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ismelinor · 2 years ago

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A Dustland Fairytale (9/12)

Read on AO3 | tagging @today-in-fic

Chapter 9: The Light Behind Your Eyes

Scully found a certain enjoyment in the grand feasts at Camelot, even after four years of pouring wine at them. She got to spend most of her time leaning against the wall, observing Camelot’s finest as they got progressively drunker and stupider. Each time she leaned over Mulder’s shoulder to clear a plate, they’d exchange pleasantries under their breath: his personal favourite was ‘kill me now, Scully’, and then she would point out an indiscretion taking place in the shadows to entertain him, or he would do his impression of Skinner sighing and rubbing his eyes and they’d both look over at the court physician and giggle. Skinner loved that.

Even better, Scully had recently learnt a spell that allowed her to switch two objects in physical space, which Mulder found endlessly entertaining. The trick was to wait until Mulder’s hand was obscured under the table, and then she could switch out one of his rings with whatever she could find: a goblet, peas from the plate she was supposed to be clearing – last week, she’d managed a whole bowl of sweetmeats. Then she got to watch as Mulder smothered a laugh, trying to figure out what the object could be without raising it above the table, before she switched it back. Skinner, of course, disapproved of such frivolous use of her magic, but after six years of these feasts, they had to make their own entertainment.

It was fun – usually.

Tonight was not shaping up to be a fun one. The king had made it very clear that Mulder was on the thinnest of thin ice: he’d missed training with the knights that morning (because the two of them had been bargaining with a man who was trying to rob the vaults of Camelot and his wife, who insisted that they were living the same day over and over and it always ended in disaster – it was a long story). Samantha had tried to cover for them, telling the king that Mulder was unwell in the apothecary – only Skinner had told a different story, saying that he needed a herb from the perilous lands and the prince had escorted Scully there to ensure it was returned safely. The result was that Spender was furious with everyone, Mulder most of all, and the lords and ladies were too frightened even to get drunk.

It was the most tense Scully had felt at a banquet, and she’d drunk poison at one of them (another long story). Spender sat flanked by his advisors, Kersh and Strughold, and they reminded Scully of a snarling three-headed dog she’d once fought off with Mulder (wow, Scully didn’t realise how many long stories she had in her). Mulder, for once, seemed to be taking the danger seriously – perhaps because this time Spender had threatened Scully’s job – and was picking at his food in sullen silence, hands remaining steadfastly above the surface of the table.

When the doors flung open, lords, ladies and servants alike looked up eagerly, hoping for some alleviation of the funereal air hanging dank in the banquet hall. It was a pair of knights, dragging something small and limp behind them. Scully first thought it was a puppet, so pale and lifeless did it seem, but no – it was her little girl. It was Emily.

Mulder was the first on his feet, leaping clear over the banquet table to get to Emily. She was just starting to wake up and gave a little laugh when she saw Mulder’s panic face. Even in the midst of the wordless, paralysing terror gripping her, the sound warmed Scully’s heart.

The knights were addressing the king and she tried to pay attention, though she couldn’t take her eyes off Emily – still so small, and battered and bruised all over.

“-found her in the forest, conjuring berries out of thin air. She didn’t deny using magic, sire, so we thought we’d best bring her to you right away.”

The king didn’t hesitate. “She will be executed.”

It felt like the air had been sucked from the room. Scully gripped onto the wall to steady herself. There were men who Scully had seen cheering at executions with horrified expressions on their faces. No child had ever been executed for magic, as long as Scully had lived in Camelot; in Mulder’s father’s time, she knew, even teenagers were pardoned on charges of sorcery. In the ensuing silence, several pale-faced ladies filed out of the room.

“She’s just a child. An innocent,” Mulder cried. Spender turned his eyes on the prince and twisted his mouth into his usual half-smile.

“There is no innocence in magic, boy. You’re too soft. You will kill her.” He unsheathed his dagger and held it out to Mulder.

Mulder stared at him incredulously. “I would sooner kill myself,” he said steadily.

The king narrowed his eyes. “I had hoped I’d taught you better than this. You will kill the child, or you will be tried as a sympathiser to magic.”

The queen averted her eyes, but she said nothing. Scully stepped forward but Mulder caught her eye and shook his head. Before he could say anything, Emily spoke, with her chin pushed out proudly.

“I am a high priestess. No mortal blade will harm me.” If Scully hadn’t figured out that was a bad thing to reveal, the colour draining from Skinner’s face would have told her.

Strughold whispered something to the king, who nodded. The royal advisor left the room hastily.

The king looked around the room. “You are all dismissed for the evening. Rest assured that no threat to Camelot will go unvanquished under my reign. We will forge a kingdom that is safe, peaceful, and prosperous.”

Scully did not move. Nor did Melissa. Strughold pushed his way back into the room through the tide of silent nobles flooding out. He handed a vial of something dark and viscous to the king, who coated his dagger in the liquid.

He made his way over to Emily, who was clinging onto Mulder’s hand and half-hidden behind him.

“Do you know what this is?” Spender asked her, holding up the dagger.

Emily said nothing, but she looked over at Scully with eyes filled with terror. It was wrong, seeing this strange little girl, this oracular figure from her dreams, shaking with fear. It was easy to forget that, despite her gifts of prophesy and magic, Emily was, above all else, a child.

“This is a dagger coated in the venom of a serket. Serkets, like you, are abominations, but their venom is remarkably useful. It can be used to kill any creature: even a high priestess.”

Emily’s bottom lip wobbled.

“I won’t let you touch her,” growled Mulder, pulling the girl behind him.

Spender waved his hand and three of the knights leapt on Mulder. He was putting up a fight, kicking and punching with all his might, but he was no match for three well-armed and well-trained men, and they had him on the ground in no time.

Standing in the centre of the banquet hall, almost comically mismatched, Spender and Emily stared at one another. She did not try to run, even as the king raised the dagger.

“If you kill me, you damn Camelot to ruin. Your legacy will die with you, and the only time your name will be spoken is when your children are cursing your name.” Emily spoke matter-of-factly, in a tone that was entirely at odds with her position, shaking like a leaf at the point of a dagger.

And then Emily turned to smile at Scully.

~~~

As soon as she met Emily’s eye, Scully knew what was going to happen. It was inevitable, she could see. Yes, it was always going to end this way, wasn’t it? That was what all the tests were for, all this talk of destiny; four years leading to this moment. Her life, to change the future of Camelot.

She looked at Mulder pinned to the ground but still shouting at the king, at Skinner hastily clearing the last of the onlookers from the room (Strughold, bloodthirsty as ever, was the last to leave), at Samantha and Missy, both surreptitiously reaching for carving knives on the banquet table.

She made her way to Samantha’s side as quietly as possible and grabbed her wrist to get her attention. “Samantha,” she whispered urgently, “I’m sorry, but I need you to do something for me. When I give the signal, I need you to grab Emily, and I need you to run with her, as fast as you can. Get to the forest. Take her to the druids; she’ll know which way to go. They’ll protect you until Camelot is safe.”

Scully could see from the sadness in Samantha’s eyes that she understood. “What’s the signal?” she asked.

Scully smiled. “You won’t miss it. I love you both,” she said, reaching out to squeeze Missy’s arm. “Tell Mulder…tell him I’m sorry, alright?”

She took a deep breath, summoned her magic to the surface, and waited for her moment. Spender took hold of Emily by the neck, raised the knife, and started to swing: now! Scully squeezed her eyes shut and muttered the switching spell – just in time to feel the dagger piercing her chest, she’d done it. She stood where Emily had, Spender’s hand tightening around her neck – and, yes, she looked over: Samantha had Emily in her arms and was running from the room. And then there was nothing but a pain so blinding it eclipsed her every sense.

Mulder had her in his arms before she hit the floor – he really did have remarkable reaction times. That was Scully’s last coherent thought before she was subsumed by the chaos.

~~~

When she awoke, she was, to her surprise, in her own bed. It couldn’t have all been a dream – the excruciating pain in her side told her that. The question, then, was how she was still alive.

She tried to sit up and the resulting grunt of pain summoned Mulder to her side. He didn’t look too well himself.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Not as bad as I ought. What the hell happened?”

“You got stabbed, Scully. With a blade dipped in serket venom.”

“Yes, I remember that part, Mulder. What happened after that? How am I still alive?”

“How are you still-?” Mulder choke and turned his head. “How can you say that like it’s nothing? It’s-it’s everything. Don’t you understand?”

Scully was speechless. She took hold of Mulder’s hand and felt it trembling. He looked down at her, eyes shining with tears. “Skinner says that the serket venom works by draining a being of magic. You’re powerful, so it’s taking longer than it usually does. The king let him take you here instead of the cells because he said you’ll be dead within the week anyway.”

Scully tried to swallow that thought – the idea that she would cease to be in a few short days. When she had offered her life for Emily’s, she hadn’t done it blindly. She knew that she would take Emily’s place, quite literally, in one of the most painful deaths known to man. She took that from Emily gladly, not because Emily was important to the future of Albion (though Scully knew she was), and not because it was written in the stars (though perhaps it was), but because she was only a little girl and she had so much life left to live.

But in making that decision, Scully had assumed that her death would at least be quick – like pulling a dagger from a wound, which Scully, unfortunately, had experience with. This slow draining of her life force was not what she had expected.

“I’m sorry, Mulder.” It was all she could think of to say.

“You’re not going to die. We’ll find a solution – don’t we always find a solution, Scully? Melissa and Skinner are looking over the books right now. You won’t die, Scully.” He sounded like he was pleading with her.

Scully could only shake her head. “You can’t mess with this kind of magic, Mulder. Haven’t I always told you that magic requires balance? A life for a life – I gave mine willingly for Emily’s. No one should be sacrificed for me, alright? There’s been enough blood shed.”

Mulder was crying now. She pulled his face to her shoulder and ran her fingers through his hair soothingly. There were things she knew she ought to say if she only had a limited time left – and not just to Mulder – but if she was going to face her death head-on, she figured she was owed a moment of weakness, and she stayed quiet.

When Mulder sat up, she found that she still hadn’t found the right words to say.

“Come on, Mulder, you were just fine before I came along and you’ll be fine without me.” She tried for a light tone, but it sounded flat even to her ears.

His eyes bored into hers, like he thought he could save her if he just looked at her hard enough.

“I wasn’t,” he said, finally. “And I won’t.”

~~~

Scully had been strictly forbidden from leaving the apothecary. Skinner was worried that if Spender saw her walking around, he’d have her executed on the spot. What no one was saying was that, since she was going to die anyway, it didn’t really matter. It might have been kinder, in fact, than this painful, drawn-out death.

After a few days, it didn’t matter anyway – Scully couldn’t have left the apothecary if she’d wanted to. It was too painful to move more than a few paces, and then it was too painful to get out of bed, and then it was too painful to even sit up.

She had visitors: every time she woke, someone was there – Skinner, Melissa, even Pendrell, though he didn’t know exactly what had happened. They all put on straight faces and brought her the latest court gossip or fruit pilfered from the kitchens or books to read, but Scully could see the sadness in their eyes. She watched, day by day, as the hope drained from her friends, and it became more and more of an effort to pretend they didn’t know what was coming.

~~~

It had been about ten days since she’d been stabbed – longer than Scully had thought she’d get – when she woke up and knew with absolute certainty that this was the day she was going to die. She couldn’t even summon enough magic to light the candle by her bed, something she’d mastered at four years old.

Mulder leaned over and lit it for her. She hadn’t seen him in days, and she understood why. He, most of all of their friends, could not face this reality. Every time she saw his face, she was more sorry for what she’d done, and more scared for what it would do to him. She’d begged Missy to take care of him, and of course she would do her best, but Scully understood that their souls were tied in a way that could not be severed, even in death. If it were the other way around – if she were losing Mulder – she was sure she would be half anchored to the grave for the rest of her life. She only hoped that he would fare better.

“Come here, Mulder,” she whispered, because it hurt to speak.

He nodded and crawled onto the bed with her. There was something different in his eyes today – something more settled than the sad, searching way he’d been looking at her since she’d damned herself. She hoped that meant that he’d accepted her fate, but she knew him well enough to doubt it.

She couldn’t think of anything to say to him, knowing that they might be her last words. That seemed like a great deal of pressure. She didn’t remember the last thing her father had said to her before he died – goodbye, most likely, given that she was fleeing Ealdor. Mulder’s father’s last words, about dragons and betrayal, had haunted him for fifteen years. What if she said the wrong thing? What if Mulder forgot them – or worse, what if he could never forget them? It was too late, now, anyway. She gasped and pressed her face into his chest when the pain became overwhelming, resigned to a silent departure.

Scully fell asleep with Mulder’s lips pressed to her forehead – not even a kiss; his lips were open and he was mouthing something onto her skin through stifled sobs. She supposed she’d never know what he was trying to say, but she had a good idea, at least.

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uroborosymphony · 2 years ago

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FOR @ECLAVIGNE ⬩ 26 FEBRUARY 2023 ⬩ MIDNIGHT

In the heart of the night, the core of winter, the wind was cold, made of ice. The trees and leaves, dancing under the breeze as the lamia was standing still, only these white locks of hers floating around her frame like Medusa. Calixtus Orion. The Witch Killer, Traitor of the Night. Her name and her titles were on the lips and fangs of every single creature of the night in 19th century during the Great War against the Witches and the Order of the Knights. Fierce and feared, she was a conquerant. Two centuries have passed then, with its battles, its sorrows, its peaces and pains. Hasn't she lost her mind after the great defeat - cutting her own head, slicing her own flesh and limbs with her own sword she kept on pulling from her shadows, over and over, for a hundred nights of red moon say the tales. Desperate. Humiliated. Damned to live with the weight of her mere existence. It's just Calista now. Many would have thought the 12th daughter of Hecate did give up on her quests and journeys however, at the dawn of the 21st century, her thirst for new battles were now running under her skin. The unexpected have made its way to modern times. New powers she has witnessed from Sons and Daughters of the Gods who got reincarnated among the humans. It became part of a new plan of hers : to steal the said powers and use these them to fulfill her ultimate goal : her end. To achieve that, she was ready to open the doors of Hell again. Vine. She often thinks of the Ruler himself. Could he be an ally, again? Certain not. Her hatred for a man who enslaved her soul and made a fool out of her TWICE was still burning, even 200 years later. It wasn't his help she would ask for tonight, no, but something completely degrading : to finally work for him. Ugh. The vampiric creature she was had no choice, in order to carry on her new obsessions she had to reconnect with the World of the Night , the one she has rejected like her own skin. She needed to walk down the underworld realms again, to re open these doors, to be aware of what was happening among the creatures of fires and eveil, to see if the new generations of Witches have rebuilt themselves after the massacre she orchestred, to taste the waters and wonder if the ghouls and vampires were still oh so fond of her.. or Not. It did take her days and days before finally accepting that : yes she had to summon him, the King, and so she does, at the top of this hill she was standing on. A call the lamia knew he would answer. In her black attire, she feels him, in her back and a smirk is drawn on her lips, her fang showing, as nontchalently she looks above her shoulder.

"Vous, ici?"

All languages could be spoken in between the two hellish beings, languages from both the earthling realms and the underworld ones as they mastered all of them. Her choice was always inspired by one of their adventures. French, for the in 1845, from the Atlantic lands of the French coasts to the Eurasian mountains for the as a new race of Blood Witches was birthed among the humans - They, of course, exterminated the entire line to the womb. Have she changed? Her skin remained untouched, immaculate, undamageable. Her hair however, turning more and more white as she was becoming more and more powerful through her blood empowerment. And her eyes, these golden orbs of hers, telling a different story, heavier, darker. Vine met her when she was 400 years old only, the lamia freshly turned 600 this year.

"My My. Greedy for my presence, are we? Do not tell me you have missed my fangs and claws in such unbearable ways you would come and get me like this, Demon? How Scandalous."

It was one of her usual games, out of playfulness, to pretend she did not just summon him. Her signature smirk on her lips as the lamia slowly turned around, her sharp eyes examinating him, standing face to face. There were only two creatures Calista considered her equals in these realms, and well, Vine was one of them. That was the most infuriating part, to her, how despite his betrayals and her constant day dreams about killing him, they would always and constantly end up side by side. Which, in a anti logical and twisted Calista way, meant she respected him.

"I have thought of your offer, Earl. The one presented to me on our last encounter in the meadows near rivers of my own blood. The atmosphere in your offices must feel terribly monotonous without a presence as delightful as mine. It is about time I explore new playgrounds, don't you believe? I'm taking the job. Take me there. Show me what you have. "

#I love love love trying anime fc for this verse #Kiss Shot is the character I based Calista on so it's SUCH a pleasure #Also I'm kinda into them #Besties :)#A sleepover with Vine and Calista be war crimes and horse riding <3 #Laughing at my own comments that's enough #셋 𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐀 / interactions.#셋 𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐀 / the immortal.

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rainstormies · 5 months ago

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chapter four

title: heir of fire

fandom: a song of ice and fire

word count: 2k

synopsis: a daughter of a lost house, hiding in the shadows of a broken kingdom. as revenge and love collide, she must choose between reclaiming her past or forging a new future

Gemma’s life at the brothel had become a routine of survival, but as the years passed, she had grown restless. She couldn’t help but think about Sam. The man she thought would eventually set her free.

For a while - after that night - she had looked at the door every time someone walked in, hoping somehow it was him. But Sam had not returned.

Men had come, but not to set her free.

She longed for more than the dim rooms and fleeting encounters with men whose names she never learned. That’s when she met Kyra, a girl not much older than herself, who often visited the brothel. But Kyra wasn’t like the others who came to escape their lives. She worked in the Red Keep, as one of Queen Rhaella’s ladies.

Kyra would come by now and then, usually to speak with the other girls or deliver messages from the castle. The two struck up an unlikely friendship - Gemma had always had a way of making people open up to her. It was a survival skill she had honed after years of pretending to be someone else.

“Kyra,” Gemma asked one night after a particularly quiet evening, “what’s it like? The castle, I mean.”

Kyra’s eyes had lit up at the question, and soon the two found themselves huddled together, whispering about the inner workings of the Red Keep. Kyra spoke of grand halls and intricate tapestries, of the politics that shaped the lives of every servant and noble alike. But it was when she spoke of Queen Rhaella that Gemma’s curiosity deepened.

“She’s kind,” Kyra said, her voice soft. “But… lonely. She doesn’t trust many.”

"Why?" Gemma asked, her brow furrowed.

Kyra hesitated, glancing around as if the walls themselves might have ears. “Because of the king. He… He’s not like her. And some of her ladies… they’ve been dismissed for getting too close to him.”

Gemma didn’t need to ask what she meant. She had seen enough in her life to know what power did to men. But the more Kyra talked about the Red Keep, the more Gemma began to wonder if there was a place for her there.

One night, over the soft glow of candlelight, Kyra made a suggestion.

"Why don’t you come with me to the castle?" Kyra’s eyes gleamed with excitement. "The Queen’s dismissed several of her ladies recently. They say it’s because they’ve been with the king… she’ll need new ones soon."

Gemma’s heart raced at the thought. Could she really leave this life behind? The brothel had been her prison, but it was also the only place she had known since fleeing Castamere. But then she thought of Sam, of the fleeting dreams she had allowed herself to have. She couldn’t stay here forever.

“I don’t think I belong in a castle, Kyra. I’ve lived… I’ve been…” Gemma stammered.

Kyra shook her head, smiling gently. “You’re more than that, Gemma. You’ve got something about you… the way you carry yourself. The way you speak. I swear, sometimes you sound like a lady yourself.”

As Kyra’s words echoed in her mind, Gemma found herself gripped by two opposing forces. Working at the castle? Under the same roof as Tywin Lannister, the man who had destroyed everything she once knew, who now stood as Hand of the King? She should be running the other way, staying hidden, staying safe. Every instinct told her that coming anywhere near him was a risk, a dangerous game she couldn’t afford to play.

But then, the other force gripped her - the one that burned hotter than fear. The desire to confront him. The hunger for revenge. She wanted him to see her, to know her face, to understand that House Reyne had not been wiped from the world as easily as he'd believed. That a daughter of Castamere still lived and breathed.

This could be the best way - to walk straight into the lion’s den. To gain his trust, to stand in the halls of power, to find the moment where she could strike. And when that moment came, she would ensure Tywin Lannister paid for every drop of Reyne blood he had spilled.

The first few days in the castle felt like walking through a dream. Gemma - now calling herself ‘Gemma’ in truth, no longer clinging to Serena - kept her head down, moving through the halls with an unfamiliar grace she hadn't known she possessed. The other girls whispered about her behind her back, but Gemma didn’t care. She had learned long ago how to be invisible when needed.

She didn’t speak much at first, afraid that someone might recognize her - or worse, see through her act. But when she was introduced to Queen Rhaella, something unexpected happened.

The Queen’s eyes swept over her, pausing on her face for a moment longer than the others. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Gemma, Your Grace,” she replied, her voice soft but steady.

Rhaella’s gaze lingered. “Where are you from, Gemma?”

Gemma swallowed hard, trying not to let the panic rise. She had rehearsed this moment countless times. “I’m from the westerlands, Your Grace. My family... they were lost in the war.”

