the goofy, awkward moments in sex, when a person figures out what they like or don’t like, what they love and what they hate. You’ve probably been left with a handful of one night stands where you got no feedback, never had a chance to understand what felt good to you, and now are paralyzed to the point of doing nothing.

John resets the moment. He strokes the side of your face, then leans down and kisses you. Slow, gentle. No rushing. The barest brush of his tongue against yours, just enough until he feels you relax a bit underneath him.

As much as he wants to compartmentalize it, John knows from working with you that you’re eager for feedback. You’re eager to learn, and you never take constructive criticism badly.

“Let me help you,” he says now. “Okay?”

You gaze up at him, and if your body is tense as a strung wire, your eyes are full of trust. “Okay.”

“First thing, sweetness. You have to breathe for me. You’re holding your breath, and it’s making you tense.”

Sure enough, your tight, shallow breathing evens out and deepens. And sure enough, he feels your body relax a bit more. He kisses you as a reward, then gives you more advice that you take readily.

“You can move your body. Make yourself comfortable.”

“I want to feel your hands on me. I want you to touch me too. I’m yours.”

“You need to talk to me. Tell me what feels good. Tell me if anything doesn’t feel good.”

As he instructs you, he eases back into it. Kisses your mouth, kisses his way over your face and neck, spends long moments at your bared breasts. It’s the first test, but you breathe as he mouths at your tender skin, as he suckles against your hardened peaks. And you move underneath him, arching your chest to give him better access.

A beat later, he feels your hands—still tentative, but warm, soft—touching him. Stroking his shoulders, his arms. Running your fingertips through his hair.

He’ll find out later, days later, that you had only been working off of previous feedback from those terrible one night stands. The guy who told you that you were breathing too loudly, the guy who told you to lie still. One baffling guy who told you not to touch him, to keep your hands to yourself as he fucked you.

But now? This is a good start to finally getting to what you like. To finding out together.

What you don’t like: anything remotely like tickling. He skates his fingertips too lightly over your sides, down the curve of your waist, and you jerk away from him like you’ve been burned. You apologize a second later, but John laughs, which makes you laugh too. It dispels some more of your nervousness, and when he tries the move against with more pressure—down your sides, over your waist—you like that far better.

You also don’t like it when he pauses at the scar on your hip. It’s still a lurid red, and it pulls him up short for a moment. Dampens his own mood. It reminds him at how close you were to really being hurt, even killed. You don’t like it when he bends his head to kiss the ridge of scar tissue, and he doesn’t push it. Instead, he shifts his head and kisses your stomach where the edge of your panties is, and you like that a whole lot more.

What you like: everything else. Every other thing he gives you, everything he does to you. You like it when he eases your panties off you. You groan when he buries his face between your thighs, and you gasp when he kisses you there, when he drags his tongue over the slick seam of your cunt. You like it very much when he laps at your arousal, when he lays plush kisses to your swollen clit, when he slides a finger inside you and a second finger and when he slides them along your inner wall until he finds the spot that makes you jerk underneath him, whine out his name, reach down and tug at his hair.

You like it when he makes you come with his mouth, and you like it when he makes his way back up your trembling body, when he spreads your legs wider to fit him. When he pushes into you in a slow, steady thrust, so soon after your orgasm that he feels the tiny aftershocks as he seats himself inside you for the first time. You gasp at the sensation, you breathe out a “god, John,” but when he opens his mouth to ask if you’re okay, you grab his head and kiss him so hard you steal his breath from him.

And you especially like it when he coaxes another orgasm from you, his thrusts strong and steady, deep. When you bend one leg alongside him, he reaches down and hikes it higher over his hip. It allows him to push deeper inside you, that extra fraction making you cock-dumb, because you’re so far gone you forget to be nervous. You forget to lie still, to keep your hands to yourself, to hold your breath.

You arch up and meet him thrust for thrust. You wrap one arm around his broad shoulders but the other hand reaches down and grips the meat of his ass, urges him on. You breathe; you pant in his ear, and sometimes it’s just your hot breath, but just as often it’s you talking, babbling, begging him to fuck you, to please don’t stop, to keep going, to never stop fucking you.

And you like it when he does as you say. He doesn’t stop, and you come again, but then you whine out that it’s too much. It probably is: you’ve gone from disappointing interludes with absolute bell-ends, and now you’re an overstimulated mess underneath him. You’re not openly crying but tears leak out of the corners of your eyes and streak down your face. Your lips are slightly chapped and swollen, and you look stunned.

“Want me to stop?” he asks. He kisses one damp cheek, then the other, and he can taste the salt from your tears. “Too much?”

“Uh-huh.” It comes out slurred.

“Need you to use your words, sweetness.”

“I don’t think…” You blink, and you lose a bit of your stunned quality. “I don’t think I can again.”

“Oh, I think you could.” Another kiss, this one open-mouthed on your pulse point. He presses his teeth there, sucks lightly against your skin. “I think you have one more.”

“John—”

“Gotta make up for lost time.”

“I can’t.” You whine, but it ends in a moan as he bites you harder at where your shoulder meets your neck. “Too much. It’s too much.”