The Queen seemed to accept the answer, nodding slightly before turning away. It wasn’t until later that day when one of the other girls pulled Gemma aside.

“You impressed her, you know,” Violet said, grinning.

Gemma blinked, surprised. “I did?”

Violet nodded eagerly. “You don’t act like the rest of us. You speak well. The Queen likes that. She values poise, respect... and loyalty.”

From that day on, Gemma worked diligently, and the Queen took notice. She was given tasks that required discretion and care - organising letters, preparing Rhaella’s chambers, and even sitting with her during her quiet moments. There was a closeness developing between them, a bond that Gemma hadn’t expected. She found herself in the Queen’s good graces, and it wasn’t long before she became one of Rhaella’s favourites.

The other ladies noticed it too. “The Queen always asks for Gemma,” they whispered with envy. “She never asks for us like that.”

Gemma found herself in rooms where whispers of politics, war, and the Targaryen legacy swirled. She learned quickly to keep her head down and her ears open. Rhaella confided in her, in ways that surprised Gemma. She would talk of her fears, of the king’s rages, and the toll it took on her soul. And Gemma, for the first time in years, found herself feeling needed.

But there was always a lingering fear. The fear that someone would recognize her. That her past would catch up with her. She was Serena Reyne, the last of Castamere, living in the lion’s den. One misstep, one wrong word, and her true identity could be her undoing. But for now, she had found a new place to belong, even if it was built on lies.

And as she served the Queen, Gemma vowed to never forget who she really was - even if everyone else did.

The day Lady Joanna Lannister arrived in King’s Landing, the Red Keep seemed to shimmer with new energy. Gemma had heard whispers of her arrival days before, the servants gossiping about the beauty and grace of the Lady of Casterly Rock, wife of Lord Tywin Lannister. Some spoke of her warmth, others of the fearsome power she held, not only as Tywin’s wife but as someone who had once served Queen Rhaella herself.

When Gemma first saw Joanna, she understood why the court had so much to say about her. Lady Joanna was tall and regal, her golden hair cascading down her shoulders, bright as the sun itself. Her dress was a deep crimson, embroidered with golden lions, making her look every bit the powerful lady she was rumoured to be. But what struck Gemma most was Joanna’s kindness. Unlike so many of the highborn women she had met, Joanna’s smile seemed genuine, and her laughter was soft and warm, like music.

Joanna had been walking through the Queen’s garden when Gemma, carrying a tray of wine, passed by. Their eyes met for a moment, and Gemma quickly lowered her gaze, instinctively avoiding the attention of one so highborn. But Lady Joanna had smiled at her, a soft and inviting gesture, as though she could sense something more in Gemma’s demeanour.

“Is that wine for the Queen, my dear?” Joanna asked gently.

Gemma nodded, her voice catching in her throat. “Yes, my lady.”

Joanna’s smile widened. “You carry yourself well. The Queen is fortunate to have such attentive ladies.”

Gemma mumbled a thank you, bowing her head. She wasn’t used to kindness from noblewomen, especially not one of Joanna’s stature. As she turned to leave, another maid caught her arm and whispered, “Be careful around Lady Joanna. She used to be one of Queen Rhaella’s ladies... until she was dismissed.”

Gemma frowned. “Dismissed? Why?”

The maid leaned in closer, her eyes darting around. “The Queen believed Joanna was too close to the King... thought she might be his mistress.”

Gemma felt a sudden twist in her stomach. Queen Rhaella, so isolated and paranoid, had cast out someone as kind as Joanna over mere suspicion? It made sense now why the Queen’s mood darkened at the mention of Joanna Lannister. The court’s whispers about the King’s affairs were many, and Rhaella had grown increasingly distrustful over the years.

Later that day, when Joanna returned to the Queen’s chambers, Gemma found herself serving them both tea. She stood at the side of the room, silent, watching the tension between the two women. Joanna spoke politely, but Queen Rhaella barely acknowledged her. The bitterness was palpable, and Gemma wondered what it must have been like for Joanna, dismissed from the Queen’s service for something she had no part in.

But then, Gemma’s thoughts turned darker. As she poured tea for Lady Joanna, a shadow fell across the room. Tywin Lannister had entered, his presence commanding immediate attention. He was tall, broad, and his golden hair was now streaked with silver. He looked every bit the lion of Lannister, his sharp gaze assessing the room with a predator’s calculation.

Gemma froze, the teapot trembling in her hands.

Tywin Lannister.

The man who had murdered her family. The man responsible for the massacre at Castamere. For the downfall of House Reyne. For her father’s death.

She had never seen him in person before. He was a figure from nightmares, a name whispered in dark corners, a symbol of everything she had lost. And now, here he stood, not ten feet from her, completely unaware of who she was. The room seemed to shrink as her heart pounded in her chest. She wanted to scream, to throw the boiling tea in his face, to claw at him with her bare hands.

But she couldn’t. She had to stay still. Stay quiet. She was no longer Serena Reyne. She was Gemma, the Queen’s servant. A girl from nowhere.

She lowered her head, forcing herself to breathe. Tywin’s voice cut through the silence, deep and authoritative as he spoke with the Queen and Joanna. She could feel his eyes briefly glance over her, but there was no recognition in them. Why would there be? She was a nobody. A servant. And to him, the Reynes were long gone, buried under the stones of Castamere.

But Gemma’s blood boiled beneath her skin. She wanted to scream at him, “Do you know who I am? You killed my father! You destroyed my family!” But she couldn’t. She could do nothing.

Tywin spoke for only a short while before excusing himself. As he turned to leave, Gemma’s hands clenched into fists beneath her skirts. The rage inside her burned like a fire, but she swallowed it down, hiding it deep within herself.

This man, this monster who had ripped her world apart, would never know who she was. She would never have the satisfaction of seeing the fear in his eyes. But maybe, one day, she could avenge them. Maybe, one day, there would be a reckoning for Castamere.

But not today. Not yet.

When Tywin left the room, Joanna glanced at Gemma again, her gaze lingering for a moment as if sensing something. But she said nothing, and neither did Gemma. The tea was served, and life went on.

#got #game of thrones #asoiaf #a song of ice and fire

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addamvelaryon · 2 years ago

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A connection between the trees and the sea:

Closer at hand, it was the trees that ruled. To south and east the wood went on as far as Jon could see, a vast tangle of root and limb painted in a thousand shades of green, with here and there a patch of red where a weirwood shouldered through the pines and sentinels, or a blush of yellow where some broadleafs had begun to turn. When the wind blew, he could hear the creak and groan of branches older than he was. A thousand leaves fluttered, and for a moment the forest seemed a deep green sea, storm-tossed and heaving, eternal and unknowable.

Ghost was not like to be alone down there, he thought. Anything could be moving under that sea, creeping toward the ringfort through the dark of the wood, concealed beneath those trees.

— A Clash of Kings, Jon IV

Another thing I noticed, the Dothraki in Essos avoid both:

To the Dothraki, water that a horse could not drink was something foul; the heaving grey-green plains of the ocean filled them with superstitious loathing.

— A Game of Thrones, Daenerys VI

The horselords had hitherto shunned the forests of the northern coasts; some say this was because of their reverence for the vanished wood walkers, others because they feared their powers.

— The World of Ice and Fire, Ib

The description of the forest dwellers of Essos is quite similar to the way the race called the Children of the Forest or Those Who Sing the Song of Earth are described in Westeros:

The God-Kings of Ib, before their fall, did succeed in conquering and colonizing a huge swathe of northern Essos immediately south of Ib itself, a densely wooded region that had formerly been the home of a small, shy forest folk. Some say that the Ibbenese extinguished this gentle race, whilst others believe they went into hiding in the deeper woods or fled to other lands. The Dothraki still call the great forest along the northern coast the Kingdom of the Ifequevron, the name by which they knew the vanished forest-dwellers.

The fabled Sea Snake, Corlys Velaryon, Lord of the Tides, was the first Westerosi to visit these woods. After his return from the Thousand Islands, he wrote of carved trees, haunted grottoes, and strange silences. A later traveler, the merchant-adventurer Bryan of Oldtown, captain of the cog Spearshaker, provided an account of his own journey across the Shivering Sea. He reported that the Dothraki name for the lost people meant “those who walk in the woods.”

— The World of Ice and Fire, Ib

Interestingly, walking through the woods is a descriptor that references the White Walkers as well:

“Oh, my sweet summer child,” Old Nan said quietly, “what do you know of fear? Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the long night, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little children are born and live and die all in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt and hungry, and the white walkers move through the woods.”

— A Game of Thrones, Bran IV

The horn blew thrice long, three long blasts means Others. The white walkers of the wood, the cold shadows, the monsters of the tales that made him squeak and tremble as a boy, riding their giant ice-spiders, hungry for blood …

— A Storm of Swords, Samwell I

Of the forest dwellers, the COTF seem to be a friendlier race whereas the White Walkers are presented as sinister. The same seems to ring true for the merlings, between those who live in the far north and those that reside in the southern waters:

They tell of pale blue mists that move across the waters, mists so cold that any ship they pass over is frozen instantly; of drowned spirits who rise at night to drag the living down into the grey-green depths; of mermaids pale of flesh with black-scaled tails, far more malign than their sisters of the south.

— The World of Ice and Fire, The Shivering Sea

The northern waters also have a curtain of light that matches the one in the Land of Always Winter:

Sailors, by nature a gullible and superstitious lot, as fond of their fancies as singers, tell many tales of these frigid northern waters. They speak of queer lights shimmering in the sky, where the demon mother of the ice giants dances eternally through the night, seeking to lure men northward to their doom. They whisper of Cannibal Bay, where ships enter at their peril only to find themselves trapped forever when the sea freezes hard behind them.

— The World of Ice and Fire, The Shivering Sea

And he looked past the Wall, past endless forests cloaked in snow, past the frozen shore and the great blue-white rivers of ice and the dead plains where nothing grew or lived. North and north and north he looked, to the curtain of light at the end of the world, and then beyond that curtain. He looked deep into the heart of winter, and then he cried out, afraid, and the heat of his tears burned on his cheeks.

— A Game of Thrones, Bran III

DEAD THINGS IN THE WOODS. DEAD THINGS IN THE WATER.

I was once again thinking about how Patchface has a tendency to say some rather odd things, and if you view the phrase "under the sea" as an indication of death/afterlife, the things he says take on a more sinister connotation:

Patchface rang his bells. “It is always summer under the sea,” he intoned. “The merwives wear nennymoans in their hair and weave gowns of silver seaweed. I know, I know, oh, oh, oh.”

— A Clash of Kings, Prologue

Patchface was capering about as the maester made his slow way around the table to Davos Seaworth. “Here we eat fish,” the fool declared happily, waving a cod about like a scepter. “Under the sea, the fish eat us. I know, I know, oh, oh, oh.”

— A Clash of Kings, Prologue

“Under the sea the old fish eat the young fish,” the fool muttered at Davos. He bobbed his head, and his bells clanged and chimed and sang. “I know, I know, oh oh oh.”

— A Storm of Swords, Davos V

They found Her Grace sewing by the fire, whilst her fool danced about to music only he could hear, the cowbells on his antlers clanging. “The crow, the crow,” Patchface cried when he saw Jon. “Under the sea the crows are white as snow, I know, I know, oh, oh, oh.”

— A Dance With Dragons, Jon XI

Patchface jumped up. “I will lead it!” His bells rang merrily. “We will march into the sea and out again. Under the waves we will ride seahorses, and mermaids will blow seashells to announce our coming, oh, oh, oh.”

— A Dance With Dragons, Jon XIII

“Under the sea, men marry fishes.” Patchface did a little dance step, jingling his bells. “They do, they do, they do.”

— A Dance With Dragons, Jon XIII

Patchface drowned but survived under mysterious circumstances:

The boy washed up on the third day. Maester Cressen had come down with the rest, to help put names to the dead. When they found the fool he was naked, his skin white and wrinkled and powdered with wet sand. Cressen had thought him another corpse, but when Jommy grabbed his ankles to drag him off to the burial wagon, the boy coughed water and sat up. To his dying day, Jommy had sworn that Patchface’s flesh was clammy cold.

No one ever explained those two days the fool had been lost in the sea. The fisherfolk liked to say a mermaid had taught him to breathe water in return for his seed.

— A Clash of Kings, Prologue

The previous passage almost seems to echo the following:

He had been the thirteenth man to lead the Night’s Watch, she said; a warrior who knew no fear. “And that was the fault in him,” she would add, “for all men must know fear.” A woman was his downfall; a woman glimpsed from atop the Wall, with skin as white as the moon and eyes like blue stars. Fearing nothing, he chased her and caught her and loved her, though her skin was cold as ice, and when he gave his seed to her he gave his soul as well.

— A Storm of Swords, Bran IV

That's not the only connection that exists between the merlings and the white walkers:

Mormont was deaf to the edge in his voice. “The fisherfolk near Eastwatch have glimpsed white walkers on the shore.”

This time Tyrion could not hold his tongue. “The fisherfolk of Lannisport often glimpse merlings.”

— A Game of Thrones, Tyrion III

Which of course reminds me of Cotter Pyke's ominous letter to Jon Snow:

At Hardhome, with six ships. Wild seas. Blackbird lost with all hands, two Lyseni ships driven aground on Skane, Talon taking water. Very bad here. Wildlings eating their own dead. Dead things in the woods. Braavosi captains will only take women, children on their ships. Witch women call us slavers. Attempt to take Storm Crow defeated, six crew dead, many wildlings. Eight ravens left. Dead things in the water. Send help by land, seas wracked by storms. From Talon, by hand of Maester Harmune.

Cotter Pyke had made his angry mark below.

“Is it grievous, my lord?” asked Clydas.

“Grievous enough.” Dead things in the wood. Dead things in the water. Six ships left, of the eleven that set sail. Jon Snow rolled up the parchment, frowning. Night falls, he thought, and now my war begins.

— A Dance With Dragons, Jon XI

Dead things in the woods. Dead things in the water. Here's the description of the white walkers and the merlings:

Will saw movement from the corner of his eye. Pale shapes gliding through the wood. He turned his head, glimpsed a white shadow in the darkness. Then it was gone. Branches stirred gently in the wind, scratching at one another with wooden fingers. Will opened his mouth to call down a warning, and the words seemed to freeze in his throat.

[...]

A shadow emerged from the dark of the wood. It stood in front of Royce. Tall, it was, and gaunt and hard as old bones, with flesh pale as milk. Its armor seemed to change color as it moved; here it was white as new-fallen snow, there black as shadow, everywhere dappled with the deep grey-green of the trees. The patterns ran like moonlight on water with every step it took.

— A Game of Thrones, Prologue

— The World of Ice and Fire, The Shivering Sea

Pale and black and grey-green. All frozen.

There is also this similarity of both being said to lay with human women to sire terrible offsprings:

He remembered the hearth tales Old Nan told them. The wildlings were cruel men, she said, slavers and slayers and thieves. They consorted with giants and ghouls, stole girl children in the dead of night, and drank blood from polished horns. And their women lay with the Others in the Long Night to sire terrible half-human children.

— A Game of Thrones, Bran I

An even more fanciful possibility was put forth a century ago by Maester Theron. Born a bastard on the Iron Islands, Theron noted a certain likeness between the black stone of the ancient fortress and that of the Seastone Chair, the high seat of House Greyjoy of Pyke, whose origins are similarly ancient and mysterious. Theron’s rather inchoate manuscript Strange Stone postulates that both fortress and seat might be the work of a queer, misshapen race of half men sired by creatures of the salt seas upon human women. These Deep Ones, as he names them, are the seed from which our legends of merlings have grown, he argues, whilst their terrible fathers are the truth behind the Drowned God of the ironborn.

— The World of Ice and Fire, The Reach

We know the dragons are contrasted against the white walkers, but perhaps the merlings are too:

The big man looked out toward the terrace. “I knew it would rain,” he said in a gloomy tone. “My bones were aching last night. They always ache before it rains. The dragons won’t like this. Fire and water don’t mix, and that’s a fact.”

— A Dance With Dragons, The Dragontamer

Although no one can say for certain exactly what kind of creatures Euron (who, while not exactly THE NIGHT KING, is still very Night King coded) plans on summoning from the sea, but perhaps the merlings are part of his plan.

#asoiaf #asoiaf meta #meta #merlings #white walkers #the others #the children of the forest #I'm connecting the dots

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misguidedasgardian · 2 years ago

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The White Dragon (9)

9. While you were gone

MASTERLIST

Summary: You’d been living in a dream, and now you had to wake up

Pairings: main Harwin Strong x Fem!Targaryen reader

Warnings: cursing, medieval and A song of ice and Fire AU customs, talks about “bastards”, name calling, mentions of smut, and more, a tamed chapter

+18, MINORS DNI

Wordcount: 3.7 k

Notes: One thing I changed from ASOIAF… since the conquest, the Tully’s were the lords of the Riverlands… well, now the Strongs are 😂 Short chapter I think, but a transitional one, we will see what they'd been up to for the last 10 years

Year 128 AC, 10 years after the departure from King’s Landing

The thing is… that when you are the highest ranking person in a holdfast, you can practically live however you want. And away from court, and royal protocol and responsibilities, you learned, fairly quickly, that you were free

And that’s how you lived with your small family.

You shared your bed with your husband, and sometimes your children, when they crawled in your bed in the midst of the night claiming about having nightmares. Harwin’s desire to extend your family never dwindled, and you tried, everynight to do so… now for pleasure more than need.

In your fourth year away from court a third babe was born to you, a little girl, with silver hair and kind eyes just like your sweet mother and with the coloring of your husband. She was the apple of his eye, and yours, and you named her Aemma, with your father’s blessing, he even made the trip to bring you a dragon egg. That never hatched

Your children grew as summer grass, free from the schemes and darkness of the court. Running over open fields, green woods and jumping over streams. And their dragons grew alongside them. Maekar and Rhaegar turn into young dragonriders at age 7, and your daughter was content with riding with you, in Vhaelar’s back

Harwin dealt with matters of the Strong lands and you managed to finish the construction of your new home. A castle. It was over the hill overlooking Harrenhal, and it was beautiful, with big windows with painted glass and a big patio where your children grew, played, and learned under the shadow of a beautiful tree that you built your home around. towers in which you and your children had your quarters, and a tower named the tower of the princess, that serves as a watch tower with a dome, a favorite spot for you, Rhaegar and Aemma. In the castle you had headquarters for your servants as well, and you all lived together. Still keeping the old Harrenhall, since it was an important seat of great size, closest to King Landing, it was an important military outpost for armies of the crown that could not be forsaken.

Your children were instructed in philosophy, history, even some arts, and they spoke Valyrian fluently, thanks to your own teachings. Maekar, ever the scholar, would pay close attention to his teachers and septas, but Rhaegar, on the other hand, the boy’s mind seemed to be everywhere but on the patio. And sweet, Aemma, of 6 name days, would listen to her brothers, and learned to read and write only at 4 years old, and the first thing she wanted to do was to write to her dear grandsire, who sat in a big chair and wore a golden ring in his head.

Ser Steffon at the beginning traveled with you, even if as Rhaenyra had two more sons, and that drove you away from the line of succession, you still were a princess of royal blood, so, your own Kingsguard was appointed to you, alongside a bunch of city watch former soldiers that became soldiers of the House Strong. But your personal guard traveled back and forth, and now with a bigger royal family and descendants to the throne, he was more needed in the Red Keep, than by your side. He was very close to renouncing but you insisted otherwise, you needed him by your father’s side, even if his only wish was to stay with you and train the boys, something you had been postponing as much as you could but they were ten now and Harwin was dying to start their training.

Under yours, and Steffon’s eyes, you guarded Joanna’s safety, as many suitors came to her seeing that she was now a widow, and a young Lannister woman, and you gave her the liberty to be courted in your home, and to chose her own spouse, after many suitors, she fell for the heir to house Tully and Riverrun, a handsome and good man, with auburn hair and freckles and a kind smile. Of course his Lannister brothers refused him, but with you, a princess, behind her, there was nothing they could do, and with angry looks, they let her wed him. You had constant contact with the Tullys, since the Strongs were the lords of the Riverlands, and House Tully was loyal to you. Now Joanna was happier than you had ever seen her, with two beautiful sons with auburn hair and green eyes just like hers

But the shadow of the crown was always over you, constant news reached your ears, and a worry was eating you. According to some reports… Rhaenyra’s offspring did not resemble Ser Laenor, and that was becoming a problem for her, the whispers reached you in Harrenhal. The line of succession, her line of succession, was trembling, and in a corner of your mind you wondered if after her, came you as heir, or Aegon, Alicent Hightower’s son. Maybe that was a question you didn’t need answering. Your father was right, the Iron throne was the most dangerous seat in the realm, and looking at your children, you decided you will turn a blind eye and deaf ears to those nasty rumors, which weren’t really rumors, but your allegiance lies with Rhaenyra’s claim and line.

Your children deserved to be as free as their dragons, and the crown and court was like the Dragonpit for them, a beautiful cage, but a cage nonetheless. You managed to create a perfect life, and escape it, or so you thought.