“You’re doing so well, though. You don’t have one more? Not even for me?” He laves the flat of his tongue over where his teeth have left dimpled marks, then he blows over the wet line, makes you shudder underneath him.

“John,” you reply, but it holds less of a warning than before. There’s surrender in your tone.

“Love feeling this sweet pussy coming around me,” he growls in your ear. “Fucking soaking my cock, sweetness.”

The dirty talk makes you clench down on him, and he smiles to himself. He draws back, sinks back into you. He goes slow, and you whine that it’s too much, but you like this too because you hold him tighter. You press back against him each time he seats himself in you, his hips settled against yours. He goes slow, so slow, sinks into you as deep as he can, barely pulls out before he’s pushing back inside. You’re swollen, fevered where he’s joined to you. You’re so fucking wet that he feels your arousal soaking the coarse hair at the base of him, dripping down your thighs, likely soaking the chaise.

He's proud that he’s been able to forestall his own pleasure, but his restraint has frayed. How could it not? The whole moment had been sold as for you, to make you feel good, to make sex not the scary specter it has been for most of your adult life, but John can’t remember the last time he had sex where he felt so connected to his partner.

Maybe he never has. He can’t conjure up a moment from his past when he felt so flayed alive, his heart visible and beating as he joined with another person. He can’t remember ever reveling so deeply in his partner’s pleasure. He can’t remember anyone else’s touch or voice in his ear or breath panting underneath him making him feel so whole.

But you like it when he finally comes too. He pulls another orgasm from you, less intense but longer—you tremble for longer, and your cunt twitches against him—and it sets him over the edge. He groans in your ear that he’s close too, asks where he should…but your hand on his ass pulls him deeper into you, and if the gesture wasn’t clear, you whisper that you want him to come inside you, you want to feel him, and he does. His pleasure breaks around him, shatters him, and he growls your name as he fills you, and you answer by whispering his name back, over and over.

-----

If you never had a satisfying sexual experience before, John can guess that you never had the post-sex moments either. The come-down, the cuddling, the falling asleep together.

He gives that to you now too, but it’s not altruistic at all: he wants it too. He selfishly wants it. He leaves you on the chaise to get a washcloth, a glass of water, and he helps you clean up. He helps you recover, but then he leads you to the deep couch on the other side of the room and has you lie down. He lies down beside you—it’s a tight fit, but he holds you safe between the broad planes of his body and the back of the couch, and he covers you both with a light blanket.

“Thank you,” you tell him, and it’s plaintive. It makes that ache in his chest flare back, so he kisses you gently, replies, “don’t ever thank for me this.”

It doesn’t take long for you both to fall asleep: you go first, the slack weight of you pleasant against his body, the deep and even breathing, the little grumble as you shift. He’s not far behind you, but he has a moment or two where the earlier thread of despair pushes to the forefront of his mind.

He might just be John right now, and you’re just you, but soon enough you’ll be soldier and captain again. How will it ever work, now that you’ve fallen from grace together?

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cashmoneyyysstuff · 2 months ago

Text

katsuki hates black coffee. it's so obvious it's almost painful. the face he makes when it's done brewing, the way it takes him taking a deep breath and chugging the entire thing in one go to finish and the deep, deep sigh he let's out afterwards.

it's obvious, too obvious. you know it, he knows it.

but he insists on drinking it every single day.

every morning he makes it exactly the same and you just cannot understand why. and you're determined to find out.

today you're both off work. it's been happening less frequently and you couldn't be happier to spend time with your man today. he must've been dead tired, because you woke up before him and his alarm, that he has even though he always manages to wake up before it rings, so you sneakily turn it off and escape from his bear like grip to sneak to the kitchen.

like the great, amazing, loving partner you are, you decide to make him breakfast in bed. you know that despite him not liking overly sweet foods, he still likes him some sugar. you make him pancakes like you know he likes, a family recipe you still haven't told him. you know it's a bit petty, but if he found out he'd probably be able to replicate them to a t immediately and you like taking care of him, and you like the feeling that bubbles in your chest when he groans happily when the food hits his tastebuds and he gobbles it up.

your secret stays safe with you for now.

tray in hand and returning to your bedroom, you're surprised but definitely happy to see him still asleep when you're done. you smile, he truly does deserve the rest after all the work he'd done. you place the tray onto your night stand, running your hands over his eyebrows and slowly running over his messed up hair, thumbing at his hairline. his eyebrows slowly furrow as he tries to lean into it, cheek smudged against the pillow.

"baby.." you sing, katsuki grumbles, shoving his head into his pillow.

"katsuki.." you giggle, running your hand over his back to ease him into waking up. he flips around in an instant, raising an arm up and stretching, his other arm reaches for yours. you give it to him, he squeezes your hand and runs his other one through his hair.

"hi.." you chirp sweetly, katsuki grunts in response, squeezing your hand again in greeting.

"..how long've you been up ?" he asks, voice still deep and gruff from just waking up.

"about an hour.." you respond quietly, easily talking and not in a rush for once. katsuki's eyebrows furrow in confusion and his head whips towards his phone, grabbing it and checking his alarm that had been mysteriously turned off. he turns to squint at you and you giggle, he pinches your thigh and mutters out a "dummy.."

he sniffs the air when he registers the smell of pancakes, and his head quickly zips over to the tray you'd placed there for him. his ears turn pink "you didn't have to do this." you notice how he refrains from adding an affectionate insult towards the end of his sentence, you laugh.

"i know, but i wanted to. now eat up before it gets cold !" you grinned. katsuki sighs, a soft smile pulling at his face before he ducks his head, grabbing the tray and placing it in his lap. his eyes close the moment he gets a bite and your heart beats hard against your chest.

"you seem to be enjoying that." you say cheekily.

" 'm gonna get that recipe outta you one day." he vowed, pointing his fork at you, he groans when he gets another bite "so fuckin' good.." he mutters to himself between bites. you chortle.

after swallowing a few bites in silence, katsuki smacks his lips before he talks again "you just gonna watch me eat ?"

"i'm liking this view," you respond, leaning against your hand and sighing dramatically. katsuki rolls his eyes, an unmistakable blush crosses his cheeks before he's beckoning you over with a 'come here' motion, picking a piece of pancake onto his fork and placing a hand underneath the other as he brings it closer to your lips. "open up," he orders, and you do, tasting your work. you hum happily, and he watches you intently as you do. his eyes drift over to the mug still untouched on the nightstand.

a mug of coffee. black.

he frowns almost immediately, you don't need to look away to know why. you see how he tries to fix his face immediately, you assume so as not to hurt your feelings, your heart warms just a bit more. but you can't help but tease him.

"better drink it before it gets cold.." you sing, trying to sound unbothered. katsuki's grunt borders on a whine as he places his tray to the side. he picks up the mug, making sure to scowl at the black liquid inside, he inhales, before gulping it up quickly.

only to stop, eyebrows furrowing curiously at the flavour.

"it's--"

"good ?" you smile knowingly, you lean back a bit, pressing your legs to your chest and wrapping your arms around your legs. you swing slightly side to side.

katsuki slowly blinks at you "what d'you.."

"i put some sugar in it." you admit, you see how katsuki's face drops, eyebrows flying to his hairline. "katsuki, we both know you don't like it plain black. i don't see why you can't just have some sugar in it." you shrug "i know you've got your diet, but it won't kill you."

he leans back, shrinking into the headboard like he'd been caught committing a crime. his lips pull up into a frown.

"i know that, that's not the problem.." he downs the rest of his drink and he sighs afterwards, it almost sounds like a sigh of relief. it makes you snort. "then what is ?"

"i dunno..hadn't had it in a while and figured i'd try it again, see if i like it."

"but you clearly don't."

"i'd get used to it then." he shrugs.

"katsuki.." you sigh, "you don't have to, you know. nothin' wrong with a little sugar." you tease. honestly, you found it cute. you know he's stubborn and he doesn't give up, even against his own body. you'd seen it happen multiple times, but with something so simple as black coffee was pretty funny.

you think, maybe, he's trying to be more grown up. you remember he tried black coffee back in high school and hated it so bad it ruined his mood for the entire day. maybe, he thought he should like it now since he's graduated and he's an adult. it was sweet, just like how he liked his coffee. and it was so him. you want him to know he doesn't have to change a thing, he's perfectly okay and adult as he is now, coffee plain or sugary. with cream or without or with a sweet treat from the bakery next door.

"course i know that." he mutters after a while, smacking his lips when the taste of his coffee still lingers on his tongue. he places it and the tray back on the nightstand. he grabs your hand, pulling you closer to have you sit in his lap. "so come give me some." he smirks at your flustered expression. one hand reaches the back of your neck to pull you closer, his other hand at the small of your back for the same purpose.

"you just ate and you still haven't brushed your teeth, mister." you run your finger in circles over his chest. he gets hot quickly in the night so he likes to sleep shirtless, your hand runs over the shape of the scar on his shoulder. katsuki snorts, sharp teeth on display as he smirks.

"so ? you know you always wanna kiss me." and he smirks because he knows he's right. you huff, but lean down to kiss him anyway, muttering a quick "shut up," before silencing him. he snickers against your mouth and it doesn't take him long to deepen the kiss, you squeal when he flips you over, laying you right back in bed.

"thanks for breakfast." he says against your lips, leaning back in before you could respond "you're not gettin' away anymore, though. you're gonna spend the day here with me, where you're supposed to be." he drops onto you and you let out an "oof !" at the pro hero mass dropped onto you. you grip his shoulders as he kisses from your cheek to your ear.

"d'you like breakfast ?" you breathe out.

"you know i did, don't make me say it again." he grunts out, biting your cheek when you giggle "now i'd like to spend some time with my girl." he mumbles against your shoulders, voice muffled. you giggle, bring his head up to press your lips to his again.

and they taste sweet, just how you like them.

taglist (finally!!) if your name is pink i unfortunately couldnt tag you :((( : @napbatata @andysdrafts @queenpiranhadon @jastoo46 @cecelia77

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