Aemma rested her head in her chubby little arms, looking at the horizon from the Princess Tower, the sound of horses neighing, and hooves and carriages reached her before a caravan appeared through the King’s road, and she recognized the banner immediately, the banner of her house, flying high alongside the three headed dragon

“Grandpa is here!” she screeched, jumping on her feet and running down the spiral stairs. “Grandpa is coming!” she repeated, as her small feet led her to where you probably were, in the gardens with a book. “mommy!”, she threw herself and you catched her in your arms

“What is it, sweet girl?”, you asked as you kissed the top of her head

“Grandpa is coming”, she beamed with a big smile, missing some teeth, “I saw him”, since you weren’t celebrating any name days, or festivities, the fact that your father by law was visiting did concern you.

“Is he now? then we should greet him”, you muttered, “Where are your brothers?” her little face

“I don’t know”, she muttered, looking at the ground in front of her, revealing her little lie.

“Oh you don’t know?” you giggled

. . .

“Arghugon, Karnax!” demanded Rhaegar, and the dragon fell from the skies and with her powerful claws and clinged into the poor stag that screamed in agony, as the dragon lifted its prey, threw it in the air, “Dracarys!” and finally burned it to the crisp so he could eat it. The cream colored beast with golden marking devoured it whole in long bites. Rhaegar knew better than come close to him when he was feeding, so he was content in watching from the tree line

Maekar joined him, hoping that his own dragon won’t come near him now. The blue and silver dragons as flying over the God’s eye

“Aerion is bigger”, whined Rhaegar

“They are the same size”, Maekar answered, “they were born at the same time, and they grow all the same, eating the same, sleeping the same. He only looks bigger because it’s mine”, he joked. Rhaegar rolled his eyes, as his dragon finished his feasting

“You heard that?” Maekar asked, walking away from the trees and looked towards the road, where he saw the caravan approaching, “it’s probably Grandpa Lyonel”

Many couldn’t tell them apart, but one look from you was enough to do so, Maekar had broader shoulders than Rhaegar, and he wore his hair short, strong dark curls over his head, while Rhaegar screeched and screamed when the maids tried to cut his main, so you let him wear it longer, often he had to tie it to keep it from obscuring his gaze.

“Mom will want us there to receive him”, told Maekar, and without thinking it anymore, he ran towards Aerion, who had landed close to him. Rhaegar did the same with Karnax. And they both flew the few miles that separated them from the Castle.

“Where were you?” you asked as they ran to your side fixing their clothes and hair

“Sorry mom, I was teaching Karmax to hunt”, muttered Rhaegar, “Maekar was helping me”

“Good lad” you looked at Harwin with a side smile as he ruffled the boy’s hair, as you stood with the members of your household outside the castle to wait for your father

The carriage stopped right in front of you all, a soldier jumped from it and opened the door, and Lyonel showed up, he had lost part of his hair, as ten years took its toll, but he was still a tall, proud and Strong man.

“Grandpa!” Aemma jumped into Lyonel’s awaiting arms, and the man giggled having his granddaughter hugging him tightly

“Hello sweet girl!” he greeted

“I missed you grandpa”

“I missed you too, and your hugs”, you knew Lyonel wasn’t a man you could just easily hug or anything, but he only had one weak spot in his strong walls, and that was their grandchildren.

“Lord Lyonel” you greeted

“Father”, greeted Harwin by your side

“My Lady”, he muttered looking at you, “Son”

“Grandpa” mocked Rhaegar, because of all the title-calling. You looked at him with warning in your eyes but Lyonel only smiled and he hugged his grandsons

“What have you two been up to? uh?”

“Making the teachers a little mad, that’s all”, muttered Maekar

“just a little?” Chuckled Lyonel.

After the warm welcome you of course invited Lyonel in, the day was turning into darkness, and it was time to serve supper.

Lyonel had much to say about the capital, contrary to the both of you who lived lives more sunk into a routine. The boys and Aemma of course had much to say to their Grandsire, tales about their dragon’s growth and their personal achievements, like they could hold conversation in High Valyrian, and Harwin laughing about it because he felt left out about you chiding them in your mother tongue so it will have more impact.

With long pouts on their account and they had to be sent to bed, they wanted to share the after-dinner with their parents and grandfather, but you insisted that they will have a long day tomorrow showing Lyonel all the things they talked about.

After dinner, Harwin, Lyonel and you, gathered in the library, with a cup of wine in hand and the hearth lit up, it was a beautiful night, you could heard crickets in the distance

“It is not that we don’t enjoy your visits, dear father, but I must ask, what brings you here?” asked Harwin

“I cannot visit my son, his beautiful wife and my sweet grandchildren?”, he tried to sound funny, and you did smile, but his face was tainted with concern, “being here is like a breath of fresh air, so relieving from all my duties… and the heaviness of the court”

“Lyonel, is there something wrong?”, you asked, placing your hand on his arm, encouraging him

“I’m afraid there is something”, he admitted, “it’s about the princess”

“What is it?” you asked. And one of the things you liked most about Lyonel is that he always went straight to the point, he was frank

“Rhaenyra is alone, without allies, she is sinking, so is her claim”. Even that didn’t surprise you, the ghost of your sister and her hostility towards you ever over you. You had contented with the fact of being the second daughter, and you were happy because of it, but the thing is, she was the first, the heir, and that will have a toll on you someday, and perhaps that day had arrived

“Do you come on your own accord?” asked Harwin

“She sits at the small council”, you interrupted, “she lives in the Keep, she is an active member of court, what was she doing all this time but make allies and show herself as a ruler?”, you muttered, in disbelief, “what has she been doing?”, you asked again. Lyonel looked down

“Did she send you, father?” he asked

“No, well, she may have hinted at it”

“What do you mean?” you muttered

“She needs you, a senior member of the Royal Family, to back up her claim, to support her”, he said, “she has said, outloud, and on many occasions that if you were there at court, you would support her ideas and contributions”. You had never hold grudges against your sister, despite everything, but now… your name being spoken like that, her using you, despite being miles away… really, you now cursed her, for putting your own comfort, word and life in the line

“I don’t know what I could do for her”, you whispered, “I don’t understand, she had ten years at my father’s side, she should have strengthened her claim by now…”

“The Queen also sits at the small council, they both have their claws on the King”, this was all said in the privacy of the library, in complete secrecy, “and I fear that they are going to… tear him apart”

“Father…”

“It is not with nothing but care that I say these words… only to you both, and in the safety of your home” he said, “I fear for the future of the realm”

“So bad?” you asked then, seeing your own future being sealed right in front of you

“Having you, his darling daughter, will remind his grace of his true family, of why he chose your line as the one to succeed him, I believe you will bring the court comfort, and strength, to your sister’s line.”, you shared concerned looks with Harwin, “A seat in the small council is yours, Princess, and for Harwin, there is the post as commander of the city watch”

“Those are generous seats”, your husband muttered

“Indeed”

“Lyonel…”, you called, “I don’t know what you are asking”, you needed him to say it

“I am asking for your return to court”, he said firmly

“You want us to take the boys, and Aemma?”, you asked then

“I wouldn’t ask if I didn't believe this is the best course of action, you are the lords of the Riverlands… You have Dorne and the North as allies, you built those bridges, now you need to cross them”, the princess and now Prince of Dorne had send many letters to you over the years, never forgetting the visit they paid when you were alone in the castle, and for the North, Cregan Stark always send you gifts, and letters, which you answered and in turned send more gifts.

“You are talking like a war is going to break out”, you whispered

“Princess, your father is sick”, he told you, “his mind is drifting, he might change his mind, or else, the Hightowers might take that chance to do something…”, Lord Lyonel was one of the smartest and joust men you had ever encountered, and he sat at the side of the King, if he was exposing this to you, is because it had merit.

“Dear father by law”, you muttered, “we will talk about this, you must understand my trepidations since… I’ve made Harrenhal my home and, it’s so sad for me to leave it”

“Of course, my sweet daughter by law”

After that, you and Harwin walked together towards your shared chambers, ready to take to bed, you were suddenly so tired

“We need to start making preparations” he said as he started taking off his clothes

“Harwin…” you called with concern, “Are you truly entertaining this?” you asked, “put ourselves and our children at risk?”

“The Red keep is the safest place”, he muttered

“For now” you said, “you heard your father, The King is sick, how long until he expires, and a war breaks out for his succession?” you asked, “To Rhaenyra to fight young Aegon, and the Hightowers…”

“That might not happen if we are there”, he said firmly

“You had visited the capital more than me”, you muttered, you were only going for very special occasions that you could count with fingers of one of your hands, loving your new home too much to abandon it for long, Harwin however, visited as twice as many times, being called upon by his father constantly for accounting of the Riverlands, “what do you think?”

“I think that my father’s fears as true, we must return at once”, he said firmly

“You seem so eager to return to the capital, husband”, you muttered with bitterness

“Don’t, don’t do that” he begged. You know that even if Harrenhal was thriving under his leadership, no matter how many rides spurring his horse he took, or how much he trained, or how many times a night he took you, he had became restless, missing the fast pace of King’s Landing, and that harmed you, because you were so happy here, but you knew he was missing something to be completely full, or perhaps someone

“I don’t want to go”, you said, words stuck to your throat and tears threatened to fall from your eyes, “I have a bad feeling about this”

“Don’t cry”, he begged

“We are happy here”, you fighted, “our children can do as they please, we can do as we please…”

“This is the future of the realm”, he muttered

“The realm is going to be fine”, you said back, “they have my sister and my father… and Lord Corlys, and princess Rhaenys standing beside her…you want them to have us as well, Maekar, Rhaegar, little Aemma, and me?”

“This is your family, calling for you”, he said firmly, “we should respond to that calling”, the battle was lost, you knew, he knew it. And deep down, you did want to answer that call, but being a mother had made you selfish, self centered, putting your children and your immediate family first

“You are the Lord of Harrenhal and the leader of our family”, you said bitterly, giving up, “what you say, goes”

“Don’t be like that”, he grunted, “I would never force you to do anything”

“But you are forcing me,” you said firmly. You didn’t look at him, instead you turned your back to him and sat on the bed to remove your shoes and socks, “You call in the maester and the Housekeeper and tell them, we leave for King’s landing tomorrow”

“Darling…” he called for you but you didn’t answer, you just left your rooms barefoot, lonely tears falling down your eyes. You ended up in the tower, you could see the God’s eye from there, and the beautiful sky with a full moon and all the stars

You didn’t want to go to the Capital, because you knew what awaited you there, and deep down you knew about the coming conflict, and the part you will play in it. Deep down you knew, you have dreamt about it many times.

And no alliances, nor dragons, not even Harwin or all the armies you could gather will protect you from your fate.

The carriages were getting ready, and your children couldn’t be happier, you had always taught them about being excited for new adventures, and traveling to the capital, to a huge castle like the Red Keep, filled with members of their family, and other kids, other dragons, they couldn’t be happier as you told them they could start their training. And for that you were thankful. Aemma wanted nothing more than to see the King, and Helaena, even if they never saw each other they exchanged letters alongside the king’s and the girls were fond of eachother.

“And we could train?” asked Rhaegar, already driving you to the edge of madness with all of his questions. following you around as you commanded servants what to pack in coffers

“I’ll ask Steffon to train you himself”, you said, and they seemed content

“And me” muttered Harwin. You smiled as you stop to kiss your husband, trying to forget the fight of the night before

“Iuuuu”, mocked Rhaegar grossed out by their parents shows of affection, you just giggled as Harwin chuckled and ruffled his hair

“Maybe at court you’ll find a girl to love just as much I love your mother”, he muttered

“Ugh, father, I’m only ten!” he mocked and ran off. You laughed as you saw him go

“Great strategy, husband” you congratulated. He smiled kindly at you

“I know you didn’t want to come, but trust me on this…”

“I know”, the thing is that you trusted your own gut more than Harwin’s, but no matter, your fate was already dictated, you only had to play the game, the cards that you’ve been dealt, and… you’d always have Harrenhal if the things turned sour.

But now your other son required your attention, pulling at your arm

“Where are our dragons going to go?” asked Maekar

“Probably to the dragonpit” you answered, “I told you about it, remember?”

“Yes, but Aerion and Karnax are always in the open”, fighted Maekar

“I know my love, but it’s only for a short time”, you answered calmly. The dragonlings would usually sleep in the wild, and when the weather was hard, Vhaelar would shelter them under her huge wings, as she still recognized them as her’s. “Or they go where their mother goes, just like you”, you booped his nose and he giggled.

And sooner than you’d like, you were ready, all the things were loaded, and only your family was left

“Can we go on dragon back, mother?”, asked Aemma, you looked at Harwin and he nodded

“Yes, sweetlings”, your sons cheered in joy. You did want to arrive on Dragonback, to show some authority. A show of strength

And as you saw the caravan with your husband and Lyonel part before you, you looked at your children with worry, but as they looked up at you with bright smiles, you knew everything was going to be alright

Taglist! ❤️ @tearsarcane @integra1127 @aestmilky @thanyatargaryen @tythaitie @lostinworldofdarkness @voodoogoul @wildmindedbeauty32 @lil-pudd @alicattx @electric-bloo @astaaan-lol @stargaryenx @kaitieskidmore1 @bregarc @lilpnd @jcpenneyyy @janelei @fexibau @ladyoakenshield157 @danielle-leah1997 @lady-ragnvindr @cecilyjmorgenstern @omgsuperstarg @bugheadskid @batprincess1013 @her-fandom-sanctum

Notes: Karnax is the first dragon ever mounted by a man, and that man was Aerion, the very first Valyrian. They were inseparable once Karnax hatched, and then when Aerion realized he could mount him and fly in it, they founded Valyria. Those are the names chosen for the dragons of the Strong Boys

#harwin strong x reader #ser harwin x reader #harwin strong x targaryen reader #harwin strong #ser harwin strong #harwin breakbones #harwin x reader #ser harwin breakbones strong #targaryen!reader #hbo house of the dragon #house targeryen #house of the dragon #house targaryen #misguidedhotd

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merakiui · 3 years ago

Note

royal!scaramouche x servant!reader is great and all but HAVE YOU CONSIDERED BUTLER!SCARAMOUCHE X ROYAL!READER?!

THINKING THINKING THINKING AAAAA I’ll put my thoughts under the cut!

He’s taken in by the palace after a few knights find him in the dreary countryside, surviving off of the smallest portions of food scraps, and he’s brought to the King and Queen, where they debate what to do with him. He’s just a young boy whose home and family are unknown, but your parents surmise something happened or else he wouldn’t have been found wandering from place to place. They take pity on him and ultimately decide to let him stay in the palace, so long as he’s able to prove his worth.

In other words, he’ll become a servant.

He’s trained by some of the older servants, all of whom pass on their knowledge and wisdom to him. He’s surprisingly obedient for a child and doesn’t have much to say. It’s almost as if he doesn’t have an opinion and simply goes along with the majority. Things change when he’s introduced to you. You’re told that one day he might be serving you when you’re older and that since the both of you are somewhat close in age you’ll be the first person he serves once he’s eligible to start as your butler. As of now, he’s just an errand boy for his superiors, whose only tasks are to fetch small things like towels and bath products, frozen ingredients from the ice cellar, and to accompany the others wherever they go so that he can memorize the layout of the palace.

It isn’t long before he’s finally able to serve you. It’s been a few months and he’s managed to learn as much as possible in the time he’s been living there. He’s bright for a child, but there’s not much emotion. He hardly smiles or laughs. He just exists. And even though this is technically a practice for him, he does what he can to ensure he’s good enough so that he won’t be thrown out into the wild again.

He’s not that talkative at first, but once he spends enough time with you he’ll slowly start to emerge from his shell. The two of you grow up together, with him standing loyally by your side as your dutiful butler, and you as the one set to inherit the throne someday. You’re destined for greatness; he is destined to be your disposable shadow. Nevertheless, the two of you have a friendly bond. He’s gotten comfortable around you as the years have passed and the two of you have matured. Now he’s a lot more harsh, especially when it comes to your schedule and the fact that it must be followed otherwise you’ll hear an earful from royal advisors and your parents. But you know that underneath all of those thorns he means well. He’s just looking out for you as your butler.

And all seems to be going well. He accompanies you wherever you go, whether it’s to the gazebo for an afternoon lunch or to the occasional gatherings between other royals your age, where the lot of you indulge in silly, political gossip and tea and snacks. Scaramouche doesn’t mind his daily life. It’s nice being your butler. You treat him very well—almost as an equal instead of someone below you in terms of social status. When it’s just the two of you, you discard all of the stuffy titles and proper etiquette and address him as a friend. And it’s really nice because you’re the first friend he’s ever had. You taught him the meaning of the word ‘friend.’

Unlike everyone else, you accepted him without any questions and you promised to never abandon him. He’s your butler. No one else’s.

And then you reach the age where other duties start to become far more…real. Your betrothed visits a lot—far too much for his liking—and Scaramouche is forced to stand in the background while you entertain your fiancé. He was aware that you were engaged long before he even met you and he knows that your future has been written for you—knows there’s no way he can change that. He knows he can’t be the one to marry you. From a standpoint of political and social power, it wouldn’t work. He’s no one of importance in the eyes of royalty.

Oh, but how lovely it is to fantasize about a life with you, where the two of you are happily married and you don’t have to worry about your royal duties.

That’s nothing but a foolish dream, one he finds himself desperately wishing would come true each time he lays eyes on you and your bothersome fiancé.

#genshin chit chat #i have way too many thoughts #but these are the basic ones #aaaaa butler mouchey <3 #meraki faves #butler scaramouche

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darkandstormyart · 4 years ago

Text

Xicheng fic recs

(figured i might make a list of my own)

(to be expanded as i dig out more treasure/remember stuff)

in no particular order:

Deep as the Yearning Night by FreckledStarKnight

“At first, it was pure chance. The second time was accidental. And the third time? Well, they say the third time’s the charm, after all. Lan Xichen discovers that Jiang Wanyin sings beautifully and is immediately enamored by it. His pursuit of Jiang Wanyin’s secret talent leads to a discovery and a series of events that he did not anticipate at all. Not that he’s complaining, of course. He got what he came for and more. Or, how two sect leaders get together through the song called love. CQL-verse.“

post-seclusion lxc

trying to get jc to sing

bonus lxc & jin ling feels i hadn’t considered before

cute

Always use protection by hesselives

“In which Lan Wangji attempts to hire a new bodyguard for his older brother, a well-known traveling exorcist. Jiang Wanyin doesn’t even make his carefully considered list of Top Ten Candidates, and yet here he is.

Lots of wandering in the countryside, distant yelling, and mildly inconvenient spirits.”

bodyguard au

honestly just really intersting worldbuilding

Rewrite the stars by Arashii

“Five great kingdoms have been fighting for years and when the kingdom of Yunmeng is destroyed, the Crown Prince Jiang Cheng vanishes.In Gusu, Lan Xichen makes an offer impossible for Jiang Cheng to refuse. His life or revenge? There’s only one option and Jiang Cheng swears loyalty to the man he hated the most his whole life, the Crown Prince of Gusu, Lan Xichen himself.Written for XiChengFest2020 - Day 4“

ROYALTY AU ROYALTY AU

enemies to lovers!

flashbacks! i love flashbacks so much ohmygod

No paths are bound by Arashii

“In seclusion, Lan Huan has the support of a ghost no one has seen since the massacre of Yunmeng Jiang. His feelings start changing with the often visits and conversations they share. Before Lan Huan can confess though, he ascends, leaving everything and everyone behind him.

Two hundred years later, back to the Human Realm and without powers, the Martial God Zewu-Jun has a mission to uphold. His Heavenly Calamity started. The clues are little and the support comes in the most unexpected form, the current Ghost King: Sandu Shengshou. Now they need to stick together to contain a menace that is slowly growing.“

TGCF AU TGCF AU

ghost king jiang cheng come on

doesn’t follow tgcf plot, just the setup so no spoilers

jiang cheng gets the dogs and the xichen he deserves

once upon a dream by cafedeolla

“Xicheng soulmate AU

An au where your dreams are small snippets of your soulmate’s day. They’d show small things like buying coffee, reading a book, or hanging out with people from their perspective.

The problem was that people always have expectations and Jiang Cheng knows he always falls short of them. Time and time again.“

soulmate au, but being soulmates is more a problem than a solution

misunderstandingssss all over the place

now with a squel (in progress?)

Lan Furen series by jagaimocchi

“Jiang Cheng leaves Lotus Pier before the Wen Internment Camp and before the destruction of his home. When he meets Lan Xichen on the run from the Wens after the burning of Cloud Recesses, his plan to live a peaceful life away from cultivation sects is quickly derailed. Now, free to make his own choices, he cannot find it in himself to leave the other man's side.

With love, patience and time, Jiang Cheng finds his own happiness and peace with his past.“

have you ever wanted a fic where jiang cheng peaces out from home in search for a better life, bc he’s Had Enough??? jags got you covered

adorable xicheng

good uncle-dad-figure Lan Qiren

ongoing <3

Just around the riverbend by JungleJelly

“One day.

Jiang Cheng just wanted one day of peace and quiet, away from home, away from his responsibilities, away from his idiot brother and his nutcases of a mother and father. Just a few hours alone — him and a boat and nothing else.

Clearly, that was too much to ask for.”

now with a new story in the series which is adorable too!!!

mermaid!lxc need i say more?

Bad ideas (where they lead) by JungleJelly

“Jiang Cheng is a busy man. Fortunately, he is also a huge pushover when it comes to his sister, so when she recommends that he start doing yoga, he agrees pretty easily.Featuring Lan Xichen in yoga pants, Jiang Cheng’s inability to handle a crush, and, perhaps most importantly, a big fluffy dog.“

done for 2020 MXTX MiniBang

yoga instructor Lan Xichen

Jiang Cheng is: struggling with a crush on the yoga guy from youtube & very angry about that

If there’s a price for rotten judgement by TheWanderingHeart

“All Jiang Cheng wants to do is, well... his job, really. Other than that? Keep the city safe, keep his nephew alive, keep his sanity intact (if possible).

So when his brother calls with unexpected news, he knows all of that is about to fly out of the window.

***

[Every instinct is telling him don’t ask, you don’t want to know. By this point, Nie HuaiSang has scooted closer to listen. Jiang Cheng takes a steadying breath and pulls out his antacids. “What did you do?”]”

superhero au, come on

jc just trying to do his job in peace

(he can’t)

i love it so much oh my god *sobs*

The Form of Boneless Ice by TheWanderingHeart

“Mythical beasts have long ago been driven to extinction by the gentry — hunted for sport, but more importantly for their magical cores. Since then, there remains only one creature that has never been caught. The Jiang’s retreated a long time ago. Abandoning land altogether, they sought safety where the humans could not reach.It all comes to a head though, purely by chance. (Or is it by fate that a spontaneous decision allows for them to meet? If fate were a rock!) Jiang Cheng suddenly finds his whole life balanced on the head of a pin — on the flimsy promise of a human boy. In his opinion, things cannot possibly get worse!(But then they do when the Wens decide it’s finally time to search for the elusive merpeople, and suddenly nowhere is safe.)“

there she goes again, with another beautiful xicheng story full of awwww and mythology

actually one of the first xicheng fics i read

i chose it because there were mermaids

painfully accurate takes on Jiang family dynamics

kids! lots of kids!

Let me Slytherin to Your Heart by TheWanderingHeart

“Jiang Cheng never thought he'd return to Hogwarts, but in hindsight, he probably should have known that someday he would.With his nephew about to start school, he reluctantly takes his good friend's bad parenting? career? advice and ends up tumbling head-first back into the madness that he hoped he'd left behind... and rediscovering some feelings he thought he'd left behind too.“

Harry Potter au!

just really fecking cute

lots of snakes

[I am not going to link all of Jo’s fics, though I probably could, just my 3 favourites. UOSB is there by default]

Talent Hunt Crew Finds Angry Guy Shouting On College Campus, Recruits Him For Vocal Projection Abilities by oh_fudgecakes

“Jiang Cheng, resident Angry Guy and heir to a conglomerate empire, has never been the apple of his father’s eye. Quashed under the shadow of his brilliant brother, the music prodigy Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng sees his chance to turn things around when he is recruited by the All-Stars Lan Talent Hunt. One problem: he can’t sing to save his goddamn life.As he struggles to develop his nascent singing abilities, Jiang Cheng finds himself sucked into the whirlwind drama of reality TV, helped along by his adoring siblings, his irritable vocal coach Wen Qing, and strangely enough, the unfairly attractive host of the All-Stars Lan Talent Hunt, Lan Xichen. Somewhere in the glare of the stage lights and an unexpected first love, Jiang Cheng stumbles upon the thing he was searching for all along: the courage to dream — and to attempt the impossible.“

done for 2019 MXTX Big Bang

uuuuuuuuuuh i might have cried maybe

heartwarming? painful at times? lots of family love?

slowburn xicheng being lovely

The Provenence of Hope series by velithya

“A chance meeting on a night hunt sets a course of events into motion that will change everything. Featuring Xicheng getting together, recovery for Lan Xichen, healing for Jiang Cheng, and always, always, hope.“

got everything. feels. hope. love. ~~healing~~

A Small Measure of Peace by Sandstone112

“With his brother in seclusion, Lan Xichen finds himself in temporary custody of his nephew with little to no expertise in the child-raising department. Uncertain and alone, Zewu-Jun is willing to do everything to be the person Yuan needs—even if it means inviting Sandu Shengshou to a playdate.“

a loooot of adorable family times with jc and lxc taking care of their nephews

good grandpa lqr!

canon but fixed and less painful

🍋🍋🍋🍋🍋if you wish to avoid scurvy:🍋🍋🍋🍋🍋

Some day I’m gonna make you mine series by locketofyourhair

xicheng getting together through the years

friends with benefits but the real benefits are the friends we made along the way

Take me over (take me tonight) by velithya

jiang cheng has a tattoo and lan xichen doesn’t stand a chance

i'd be the sweet feeling of release (mankind now dreams of) by piyo13

two bros, chilling in a cave, no feet apart because they don’t want to lose their cultivation powers what are you gonna do

haven’t read yet and shame on me, but AM GONNA:

Upon Our Silver Bridge by TheWanderingHeart obviously

““When the path ignites a soul, there's no remaining in place. The foot touches ground, but not for long.” ― Hakim Sanai

Lan Xichen's sorrows have caught the attention of something. Unlike the adventures and foes they have faced before, there is no obvious enemy here to defeat. If this is the same thing they thought had taken Nie Mingjue's life, then he believes it is fated for him to die as well. Nothing can stop the black fire when it wants to burn.Jiang Cheng is sure his part in this is over. Wei Wuxian is back, his grand adventure concluded, and he'd never been at the centre of it anyway. So what does it matter what happens to him in the end? Slowly, he will come to realise that there will always be a battle to fight, a story to tell, a choice to make, and there is no such thing as an end to anything.“

it was difficult to do things in 2020 and few i regret not doing more than not reading uosb yet :’(

i will tho

Emergency Help Wanted by piyo13

“EMERGENCY HELP WANTED I lied when I got my job. I told them I had a kid so I could leave early from work to pick him up from daycare, take him to doctor's appointments, and occasionally miss a day when he's sick. Long story short, I'm in too deep. I didn't think it through. Looking to rent a kid for bring your child to work day. Must be a boy ages four to six, longish dark hair, likes soccer. Must also be artistic as the macaroni noodle paintings I made seem a little advanced for his age. Also, I will pay extra for someone willing to play the role of husband when dropping him off. He's a prosecuting attorney who often brings his work home. Message me for further details. Serious inquiries only.“

Running Our Hands Through Embers by MarvelousMar

“If asked, Jiang Cheng would compare falling in love with Lan Xichen to a moth inevitably drawn to a flame.It burned.***In which Jiang Cheng discovers that even death can't help him escape from his trauma, so he embarks on a quest to save the people he loves, fix what he can, make the love of his life fall for him, and maybe, somewhere along the way, do a little bit of healing.”

The Beginner’s Guide to Moving On by InvincibleMel

gone from ao3, but i think there’s a link with a pdf going around

#xicheng #fic rec #Jiang Cheng #lan xichen #mdzs #the untamed #the grandmaster of demonic cultivation #mo dao zu shi

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bokutoslittlebird · 4 years ago

Text

Your Place

Akaashi x sister!reader

Author’s Note : This was originally gonna just be a short drabble but like.. I’ve thought of this before. So I changed it into a full fledged fic; Fukurōdani has a girls’ volleyball club ; Love hotels in Japan are pretty popular, especially in Tokyo, and happen to have kiosks to keep up the anonymity, while also offering options of staying overnight or for a few hours (generally 2-4). The rooms offer lots of options, including room service (including food and toys), such as jacuzzi, showers, massage chairs, King-sized bed, as well as a box of free condoms ; okay I don’t know if a butt plug can actually plug up a vagina and if it is even safe (it should be) so don’t take my words as fact! Please!

Warnings : Incest, noncon/dubcon, gaslighting, naïve and innocent reader, manipulation, alcohol, underaged drinking [legal age in Japan is 20], love hotels, Keiji wants lil sis to be his housewife, mating press, pussyjob, orgasm denial, overstimulation, sex toys [butt/anal plug, egg vibrator, hitachi wand vibrator], lots of Nii-sans used, breeding kink, no actual pregnancy (yet), fingering (f. receiving)

The roars of the crowd enters your ears as the ball bounces against the floor of the large stadium, the opposing players diving to receive the ball only to fail. Your team screams and cheers, everyone running to envelope the ace of your team, Akari, as she hugs everyone back. Screaming hurts your ears, yet you’re still doing it. Adrenaline rushes through you as the announcer claims your team with the victory and the announcement that you’ll be moving onto the next round, the finals of Nationals.

Your team lines up, shaking hands with the opposing team as congrats is shared between members. Once that is done, you all face the seats on both sides, bowing and thanking them for cheering you all on. When your eyes look into the stadium seats, they immediately catch the lidded eyes of Keiji, his hands clasped together as he smiles. The simple motion has your chest puffing with pride, tears sliding down your cheeks as you know you made him proud. With your position on the team, he’s the one who trained you to be the best setter the Fukurōdani girls’ volleyball club has ever had these last three years.

Once the moment is over, everyone is back at the hotel room and either on their laptops, phones, television, or asleep. When you exit the bathroom, your hair has been brushed and styled with a nice dress, accompanying the leggings and boots Keiji gifted you to wear. Akari whistles, her arm over your shoulder as she talks to you.

“Who you lookin’ so good for?” She pries, eyes tracing the lip gloss you put on.

“My brother. He requested me to wear something nice. He’s taking me to dinner,” a bit of heat is in your voice as you say that. Keiji’s always pampering you, he loves seeing you dolled up. It’s been like that since you were playing dress-up when he was 10 and you were 5. Akari’s gaze takes on a confused look, pursed lips as she processes your words.

“He’s always taking you somewhere nice after a good game, it feels like. Why don’t you ever invite us?” She finally says. Your head snaps up, looking in the mirror at yourself compared to Akari who is also looking at your face and outfit. It wasn’t glamorous in your eyes, but it suddenly dawns on you that it’s more than a brother should expect. The twist in your gut is ignored, your head shaking as you clear your head.

“He doesn’t know any of you guys. Plus, he’s an alumni. He’s always at our games,” your response isn’t what she was expecting, you’re sure of it. But the truth is, you don’t know why Keiji takes you out to nice restaurants or just on nice walks after games. It’s the few times he has off, always requesting off to be with you, cheering you on, his full support as your brother. Occasionally, he even brings along Bokuto, his best friend, who always congratulates you and asks to have you visit his own team someday. It’s a request that you always turn down, Keiji’s eyes taking on a dark glint that sends shivers down your spine at just the mere memory of them.

Akari leaves you alone after that, your time to get ready slowly coming to an end as your phone rings. It’s Keiji, of course, asking if you’re ready yet. “Almost, nii-san! I just need to get my coat and then I’ll head down.”

He’s at the lobby of the hotel, lounging in a chair as he swipes on his phone. He’s dressed as nicely as you are, black slacks with a nice white dress shirt, all under a large coat to keep out the cold. You bounce up to him, excited for the dinner. “You look beautiful, [Y/N],”

“Thank you! You know me so well, so it’s really all your doing,” you giggle, linking your hand in his offered elbow. It felt so right, being beside as you had been these past few years. Walking towards the restaurant, you didn’t even feel the ache in your ankles and balls of your feet from the heels nor the unmistakeable tension between the two of you. It just felt familiar and right to be in this position, sitting across from Keiji as he lets you gush about all the stuff going through your head during the match or even when you happened to be getting ready for the dinner. A shadow seems to settle over his face as you refer to it as such, just a dinner. You almost referred to it as a date, but quickly corrected yourself.

Tension hangs between you two, you having to force it away by breaking the silence Keiji brings. He’s usually much more talkative, praising you as he talks about what you did right and correcting you on things you did wrong, but never criticizing you too hard. Dinner ends, with Keiji paying the full bill without ever letting you know, saying that he simply cannot let a woman pay, regardless of situation. The champagne and wine he let you have a taste of lingers in your mouth, a burn in your throat from the bitter taste of alcohol. It’s not enough to get you drunk, but you do find yourself clinging to Keiji tighter, feet unstable and legs unreliable as he brings you back to the hotel.

He stops and even in your bubbly and hazy state, you can tell the hotel isn’t the same. “Come on, you need to rest,” he says, lips next to you ear as he ushers you inside. Upon entering the room, the lobby, you know it’s not the same. You panic, the alcohol making you less restrained in your actions as you go to tug on Keiji’s arm.

“Nii—”

“Ah, ah, Keiji, dear. Until we get back to your room,”

His usage of ‘your room’ has your nerves calming down, even as he uses his card to pay the kiosk and tap on the screen, buying something. A metal jingle comes from the bottom of the electronic, Keiji picking up the key to a room. Urging you along, you follow him to the elevator. The lack of people seems to enter your mind, confusing you as you glance around the spotlessly clean black elevator. A small voice enters your mind, telling you that the hotel’s elevators are supposed to be silver, shimmering in the light that shines down.

Keiji has to practically drag you into a room, the door shutting and clicking behind you as it locks. The room is spacious, a large tub in the corner of the room as the king-sized bed offers comfort and relaxation. Yet, you falter— unmoving, your voice seems to barely get out as you question your brother. “Where... where are we?”

“My room for the night, dear. You’re drunk, you need to rest,” his comforting words have you slowly shuffling towards the bed. The chair beside the bed seems too fancy for something in a normal hotel room, more adrenaline entering your veins as you panic from unfamiliarity.

“Nii-san, I don’t like this. Take me back to my room. Akari and Hana and-”

“Shut up, you little slut,” the venom in his words has you squeaking, your much smaller frame easily being pinned to the bed by Keiji’s much broader frame. “I’ve been generous this entire evening and all you’ve blabbered about is your team and your friends. What about me, huh? You haven’t even asked how I was doing the entire date,”

“Nii-san, stop!”

“Do I not hold the most importance in your life anymore? You used to be all over me, my sweet little sister that absolutely enjoyed being around me. Now you’re prancing around as if you have not a care in the world. That boy from the boys’ volleyball club seemed awfully close for comfort, don’t you think?”

“He-,” you once more falter, the brief images from after the game when the captain of the boys’ team congratulated all of you on the win. He wasn’t close to you, you were sure of it, but why would Keiji have been there? “He’s barely a friend, nii-san,”

“Not only that, but you always have that giggle and tendency to twirl your hair as you talk to Bokuto-san, your body moving closer to him as he would walk beside you. You barely acknowledge my existence anymore. Do you know how that makes me feel?”

“I’m sorry,” the tears spill down your cheeks, a hiccup as he continues to say mean things. “I’m sorry,”

“You’ll be graduating soon and then you’re going to live with me. You’re going to live with me and be my little housewife. I’m going to make you completely mine, inside and out,” his breath is hot as it fans over your face, his grip strong as he continues to squeeze and hold your face. You’re unable to do anything, the fear from his words and actions has you frozen beneath him. As his words settle in, ice crawls through your veins as you realize your gut feeling, the tension between you two, everything you ignored for the past hour and a half had a reason for being there. His entire plan was to bring you here, but you’re unable to do much of anything against him — he’s always been stronger than you. When you were young, it was comforting, his arms holding you after a nightmare or even when your first friend moved to America, but now it just served to bring more tears to you eyes, your body forced to let him do what he wants to you.

Keiji’s quick to undress you, your coat being shed as he pushes your fancy dress up, the leggings, shoes, and panties being pulled off and left to fall on the floor. Tears continue to fall, chest heaving as you’re powerless to do anything. Even if you could find the energy to move and attempt get him off of you, it wouldn’t bring anything to fruition. “You’re so dry, are you not enjoying this?”

“No, nii-san. I’m not,” you’re honest with him, yet he doesn’t stop. Sitting back on his heels, he lets his eyes trail over your form. Before a thought can enter your mind to move, he’s pushing his weight on top of you as he grabs something the table beside him, a long metal rod emerging from the miniature dresser. He keeps you pinned, moving the rubber head down to your clit, pressing a button as it begins to vibrate. “Ah! Nii-san,” your muddled voice comes out, the sensation sending an unfamiliar tingling up your spine.

“It feels good, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, I’m going to make you feel even better. All you gotta do is relax, pretty girl,”

“I’m- I’m still- y-your—” your words die on your tongue, your gut twisting into a knot as the sensation turns pleasurable. You’ve never touched yourself, always being told by Keiji that only bad girls touched themselves, that whores and sluts did. Keiji-nii doesn’t like those kinds of girls, so you never dared to go against his wishes.

“Of course you are, baby. You’ll always be my pretty girl, even if I have to remind you exactly where you belong. I’ll remind you of your place,” his words stop there, but in your head his words continue. Silently, the words of ‘if you’ll let me’ enter, an unspoken question that asks for your consent. Yet, you don’t give him anything else. Your moans and mewls are all he gets, a hand grasping at the unbuttoned dress shirt still on him. A small smile paints along his lips, your vision going black as you roll your eyes. Before the knot can release, the vibrations are removed from your clit and you whine, aftershocks coursing through you.

Keiji’s voice is barely a whisper, under his breath, “I’ll give you something much better, don’t worry.” The vibrator is forgotten and discarded, his hands fumbling with his slacks as he pulls them down, along with the dark grey underwear. His cock springs free, hard and thick and long, you unconsciously scoot away as he strokes himself. “Don’t move away,”

“But it’s scary, nii-san,” you whimper, arms close to your chest as your head bumps against the headboard. He doesn’t say anything, using his hand to rub his cock’s tip against your folds. Contrary to earlier, you’re dripping wet as the wet smacks of his appendage against your skin has you clenching around nothing, more juices dripping out. Moving his hips back and forth, he adds another sensation on your clit as he thrusts in between your folds. His tip catches onto the hood of your folds, brushing against the overly sensitive nerves as you whine and mewl at each move he makes.

“You’re so nice and slick for me, it won’t hurt. It just seems scary, look,” he forces you to do just that, hand gripping your hair as he forces you to look at his cock. The underside of it is glistening with your slick, absolutely dripping with you as it slides down to his base and over his balls. “It’s just in your mind, it won’t hurt. Don’t you trust me?”

“But nii-san, I don’t want this,” it’s not what he wants to hear, you’re sure of it. Yet he says nothing. A sigh finally breaks the silent tension as he rubs his finger against your cunt, two fingers slipping in until they can’t anymore. You’re tight, you know you are, clenching around only two of his fingers.

“If you didn’t want this, you would still be dry. You wouldn’t be squeezing my fingers so snugly. This is your body saying it wants this, don’t you remember what I said?”

Of course you don’t, he says a lot to you, so you shake your head. Another sigh.

“You need to listen to your body. It knows you better than you know yourself. I know you better than you do, you know,” his words ring true, his fingers continuing to pump themselves into you as he talks. Eventually, the feeling is no longer unfamiliar, the sensation pleasing as you moan. He smiles at that, leaning to press a kiss to your forehead as his fingers retract themselves. Using the slick on them, he rubs them against his cock to use as lube.

Pushing his tip into you is scary, but it’s not painful. As he sinks further into you, it becomes much more painful. The room must be soundproof, since Keiji keeps pushing in without trying to make you stop your screaming. He does, however, lean down to press his lips to your tear-stained cheeks as you squeeze him. He groans, his hips rutting against you. “You’re fine, stop screaming. Stop being so pathetic,”

His harsh words have your screams silencing, tears and sniffles as your walls flutter around him. It still hurts, it burns, it stings, it’s more painful than anything you’ve ever dealt with before. Before you can manage to get adjusted, Keiji is pushing your legs up to your chest, somehow making himself feel deeper than he actually is. The feeling of being crushed is back once more, his hips rearing back only to come back down against your skin. The scream from your throat is more of a moan, nails digging into the back of Keiji’s neck and teasing the small hairs as he pistons his cock into your cunt.

It’s a tight fit, the way you’re sucking him in and squeezing him with every thrust. Keiji’s balls slap against your slick ass, cunt squelching with each pump of his cock into you as more juices are forced out. His own moans and grunts of pleasure are drowning in the wave of mewls, squeals, and moans spilling from your lips. The feeling from before is back, the knot in your tummy as he rubs his cock against the inside of your walls and instead of being denied once more, the knot finally snaps as you cream all around his cock, accompanying a squeal of his name.

“That’s it, pretty girl. Cum on my cock, let me know how good you feel,” he chuckles, picking up his pace as you continue to suck him in. A garbled call of ‘nii-san!’ leaves your lips, the sensation of his heavy balls slapping against you and his thick cock against your fluttering walls has you creaming around him once more. A sound akin to a growl comes from his throat, leaning even further forwards as he gets himself as deep as he can go, the hair at the base of his cock rutting against your sensitive clit. “I’m going to fill you with my seed and you’re going to have my babies, okay?”

“No, nii-san, I don’t want that!” You cries are ignored, your body continuing to clamp around his cock as he shoots his load into you. The feeling of being full and so warm inside has your eyes rolling, drool spilling from your open mouth as you gush around him, clear liquid splashing against his abdomen.

Once the high has passed, he removes his cock from you, keeping you in that position. You don’t dare speak, unsure you’ll be able to as your throat burns from all the screaming and cries. A metal object briefly enters your vision, the object being inserted into your pussy that drips with your brother’s seed, milky white and thick.

“If you keep it all inside, I’ll give you another treat, okay? You wanna be a good girl for me, don’t you?” He doesn’t wait for a response, but he does take out another object. “You need to keep having an orgasm, I’ll make sure you feel real good, okay?” A medium-sized egg-shaped object enters your ass, another stinging pain from the insertion. Another round of vibrations start, your legs shaking as you mewl, head thrown back as you feel another orgasm quickly coming on. “You’ll be a good little housewife for me, won’t you? Swollen with my child and your pussy will be all for me, you know this, don’t you?”

Of course you do, regardless whether your mind agrees with you or not. He’s your nii-san and he knows best.

#haikyuu x reader #haikyuu smut #akaashi x reader #Mr. Keiji #BB.Kinky #BB.Dark #BB.Requests #tw.dubcon #tw.noncon #tw.alcohol #tw.manipulation #tw.incest #tw.gaslighting #tw.degradation #tw.breeding #tw.pregnancy #cw.pregnancy #cw.alcohol #cw.overstimulation

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hobidreams · 5 years ago

Text

april 1869.

the night brings with it the moon, rippling waters, and truths silenced with his mouth hot on your skin.

pairing: joseon king!yoongi x reader genre: smut, angst words: 2.2k contains: historical au, exhibitionism (but more indirectly), rough sex, dirty talk, name-calling, hurt feelings, hair pulling, a very unhealthy (but historically accurate) relationship, yoongi is an ass

moonlit throne index. this is drabble two. start from the beginning?

The chilly evening wind of coming spring sweeps a scattering of fallen leaves across the courtyard. It ripples through the sleeves of your jeogori as you descend from the stone veranda of your quarters towards the private palace gardens. The two guards who stand at the entrance move wordlessly aside upon seeing you, offering you slight bows that you return. Past this barrier, the tall, reaching trees hang against the darkened sky, heavy branches scratching invisible marks over the moonlight. You follow the set path with steady footsteps, passing blooming shrubs with a yawn on your lips. The day has been long and your eyes are sore from studying medicine with only a dim lamp for company. But the breeze - it whisks away fatigue with an enviable ease.

The path winds along the expansive pond. Water lettuce and lily pads cover most of the liquid surface, lining the makeshift island that houses your favorite: the grand pavilion. Recently renovated on the king’s direct instruction. You move closer, slippers leaving stone to scrape the thin wooden bridge.

Something in the dark shifts.

Your eyes fall upon a shadow. Your steps stutter, then quicken.

“Jeonha.”

The king sits on the left bench, near the open front that has yet to be replaced, with a casual arm draped over the intricate banister. He doesn’t stir at the sound of your deliberately soft voice, his gaze remaining mired on something in the distance, far beyond the pavilion’s, or perhaps even the palace’s, reach. His hat is abandoned beside him, the topknot slightly loose where it is bound on his head.

“May I join you?”

He waves his hand absently.

You consider your options, but ultimately take advantage of the pavilion’s half-finished state and sit on the very edge with your legs tucked under you in a traditional kneel. You cannot even remember the last time you’ve sat together like this - out in the open outdoors, away from the tightly-drawn curtains of his chambers and away from prying eyes. Only now do you realize how much it had been missing. “The willow trees have grown out nicely,” you offer, what you hope is a safe topic. You watch a lily pad drift idly by. “I hope the lotus flowers bloom well this year. The pond truly felt so empty last season without their color. I—”

“Is it commonplace for subjects to inflict idle chatter on their king?” The ice in his voice is a slap across the face.

You shut up immediately. Nervously swallow too, but the heaviness in your throat remains stuck. You’ve become uncomfortably familiar with that tone, the quick temper that flares up in seconds but takes its time to dissipate. A part of you wants to retreat and hide; the other can never bear to leave him. Ever so slightly, chewing on the inside of your cheek, you turn your head instead. Take your first good look at him and almost gasp at how gaunt he looks in the sparse light. Nor do you expect the deep purple settled beneath his eyes. If this had been ten or even just two years ago, you wouldn’t hesitate to mention it but with things as they are, you are so nervous to speak and…

“What?”

“Have,” you bow your head slightly, “have you not been sleeping?”

Silence.

“Jeonha?” You press. “Please.”

When he finally looks at you, it’s with a glare. “I haven’t the time.”

“And your meals?”

“Not hungry.”

Your fingers knot. “But rest, sleep is essential. As is food. Without it, to make important decisions—”

“Hah!” His scowl deepens, the scar stretching down with his lips. “It would make little difference in how they are received.”

Ah.

You should’ve known it was impossible to miss the rumors rumbling through the palace, their source the restless palace occupants faced with a ruthless king. He can’t stop the rampant thievery brought on by the grain shortage, yet executes the thieves themselves. His petty rejection of treaty with Japan left threats of war looming like an open wound that refuses to heal. All this, the former king would never have done. Or so the gossip goes.

“Still… Jeonha, you cannot, simply cannot, live like this. The people need you to be strong. They need their leader. Every hour you spend pushing yourself too far is an hour taken off your life. ” Saying the words alone puts a tremble in your fingers. The thought of his death could keep you awake right along with him. Has. But every syllable you speak is an overstep of your boundaries and rank. “I-If something is weighing on your mind, tell me. Use me. Tell me what you need and I’ll try to help however I can.”

He laughs then, but it’s an ugly, mocking sound. With a thud, he drops to the floor. “Spare me your fucking idealism.” His tight fist finds the roots of your hair. He yanks, hard. Your plain hairpin clatters to the floor, teetering wildly off the pavilion edge. “You, help me? What power do you have?” He drags you backwards, your eyes wide and quivering as they find fury in his. “What can you really do?”

He all but rips open your sash and you let him. You let him throw aside the layers that cover your chest until you’re exposed to him, torn white fabric pooling around your arms. His breath is hot at the shell of your ear as he growls, “this is all I need from you. This and nothing else.”

“T-Then use me,” you repeat, despite the dagger stab of pain in your heart. If this will lessen his burdens, you’ll do it. If this will have him in your arms if only fleetingly, you’ll do it.

He grabs a breast and smirks when you tense, then cry out when he pinches a nipple pebbled from the wind. Take it all, you think deliriously when his fingers tighten with an almost unbearable strength, and again when he dips his head low, sucking hard at the nape of your neck to give you a dark ache to remember come morning. He leaves one mark then another, and another, as if threatening to consume you entirely with his desire. And you? You’re addicted to that jolt of pain, the heady wetness of dominance that says he wants you. He wants nothing but you right now, and you tuck that precious knowledge away with a moan.

When he flips you onto your back, you don’t hear the quiet splash as your hand knocks the pin over. All your focus is stolen by your king between your legs, demanding obedience even from his knees. He wastes no time in forcing your skirt up, undoing the ties of the shorts beneath and throwing them aside. You don’t think you breathe until his nail rakes across the scrap of cloth covering your heat. “Look at you,” he mutters. “So wet. Shameless.” He doesn’t bother taking off the sokgot before fucking two fingers into you, deep enough for you to feel the ridge of his knuckles. The way your tight cunt opens and molds to him makes him sink his teeth into his lip in appreciation.

You already feel pressure building when he curls his fingers. It spikes up when he scissors, pushes you apart to hear you gasp. The noise travels far, echoing across the water while he makes a mess of you with each rapid pump. You don’t need to see to know that clear arousal is running down the sides of your lower lips. The sound of slick is as lewd as your whines, pitched at a tell-tale high.

“Fast, too fast,” you groan. But when you shift back, you’re only met with open air beneath your hands. You turn your head in panic and yelp when you realize just how close you are to the edge, with nothing but murky water below. “J-Jeonha, let me bac—”

“No.” His eyes glimmer with something possessive at the sight of you stretched out over the precipice, moonlight’s glow painted across your bare skin. All that pliant softness for him to ruin.

And you do break, when he hits that spot and punishes it without a second’s pause. “Please, oh god, please.” You don’t even know what you’re begging for but his palm slaps against your skin with reckless strokes. Your spine curves back, head going with it until all you see is the night and burning stars and everything in this palace that belongs solely to him. You let go. You cum with an errant hand flung out, fingers skimming across the water, the rest of you pinned beneath him. Uncontrollable.

His smile is sadistic as he leans over you, still fully clothed in his royal robes as he watches you tremble. “Think the guards can hear you?” You want to shake your head but all you do is grind your hips into him. “If they turned their heads, they’d see you like this. Needy. Desperate.” He spits the humiliating words through set teeth. “Why don’t I call them over and show them what the esteemed physician is really like?” His cocksure grin stretches even wider when he feels you clench in response. It seems to make up his mind; he doesn’t extract his fingers even though bliss has turned sharply into soreness. Just fucks you through the last of the aftershocks and then some until he brings you to peak for a second, noisy time.

Only then does he draw back, swiping his tongue slowly up his soaked hand. His eyes never leave you, even as he strips enough to pull his thick cock from the folds of gilded silk. You don’t get much of a glimpse before it’s sheathed in you, much fuller than his fingers. Your overstimulated cunt reacts despite the sensitivity, wetly clinging to his shaft as he bottoms out. He doesn’t stop to savor, doesn’t even let you catch a breath before he’s moving forward. His thrusts now, angry and quick and deep - they’re for him.

The low grunts of effort drop alongside sweat down his neck, topknot bobbing back and forth and he keeps going, nimble hips pistoning with none of the precision of his swordplay. Where that is beautiful, controlled movements, he finds himself the exact opposite when he’s inside you. A damn slave to the pleasure surging through his body, and he seems to hate that he needs it. A loathing that he leaves in the bruises on your ass every time you smack to the floor. “Always this tight for me,” he mutters in a low register.

You’re trying your best to hold on, and survive the acute ache of him battering against your deepest core because you could never ask him to stop. Your fingers cling to the stone boundary, holding you to solid ground when everything feels like it’s been tossed clear up into the air. You almost can’t bear to look at him like this. It’ll make you believe in the intimacy shared between lovers when this is—

He snarls your name, draws your attention back. “Say it.”

“J-Jeonha…!”

He must like what he hears and finds in your gaze, for he smirks. “You’ve become a nice little whore for me, haven’t you?”

And that’s it. That’s when you feel the hot sting behind your eyes finally overflow. It’s a word that’s you’ve become well-acquainted with these past few months but to hear it from his lips is... The tears slide backwards down your cheeks, rippling the pond but he doesn’t notice. Or if he does, maybe he pretends they’re of pleasure. If only you could follow suit.

He takes two almost-unbearably deep strokes and then, suddenly, you’re empty. He’s gasping, surprisingly undone as his hand slides frantically on his own cock. Sticky cum soon splatters all over your stomach, staining your skirt with his conquest. Panting, he looks at you through loose strands of blonde hair and doesn’t pull away. Instead, he leans forward. For a moment, you forget yourself and expect him to kiss you. Instead, he hauls you up from the brink with a sweaty hand on the back of your neck.

“What? Want something else?” He snaps when he finds your puffy eyes staring at him.

You think about asking him if he’s alright. Maybe he would listen if you tried again, just once more time. But your body is sore, your thighs and core between them especially so. A lingering reminder that this is perhaps all you are good for in his eyes. Whore.

“No. Nothing.”

He stands, wiping dust off his sleeves, but otherwise not bothering to fix much of his wrinkled robes. “Then you are dismissed,” he says, then walks off. Likely to his private quarters, the back entrance connected to this garden.

Alone on the floor, you curl yourself up and still feel the emptiness, a dissatisfaction. You hadn’t noticed it before, but a songbird has been singing, marking the terribly late hour. On a sigh with fingers trembling, you pull the scraps of your jacket around your nakedness and try to shield yourself from the wind.

#ficswithluv #bts smut #yoongi smut #bts scenarios #bts imagines #bts angst #yoongi x reader #daechwita #historical au #rain writes #moonlit throne #'drabble' i said... 2k words later... lol

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lokilickedme · 3 years ago

Text

The Way

I’m writing horror again. I guess it’s that time, you know, that time that has nothing to do with Halloween or the seasons or whatever, that time when it just hits me for some reason. And just like I always do, I’ll say I don’t know why.

Even though I know why, and you know I know why.

Because the truth is always so much weirder and worse and more disquieting than any excuse I could make up for it, and sometimes I just feel the need.

Today I felt the need, and I couldn’t make it go away.

And so I sat down, and words I didn’t want to write were written.

8592 words I would rate this Mature 18+ if it was a fic, strictly because of the subject matter.

Warnings: Death, mostly. Religious trauma, brief descriptions of abuse, mentions of mental illness, domestic violence, grief, familial dysfunction, religious abuse, emotional abuse, medical conditions, brief mentions of drug use/abuse, mild gore in reference to corpse decomposition, psychological unease and mild terror, child abuse (mental/emotional/psychological), brief allusion to physical child abuse, cult references, loss of faith, attempted murder, possible actual murder.

A Note: I love you guys, you’re always so quick and willing to be helpful and offer advice and suggestions and such, and I adore that about you. But on this piece of work I ask that nobody offer any theories about what happened to my brother - medical, criminal, or otherwise - and please no suggestions on things we could do to pursue investigation, that ship has long sailed. It’s been 23 years and he’s a cold case. We spent years trying to sort it out but in the end it’s just something that happened, and we moved on because we had to. There are a lot of open ends, a lot of question marks, a lot of suspicious details that never connected to anything - and we tried, we truly did. If anyone out there knows the truth, they’ve never shown themselves to us. We do have our theories, but my brother was a secretive person living a life none of us knew about, and the people he knew weren’t people we knew. Everyone involved is either dead or moved on or got away with whatever it was they did, and there are only three of us who still care. It’s over.

Until today, I’ve never put these events into words.

It was something I needed to do, finally.

This is PART ONE. There may not be a part two, unless doing this ends up making me feel better.

Please feel free to comment if you wish. As you can see, pretty much nothing triggers me. I just ask that you please refrain from the type of comments noted above.

And thank you.

----------

This is, regrettably, a true story. Nothing has been changed but the names, because the dead don’t like being talked about, and James was just enough of a shit to haunt me for it.

----------

They made up their minds And they started packing They left before the sun came up that day An exit to eternal summer slacking But where were they going without ever knowing the way

They drank up the wine And they got to talking They now had more important things to say And when the car broke down They started walking Where were they going without ever knowing the way

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

Their children woke up And they couldn't find them They left before the sun came up that day They just drove off and left it all behind them But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

- The Way, Fastball, 1998

That was the year James died in his sleep.

Or that’s what they say, anyway. Asthma, the likely cause based on his medical history, our first and least disturbing assumption. Undetermined, the official determination based on the hastily scraped-together autopsy, the best that could be done under the circumstances. We tell people he had breathing problems, and they nod their heads and agree because they knew he did, and now he’s been gone so long that nobody asks. Most of the people who ever met him have long moved on or disappeared or died themselves, or just remember him as the enigmatic middle son from the Keithley family that nobody really knew very well. You know, the odd one, the one that showed up at meetings maybe once a year and smiled nervously but didn’t really talk to anyone and always seemed anxious to leave? The one who died under mysterious circumstances? That one.

He left the way he always came in. Quietly, unexpected, without anyone being aware of either his entrance or his exit.

But me and mom know some things, and she’s not talking. She probably never will.

So maybe it’s time I did.

December 1998. I’d gotten married two years previous and moved back to the family land with my new husband. He hated it there, but we had an affordable place to live. It wasn’t bad. He’d tell you otherwise. The land never sat right with him, but I’d lived there too many years to see it. I’d been fifteen when my father uprooted his large family from the city and hauled us out to the great back door to nowhere, and even though I’d left several times to wander elsewhere, I always came back.

I didn’t realize why at the time, at any of the multiple times. But now I know. That place gets you, and it holds you, and unless you’re goddamned devoted to staying gone you will always be pulled back. It took me till I was 49 to funnel the necessary amount of devotion away from the religious dedication I’d had jackbooted into me and turn it toward getting out, but against a great number of overwhelming odds I finally did it.

But this isn’t about that, not yet anyway. This is about my brother James, and how he went to sleep one night and found his own way out.

----------

It was snowing, had been for days, a bit unusual but not unheard of. The part of the state we lived in was notorious for extended ice storms and we knew a bad one was coming, but until it hit we played in the snow like it was a gift and we were deprived children who knew it was all going to be taken away soon. My brothers and I were adults but you wouldn’t know it, watching us sneak around in the woods staging elaborate commando attacks on each other. James was the best of us, a stealth king who could stand in the middle of a room for an hour without a single soul seeing him. Perception bias, he said. Your brain ignores me because I obviously don’t belong, like those puzzles where you circle what’s wrong but it takes you forever to find them.

He crept around in the forest scaring the shit out of people, dropping his long tall self out of trees, appearing from nowhere to administer a well aimed snowball to the face of whoever happened to cross his path and then disappearing just as quickly. We called him a wraith and it wasn’t a good natured jibe. We meant it. He made people nervous. He was the stealthy kind of quiet you associate with danger, and he knew how to do things an average person doesn’t ever have any need to know. It was a quiet cool that we admired him for, because none of the rest of us had it.

The religion we were raised in kept a tight lid on us, but me and James, we never really let it get into our bones. We were the smart ones, in retrospect. I went through the motions by force of habit and a sense of self preservation, doing what was expected and demanded of me, following the rules and making myself a perfect example of a young member of the church so I wouldn’t bring shame on the congregation and my family. But mostly the congregation. It was always more important than anything else. And I had behaving down to an art form, but mostly when people were looking. Usually also when they weren’t.

But sometimes, not quite.

And then I prayed for forgiveness about it later because God was supposed to forgive you if you asked him to, right? The tenet of willful sin being unforgivable never took root with me even though that was what the church conditioned into us through fear and constant repetition. They said it from the stage two nights a week and again on Sunday to hammer it home. Two nights a week and again on Sunday my head silently disagreed. God’s not like that. And then I did the praying for forgiveness thing even though I knew I was right, because I was disagreeing with the church, and the church was God’s channel here on Earth, wasn’t it? I committed a mortal sin at least three times a week on that subject alone, and though the dread of divine punishment was hardwired into me, I never could reconcile the concept of a loving and forgiving God destroying me simply for knowing better.

I’m not sure the comprehension of an overwatching deity ever actually established itself in James’ brain. A moral code, yes. But isn’t that what God is, really? Maybe he understood more about God and forgiveness than the rest of us. But he was considered an unapproved fringe member of the church because he couldn’t suffer people and noise and being looked at and he refused to preach, and he was soft-shunned as a result. Because if you weren’t all in to the point of being willing to die at any moment for your faith, you were as good as faithless.

And faithless meant condemned. And the congregation couldn’t be bothered with condemned people, regardless of their reasons for not having both feet in the water. The first and only option on their list was to put the person out and let them find their own way back once they realized they had nobody left in the world who cared about them.

James escaped that somehow. He was supposed to be shunned whole scale, but he wasn’t trying to convince anyone to leave the faith and he presented no threat to anyone’s strength of belief, and so far as anyone knew he’d committed no grave sins other than disinterest. So the rule that dictated we cast him out was bent enough to allow him to remain living on the family land, though at one point during a fit of overzealous righteousness my mother had tried to have a family meeting to vote on whether or not we were going to let him stay. I refused to vote and when I walked out of the house the meeting fell apart.

I’ve never forgiven her for that. Her son’s life being put to a vote with her presiding over the proceedings, vengeful and unfeeling and devoid of compassion on behalf of God himself. It takes my breath away, the anger, still to this day. The only thing I ever truly learned from my mother about parenting was a long and intensely detailed list of what not to do to my own children, and I suppose I should be grateful for that. It’s a bitter thank-you to have to give, but it’s something.

We knew James as much as he would allow us to, and not an inch further. Which meant the extent of our knowledge of him pretty much stretched to include the singular fact that he was different. What that meant, I still don’t really know - but it was there from the day he was born, that slight off-ness, the oddly off center calibration that you can’t really see so much as sense in a person. I know now he was likely on the autism spectrum and he walked through life seeing and reacting to everything differently than most of us, but that wasn’t a thing back then. You were just weird, or you weren’t. And I’m not convinced that was a bad thing for him, strictly speaking. But in the confines of our religion and our family’s devout and sometimes violent dedication to it, it took its toll almost daily.

He stood out, and he was very much a person who didn’t want to. He wanted to fade into the background, to not be seen, to not be known. And our religion didn’t tolerate that kind of nonsense, because we were commanded to be bold bearers of The Word Of God, and no exceptions were made.

None.

I’m going to stop calling it a religion now. I beg your indulgence as I shift to calling it what it is, because calling it a religion is an insult to actual religions that don’t destroy peoples’ lives with callous indifference and murderous glee.

We were raised in a doomsday death cult. There’s no other name that fits.

And we were trapped in it and its ugly cycle of neverending mental and emotional manipulation and abuse until we were adults, and some of us are still bound to it. My oldest brother worked his way up to the upper levels of oversight in the local congregation and was solidly entrenched in it until his death, which is a story for later. My youngest brother, the last remaining living blood sibling I have, is still deeply in it to this day and will likely never leave it.

I took the hard way out, three years ago, by walking away.

James, though. He took the easy way. He simply closed his eyes, and he was free.

----------

December 22, 1998. Three days before Christmas, though that meant nothing to us. The cult told us Christmas was a filthy demonic pagan ritual that was condemned by God, so to us the season was just a nice chilly time of year with lots of time off from work. We’d had an unusual amount of snow, the most we’d had in years. The roads were impassable and everyone was home except my husband, who worked close enough that his boss at the glass shop came and picked him up that morning with chains on his tires. Lots of windshields had shattered from the sudden violent cold that had struck the previous night and Scott had the only glass shop for sixty miles.

I think it must have been around noon, and likely my mother had sent my dad up the hill to see if James wanted to come down for the lunch she was making. He and his wife had split up against the strict rules of the church after a few years of suffering through an ill advised marriage, an important detail to this story that will come into the tale later, and he was alone up there at the top of the hill a lot. Sometimes he forgot to eat, or he got so busy that he just didn’t bother, so our mother always made something for him because even though he was in his 20′s he was still a kid who needed looking after and her zealous fervor against him had died down with time. I think he let her believe he was helpless because it worked in his favor and there was always lunch waiting for him in her kitchen as a result.

He was different, he wasn’t dumb.

We all lived on the hill back then with the exception of our youngest brother. He’d moved to the city with his new wife not long prior. The locals jokingly called the place a commune, and I guess they weren’t completely wrong. Thirty-eight acres of wooded land far beyond the city limits that we’d painstakingly spent years carving a livable space into, with five houses, all built from the ground up and inhabited by an extended family of well known culties from a well known cult. It’s almost comical, looking back on it, knowing now how they kept an eye on us for years to make sure we weren’t doing anything weird up there.

They should have run us off with pitchforks and burning stakes at the very beginning.

Things might have ended differently for us if they had.

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My grandparents lived at one end of the property, an old couple as simple and solid as salted soup, devoutly religious and devoted to the cult and very much cut from the can survive anything and probably will cloth like so many old country folks of their generation. They were waiting out the end of days up there in their little wooden house, expecting the final hour of this old system to come long before their own demise. I liked my grandmother, she had a sweet smile and fell asleep every time granddad started talking about the Bible and she paid me five dollars every Wednesday to drive her into town to get groceries, and years later, when she was dying, she told me she’d had a dream where she met my unborn son. I was four months pregnant and didn’t know yet that I was having a boy. She died before he was born, but to this day, fifteen years later, he tells me he’s sure he met her, he just can’t remember when.

I was scared of my grandfather. Not terrified, but there was nothing grandfatherly to him and I always suspected he never actually liked kids much. He’d once told us a story about the great Fort Worth flood that wiped out most of the city when my mom was a baby, and how he had told my grandmother to let go of my 2-year-old mother while he was struggling to get them across a rushing flooded creek in water up to their shoulders. My grandmother couldn’t swim. We could make another Ruthie, he said. But I couldn’t get another ‘Nita.

He said it proudly, like he was to be admired for his choice. I was young when he told that story, but it settled into me that this was evil.

Even when he was old as dirt and dying of a brain tumor in hospice care, he made me uneasy. I was never close to him. But for some reason, in his final days, he forgot who everyone was except me. I had been living in another state for years and he hadn’t seen me since before the tumor started taking his life. But when I walked into the room he turned his head and looked at me, and he mouthed my name.

He couldn’t speak. I don’t know what he was trying to say, struggling with words that nobody could hear. And I felt bad. I didn’t want to be the last person he recognized. My cousins adored him and had spent the last few years constantly at his side, and they were angry, maybe justifiably, that I was the one he reached for.

I didn’t want that at all.

I don’t believe he was a bad man, but he never spoke of anything except the cult’s interpretation of the Bible, and it was as tiresome as it was terrifying. Granddads are supposed to be fun. Ours quoted doctrine at us in a deep loud commanding voice that you couldn’t interrupt and you couldn’t tune out, and once he got going you had to just settle in and wait for him to run out of zealous steam. And then he would suddenly stop and command grandmother to turn on a John Wayne movie and bring him some ice cream, and it was over until the next time.

I know my mother resented him. She knew grandmother was the one that had refused to let her go, the one that had held onto her even though she almost drowned by the simple act of holding on. She knew her father had been willing to let her wash away and drown. That he thought she was interchangeable with whatever baby they would have next. How she could spend her entire life with that knowledge and not be deeply affected by it was something that never made sense to me, but now, when she’s in her 70′s and I’m in my 50′s, I finally understand. It affected her. She’ll just be damned if she’ll let anyone see it. And she had stood there in that hospice room watching him mouth my name with resentment burning in her eyes, though she would have rather died than let anyone know what it was for. He’d forgotten her weeks ago.

The house in the center of the hill was mom and dad. The homestead. The house we’d all lived in together, that we’d built with our own hands, the first thing that marked that wild overgrown hill as a place where people actually lived. A long path through the woods connected it to the grandparents’ house, and it was the epicenter of everything in our lives. James and I had lived in the upstairs rooms of that house until we both moved out and married our respective mates years later, a reprehensible act on our part that was never okay with my mother and that she never forgave either of us for. She’d wanted us all to stay. We can all live here together until the New System comes, she always said. That’s how the Bible says it’s supposed to be. We can all keep each other safe and on the right path until the end comes, and then we’ll all be here together forever.

A decade later when I sat up on the hill watching that house burn to the ground, there was as much relief as grief billowing into the sky with the black smoke. It was the end of an era, and it was far beyond time for it.

Nobody saw it but me. James was dead, had been for years. Robbie was dead now too. Dad was gone, so was granddad. Me and my youngest brother David were the last two left of the kids, but he had moved to a neighboring city when he got married and he has never seen things the way I see them. We were of different generations, we weren’t raised the same way, and he’d never experienced the abuse I lived with for the first half of my life. And he had dedicated his own life to the cult with all the honesty and lack of guile that I didn’t have when I’d made my own dedication vows at the too-young age of sixteen.

It was the end of an era, but apparently only for me.

James’ house was up the hill, past a clearing where my dad used to keep old cars that he cannibalized for parts. Our oldest brother Robbie, long married with kids of his own, lived at the bottom on the farthest corner of the land. And my house was on the slope to the west, built on the spot where we’d cleared off an old half-fallen homestead from the late 1800′s, dutifully paying no mind to the fact that a grave was nestled into the slope, right where the yellow daffodils grew. The cult told us superstition was tied up with the demons and false religion, so we didn’t have the built-in human instinct that tells most people to stay the hell away from certain things.

We just pretended it wasn’t there, and put no importance on it. It was just an old grave. The soil was good and the garden I planted next to it did well, though those strange daffodils always wound themselves through everything I put in the ground. My husband said something wasn’t right about it, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. He hadn’t been raised as devout as me.

My dad knocked on my door around lunchtime and I opened it. He backed up, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, the fancy leather coat the dealership had awarded him when he was designated a five-star Chrysler technician and given the state’s first and only license to work on the new Vipers that had recently rolled off the prototype line. It was a cool jacket. Made him look like the old pictures my other grandmother had shown me of him from the early 1960′s, when he was young and very much a product of a fancier era. He’d never stopped greasing his hair back and was still so thin that he and I wore the same size jeans.

I’ve never understood the look on his face when I opened the door. To this day I can’t sort it. It wasn’t a blankness like so many people who’ve seen death wear without awareness. It wasn’t grief. It wasn’t even shock.

He was sorry.

Those were the first words out of his mouth.

I’m sorry.

I stood there, not knowing what he was sorry for. It was cold. I couldn’t push the screen door open very far because of the snow blocking it. And my father was standing at the bottom of the steps James had helped my husband build, his hands shoved down far into his pockets like a penitent child about to get in trouble, telling me he was sorry.

James is dead, he finally said. He’s in his house. I went up there and he’s dead.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now - just now, this very moment in fact, I know that I was the first person he told. He came straight from James’ house to mine and told me my brother was dead.

I don’t know what I said back to him, I just remember sitting down on the top step and feeling the cold bite of the snow through my pajama pants. There’s a vague recollection of putting my face in my hands, and the embarrassing knowledge that I did that simply because I didn’t know what else to do. And dad just stood there, nervously stepping from foot to foot in the snow, because he didn’t know what else to do either.

I think I asked How at some point. He said he didn’t know. He had something in his pocket but to this day I don’t know what it was.

I don’t know if it was important. Something tells me it was. Or maybe it was just the eternally present handkerchief he always kept on him.

I’m sorry, he said again. He seemed to feel like it was his fault somehow. I’m sorry.

What do we do? I asked him. I’ve never felt more blank. What are we supposed to do?

I don’t remember what he said, other than he was going to get my older brother. I remember thinking that was a good idea. Robbie would know what to do. He always did. Brash and blustery and bigmouthed, he got things done while other people stood around debating how to do them. He would get on it, whatever needed doing. He would figure it out.

I went back in the house and dad walked away, headed down the path through the woods that connected my house to Robbie’s, hands still shoved deep in his pockets, the big retro vintage Chrysler emblem on the back of his jacket the last thing I saw before I pulled the screen door shut. I stared down for a minute at the mound of snow it had scooped into my livingroom, still with no clue what I was supposed to do.

No clue at all.

I kicked the snow back outside and shut the door.

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It’s an odd thing, watching the coroner’s van drive away with someone you know inside it. Someone you saw just yesterday. Someone who was alive. Someone who should still be alive but isn’t, somehow. And since there’s really no way to earn a ride in a coroner’s van without dying, there’s an awful unsettling sensation to it that you can’t get away from. The last time I saw James he was laughing that devious little laugh of his, his eyes red and bloodshot from the ever present asthma he’d suffered with his entire life. I don’t count the sight of the coroner’s van leaving the hill via our long steep driveway with his cold corpse tucked into a black zippered bag, because I didn’t see him. I never saw him. I didn’t see him dead in his house and I didn’t see them carry him out, I didn’t see them put him in the van. I didn’t see him later, when it was all over with. And if I try hard enough I can imagine that van empty, with that long black bag tossed crumpled in the back without a body in it, and James somewhere else living his life however the hell he pleases.

I hold onto that. Some days it helps. And some days I think I see him, walking by the side of the road or getting out of a car in the post office parking lot, and it makes me happy thinking he escaped. I see him in every hitchhiker, in every wandering traveler making his way down the interstate, in every tall thin man I glimpse from the corner of my eye as I go about my business in town.

He’s out there.

I hope he’s happy.

The ice storm hit the next day.

----------

For the next two weeks we were stuck on our hill. Power out, no electricity, no heat, no lights, roads iced over and impassable. We all piled up in mom and dad’s house, quietly grieving James, trying to stay warm. Most of the state lost power for days, including the city 150 miles away where his body had been taken to the state coroner’s office. There was no apparent cause of death, so the state ordered an autopsy.

His body had just been placed into cold storage to wait its turn when the power grid went down. And then, by some unholy stroke of nightmarish luck, the facility’s generators failed.

Nobody could make it in to work because of the ice. By the time someone finally got into the morgue the cold storage had been down for four days.

Six bodies melted, including James.

----------

No viable autopsy could be done, though they tried their best I suppose. The end report was obtained two months later. It was mostly inconclusive due to the long delay and resultant decomposition of tissue. There was apparent scarring on James’ heart, but it was old scarring and had nothing to do with his death. His lungs were scarred as well, but that was no surprise, he’d had severe asthma his entire life. There was no determinable cause of death, no inflicted trauma, no presence of illicit drugs as far as they could tell from the limited toxicology report they managed with what they had to work with.

No reason.

He’d simply died.

It seemed fitting, to me at least, that the end of him be enshrouded in an unsolvable mystery. He was a secretive person, intensely private. He would have loved knowing nobody had a clue what happened to him.

And so we drew our own conclusion as a family. He’d had an asthma attack in his sleep. There had been an inhaler next to his bed, but it was new and still in the box. He simply hadn’t woken up to use it. Dad didn’t participate in the drawing of this conclusion, his input kept stoically to himself, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

We pretended not to see it.

He and mom braved the last of the ice a few days later to make the 150 mile drive to see James one last time.

They came back different.

You couldn’t tell it was him, my mother said. He was melted, literally. It was like one of those science fiction movies where they melt you with a laser beam and you turn to goo.

Dad had nothing to say. He went to bed and stayed there until the next day.

You can go see him, mom told me. I’ll go with you if you want to go. But I don’t recommend it.

I decided not to go.

And so I never saw my brother dead. I never saw any proof that he was gone. He just wasn’t there anymore. There was no funeral, he was cremated and his ashes were sent home weeks later, and I went on with my life with the image in my head of James, alive, somewhere else.

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Dad was different from that day on. He’d always been stoic, terse, strict. My childhood had been spent in fear of him, an eternal dread of making him mad and feeling his temper erupt keeping me from showing any hint of a personality during my formative years. The cult had forced him to abide by the violent tenet of Spare the rod, spoil the child and there was never any risk of me being spoiled.

James being gone flipped a switch in him. He was nicer suddenly. Mellow. Kind. After the trauma wore off his humor discovered itself and he was funny. The dour angry demeanor fell off and revealed a man that I was sad never to have known before. He and I became friends. I could sense in his new attitude toward me that he regretted how he’d raised me and respected the way I’d always stood up and been my own person despite it. But my mother was falling off the deep end and for all the newfound easygoingness of my father, she counterbalanced it with an extremism born of the religious fervor of a mother determined to gain enough favor with God to see her dead child again. And she was going to make sure the rest of us did too.

We all had to get good and straight on the path, get completely right and stay that way, or we’d never see James again. He’d be in the New World and we wouldn’t, and how would she explain that to him? She and I worked together in a law office at the time and as she became more unhinged and unpleasant, I reacted by becoming more outgoing and accomplished. Our boss changed my work designation from receptionist to Executive Assistant and started teaching me how to do everything from filing papers at the courthouse to photographing accident scenes. I no longer answered to my mother, the office manager. I answered directly to the boss.

That didn’t go over well. She was a control freak with heavy untreated trauma, and the one person in the world she felt the most obsessive need to control was suddenly no longer under her thumb in a workspace where she considered herself the supreme authority. She countermanded every order the boss gave me and tried to load me up with general office chores that left me no time to do the important assignments he’d given me. I had no choice but to tell her she wasn’t my superior anymore.

She chose that day to have her nervous breakdown over James, jumping out of my car at a red light on the way home and storming angrily through a shopping mall with me trailing frantically along behind her, yelling for security to arrest me while I tried to get her to calm down. I ended up telling her she wasn’t the only person who lost James but that none of the rest of us were allowed to experience our own grief because we were too busy catering to hers.

She sat down on a bench outside the sporting goods store and glared at me with a cold hatred I’ve seen on very few other faces, ever.

I knew it would be you, she hissed at me.

That moment changed our relationship forever. It changed me forever. That was the day I decided my life was my own, that she not only didn’t have authority over me at work, she didn’t have authority over me anywhere else either. She could no longer dictate my actions, my behavior, my thoughts and feelings.

For this she disowned me. It was the first of several disownings over the next few years. I got used to it. We went to work the next day like nothing had happened, and I didn’t do a single thing on the task list she slapped down on my desk. It was a metaphor for the rest of my life, but I didn’t know it yet.

My husband and I moved out of state a couple of months later, away from that hill, away from her increasingly controlling paranoia and bitterness, the first of many small steps toward freedom.

As we were driving away with our trailer full of personal belongings behind us, he said one thing that I tried to argue against, but that somewhere deep inside I knew was probably right.

That land is cursed, he said.

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A few weeks before we moved my youngest brother came to town and we went into James’ house together. It was exactly like it had been the day my dad found him. The only thing that stood out as different was the bare mattress on the bed - the men from the coroner had wrapped him up in the sheet he’d been laying on and took it with them, leaving just the naked springform mattress James had bought for Jessica right before her final breakdown and their subsequent separation.

It took me a while to go in the bedroom, but I knew from the moment I walked into the house that I was going to end up there. I needed to see it, the place where James had closed his eyes and left us.

There was a small puddle of dried blood near the foot of the bed, brown and stained into the fabric. James always slept backwards, with his head at the wrong end. The blood had come from his nose.

I touched it. I don’t know why. It was dry.

He was gone.

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David and I laughed a lot that day. James had been funny in a way that was distinctly him, quiet and of few words, but those words had always counted. And as we sorted through his things and talked about him and moved some of his stuff into boxes to be stored away, I felt as much awed respect as befuddlement at what was around me. He’d never been a conformist, which I knew was why the cult had never gotten a firm grasp on him. He was unknowable and therefore unbindable. But his house was proof that he didn’t conform to any human expectations either, and nothing in it made sense unless you’d spent time around him.

There was an engine in the bathtub. I’m not sure what it went to. Another engine, in the beginning stages of disassemblage, rested on a blue tarp in the center of the livingroom floor, obviously the last project he’d been working on. There wasn’t much furniture - his wife had taken most of it when she left and it would have never entered his mind to replace any of it. Jessica’s cookware was in the kitchen cabinets, unused, some of it still in the original boxes, some not even fully unwrapped from their wedding shower years before. Jessica didn’t cook, she microwaved. David asked me if I thought it would be okay for him to take a glass Pyrex measuring cup because he’d broken his. I told him to take it. It had never been used.

I didn’t want anything, but knew I needed to take something. One of my husband’s solo CDs was sitting on the entertainment center and the cover, the cover I’d designed, caught my eye and brought me to the CD player to pop the tray open.

Inside was a CD single of The Way.

It was the only thing I took.

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My husband told me some time later that my dad and older brother had altered the scene before the police arrived. After the phonecall from me his boss had rushed him home and he’d gone up to James’ house without my knowledge. He’d thought it strange that he’d had to step around at least a dozen empty compressed air cans scattered haphazardly around the place as he entered, like they’d been used and tossed aside one after another. There had been several more on the floor around the bed. My father had told him to go back down and see how mom and I were doing, and when he returned to James’ house after the coroner’s departure, the cans were gone. Other than that he said things seemed different, but he couldn’t say quite how. Just not the same.

He told me my dad didn’t call the police until after he and Robbie had been in there at least an hour, alone with the body.

It’s not something we’ve talked about often, because there’s no satisfactory explanation for it that either of us can come up with. My mother says they probably didn’t want the police to assume the cans meant he was huffing compression fluid and accidentally killed himself, because Look at the shame and reproach that would bring on the congregation if anyone thought such a thing! We all knew he used the compressed air to clear the valves on the engines he was working on, all mechanics do, it’s common. Wouldn’t the police have accepted that explanation? Dad was the only one that spoke to them. They wrote down whatever he said, and then they left, and then the coroner came and took James away and that was that. My father, the most upright straight-and-narrow devoutly dedicated man I’ve ever known in my life, misled the police for a reason that he took with him to his own grave.

The only other person in the world who knew the truth about it took it to his grave too.

At the same time.

In the same car.

Four years later, on October 18, 2002.

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The big garbage bag of empty air cans and whatever else that was removed from James’ house that morning had been stashed in my dad’s garage and stayed there until a few weeks after he and Robbie’s joint funeral, when my mother asked my husband’s old boss to come and dispose of it. Scott was a man who knew people who could do things.

The evidence, whatever it was evidence of, vanished.

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The mystery around James never dissolved and eventually no one talked about it anymore, I guess because there was no way we could ever truly find out what happened without him here to tell us. There were a lot of details that we could never find a way to weave together into anything that made sense and a lot of it was probably inconsequential anyway. There was a girlfriend that he’d tried to keep hidden from us, a woman that was quite a bit older than him who wasn’t a member of the cult and therefore needed to be kept a secret. In the end she had convinced him to stop hiding their relationship and he’d bought her a ring. We met her all of twice before he died, and within days of his passing she left town with her brother and never came back, taking whatever she might have known with her.

James’ ex Jessica had sneaked onto the hill and broken into his house to put a dead raccoon in his kitchen sink a few days prior to his death. We were shocked when he told us she trespassed on the land often without anyone knowing, and my mother made my father fix the electric gate down at the road so that it wouldn’t open without one of three clickers in the possession of herself, my father, and me. James would have to come to her house and get hers any time he needed to leave the hill, an arrangement he agreed to because Jessica stole things from his house all the time, she would absolutely take a gate opener if she saw it.

He told us the gate wouldn’t keep her out though, and that she didn’t come in that way anyway. The only way to protect ourselves from her was to lock her up and he doubted even that would do it.

He died less than a week later, and twenty three years later we still don’t know how or why.

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We never felt safe on the hill again. Jessica was deranged in the worst possible way, we’d known it for a while, and James was her obsession. She’d threatened to kill him multiple times and had tried twice. We hadn’t known this, because James, big strong stoic Clint Eastwood type that he was, wasn’t about to tell anyone he was violently abused for years by a skinny little woman that everyone believed was not much more than a meek dormouse with shyness issues and a case of painful awkwardness. But we knew she was evil. We just didn’t have any proof.

The first thing my mother said after the initial emotional breakdown of finding her son dead was Jessica did this, I don’t know how but I know she did it.

I believe she was probably right. But if Jessica was anything she was wily and devious with a strong survival instinct and an uncanny ability to lie convincingly and draw sympathy onto herself. She’d convinced us for years that she was the perfect combination of sweetly harmless and endearingly clueless, but that only lasted until the day she called 911 screaming that James was beating her and then threw herself face first into a tree in their front yard and sat, calmly singing and coloring in a coloring book on the porch with blood running down her forehead, waiting for the police to arrive. The act she put on when they got there was one for the Academy, but the officers didn’t buy it.

James calmly rolled up his sleeves and showed them his scars where she’d burned him and slashed him with a kitchen knife. He pulled up his shirt and pointed out the marks she’d left on him with her teeth and nails. He hooked a finger into his mouth and showed them the empty hole where she’d knocked one of his teeth out with a baseball bat. One of the officers asked him why he hadn’t killed her and buried her somewhere on the land already.

She left in the back of the squad car, and my mother took James to the courthouse to get divorce papers started two days later.

Jessica came to his memorial service when we finally had it, several weeks after his death. She wasn’t invited but we couldn’t keep her from coming. She wore black like a widow and created a dramatic disruption complete with loud wailing and declarations of undying love, and afterward she stood to one side of the room, smirking at us with the kind of icy malice that you only see on the dangerously deranged, and then usually only in the movies. Several people commented in hushed voices, asking why she’d been allowed to come. At one point she started wailing They killed him!!, but everyone with the exception of her mother ignored her.

Her mother, who was still in our congregation, flitted around the room chatting with everyone, sobbing her heart out like it was her own son we’d just memorialized. She was an ER nurse and had been famously fired from her job at the hospital for taking locked-cabinet medications home by the purse load. She claimed she put them in her pocket to use on her shift and forgot to return them to the cabinet before leaving.

Jessica had been staying with her for a while.

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We fed the crowd at mom’s later that afternoon with my husband and his boss guarding the gate, making sure she didn’t try to come into my mother’s house. The police were called preemptively, and because this was a town of 300 with not much of anything else to do, a squad car was dispatched and stationed near the inlet to the main drive.

Jessica showed up not much later, like we knew she would. She drove past the police and parked a few yards down from them in plain sight, just sitting there by the side of the road, far enough away from our property that we couldn’t legally do anything about it. The officers got out and talked to her, warned her not to cause us any problems, and she fed them a woeful tale about being banned from her beloved husband’s memorial service and denied the right to say goodbye to him.

The officers knew there was no body at that service to say goodbye to. They also knew her.

My husband came up the hill and told us she was down at the road and that Scott was blocking the driveway with his truck to keep her out. I told my mother it was time to file a restraining order against her. She was living in fear and Jessica was known to be trespassing on our property frequently. No, she told me with tears in her eyes but not a sign of distress on her face. It was a look I knew, because my mother rarely showed emotion unless she was angry and the rest of the time it was this cold detachment. That would bring reproach on the congregation because everyone knows what we are. I can’t do that. I won’t let her win that way. I won’t let her cause us to bring shame on God’s name.

God’s name. I took it in vain that day.

More than once.

I was leaving in a few weeks, moving a thousand miles away. My husband and I weren’t going to be there to help her keep an eye out, and thirty eight acres of heavily wooded land is impossible to protect and easy to sneak onto from a hundred different directions, James had shown us proof of that.

God will protect us as long as we do the right thing and leave it to him, she said. He knows what she is.

I think it was just a coincidence that nothing terrible happened in the following weeks, because my faith was getting tenuous and a lot of prayers were going unanswered. But Jessica quietly disappeared back to her own world after a couple of infuriating weeks of putting herself in our paths every chance she got, and not long after that my husband and I moved away, and as we left the driveway for what we thought would be the last time he sighed and shook his head with the exasperation of a man about to say I told you so.

“That land is cursed,” he said.

I tried to disagree, though I don’t know why.

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Less than a mile up the road we passed a man walking. He was tall and thin and covered in the dust of a long journey with a ratty backpack strapped to his back, and as we passed him I caught his reflection in the side mirror.

It was James, I knew it in my heart every bit as strongly as I knew it couldn’t be.

He was walking away from the hill, toward the west. The way we were going. And I swear on whatever holy relic you wish to place under my hand that he raised his head and met eyes with me in the mirror, and he smiled.

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ateezmakemeweep · 5 years ago

Text

365 days.

mafia!yunho

word count: 9k

angst, fluff, smut (warning: stockholm syndrome)

request

he knew it was irrational, the intense longing and fascination with the girl he saw the night his father was murdered. he had been watching you for an hour, your hair blowing in the wind as you stared out at the ocean with a small smile on your face.

you had been perfectly content and tranquil, your feet sinking into the sand with your white sandals in hand. every time he tried to pull his attention back to the men talking with his dad, you’d make another move. a simple quirk of your lips or head tilt to the side that fully captured his attention.

he wanted you and he didn’t even know you. he had no idea why the pull toward you was so overwhelming, the possessiveness he knew he always had at an all time high.

his dad made his way over to him and followed his line of sight, shaking his head as he asked if he knew you. but before yunho could answer, the sound of a gun shot and his father’s pained groan caused him to snap his head toward the man.

the man who raised him, told him one day he’d have to carry on this business and subject himself to the worst types of criminals, fell into him as blood seeped through his shirt. yunho could only watch the man bleed out in front of him, set him onto the floor and press his large hands into his dad’s bullet wound as chaos erupted around him.

their men attacked the others, more gun shots and grunts from punching and kicking surrounding him until he saw the exact moment life left his dad’s eyes. tears welling up his vision and his fist punching the ground because he just watched his father die. it’s something he always prepared him for but never thought would actually happen, the hole in yunho’s chest already filling him with so much sadness and devastation.

and then when he looked up toward the beach, you were gone too.

it took him five years to find you.

and when he did, the empty hole in his chest finally felt like it was healing. he knew it was fucking crazy and that it made no sense. that he could look at a person just once, not even have a conversation with them, and claim them as his.

but he wanted you and he always got what he wanted.

that’s why he waltz right into the private party you were in, took a glass of champagne from the waitress’s tray with a wink, and watched. he watched your boyfriend flirt with girls behind your back and the way you were so carefree and alluring.

your smile effected everyone in the room, men and women, and it’s like you didn’t even know it. you saw your boyfriend’s advances toward anyone but you and slapped him across the face, a smirk appearing on yunho because he’s hoping you’ll be that feisty with him.

he followed behind when he saw you making your way to the bathroom, an elaborate path of twists and turns that makes a part of him angry and protective over you; it’s dark and dangerous here, what if some psycho decided to stalk you?

his body was itching to follow you into the doorway, take your face in his hand and tell you how long he’s waited for you. how much he’s missed you and is so happy he finally gets the chance to know you. but this plan has to be executed perfectly, not being able to afford fucking this up and losing you again.

but he also couldn’t not say anything to you, watching you waltz out of the bathroom and look around at the large, gaudy building. he loved the way your eyebrows pinched together, looking around and your lip turning up almost in disgust at how ritzy this place was.

“are you lost, baby girl?”

you looked up at the sound of his voice and he wanted to smirk at the blank stare you threw his way, narrowing your eyes even further before brushing past him and back down the hallway. there wasn’t a flicker of recognition in your eyes, and he didn’t expect there to be, but he hopes there will be tomorrow, watching your retreating figure until you’re back at the main lobby of the party.

you wake up in an unfamiliar room, in different clothes than the ones you were wearing last night. you quickly try to piece together what happened before you start to panic, desperate to remember if maybe you got a little too drunk and went home with a random man.

but you know that wasn’t the case, remembering walking down the alley to go home and hearing footsteps behind you. turning around and seeing nothing but the gravel and shadows of the buildings. an arm catching you around the waist made you scream out, the last thing you remember feeling before your mind fogs and you can’t think of anything else but falling into a deep slumber.

you’re thinking, however, that if you were kidnapped, this is unusual treatment. because you’re in a silk nightgown with a comfortable king sized bed under you. the room is beautifully decorated and the outside window looks like something of a villa, a pool and grassland of flowers shining in the sun.

you lift your head and feel your eyebrows knit because instead of something normal like a tv or dresser at the front of the room, there’s a shower. it’s a beautiful, fancy shower, with neon lights inside and two luxurious rain shower heads.

you stretch out your bones getting more and more stiff and alert as you look around the unfamiliar room, your feet hitting the floor as you reluctantly make your way to the door; what are the odds it’s even unlocked? you think about knocking or calling out for help but what good would that really do in what appears to be a mansion like this?

you push open the door and hum in surprise when it’s open, making your way down the hall. it’s dark and full of expensive statues and artwork, taking in the columns and high ceilings as your feet start to pick up. there doesn’t appear to be anyone around so you have to hurry up and find the nearest exit, your head snapping side to side as you quietly run down the stairs and through the large house.

you’re in a room that resembles a living area, couches and chairs sprawled out around the area. pictures cover the walls and you’re frantically searching for another exit or archway when something in particular catches your eye. you shake your head because you almost don’t believe what’s in front of you, your stomach sinking and heart racing because-

“what the fuck,” you mutter out, walking over to the fireplace where a portrait of you is hung up. your face and eyes are staring back at you and the eerie feeling that rips through you makes your heart start to pound even more, to the point where you think you’re about to pass out.

who the fuck would have a picture of you hanging and why the fuck? were they some sort of creepy stalker? was he watching you now through some cameras, waiting for you to cry out for him and-

“are you lost baby girl?”

you stiffen at the deep voice that sounds like it’s right behind you, the words sounding so familiar but you can’t quite place them. and when you turn around, you see a tall man staring down. his shoulders are broad and his eyes are dark and intense, looking down at you in a way that makes your skin both crawl and warm.

his hair is slicked back and then it’s finally the way his lips quirk up that you remember him: the man from last night outside of the bathroom. the reminder sends you into a silent panic, the frantic beating of your heart starting to pound in your ears before you feel yourself grow faint.

you’re only slightly aware of being picked up and carried over to a chair, being plopped down on a cool leather seat that feels nice against your warm skin. the crackling of the fire hits your ears before it’s replaced by the sound of ice clinking around in a glass, the presence of someone kneeling below you causing your eyes to flutter open again.

and there in front of you is the man, his dark eyes and towering presence even as he’s bent down next to you. you watch as his hand reaches out, littered with tattoos on each knuckle, and you do your best not to flinch away.

“suck it.”

his demand leaves no room for objection, the ice cube he’s holding out for you cold and wet on your lips. you refuse to meet his gaze as you open your mouth slightly, his fingers pushing their way through your mouth and making your heart and stomach squeeze; if it’s fear or ill placed arousal, you’re not sure.

but it quickly turns to anger when he pushes down on your lips. he swirls the wetness over them as you meet his gaze, this bizarre mix of hard warmness as he explains to you that you probably passed out from shock. you can’t even stop yourself from spitting the ice cube at him, watching him with cold eyes as it hits his chin.

the way he tenses and his eyes darken make you think he’s about to hit you but you could give a shit, looking at him with such ferocity as anger courses through your veins; who the hell is this lunatic and why does he have you here? why does he have a picture of you hanging above his fireplace like it’s some sort of family portrait?

his jaw clenches and he rips himself away from the chair, his hand flying up to his hair before you straighten yourself up and shake the remaining nerves away.

“who the fuck are you?” you snap, “why am i here?”

he doesn’t answer your questions, just looks at you with a challenging look like he almost doesn’t believe you’re talking to him like that. you purse your lips to the side, biting at the inside of your cheek when you jump up from your seat despite your pounding head.

“are you gonna answer me or not?” you ask, making your way over to him like he doesn’t completely tower over you. “who the fuck are you and where did you-”

“sit down.”

you narrow your eyes at his demand, the way his voice is calm and steady despite the darkness in his eyes only making you more eager to poke at him. he’s completely ignoring your questions and expecting you to listen, making another wave of anger course through you.

“fuck you and answer me,” you snap. “why do you have that portrait of me?”

“sit down,” he repeats, an edge to his voice though still steady enough. but you couldn’t care less, desperate and getting more and more anxious to know who this psycho is and to know-

“where am i?” you ask, voice high and booming through the living room as you raise your pitch. and that seems to be what makes him crack, makes him step forward and grab you by the arms roughly. he pushes you back down into the chair, words dying in your throat as he manhandles you.

“sit the fuck down.”

the silence between you is thick as he glares at you, your own eyes wide and fiery as you meet his stare head on. it could be thirty seconds or two minutes but you both don’t say a word, just have a stare off that makes him take your jaw in his hand roughly.

“you wanna know why you’re here or not?” his voice growls out, the power behind it not even scaring you because “that’s what i’ve been asking, you fucking-”

his hand squeezes your face and your eyes narrow because you refuse to wince from the pain.

he lets out a sharp exhale before releasing his hold, giving you a warning look before he takes his drink and makes his way over to the fireplace. he stares dramatically at the flames and if your chest wasn’t heaving from your heavy breaths and fear, you’d yell at him to spit it the fuck out.

but you have to remember you’re dealing with someone who just kidnapped you, that you’re gonna have to try and control your temper if it means getting the hell out of here.

“i saw you five years ago,” he surprises you by saying, “the night my father died.”

you raise an eyebrow at the his words but don’t have time to dwell on them. can’t try to see if you remember him at all or think about where you might’ve seen this tall, handsome nut job before he starts talking again.

“i’d been watching you on the beach right before he got shot. i kept trying to look away but i...couldn’t. you just captured my attention and i don’t know what it was about you.”

his words make you swallow as you watch him talk, his tense shoulders and hand gripping the glass as he probably relives the moment of his father’s death. and you feel bad because that’s awful, to see a loved one die before your very eyes, but what the fuck does that have to do with you?

“but then you were gone,” he continues, “my dad was gone and then so were you. and i became...consumed with this feeling to find you again. i wanted you to be mine then and the feeling never went away.”

you can’t help the small laugh that leaves you, shaking your head in disbelief. how could he have gotten that feeling from just looking at you? he didn’t even know your name or have a conversation with you; if you had to guess, it probably all had to do with physicality.

because neither of you were blind, both two good looking people and if he wasn’t a kidnapping lunatic, you��d be attracted to him in a second. but you also don’t believe in being owned - you’re your own person and refuse for someone to refer to you as theirs.

“that sounds pretty fucking crazy to me,” you snap, crossing your legs as you squint your eyes and look at him. “you didn’t even know me and you still don’t. i’m not something to be owned, especially by someone like you who thinks kidnapping me would automatically make me yours.”

“i know,” he says. and for a second you think maybe you got it all wrong. you don’t know what any other possible scenario could be but if he knows you’re not his and that he can’t just take you, then what the hell is this for? what’s with the freaky portrait and abduction? what’s with that-

“that’s why i’m giving you a chance to fall in love me.”

your eyes bulge open at his words, looking at him in disbelief and shock because this fucking guy cannot be serious. neither of you say anything until you shake your head, watching him walk toward you when he sees you’re ready to bolt and scream at him.

“what the fuck are you talking ab-”

“i’m giving you a chance to love me on your own. so you can see that i felt something for a reason. not because i forced you but because you’ll actually have feelings for me, too.”

“i don’t want a fucking chance, i don’t need one,” you snap, sick and tired of the ludicrous nonsense coming from this grown man. “i have a boyfriend and a life to get back to. i don’t know you and you don’t know me and you’ve gotta be really fucking deranged to think i’m gonna stay here and-”

his words cut you off as he plops down in the chair next to you, explaining his men have already “put a hold” on your life as you know it. e-mailed your work and left a note for your boyfriend and family, made it seem as if you wanted a break and took a much needed vacation they had all been begging you to go on.

“and if you don’t love me, i’ll let you go,” his deep voice tells you, like he’s gonna be so gracious toward you and your wishes. “but i’m just asking for you to see what it’d be like. to have a life with me and see if you could love me.”

you don’t know how to process what this man is saying to you, thinking that he has to have some sort of mental illness. using his piecing eyes, towering frame and good looks like that’s gonna somehow be enough for you to fall at his feet.

but if he thinks it’ll be that easy, he has another thing coming.

because while yes, he’s attractive and yes, you could see yourself being attracted to him if he wasn’t a raging lunatic, you will absolutely not submit to him. so you turn your head to the side and smile at him, a small, sarcastic smile with your eyes narrowed as you look at man staring down at you.

“go fuck yourself,” you say through gritted teeth, jumping up from your chair and away from him. you only get about three steps before he gets up and grabs you around your waist. his hands are large on your waist as he throws you back down on the chair, pulling you by the hair so your neck is craned up against the back of the cushions.

you’re only slightly aware of his knee between your legs, more so focused on the way your heart is pounding and breath is strangled from his tight, strong hold on you. how his dark eyes are boring into yours and how his hand is hovering over your chest.

it feels like he’s got you completely caught and that you can’t do a thing about it. your mind racing to push and fight and get away from him but your body doing it’s own thing. tightening at the way his knee is so close to your pussy, his hand almost grazing your thigh while his other is right next to your head.

“i’m not gonna touch you or do anything you don’t want me to,” you hear him mumble in your ear. you can feel your heat against his knee as his breath fans across your neck, noticing the way you shiver and how it’s the firs time you’ve given in since he brought you here.

but he also sees fear and that unsettles him. makes him feel like you think he’s a monster.

“i’m gonna wait until you come to me on your own. ready for me to touch you and then begging for me to fuck you.”

you sharply inhale as he completely rests his hand on your boob, feeling the sheer size of it in comparison to your chest and not being able to help but swallow nervously. and then he squeezes and a gasp leaves your mouth, his mouth hot and close to your ear.

“but don’t fucking provoke me,” he warns lowly, his knee pressing against your dress that’s pooling loosely between your legs. “because i won’t be gentle.”

you don’t even realize you’re shaking until he pulls away, watching him let out a sigh as he walks back over to the fire. his walk is cold and calculating despite the way he’s so hot and unpredictable, a burst of anger in his eyes before you can even blink.

the crackling of the fire rings in yours ear again as you look over at him, feeling a wet tear on your cheek that you didn’t even feel escape.

“i’ll give you 365 days. if you don’t love me by then, i’ll set you free.”

another round of panic and anger fills you despite the terror you’re feeling, shaking your head and wiping at the tear before you spring up and start to run. but the man only growls again, snapping his head around before the sound of his feet following you cause you to speed up.

but it’s no use because he wraps his strong arms around your waist and shoves you against the wall, his chest flush against your back. you feel his lower body pressed into your ass and you want nothing more than to kick him right between his legs, knowing that that is probably the reason for all of this.

“if you just want to fuck me, then get it over with. don’t try to say this is about love, you sicko.”

you hear him chuckle in your ear before he takes your hair in his large hand, wrapping his fingers around it and pulling so you’re looking at him. he can see in your eyes that you’re scared but also ready to fight, the searing determination and anger in them making him all too excited and fond of you.

“it is, baby girl, what do you take me as? a perverted monster?” he asks with a smirk and you’re so so tempted to spit in his face and continue to curse at him. but you can’t because then his lips brush yours, not enough to classify it as a kiss, but just a little tease. just enough to feel your breath tangle and mouths to part on one another.

“and i already told you i’m only gonna fuck you once you’re begging.”

you tried to escape again the next night.

stayed camped out and hidden away in your room all day until it became dark outside your window. he had come in a few times to check on you and you had faked a slumber each and every time, your lip curling when you see he had left food for you.

what a polite kidnapper, you thought, giving you deadlines to be set free and food like he’s the poster child for psychotic abductors.

but then what you discovered about him proved that, maybe, he really was psychotic. or at least very much a criminal. because one second, you’re rushing down the hall and through the main room where your picture is creepily hanging and the next you’re outside.

the cold night air hits your face and you tell yourself not to get too excited yet, you still have an acre of land to maneuver while also avoiding him and the several other men you think must work for him. the other men you see standing in a circle, your tall, broad kidnapper looming over someone curled into a bloody pile on the floor.

and then without a second thought, you watch his arm extend down and a gunshot rings through your ears. it’s the first time you’ve ever heard that sound and you watch with wide eyes and a pounding heart as the bullet hits the man and his shaking, shriveled up body stops.

dark familiar eyes meet yours as you feel yourself grow faint, a pair of arms wrapping around your waist before you hit the concrete floor underneath you.

the next time you open your eyes, you’re back in the bedroom. still so shocked by how nice it is, how soft the bed is under you and the view outside the bright, sunny window. you stretch out your body as you try to remember how you got here, remembering the way you crept around the house desperate you find a way out.

“are you okay?”

the deep voice coming from the corner of the room causes you to jump, looking over to see the man’s long body leaned back and sitting in the chair. he’s watching you carefully and shirtless, his board shoulders and toned stomach on complete display.

it makes you swallow as you try to not allow your eyes to roam, remembering that this is the man who’s forcing you to stay with him for a whole year. a whole year and he hasn’t even told you his name yet. or told you his occupation, but it seems kind of obvious given what you saw last night.

how him and his men hold such a powerful, strong presence. how they have guns and protection at all times and they were able to so callously watch a man die.

“i’m sorry you had to see that,” he says, his soft voice sounding so foreign to your ears; but then it gets that deep growl back and you find yourself not being able to look away from him. “but he deserved it. he was hurting children and betrayed us. we don’t allow that type of shit.”

you can’t help the smirk that crosses your face at the comment, your tongue poking at your cheek as train your gaze on his face and feel something vengeful and petty course through you.

“but kidnapping women is okay?”

his eyes narrow at your comment but he only pops his neck to the side, his eyes raking over your exposed legs in the night dress you’ve been wearing since yesterday. you notice his eyes on you and raise an eyebrow, not missing the dark look in them as he takes in the sight of you.

“what exactly do you do?” you ask him with a raised eyebrow. “since, you know, i don’t even know your fucking name.”

he smirks, bending his head down so he doesn’t laugh because okay, maybe this whole situation is a little absurd.

“sorry about that. i’m yunho,” he tells you when he looks up, his deep voice a contrast to the glint of amusement in his eyes. “and i’m a... business man. the head of a corporation, we’ll say.”

you let out a scoff as you shake your head, jumping up from the bed and making your way over to him. “if i’m stuck with you for a year, you’re gonna fucking be honest with me. you can’t just keep everything from me and expect me to-”

he’s out of his seat and you’re on your back in a second, the soft bed under you as he looms above you. despite the harsh way he got up and pushed you back, nothing is threatening. he’s just looking at you with his usual hard stare, his long finger tracing down on your neck and over your pulse point.

“listen to me carefully, pretty girl,” yunho breaths out. “i am gonna be honest with you about everything. my intentions with you and anything regarding that. but my work stuff? you’ll know what you need to know about that.”

you let out a shaky exhale as you look up at him, ignoring the way his finger on your neck makes you feel warm and like a piece of prey caught.

“because that’s what’s gonna keep you safe. the details are dangerous and you need to stay out of it,” he continues, his hand softly running through your hair. his eyes roam over your face again, moving to caress your cheek and you don’t wanna believe it but it’s actually a soft and sweet touch.

“i know you don’t believe me, now, but your safety has quickly become my number one concern.”

you swallow down the lump in your throat, staying trapped underneath him as looks over every bit of your face. you don’t understand him, how he could go from hot to cold and how he could look at you in such a way that holds care and desire.

he pulls himself away from you and makes his way over to your door silently.

“you should get showered and dressed, we’re going shopping.”

your eyebrow quirks up as you look at him, sitting up on the bed and turning so you can look at him. “oh?” you quip, “so now you’re trying to buy me?”

his hand comes up to his face, rubbing over it in stress before he meets your eyes. “no,” he grunts out lowly, your eyes running over the long, tattooed fingers you can’t seem to look away from. “but you’re gonna need clothes, are you not?”

“i guess i am,” you bite out in annoyance, rolling your eyes when he leaves the room without another comment.

you felt bad about spending his money for all about five seconds.

but now. now you were almost doing it vengefully, picking up the most expensive pair of shoes you could find just so he could be charged the absurd amount of money.

but by the sixth store, you saw it was no use. because he just handed over his black card without a care in the world, like you weren’t raking up thousands and thousands of dollars on clothes and shoes. and you think about how someone so obviously a criminal attains that kind of wealth, hooking the lace bra that matches your black thong when no other than he himself bursts through the door.

it’s in the same manner in which he took you from your life, abrupt and absurd and like he belongs in that room, deserves to be seeing you standing there half naked like this lingerie is for him. “get out,” you snap, not caring that his eyes are on you but more so at the way he thinks he can just do that.

he only raises his eyebrow at you, bursting in just because he thought you were in there for far too long and was paranoid you somehow escaped him and his four men. but instead he’s met with the sight of you, lace complimenting your skin so well and it’s taking everything in him not to crumble at your feet.

especially when, after he doesn’t answer, you advance further with a look in your eye that makes his dick twitch in his pants. “get. out,” you say through clenched teeth, pushing him back until his back hits the door. “or else.”

“or else what?” he challenges, not being able to help the way a smirk spreads across his face or the way his eyes roam your body. you’re just so fucking hot and angry, nothing like the woman he thought you were five years ago but finding this way better.

the way you’re so feisty and don’t back down, the way you act like this but then submit the second his hand is on you. because you’re bound to say something in a second that’s gonna make anger course through his veins and-

“or else this will be the last time you’ll see me like this,” you tell him with a smirk, not thinking twice about palming him through his pants the same way he did your chest. ”it’ll be a long year for you, don’t you think?”

and just like he predicted, his hand reaches around your throat and he backs you up until you hit the cold mirror. you look away so you don’t smirk at the reaction you just knew you were gonna get, hearing the way his breath turns ragged and his vein bulges out of his neck from trying to control himself.

“i can promise you that won’t be the case, baby girl,” he growls in your ear. the tiny chuckle you release causes him to tighten his hand around your neck even more, your hand reaching down again so you can cover his bulge.

“are you promising or hoping?” you ask him, your voice breathy and eyes teasing as you look up at him through your lashes. “because those are two very different things.”

you watch his jaw tick and eyes darken even more before he releases his hold on you, staring down at you for a few silent moments until you’re finally alone in the dressing room again. and when you are, you rip the lingerie off and slip on your dress again, annoyed by him and this situation and your ill placed arousal at teasing him.

“i’m done,” you announce as you walk past him, crumbling up the underwear and bra in your hand before throwing it at his face. you roll your eyes at the familiar sound of feet following you, walking yourself out of the store and back to the car he all but dragged you into hours earlier.

later that night at dinner, however, his eyes and demeanor take a turn that calm your irritation. it doesn’t halt it or dissipate it by any means but you crazily enough find that you’re...accepting of the conditions. it started when you sat down and saw all your favorite meals cooked, raising an eyebrow when you asked him just how long he’d been stalking you.

he only rolls his eyes and tells you he watched you carefully at the party you first saw him at, how he noticed you avoided all the red meat and your eyes lit up in particular when it came to the pasta and seafood dishes.

“what a gracious kidnapper you are,” you tell him, resisting the urge to moan in delight when you pop the ravioli in your mouth; fuck him, it really does taste good. you look over to see a blank look on his face, raising your eyebrow questioningly from across the table.

it takes a while to get the conversation going, the both of you just commenting on the food or clothes before he finally thinks about how to approach it.

“i know this is a...hard situation. but for it to work, we both need to try.”

your eyebrows pull together at his comment, putting your fork down as you cock your head to the side. and once he’s sees you’re about to say something, most definitely sassy and anger-inducing, he talks again.

“we can make this year either really fucking good or really fucking hard. but we both need to try, y/n. you need to see this as an opportunity given to us by fate.”

“by fate?” you question, voice raising as you feel irritation fill you. “you fucking took me, yunho. you planned this all out and kidnapped me. this was completely your doing!”

his fists clench as drops his gaze away from you, biting the inside of his cheek hard enough until blood is drawn. he knows you’re right and that this instant of meeting wasn’t fate. but him seeing you that night was, him getting that feeling and not being able to stop thinking about it was.

“but first seeing you wasn’t,” you hear him say, his head snapping up to look at you. “it felt like i was given you before my dad died. that i couldn’t take my attention away from you because...something knew i was gonna need you.” your eyes narrow as you listen to him talk, the honest and brashness in his tone making you keep your mouth shut.

you still think it’s fucking crazy and it still doesn’t make sense. but you know what trauma can do to the mind also.

“but then he was gone and so were you. and i can’t find my father again until i die but i found you again. i found you.” the words don’t sound like they should be coming out of his mouth, the deep voice that growls curses at you with eyes that flare just as much darkness.

but now he gets up from his seat to walk over to you and you don’t find yourself being scared. the way he circles your chair not making you feel like he’s a big bad hunter and you’re a fragile little deer.

“you keep saying i have to try,” you say, spinning around in your chair and looking up at him. he’s watching you so carefully, like he’s hanging on every word you’re saying tonight because you haven’t cursed at him and tried to run away. “but you’re not much better yourself. you have a temper too.”

“i know,” he says, bending down so his face is at your level and a small smirk on his face looking almost...cute. “but i want you to help me. help me learn to be more...gentle. for you.”

you let out a quiet sigh, nodding your head before you bite down on your lip and look up at him with something darker in your eyes. “and it’s still true what you said the first night? that you won’t...force me to do anything?”

his hand reaches up to caress your cheeks as he shakes his head, the soft look in his brown eyes the nicest you’ve seen since you know this man. “i’m not the monster you think i am,” he says, his eyes falling to your lips before he looks into your eyes again. “and i hope you’ll see that one day.”

the next few weeks with yunho were rather....calm. he ate every meal with you and you guys got to know each other a little more. no snippy comments or reminders that he’s technically holding you hostage, just conversations that were light and let you two see more about each other.

how he’s tough and hard but has a soft side. how even though he’s harsh with his men, you see the fond way he looks at them. he learns that even though you’re naturally bratty and roll your eyes way too much, you also have a sweet smile that could melt away almost any of his qualms.

but getting you on the plane proved to be a challenge.

“i’m not a sack of potatoes you can just transport from country to country, yunho,” you snap, “and why do i have to go anyway? you barely tell me what you do for work in the first place.”

he only took your face in his large hand and squeezed, realizing over these past few days just how much your eyes linger over them. his long fingers covered in black ink, usually with sliver and black rings adorning them.

“you’re going because i’m going,” he answers lowly in your ear. “and i’ll put you over my shoulder if i have to.”

“you wouldn’t fucking dare.”

but oh would he. because now here you sit, with your arms crossed, jet lagged and a puss on your face as you sit in a ritzy hotel. he’d been making you sit here like some perfect little trophy waiting for him, your eyes following him as he sat down and talked with another tall handsome man.

and maybe because you were pissed or bored or knew by the way they kept glancing your way that they were talking about you but you couldn’t help the way you pranced over there with your vanilla ice cream cone in hand. licking at it slowly as a dollop of white covers your lip, wiping at it with your finger before swirling your tongue around it to lick it off.

“are you talking about me?”

your eyes meet yunho’s who looking at you with a guarded expression, the other man smirking as he introduces himself as mingi. “i was telling him what a...gentle, obliging woman you are.”

you raise you eyebrow as you lick at the ice cream, looking right into yunho’s eyes as you decide to poke the bear just a little bit. because he forced you on that plane and completely rendered you unable to move for the entire flight. he kept his hand on your knee and his cold skin felt nice on your warm leg despite the rage you felt.

so now, you think, he deserves to be fucked with a little. in a way that he can’t fight you back on because he promised not to touch you. so you make sure to keep your gaze on him the entire time, swirling the ice cream around your mouth and tasting the vanilla on your tongue.

“is that right?” you hum, looking at mingi as you lick off the white cream that’s covering your lips.

“stop it,” you hear yunho’s voice growl but you can only smile, walking closer to mingi before you lick at the ice cream again. mingi’s eyes move to your lips for a split second before going to yunho, watching the way his friend is growing enraged and bothered.

“you want some?” your voice suddenly asks, circling the tip of the ice cream with your tongue before pressing it to mingi’s lips. the man shakes his head and you turns your head to the side, a little hum leaving you just as yunho’s arm wraps around your waist and roughly pulls you into him.

“what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

you turn around and meet his gaze, your eyes heated and vengeful and you think you’re probably having a little too much fun with this.

“i’m bored,” you tell him flatly, reaching down for his hand before bringing it up to hover over your stomach. he sharply exhales but then instead of placing his hand on your skin, you drop the ice cream cone in his hold and walk off toward the elevators without another word.

the hotel room is laid out eerily similar to your bedroom at...the room at yunho’s, a large bed placed in front of a full length shower with lights and an array of sprayers; you wanna know when this bizarre style of room became the choice for wealthy criminals.

you strip down out of your clothes and walk toward the shower, turning on the faucet until the water is scorching. you laugh to yourself as you think of the way yunho’s probably downstairs still frustrated and anger at the stunt you pulled.

you both promised to try with each other but how can you not have a little fun? especially when he forced you on the plane to a new country and already set the tone for the day? you’re so lost in your thoughts that you don’t hear the door open or yunho take in a sharp breath, your naked body exposed as water drips down the curve of your back.

you only know he’s here when his naked body is next you, craning your head to see his broad shoulders and erection in the steamy air. you can’t seem to tear your eyes away despite what’s going on in this moment, far too distracted by how big his cock is. not like you’re surprised, though, given the sheer size of him.

“you just gonna stare or are you gonna try to put on another show?”

his voice is even and low but there’s an underlying tone of frustration that makes you all too amused. you bite down on your lip so you don’t smile, instead choosing to let your eyes roam over his body.

“i don’t know what you’re talking about.”

a huff leaves his mouth and he shakes his wet hair out, making his way over to you until he’s standing over your body. your eyes travel up his torso and pecks until you’re looking at him, your skin wet and only a few inches from grazing.

“you wanna touch baby girl?” he asks, his voice deep and strained and you wanna laugh because it’s almost too fucking easy. you place your hands on his chest and turn him until he’s pushed against the wall, his adams apple bobbing at the way you press your naked body on his.

the sexual tension and attraction has been palpable this entire time but it’s only getting more and more intense as the days go on, your hands sliding slowly down him as you feel him start to shake underneath you. you know he probably wants to throw you against the wall and wrap his hand around your neck, warn you lowly that he’s not gonna touch you but that you better not provoke him.

but instead he just takes it, his head leant against the wall and his chest heaving as your fingers trace right above his cock. you’re not gonna lie and say you’re not wet and aching between your legs now but you can’t focus on that, far too distracted by the way it seems like you finally have him under control.

and it’s because of that you look at him, pump his wet dick just once in your hand and hear him growl. you smirk in his face as you circle the tip before pulling your hand away, feeling something hot and fiery sear through you at the way he looks so worked up over this; his eyes are dark and hazy and he looks about to ready to fuck you against the wall.

you flick your hand so the water and his slick precum fall off your hand, rolling your eyes before you turn around and go to exit the shower; but then, just as you predicted, he reaches out and roughly spins you around. his hand is on the back of your neck and your mouths are just inches apart, his lips brushing yours and you can feel how ragged and rough his breaths apart.

“how many fucking times do i have to tell you not to push me?” he growls against your mouth. “don’t you think your little stunt downstairs was enough?” you only look up and meet his gaze, the teasing look replaced with a hardness that causes him to squeeze you tighter. you just look so unbothered while he’s ready to explode, everything about you and your presence overwhelming him.

“you’re gonna make me do something i don’t wanna fucking do.”

and at the time, you think his words just mean he’s gonna go back on his words and show you that he’s a monster. that he’s gonna take you even though you’re not crying out for him and you can’t say you’d really be surprised at this point.

so you only shrug your shoulders, quirking an eyebrow challengingly. “yeah? and what’s that? fuck me even though i’m not begging for you?”

and that’s exactly what you think is gonna happen when he drags you down the hallway of the suite in a robe. you’re fighting against him but his hand is wrapped so tightly around your wrist, walking into another dark room as he throws you down on the bed.

you rut against it and try to run away but he only pushes you down with a lowly growled “stop it.” you feel yourself start to panic slightly when he cuffs both your hands, black leather around your wrists and sliver chains attached to the high posts of the bed.

you nearly kick him in the face when he does the same thing to your ankles, your growled out curses and screams telling him to fuck off falling on deaf ears. you’re completely spread out in front of him as he looks at you from the bottom of the bed, his body free of clothes as he peers down at you without a word.

you don’t know what the fuck he’s about to do but you can’t stop the way you’re shaking. out of fear and arousal and fury and everything you’ve felt for the past month and a half of your life. you two just wordlessly stare at one another, his eyes never leaving your face despite the way your legs are spread, before he breaks it off and takes a seat on the couch.

you narrow your eyes when his hard cock hits the air, the sound of the door opening making you swallow and tense; you half expect to see mingi walk through the door, some sort of sick twisted idea that yunho had to prove that you’re his.

what you don’t expect, however, is to see a woman you’ve never seen before walk in the room, clad in the black lingerie you threw in his face when you were shopping that day. something about it unnerves a crazy part of you but you don’t say anything, can only watch as she crosses the room and bends down into between his legs.

you bite the inside of your cheek and swallow down, almost not believing it when you watch her take his cock in her mouth. your mouth falls open slightly at the way he throws his head back and letting out a small groan, wondering what kind of sick shit he’s pulling right now.

his head falls back as you watch her head start to bob up and down, her hands laid out on his thick thighs and making something in the pit of your stomach burn.

he watched you flirt with mingi and now he’s making you watch this. watch as he moans and fucks up into this random woman’s mouth. his head rolls back up to watch you, your eyes wide and unable to leave the sight in front of you.

but then the second you meet his gaze, you look away.

because it’s too much, to see his glassy eyes full of arousal and lust as someone else sucks him off. as he moans and thrusts his hips frantically while you’re spread out right there and feeling wetness seep between your legs.

“look at me,” you hear his deep voice growl. you swallow and bite down on your lip, the sound of the chains clattering when you try to move away at the sound of him moaning again sending a satisfied smirk on his face.

“i fucking told you to look at me.”

you can’t help but look up at his words, feeling yourself swallow a whine when his eyes roll back into his head. the girl’s head bobs faster and faster on his dick, his large tattooed hand grabbing the back of her hair as he bites down on his lip.

the room is full of sounds of his strangled grunts and her slurping, the way you flail and rut against the clanking chains making you more and more angry. why is he doing this and why is it working? why are you so effected by seeing someone else get him off and wishing it could be you?

because the burning ache between your legs is too much and you feel the wetness on your thighs.

you can’t tear your eyes away from him when you know he’s about to come, the way he bites down on his lip and fucks up into the hot mouth sucking and licking him. he makes sure to look right at you when his mouth falls open, releasing into the girl’s mouth and making a hot pang of desire shoot right through you.

you’re clenching around nothing and hate that you feel this way, how wet and ready you are for him to push that girl off of him so he can fuck you. fill you up the way you feel the need to to be despite everything so fucking wrong with this situation.

but when he makes his way over to you, the girl wiping at her mouth as she walks out of the room, he doesn’t look like he plans on doing so. he only leans over your body and can smell the arousal on you, his large hand in between your legs and on the soft, wet sheets.

“maybe now...you’ll be a good girl for me. and won’t pull the shit you do.”

you look up at him through hooded eyes and feel your mind clouded, his flushed face looking down at you with such a hard stare. you try to touch him but you’re still completely tied up, a whine leaving your mouth as the chains clatter and your restraints just get tighter.

“yunho,” you whine out and the sound of your name falling from your lips almost makes him crack. but he only takes your face in his hand, his thumb running against your lower lip that you immediately take in your mouth.

you look up at him as you suck his finger, swirling your tongue around him and feeling your pussy throb. he watches for a few seconds before shoving his finger down you throat until you gag, shaking his head as he trails his finger down your chest and circles your hard nipple.

“do you want to touch me now?” you hear him mumble lowly in your ear. a broken whine leaves your mouth as you whine out a yes, to beg him to fuck you and that you need him his cock and want him now.

“please,” you whine and you don’t even recognize your own voice.

because the pounding in your ears and between your legs is completely overpowering you. he leans closer to you and takes your face in his hand, his body overs yours and his hot mouth by your ear making your eyes roll into the back of your head.

“i’m gonna fuck you so hard baby girl,” he grunts lowly and the words fill you with such relief and excitement. your pussy clenches in anticipation and you pull against the restraints so you can touch him and have your hands on him.

his eyes watch you carefully, the way your robe has fallen off your shoulders and your nipples are hard in the air. how your legs are shaking and he wants nothing more than his bury his face between them.

but you pushed him to this point and now, even though it pains him, he has something to prove. it’s why he bends down to kiss at your inner thighs, his lips and hot mouth so close to your pussy you feel tears in your eyes.

“i’m gonna fuck you until you scream for me,” you hear his deep, strangled voice says. he can’t help but lick up your pussy just once, toying at your clit just to get a taste of you as you widen your legs and scream out at the feeling.

but then his mouth is away and he brings his face to yours, pressing his lips to your mouth in a kiss. the first real kiss you two have had thus far, where your lips are parted and you can even taste your heavy arousal on him.

“but it won’t be tonight, baby girl,” he hums, kissing down on your neck before pulling away and leaving you panting on the bed. he makes no move to untie you or fuck you or do anything, just leans his head against the bed frame and looks over your body with lust in his eyes.

“after all, we have a whole year together, don’t we?”

#this is an absurd one ladies #tread lightly #but i got inspired by the movie 365 days #and had to bump up this request #yunho #yunho angst #yunho fluff #yunho smut #ateez angst #ateez fluff #ateez smut #yunho imagines #ateez imagines #yunho scenarios #ateez scenarios #ateez #request

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